So, yeah, this happened.
I don't even know. Blame my roommate. I do.
PS- there is already more waiting to be edited and also posted on AO3.
Title: Experience, the Daughter of Fools
Word Count:
Fandom: Veronica Mars (movie canon compatible)
Disclaimer: I’ve had a lot of therapy.
Summary: Lessons Veronica has learned over her many years of experience in, no particular order.
Author’s Notes: The title is from a poem I wrote years ago and, while this is currently marked complete, do not be surprised if new lessons pop up. Sorry, the chapter lengths are all cattywampus; it’s a thing. Note: beta reader, Talipo, feels the need that my chapterization choices are crap and that you should remember that these lessons are not chronological and in the perspective of the Veronica learning the lesson (I feel this is apparent through lessons #1-31 in juxtaposition to every other chapter. See? I have faith in you dear readers, she thinks you will be confused or frustrated and not get it. We have had words about it; the chapter order was our compromise).
Foreword
I've learned a lot in my life. Spending all but a handful of years as a student doesn't hurt. Between my afterschool surveillance and two degrees I feel like there's not much left for me to discover.
Lesson #999: addiction comes in many forms.
Hello, my name is Veronica and I am an addict.
The things I am addicted to could fill an encyclopedia. Sarcasm. Snark. Pizza. Eavesdropping. Tazers, cracking wise, and frosting. Food that comes in a box. Fuzzy slippers. Adrenaline. Logan Echolls. My smartphone. AngryBirds. Vengeance. A Song of Ice and Fire (Arya will kill you all). Trouble. Being right. Spaghettios.
And that is just the top of the list.
All of these things have cost me and I like to think that, for most of them, I have hit bottom, I have admitted that I have a problem and am actively recovering.
My secret?
Cold turkey.
Ok, occasionally I fall off the wagon and eat an entire pizza by myself on a Friday night. I get back on the wagon though. I get back on it every time.
My success has been varied (let’s face it, going cold turkey on sarcasm is destined for failure) but I have by far amassed the biggest, shiniest chip in recovering from my obsession with one Logan Echolls.
(Which is hilarious because he used to accuse me of being obsessed with Duncan and going cold turkey there was practically federally enforced and almost a non-issue).
I’d like to think it was just how rocky that rock bottom was, just how many opportunities for assault charges to be filed there were but that wasn’t it.
I think it was actually the worst sex we’d ever had that made it so easy to walk away. To not look back.
Things had been uncharacteristically quiet after I busted The Castle’s membership wide open (well, ok, not for them) that the letter from Stanford saying I was eligible for a game changing scholarship was taken pretty seriously, especially once Dad found out about it.
Getting out of Neptune, away from the ghosts that dogged my daily existence, and starting again in a place where no one had ever called me a slut or accused me of kidnapping or raped me or attempted to kill me sounded like heaven.
Starting fresh meant starting fresh. I was not even considering a long distance relationship. I was no Meryl; I just didn’t have it in me to trust in love. Nope. No way. No how.
She’d said when you were in love you just knew. And I didn’t. I had been in love. In love in love and I knew no such thing. I hadn’t known about Duncan’s epilepsy, or the possible incest. And with Logan I had known he loved me but I didn’t know how to trust him, how to believe him, how to not be disappointed and angry when he did something characteristically dangerous. Love brought no new knowledge for me, and I didn’t see how that could be any different with Piz.
Needless to say he didn’t take that well. The least well I had ever seen him take anything. There was screaming, there was crying, there was slamming of doors. Somewhere in there, there was also breaking up.
One drunken pity party later there was also the worst, least satisfying round of angry sex Logan and I had ever had. Probably mostly because I couldn’t look at him. He’d likely thought that it was the start of relationship-bout #32, his smugness and relief on his face, and I was just ripping off the Band-Aid. Or saying goodbye. Or self-destructing. Or just burning the bridge, making sure that I couldn’t come back (a token page out of the Echolls playbook).
I’d wanted to puke as I pulled out of his arms-both of us still panting, sweat still hot and slick on our skin-righting my clothes, and leaving without a farewell kiss.
And I’d never gone back. There were no all-night drives to park at the Grand and stare at his (and Duncan’s and Dick’s) balcony. No checking his credit card statements or cell records. I didn’t even call Tina at the front desk to see if he was still staying there.
Sure, I ached-God, did I ache-but I was aching for Back-Up and Piz and Wallace and Dad and Mac and, God, Logan and Lilly and even my car and my carpets so he just kind of got lost in the shuffle and misery which came up hard against the 18 credits I was taking to make the most out of my scholarship and graduate early.
Detox is always the hardest part.
Lesson #1: warm is good.
And cold? Cold is bad.
Lesson #2: lights are bright.
Lights are bright and shutting your eyes only fixes that a little. Even when you’re yelling about it.
Lesson #3: food please.
No, really, food now.
Lesson #4: farting feels funny.
Especially when there is already squishy stuff on your butt.
Lesson #5: things change faster when you scream (also see #31: the squeaky wheel gets the oil).
They may not always change to be what you want but they still change and, keep at it long enough and loud enough, eventually it will go the way you want.
Lesson #9: Daddy loves you.
You’re pretty adamant about being warm but there is something about this particular warmth, these particular nuzzles, that particular laugh that always feels warmer.
Lots of them feel different but these? These are the best. And you want them forever.
Lesson #1,362: alcoholism is a disease.
A psych major spends a substantial amount of time with addiction in an academic sense. I heard over and over that addicts do not recover for a significant period of time until they want to get clean for themselves (accompanied by the ever popular, they’ve got to hit rock bottom first).
Not for husbands, not for babies, and certainly not for forceful daughters who hunt them down and decide to blow their life savings as though money is the only obstacle to being well.
Even hitting bottom may not be enough to turn an addict around.
There’s a big difference between knowing it and knowing it and that right there is the genesis of billions spent in therapy and rehab around the world.
A professor of mine said I showed a distinct lack of empathy. He wasn’t wrong. He said I’d never make a good clinician until I learned to see the person and let go of the judgment.
(The Al-Anon and AA meetings he sent me to didn’t really help with that.
Neither did law school.)
Lesson #46: people suck.
As an Earthling you learn this lesson almost constantly. Every time you think you have accepted it someone does something heroic or selfless and you think, for just a fraction of a second, that people are basically good and humanity in general will figure its shit out sooner or later.
Sooner, rather than later, you regret that thought because people suck.
The parent who is tough on the kids all in the name of doing what is best for them turns out to be folding them in the bathtub.
That’s what you get for giving someone the benefit of the doubt, for believing for even a second that people are not messed up little assholes.
Lesson #749: one cannot always be right.
Deep breath.
I’m wrong sometimes.
I hate it, but I am. I’m not fucking Jessica Fletcher? I don’t know all the penny-ante shit constantly. Sometimes I am wrong.
Sometimes I am wrong and bad stuff happens.
Lesson #31: the squeaky wheel gets the oil.
It does not, however, get a pony.
Unless you count the stuffed, taller than me, stands on its own (but not if you climb on its back) version Mom put a bow on and hid in my closet.
I don’t.
Lesson #3,284: being wrong can be nice.
We never talked about it. Well, we hadn’t talked about it since college (a horrifying conversation that essentially amounted to both of us tending to the nuclear winter option). Sure, there was a brief gasp of the word condom that night at Dad’s and after we were in each other’s pockets when he was stateside so things like pills and test results weren’t exactly secret or even tucked in drawers.
So, what I’m saying is, we never really talked about it.
And then suddenly I’m having flashbacks to the doctor telling me I have chlamydia. Only this time the sexually transmitted disease could eventually be a person.
I really thought I’d developed hypothyroidism or something but… nope. Just a case of baby.
Apparently when your sex life is a little inconsistent (four weeks of several times a day to six months of nada) your pill taking tendencies can get a little inconsistent too. Without you even noticing.
I spent a while deftly hyperventilating under the cover of being chill.
I was pretty sure what Logan’s reaction was going to be. I was pretty sure what my reaction was. It was supposed to be the same as both of our well-thought decisions were when we were 18 and so royally messed up we would could barely function as a couple for more than six weeks.
And I was fine with that.
I would tell him and we’d make an appointment and I’d be under the weather for a while and everything would be fine.
But I kept picturing Duncan and Meg’s little girl. Who would she be now? I kept feeling the weight of her in my arms as if I had said goodbye to her hours ago instead of more than a decade. What would a shape like that feel like if it were truly mine, mine to keep, not just mine to keep safe? What would a shape like that look like if it were half Logan? What would a shape like that grow to be like if it were ours? Ours to mess up as royally as we were messed up?
I think I had been sitting in my car outside the doctor’s office for nearly eight hours by the time Logan slid in next to me, worried and too quiet (it’s not creepy to access your loved ones’ smartphone GPS when they have a dangerous job and are not responding to contact attempts-“Fucking answer your goddamned phone, Veronica, or I’m calling your father!”).
I just looked at him for a really long time.
Eventually he took the keys out of my hand and pulled me over the stick shift and into his lap, my feet dangling into the wheel well like a kid on the counter.
“Your dad’s okay. I’m okay,” he said. “Wallace, Mac, Dick. Even Weeves was fine when I called him looking for you a couple of hours ago. But you, you, Veronica Mars, are not okay.” He kissed my temple and smelled my hair. “I wish you’d talk to me.”
This was a lesson I had already learned: you can’t always run. I could climb out of his lap and out of the car and bury my head in my dad’s spare room for a week until I had dealt with this-that 18 year-old sure would have-and Logan would have accepted it. Been hurt and asked me to explain, but accepted and tried not to hold on to it (God, it’s almost like we’re adults). But that wasn’t the relationship I wanted anymore, it wasn’t the standard I could live with and, really, I could stare down Fitzpatricks with guns so I could muster up the guts to sit there and try to process with Logan rather than keep him at arm’s length until the spinning stopped.
So I moved his hand that was holding mine to my stomach and looked at him out of the corner of my eye.
He was a smart boy, always had been. It didn’t take him all that long to get it.
I pulled my hand out from under his and watched him more closely. I felt his fingers flex against my belly and his eyes crinkle up and down as he tried to decide which reaction to show me. He turned his nose into my neck for a moment then let his head fall back against the seat, a laugh escaping (short, half rueful, half mischievous).
“Well,” he said, other hand carding through my hair, “it would never be dull.”
“Are you saying we’re dull now?”
He laughed again and kissed me on the lips. I turned into it and we sat there for a while.
“Would we be like them?” It took forever to come out of my mouth.
“No.” The sureness in his tone wasn’t code for Echolls bravado or some sort of front. It was as real as his voice when he told me he loved me, only without the pain, without the years of history and details.
The confusion must have been in my eyes.
“Do you have any idea how much therapy is in this car?” I did, actually. “We couldn’t be them if we tried. We would mess up in all new, us ways but we would never be them.”
I guess I smiled a little too. But then, “The hero is the one that stays.”
“You’ve always been heroic, Veronica,” he brushed hair off my neck, “and I’ve never been any good at leaving you alone so…”
“‘All new, us ways…’”
He shrugged, “Could be epic.”
I looked into the calm and the sureness and the love in his eyes and I remembered a long ago feeling of warmth, a special, like no other kind of warmth and I thought, He’d be a really good dad.
I smiled and I kissed him. He was going to be a really good dad.
Lesson #2,511: heels are good for making out.
The height difference is different now. I remember straining up on tiptoes as he leaned down just to kiss him goodbye and it’s not the ache and pull that I remember. I catch myself missing it sometimes like when we part ways at an airport or a ship yard and I think there should be just a twinge more of physical pain to keep the ache in my chest in check.
On the plus side, it means he kisses my lips more than my forehead. A welcome change.
PS- there is already more waiting to be edited and also posted on AO3.
Title: Experience, the Daughter of Fools
Word Count:
Fandom: Veronica Mars (movie canon compatible)
Disclaimer: I’ve had a lot of therapy.
Summary: Lessons Veronica has learned over her many years of experience in, no particular order.
Author’s Notes: The title is from a poem I wrote years ago and, while this is currently marked complete, do not be surprised if new lessons pop up. Sorry, the chapter lengths are all cattywampus; it’s a thing. Note: beta reader, Talipo, feels the need that my chapterization choices are crap and that you should remember that these lessons are not chronological and in the perspective of the Veronica learning the lesson (I feel this is apparent through lessons #1-31 in juxtaposition to every other chapter. See? I have faith in you dear readers, she thinks you will be confused or frustrated and not get it. We have had words about it; the chapter order was our compromise).
Foreword
I've learned a lot in my life. Spending all but a handful of years as a student doesn't hurt. Between my afterschool surveillance and two degrees I feel like there's not much left for me to discover.
Lesson #999: addiction comes in many forms.
Hello, my name is Veronica and I am an addict.
The things I am addicted to could fill an encyclopedia. Sarcasm. Snark. Pizza. Eavesdropping. Tazers, cracking wise, and frosting. Food that comes in a box. Fuzzy slippers. Adrenaline. Logan Echolls. My smartphone. AngryBirds. Vengeance. A Song of Ice and Fire (Arya will kill you all). Trouble. Being right. Spaghettios.
And that is just the top of the list.
All of these things have cost me and I like to think that, for most of them, I have hit bottom, I have admitted that I have a problem and am actively recovering.
My secret?
Cold turkey.
Ok, occasionally I fall off the wagon and eat an entire pizza by myself on a Friday night. I get back on the wagon though. I get back on it every time.
My success has been varied (let’s face it, going cold turkey on sarcasm is destined for failure) but I have by far amassed the biggest, shiniest chip in recovering from my obsession with one Logan Echolls.
(Which is hilarious because he used to accuse me of being obsessed with Duncan and going cold turkey there was practically federally enforced and almost a non-issue).
I’d like to think it was just how rocky that rock bottom was, just how many opportunities for assault charges to be filed there were but that wasn’t it.
I think it was actually the worst sex we’d ever had that made it so easy to walk away. To not look back.
Things had been uncharacteristically quiet after I busted The Castle’s membership wide open (well, ok, not for them) that the letter from Stanford saying I was eligible for a game changing scholarship was taken pretty seriously, especially once Dad found out about it.
Getting out of Neptune, away from the ghosts that dogged my daily existence, and starting again in a place where no one had ever called me a slut or accused me of kidnapping or raped me or attempted to kill me sounded like heaven.
Starting fresh meant starting fresh. I was not even considering a long distance relationship. I was no Meryl; I just didn’t have it in me to trust in love. Nope. No way. No how.
She’d said when you were in love you just knew. And I didn’t. I had been in love. In love in love and I knew no such thing. I hadn’t known about Duncan’s epilepsy, or the possible incest. And with Logan I had known he loved me but I didn’t know how to trust him, how to believe him, how to not be disappointed and angry when he did something characteristically dangerous. Love brought no new knowledge for me, and I didn’t see how that could be any different with Piz.
Needless to say he didn’t take that well. The least well I had ever seen him take anything. There was screaming, there was crying, there was slamming of doors. Somewhere in there, there was also breaking up.
One drunken pity party later there was also the worst, least satisfying round of angry sex Logan and I had ever had. Probably mostly because I couldn’t look at him. He’d likely thought that it was the start of relationship-bout #32, his smugness and relief on his face, and I was just ripping off the Band-Aid. Or saying goodbye. Or self-destructing. Or just burning the bridge, making sure that I couldn’t come back (a token page out of the Echolls playbook).
I’d wanted to puke as I pulled out of his arms-both of us still panting, sweat still hot and slick on our skin-righting my clothes, and leaving without a farewell kiss.
And I’d never gone back. There were no all-night drives to park at the Grand and stare at his (and Duncan’s and Dick’s) balcony. No checking his credit card statements or cell records. I didn’t even call Tina at the front desk to see if he was still staying there.
Sure, I ached-God, did I ache-but I was aching for Back-Up and Piz and Wallace and Dad and Mac and, God, Logan and Lilly and even my car and my carpets so he just kind of got lost in the shuffle and misery which came up hard against the 18 credits I was taking to make the most out of my scholarship and graduate early.
Detox is always the hardest part.
Lesson #1: warm is good.
And cold? Cold is bad.
Lesson #2: lights are bright.
Lights are bright and shutting your eyes only fixes that a little. Even when you’re yelling about it.
Lesson #3: food please.
No, really, food now.
Lesson #4: farting feels funny.
Especially when there is already squishy stuff on your butt.
Lesson #5: things change faster when you scream (also see #31: the squeaky wheel gets the oil).
They may not always change to be what you want but they still change and, keep at it long enough and loud enough, eventually it will go the way you want.
Lesson #9: Daddy loves you.
You’re pretty adamant about being warm but there is something about this particular warmth, these particular nuzzles, that particular laugh that always feels warmer.
Lots of them feel different but these? These are the best. And you want them forever.
Lesson #1,362: alcoholism is a disease.
A psych major spends a substantial amount of time with addiction in an academic sense. I heard over and over that addicts do not recover for a significant period of time until they want to get clean for themselves (accompanied by the ever popular, they’ve got to hit rock bottom first).
Not for husbands, not for babies, and certainly not for forceful daughters who hunt them down and decide to blow their life savings as though money is the only obstacle to being well.
Even hitting bottom may not be enough to turn an addict around.
There’s a big difference between knowing it and knowing it and that right there is the genesis of billions spent in therapy and rehab around the world.
A professor of mine said I showed a distinct lack of empathy. He wasn’t wrong. He said I’d never make a good clinician until I learned to see the person and let go of the judgment.
(The Al-Anon and AA meetings he sent me to didn’t really help with that.
Neither did law school.)
Lesson #46: people suck.
As an Earthling you learn this lesson almost constantly. Every time you think you have accepted it someone does something heroic or selfless and you think, for just a fraction of a second, that people are basically good and humanity in general will figure its shit out sooner or later.
Sooner, rather than later, you regret that thought because people suck.
The parent who is tough on the kids all in the name of doing what is best for them turns out to be folding them in the bathtub.
That’s what you get for giving someone the benefit of the doubt, for believing for even a second that people are not messed up little assholes.
Lesson #749: one cannot always be right.
Deep breath.
I’m wrong sometimes.
I hate it, but I am. I’m not fucking Jessica Fletcher? I don’t know all the penny-ante shit constantly. Sometimes I am wrong.
Sometimes I am wrong and bad stuff happens.
Lesson #31: the squeaky wheel gets the oil.
It does not, however, get a pony.
Unless you count the stuffed, taller than me, stands on its own (but not if you climb on its back) version Mom put a bow on and hid in my closet.
I don’t.
Lesson #3,284: being wrong can be nice.
We never talked about it. Well, we hadn’t talked about it since college (a horrifying conversation that essentially amounted to both of us tending to the nuclear winter option). Sure, there was a brief gasp of the word condom that night at Dad’s and after we were in each other’s pockets when he was stateside so things like pills and test results weren’t exactly secret or even tucked in drawers.
So, what I’m saying is, we never really talked about it.
And then suddenly I’m having flashbacks to the doctor telling me I have chlamydia. Only this time the sexually transmitted disease could eventually be a person.
I really thought I’d developed hypothyroidism or something but… nope. Just a case of baby.
Apparently when your sex life is a little inconsistent (four weeks of several times a day to six months of nada) your pill taking tendencies can get a little inconsistent too. Without you even noticing.
I spent a while deftly hyperventilating under the cover of being chill.
I was pretty sure what Logan’s reaction was going to be. I was pretty sure what my reaction was. It was supposed to be the same as both of our well-thought decisions were when we were 18 and so royally messed up we would could barely function as a couple for more than six weeks.
And I was fine with that.
I would tell him and we’d make an appointment and I’d be under the weather for a while and everything would be fine.
But I kept picturing Duncan and Meg’s little girl. Who would she be now? I kept feeling the weight of her in my arms as if I had said goodbye to her hours ago instead of more than a decade. What would a shape like that feel like if it were truly mine, mine to keep, not just mine to keep safe? What would a shape like that look like if it were half Logan? What would a shape like that grow to be like if it were ours? Ours to mess up as royally as we were messed up?
I think I had been sitting in my car outside the doctor’s office for nearly eight hours by the time Logan slid in next to me, worried and too quiet (it’s not creepy to access your loved ones’ smartphone GPS when they have a dangerous job and are not responding to contact attempts-“Fucking answer your goddamned phone, Veronica, or I’m calling your father!”).
I just looked at him for a really long time.
Eventually he took the keys out of my hand and pulled me over the stick shift and into his lap, my feet dangling into the wheel well like a kid on the counter.
“Your dad’s okay. I’m okay,” he said. “Wallace, Mac, Dick. Even Weeves was fine when I called him looking for you a couple of hours ago. But you, you, Veronica Mars, are not okay.” He kissed my temple and smelled my hair. “I wish you’d talk to me.”
This was a lesson I had already learned: you can’t always run. I could climb out of his lap and out of the car and bury my head in my dad’s spare room for a week until I had dealt with this-that 18 year-old sure would have-and Logan would have accepted it. Been hurt and asked me to explain, but accepted and tried not to hold on to it (God, it’s almost like we’re adults). But that wasn’t the relationship I wanted anymore, it wasn’t the standard I could live with and, really, I could stare down Fitzpatricks with guns so I could muster up the guts to sit there and try to process with Logan rather than keep him at arm’s length until the spinning stopped.
So I moved his hand that was holding mine to my stomach and looked at him out of the corner of my eye.
He was a smart boy, always had been. It didn’t take him all that long to get it.
I pulled my hand out from under his and watched him more closely. I felt his fingers flex against my belly and his eyes crinkle up and down as he tried to decide which reaction to show me. He turned his nose into my neck for a moment then let his head fall back against the seat, a laugh escaping (short, half rueful, half mischievous).
“Well,” he said, other hand carding through my hair, “it would never be dull.”
“Are you saying we’re dull now?”
He laughed again and kissed me on the lips. I turned into it and we sat there for a while.
“Would we be like them?” It took forever to come out of my mouth.
“No.” The sureness in his tone wasn’t code for Echolls bravado or some sort of front. It was as real as his voice when he told me he loved me, only without the pain, without the years of history and details.
The confusion must have been in my eyes.
“Do you have any idea how much therapy is in this car?” I did, actually. “We couldn’t be them if we tried. We would mess up in all new, us ways but we would never be them.”
I guess I smiled a little too. But then, “The hero is the one that stays.”
“You’ve always been heroic, Veronica,” he brushed hair off my neck, “and I’ve never been any good at leaving you alone so…”
“‘All new, us ways…’”
He shrugged, “Could be epic.”
I looked into the calm and the sureness and the love in his eyes and I remembered a long ago feeling of warmth, a special, like no other kind of warmth and I thought, He’d be a really good dad.
I smiled and I kissed him. He was going to be a really good dad.
Lesson #2,511: heels are good for making out.
The height difference is different now. I remember straining up on tiptoes as he leaned down just to kiss him goodbye and it’s not the ache and pull that I remember. I catch myself missing it sometimes like when we part ways at an airport or a ship yard and I think there should be just a twinge more of physical pain to keep the ache in my chest in check.
On the plus side, it means he kisses my lips more than my forehead. A welcome change.