Dreams You Never Thought You'd LoseVM 1/1 COMPLETE

[Catalyst]

Title: The Dreams You Never Thought You’d Lose
Author: Catalyst
Rating: Mature
Coupling: Lilly-centric (with mentions of Lo/Ve)
Summary: She likes to watch them sometimes.
Spoilers: Season One, as far as I can tell.
Author’s Note: The title is from Name by The Goo Goo Dolls.
Disclaimer: Not mine

The Dreams You Never Thought You’d Lose

She likes to watch them sometimes. She thinks of them as her favorite television show, one that’s lost its sparkle and glow. One that should’ve been cancelled a season ago anyway.

They aren’t nearly as much fun without her.

Or maybe she’s just a little bit bitter. After all, Lilly’s never been one to share the limelight.

Maybe that’s why she spent so many of the months after her death with Duncan. Because even after she died, he never tried to step out of her shadow. Duncan had been and always would be happy lost in the shadow of his sister’s magnificence. His was perfectly willing to be everything Celeste ever wanted and nothing he ever dreamed of.

Sometimes Lilly wonders if Duncan even has dreams of his own. She worries that maybe he wasted all of his time trying to be someone for Celeste and now he’ll never get the chance to care about becoming someone for himself.

This is when Lilly changes the channel. It’s too late to fix Duncan, and he wouldn’t even believe her ghost when he’d imagined her himself. She can’t save her brother, so she tells herself that she wouldn’t want to anyway.

After all, she didn’t do much to change things for him while she was alive, did she?

So she watches Veronica. Sweet little yellow cotton Veronica. Only not anymore. Lilly finds herself captivated by Veronica, this girl who she had only known as a pastel shadow of her potential. Lilly regrets this Veronica, and the fact that she won’t get to unleash her on the world.

Then again, she doesn’t think she could love this Veronica quite the same. Lilly’s never been good at competition.

So she tells herself that she made this Veronica. She tells herself that Veronica is everything she was supposed to be, so, in a way, this really is all about her.

When she finds herself living vicariously through Veronica, Lilly turns the channel.

Logan’s angry and violent and bitter, and she smiles when she thinks that she’s destroyed him this way. Logan will remember her forever, as the teenage love that he doesn’t quite know how to hate, though they both know that he should. He’ll write her down in a list of regrets, but he’ll never write her off. Logan will keep her tucked away forever in a piece of his subconscious buried deeper than any psychiatrist can dig.

But then she sees him forgetting, sees him forgiving her for the things that will keep her boiling in his veins forever. She sees him letting go, moving on. She sees Veronica, this girl that is her Lilly. She sees Veronica, and Lilly regrets. She regrets everything that she made Veronica into. She sees Veronica, and she’s the only person that Lilly doesn’t know how to hate. She wants to, and Lilly’s not used to having anything denied to her.

Lilly sees Veronica Mars, and she feels exactly what she’s made everyone else feel.

Veronica is her Lilly.

And Lilly can’t hate anyone but herself.