Veronica Mars drives back to Neptune through the desert with the top down until it's too cold and her skin is turning to gooseflesh in the moonlight, shuffling through old mixed tapes because the CD player is on the fritz and the auxiliary plug went out six months ago and besides, the radio comes in cool and clear on nights like this.

She drives off the road a little, digging into the back corner of the glove compartment, but out here it's all sand, sand, as far as you can see, the scrub of stubborn grass and green reflective road signs every now and then just to remind her she isn't on some distant barren planet. The towns look like tiny mirages, the lights winking away like cold stars, like individual golden lights on some far-off tree. The desert is no place for yuletide cheer.

Veronica lets out a crowing, if muted, cry when her scrabbling fingers find one slightly splintered case, the paper label crisp and yellowed with age. Something about the silence, the hollow wind, makes her think that she could call the dead home just by too loud a whisper. And there are too many dead, too many dead.

She slams the tape into the player and calls home another as it kicks in mid-song, it's been eight years since she heard it, it was popular for two weeks her sophomore year in high school and no one plays it anymore, and with the first lush rise of the vocals her voice is there, piping a little too high because the road in front of her, this damn unending unchanging road, is smeared hazy from her tears.

She is going home, but it wasn't for this. It was for Christmas, to hear her father croon Dean Martin over the dinner, to curl up knotted tight in her old bed with her socks still on, to feel the loneliness sing to her in a way she hadn't felt since the day she hugged her father goodbye and drove out of Neptune without looking back.

But she finds Lilly on that desert highway, where she left her.

There is a part of her that she can still feel, echoing distant, a Veronica unbowed by grief who shares a dorm room with Lilly. A Veronica with long hair and a perfect boyfriend and a mother who doesn't drink and all straight A's.

It feels like a betrayal, sometimes, to be happy without Lilly, and often she isn't happy at all, but she tells herself that she would have taken it all for granted, that it is all the sweeter now.

It is the coldest possible comfort.

Five miles after the tears have dried to tight salt in the fine lines at the corners of her blue eyes, Veronica pulls off the highway and into an old gas station, so old there are no swipe machines at the pumps and the numbers actually tick by like a tired heartbeat. She has to dig in the pocket of her faded jeans for a crumpled ten-dollar bill, and the bell above the sandblasted door sounds as she shoulders her way into the convenience store.

And this entire night seems bent on making her remember.

--

Black chiffon hardly seemed that risque. Veronica bit her lip and fussed with the neckline, tugging it up a few inches, and Lilly just as cheerfully tugged it back down again, on her way to the bathroom to peer at herself over the sink and apply another layer of lipgloss and mascara.

"It's New Year's."

"Dad doesn't care," Veronica told her full-length mirror, experimentally twisting her hips so that the skirt flared and twirled around her knees. "Do you really think Duncan will like this?"

Lilly rolled her eyes. "Who cares what he likes," she replied, snapping her pocketbook shut.

"I do."

Lilly patted her reassuringly on the shoulder. "You could wear a burlap sack and Heidi braids and he'd still be panting over you. Not that you should." Lilly shot her a suspicious look, provoking a long-suffering sigh from Veronica.

"Did you try your mom?"

"She..." Veronica finally tore her gaze from her reflection, gingerly feeling around the complicated layers of twists and curls Lilly had put in her hair, and plucked a denim jacket out of her closet. Lilly just as quickly rejected it with a disdaining sneer.

"God, don't you have a leather jacket?"

Veronica shrugged. "It's on my list."

"Well, if I'd remembered." Lilly sighed. "Your mom?"

"She said she has to back Dad up."

"There's only one thing to do." Lilly gave Veronica's hair one last look and grinned. "It's always easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Although my rule is never ask for either."

And it's that look Lilly gave her, that impish grin, full of barely contained glee, that made Veronica's heart rise through her nervousness, that made her smile and wave to her parents, that made her giggle grow to full-blown laughter as soon as they were in the limousine.

Veronica had always been a little awed by the Echolls estate, more than a little awed, but she was more awed by the look on Duncan's face as he slid into the limo, onto the seat beside her, and grinned at her. Him. Lilly always rolled her eyes and was exasperated with this, with the way that every time they saw each other Duncan and Veronica each had matching expressions of what she called puppy love on their faces. Half the time Veronica was convinced that Lilly hated it so much because she had never been so vulnerable in her entire life. There was something Veronica envied in that, and something Veronica pitied in that.

It seemed inconceivable that someone like Duncan Kane could be in love with her. It seemed even less conceivable that she could ever live, if Duncan Kane wasn't in love with her.

Their hands met on the seat between them, squeezed hard.

"Vegas, baby!" Logan crowed, popping the cork on a bottle of champagne.

Like so many other nights out with Lilly, later, very very hungover, Veronica remembered only the beginning and the end. Remembered the edge of her buzz, Lilly squinting in the fluorescents just inside a rundown convenience store on the edge of the road out of Neptune, squealing and clacking her heels against the floor when she found the last dusty tube of Dr Pepper lipgloss, Logan swaggering to the counter with a case of beer and Duncan with his hand at her back, always just a breath behind her, so solid and real and warm and whole.

She remembered the lights at the edge of town, like a black bowl reflecting the light of a hundred million stars, and it was perfect and dirty underneath, salty and shameful like the taste of blood, filling her with perfumed air. Duncan beside her, Duncan with his tie undone, Duncan with his hair slicked back wet after an unexpected dip in the fountain outside their chrome and platinum hotel, and her skin was clammy and too wet, and her entire body, all of it, wanted to curl around him. Warm and safe and alive. Hers.

Lilly, later, she could shift her focus and see Lilly, her hair tumbling loose around her shoulders and her cheeks gleaming and that particular arch to her fingers as she buried her hand in Logan's hair for another kiss. Lilly was always so brilliant, shivering and trembling with it, so wickedly lovely, and just to be in the halo of her delight was enough excitement for years. Veronica looked at them, in the glass elevator all the way to the roof with confetti and champagne corks and glitter and dancing girls and smeared kisses, and saw them as she wanted them and as they were, the four of them, the wild ones and the ones who wanted to be that way. But that glee was brittle and the laughs were forced and Veronica was glad to be on the other side of it, and so, so in love that her heart wanted to break from the sheer joy of it.

They kissed in the pool, that fountain, her arms slung up around his neck and his breath hot on her skin, and Logan flipping out his credit card, utterly bored, when the security guards started gesticulating. The way Lilly desired, so violent and so consuming, scared Veronica sometimes, and she saw it too in Logan. He had everything he had ever wanted and yet he wanted more, and he wanted Lilly, and no one, no one ever really had Lilly. Except Veronica.

And Celeste always seemed on the verge of slapping Veronica across the face, but that, somehow, in that fountain, with Duncan laughing and his chest vibrating against hers and the wet black chiffon molded to Veronica's legs and her heels squelching and utterly ruined under the coruscating water, that just made it better, made it real, made it something more than the unmitigated yawn Lilly seems to think their relationship is.

There was more, but it was all in flashes. Duncan's hips shifting between her thighs and his mouth on her neck. Logan lighting a bill on fire. Veronica and Lilly facing each other, up through the skylight, heads tossed back and hair pulled free by the wind, looking up at the stars, the cold clear stars, and laughing as the night drew the heat from their flushed faces and left them shivering, muscles aching with ripple after ripple of delighted laughter.

The soles of Veronica's feet on Duncan's upper thighs and his hands wrapped tight around her ankles, keeping her up, keeping her safe.

And she thought, at five o'clock in the morning when they pulled up at her parents' house, this was worth it, worth every minute, and even the sight of her father's flushed angry face and her mother's pale drawn worry could not diminish it.

And it especially did not diminish the taste of his goodbye kiss, swept backward across the seat in the limo, her cheeks flushing red and his hand in her hair and Lilly and Logan crowing from the other seat, champagne and strawberries and him.

It was impossible, to love this much. And yet she did, she does, at the faint apology in Lilly's eyes as she waves goodbye, at the unmasked adoration in Duncan's face, at the sardonic salute Logan tosses off.

The mixed tape, miraculously kept dry in Duncan's discarded tuxedo jacket, case cracked from the inconvenient prop of Lilly's hand as Logan buried his face against her neck, now warm and real in Veronica's hand, shielded from sight in the folds of her ruined black chiffon dress.

She listened to it ten times that day, through the raging pound of a hangover headache, and felt him in every single note, felt him reverberate through her.

It is a piece of him she cannot bear to leave.

--

"Merry Christmas! Time to see what Santa brought!"

Veronica rolls her eyes and thinks about moving, tries to fake sleep but can't help bursting into laughter at the sight of her father, elf hat perched jauntily on his bald head, features split with a wide grin as he peeks at her through the opening in her bedroom door. Backup curled at her feet like she never left. Her head aches for want of coffee, but she crawls out of bed anyway and into an old ratty robe even she deemed unfit to take to her new place. Pancakes and sausage on a plate, syrup in the bottle, a pitiful tree propped up in the corner and festooned with garland and ornaments that had been new when Veronica was a child, popsicle stick reindeer heads and red-and-white bead candy canes strung on pipe cleaners.

Veronica has never quite managed to outrun her past, not really. The tape was aged, it made her wince with anticipation when she played it the night before, but she listened the whole way through and she has never, never let herself feel that vulnerable again. Never.

But she does, today, with the cuffs of her robe tucked up against the heels of her hands and Backup at her feet and the warmth of a holiday she hasn't celebrated since she left. She sees the touch of age on her father in a way she never saw when she was here. She sees a life that, at the end, she couldn't run far enough from. She sees a past that kept her bound for a year, more than a year, to a ghost, to a man barely old enough to accept the responsibility of a child, who had devoted his foreseeable future to her.

She sees him in water and stone and blood. She feels him aching between her thighs.

She wants to be whole again, and this is as close as she has been in a while, poring over stained and handwritten recipes as she and her father plan a makeshift Christmas dinner. All the pieces of her history, all she can, she wants again; she wanted to win this game, wanted to wait it out until it had stopped hurting, but she is here.

--

She sees Logan in the grocery store, like stepping through some strange mirror, and he smiles, tossing a can of pumpkin pie filling between his palms.

She sees Wallace and his brother, not so little anymore, climbing into the car with their mother, and the joy that lights up his face at the sight of her is infectious.

She sees Mac, long fringed scarf whipped by the wind, waving one gloved hand, smiling with her cheeks flushed pink from the cold.

--

And she sees Duncan, when her father sits back from his computer with a flourish, gesturing her over. On grainy surveillance footage three days earlier, a small trusting hand in his, and his hair is different and he keeps his eyes down but it's him.

"What do you think," Veronica sighs, willing her heart to slow as she sinks into her seat at the table.

"I think if they wanted him, they'd have him."

Veronica nods, wrapping her palm around a mug of hot chocolate.

"And that if you wanted him, you could have him."

He waits until the end, to look at her, but there's a smile on his face.

--

She takes only her passport and the mixed tape when she leaves three days later.

There may be a thousand more desert roads, but she'll follow them all, back to him.