Fic: "Poughkeepsie", veronica mars, PG-13, fairy_tale_echo

[fairy-tale-echo.livejournal.com]

Title: Poughkeepsie
Author: fairy_tale_echo
Fandom: Veronica Mars
Spoilers/Timeline: through S1, slightly AU for who is at the door.
Summary: You should know better.
Notes: Logan angsty!fic. Thanks to slodwick for having the party and being flexible with deadlines!

Picture Prompt



Your parents got married in Rome. (way before TomKat pulled that shit, so don’t even start, OK?) It was on the cover of People and Trina shoved her way to the front of the picture, of course, and your parents look like they might love each other a little and your Mom has the spread of photos framed in about ten rooms of the house, because it’s People magazine, after all, and eternal love, blah-blah. There are no pictures of Rome, though, because it’s not like your parents were there to sightsee. Your Dad was filming some movie and your Mom was two months pregnant with you and there’s shopping to be had, not some falling down coliseum to be seen. It was Rome, but it might as well have been Poughkeepsie. That’s the best metaphor for your family you can think of, really.

When you were almost eleven, you thought there was no way for you life to get worse. Sure, you knew there were those starving African kids and things were pretty horrible for them and you probably wouldn’t want to trade places with them, what with the starvation, but still. You didn’t figure they’d much want to trade places with you after a week in your life.

‘Cause, sure, they were starving but they did not have a mother who missed your first soccer game because she was on location filming some stupid Lifetime movie called Fatal Babysitter or something equally awful that was just going to get you jeered on the playground for the way her boobs bounced in a swimsuit while she fled from danger. Starving African kids also didn’t have your father, who was worse than not around, who was around all the time, waiting for the next big part and filling his time with screwing around with the current maid, and told you to be nice to the hordes of photographers who screamed your name as you were JUST trying to play in your own damn front yard.

So, when you were almost eleven, you were pretty convinced that your life, even with its perks, was pretty crummy and could not, in any way, get worse.

And then some waiter ten years younger than your old man beat him out for some part that had OSCAR written all over it and you made the mistake of rolling your eyes once too often at dinner and your father leaned over the table, right over the cook’s freshly prepared lamb, and smacked you, opened-handed, across the face.

And you thought then, in shock, that your life could never get worse.

Then your mother blinked twice, swallowed a mouthful of corn, pushed her chair away from the table and walked out of the room.

Your father stared at you with grim eyes and said, “It’s time for you to start behaving like a man and not a god-damned child.”

And after that, you lost track of how many times you thought there was no way for your life to get worse.

The year you turn 15 you hang up the picture of the coliseum in your room, the sole decoration on your bleached white walls as a subtle fuck you to the entire mythos of your family story. It is a rebellion against magazine covers lies and the ugly truth no one in your world acknowledges, a refusal to live in the lie of Poughkeepsie.

Your life still keeps getting worse, even if you’re not even tracking it.

Probably factored in there was the day you got the news that the first girl you loved had been found dead with her head smashed in and your best friend, her brother, turned into a zombie blinded by grief and doped to the gills. You probably thought that then.

You definitely thought it when, after a particularly nasty fight that you were the cause of, your mother ran away from your father, stopped her car in the middle of a bridge and jumped right over the side, disappearing permanently from your life the way she’d been doing in inches since the second you were born.

You might have thought it the day you realized the only person in the world you’d come to actually care about, this girl you were sorta afraid you were falling for, suspected you of bashing in the head of that first girl and told the police about her suspicions. Yeah, you thought that then.

And when that suspicion led directly to you lying on the ground, beaten into unconsciousness by that first girl’s criminal other boyfriend, before you passed out in a pool of your own blood, your last thought may have been that there was simply no way for your life to get worse.

Then you awoke in the hospital to the stark news, now splashed in across every news media outlet in the world, that not only had your old man been screwing that first girl you ever loved, while you were still dating her, but that he’d been taping the whole sick fucking thing and, better still, turned out he was the one who’d bashed her head in to keep her from running her beautiful mouth about the whole thing.

Yes, pressing the morphine button and closing your eyes against the tidal wave of nausea you knew had nothing to do with your beating, you knew, with a hundred percent certainty, that there was just no way in the world for your life to get worse.

Turns out you hadn’t learned anything from that open-handed smack across the mouth when you were almost eleven years old.

Because it was just a few weeks later when you saw your best friend and that damn girl you’d been starting to fall for holding hands and you discovered, to your dawning horror, they were dating. (again)

And that...that was the moment you realized that starving African children had nothing on you and disease, famine, and lack of clean water notwithstanding, they never would.