Summary: We all hate ourselves sometimes. Veronica character study.
Universe: Musical-verse.
Pairings: Canon.
Rating: T for some coarse language and suicide-related themes.
"When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves."
-Chuck Palahnuik
Life is a thin balance between loving and hating yourself. That's what Veronica had learned in her life. Especially lately.
And lately she hated herself. She really did.
Veronica could blame JD all she wanted (and she did) but she knew that he wasn't the only one at fault. It was her idea. Getting Kurt and Ram back had been her idea. Luring them in had been her idea.
Of course, she eased her conscience by telling herself that she wasn't the one who planted the bullets into their chests, but that only did so much. She didn't stop JD when he went after Kurt, after she realized that Ram was dead. That was a conscious decision that she made.
And she hated herself for it.
Sure, she liked to tell herself that she was so shocked by Ram actually being dead and the fact that she was holding a dead body in her arms that she couldn't think straight, but deep down, she knew that was a lie.
She was Veronica Sawyer. She had a good head on her shoulders. (At least she used to. She wasn't so sure anymore.) It had only taken her a moment to realize that Ram was no longer breathing, his heart was no longer beating, and that the blood that was pooling on his chest wasn't going to stop any time soon.
While she was holding his body her mind jerked, screaming at her that she had to save Kurt. She had almost gotten up to do just that. But then a little thought ticked in the back of her mind, like an insect in her brain. Kurt had seen everything. If he lived, he would know that it was her and JD that killed Ram and he would have no problem telling everyone just that.
Unlike JD, she could live in a world that had Kurt and Ram in it. And she figured she could also live in a world that didn't have them. But she couldn't live in a world in which she was in jail for murder. The idea of sending her SAT scores to San Quentin was no more appealing now than it had been when it first crossed her mind.
And there was only one way to sidestep that.
So Veronica sat there in the dirt, holding Ram's body and half-trying to will life back into it so that she felt like she wasn't doing what she was actually doing—sitting there waiting for someone to die.
Then the gunshot went off.
She told herself that it would have been too late anyway.
"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."
-Mahatma Gandhi
Finally she felt a little bit better. And right now, even a little bit was everything.
After Kurt and Ram, and JD's goddamn smugness that thin tightrope she was walking felt like it was going to snap under her weight at any minute, leaving her tumbling into some unknown darkness. But in this moment she was a tad lighter. The rope bowed a little less and she could walk again.
She had saved a life. That didn't exactly outweigh the three lives she had helped to end, but it had to help.
And she really did like Heather. Maybe she could even show JD that and get him to realize that people could change. She was realizing now that some people aren't as they seem. Heather was actually really sweet—she was just afraid of being anything different from Heather. Now that Heather was gone, Heather was a lot nicer.
Not to say that JD was right about the world being a better place without them. He was not right. Heather being nicer was just a happy coincidence.
Maybe then the best plan would be to keep Heather as far away from JD as possible. Keep him from seeing the very possible to twist and misconstrue said happy coincidence. And then there was the other reason too…
But Heather was so grateful. She kept on thanking Veronica for saving her life and saying that she didn't know what she would do without her. Saying that she was her best friend and that things would be better now. Every time she said that it warmed the cold piece of coal that Veronica felt had become her heart.
And like Heather said, things were finally getting better. JD was actually leaving her (and everyone else) alone. In a sick way, she kind of missed him. But she knew by now that the guy that she missed wasn't the guy that he was. Dumping him had made her a little bit of a better person and she would be damned if she would let herself backslide.
Better still, Heather wasn't trying to hang out with her or Heather. Heather was what could prove (if anything could) to JD that killing Heather didn't bring rays of sunshine to the world (despite Heather being a lot nicer). It brought out a hidden, stifled evil in Heather that no one could have predicted, not Veronica or Heather, or maybe even Heather herself.
Best keep her distance.
She was trying to become a better person and she was sure more than anything that being around people like Heather (and JD) would only drag her down into the depths of hell.
Heather, on the other hand, seemed to have the reverse effect.
Maybe each time she did a good thing, things would get a little bit better.
Maybe each time she did a good thing, she would start hating herself a little bit less.
"To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could."
-Alain de Botton
Veronica was destroyed. She had thought that things would start getting better, yet she let her best friend slip through her fingers.
She was the worst person ever. She was the literal worst person ever.
As much has being an accessory to triple homicide made her hate herself, death was so much more painful when it was personal. And even though Martha wasn't actually dead, her even thinking about killing herself made Veronica feel like the biggest failure of a friend.
And seeing her on that hospital bed with the casts. In such a deep sleep, and so pale it almost looked like she was dead. Veronica could see it—see it as though it had really happened. And it had come so close to happening.
Sure, Veronica had saved Heather. One lousy victory. But fate had stepped in to save Martha, since Veronica hadn't been there for her to do it. Since Veronica was busy being such a bad friend.
Maybe she was only able to have one friend at a time. Martha (almost dead) her whole life, then Heather (dead) for three weeks, then JD (murderer) for less than that, and now Heather (suicidal). And, given that track record, how long would it be before she inevitably screwed that up and let Heather die?
Then Veronica's heart fell into the pit of her stomach. Was this her fault? Had she pushed Martha to do this by telling her about the letter in the horrific Heather Chander-esque way that she had?
She thought back to the look on Martha's face when she told (more like destroyed) her. She thought back to Martha running away. And then she wasn't even at Ms. Fleming's stupid-ass assembly. And she had thought nothing of it. Not like it would have made a difference anyway.
Seeing her in the hospital was the next time she had seen her.
She didn't deserve to live. She deserved to die even more than JD did.
Sure, JD had actually killed three people, but they were people that he hated. Veronica had pushed her own best friend to suicide, and wasn't that worse?
She didn't know and in all honesty, thinking about it more only made her want to die.
"To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."
-Herman Melville
Which was why she decided that the best thing that she could do was to the lovely mix of saving everyone and killing herself. Maybe not the ideal solution, but it was the perfect solution. And nothing in her life had been perfect thus far, so having the perfect death seemed to be just the thing to do.
She would go out like a martyr. It was sickening in a way. She didn't deserve to be thought of that way. This. This was what she deserved, aftermath be damned.
It would be so easy. All she really needed to do was drop the trigger in the field and run away as best she could with her cracked rib or whatever it was that was making her insides feel almost as bad as her heart did. No more death.
But that wasn't what the world needed. The scale was tilted. People had died needlessly, and now was time for her to level the playing field while simultaneously creating a large crater in the less metaphorical playing field.
Let her do the world this favor. Ultimately this was best for everyone, even her parents (and definitely for her friends.) Her parents would no longer have to have a murderer as their only daughter. Rather, they would have a sad suicide statistic, but hey. At least she was going out in an interesting way to mix it up. She was sure that not a lot of people in heaven could say that they had actually exploded.
Then again…there was no way she had a golden ticket into heaven anymore. Well, she was sure that not a lot of people in hell could say that they had exploded either.
Hell. A chilling thought, but fitting.
It was what she deserved.
Oh, look. A limping jackass.
They ended up being more similar than she ever would have thought.
You'd think that that would have made her hate him, but it didn't. No matter how much she felt like she should have hated him, she just couldn't bring herself to. Or maybe she did hate him…but she really liked him at the same time. Just like herself in this moment.
"From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate."
-Socrates
Had she loved JD? She didn't think so. She certainly had never said that she had. All that she had known was that she really liked him—had wanted him really badly.
When she had been pining for him she was left with a giant blind spot. She couldn't see all the anger that he had. All the hate that he had. She had been so busy focusing on how much she wanted him that she couldn't see what was stirring just beneath the surface, despite it kicking up sand and dust all the while, eventually blinding her too. Maybe that was her downfall. (It was certainly his.)
That was probably the deepest cut of all. That was why she couldn't stop blaming herself. She had pushed him to do it He had killed people for her. That made it her fault, didn't it?
"Let God deal with the things they do, 'cause hate in your heart will consume you too."
-Will Smith
In the end, neither of them decided to let everyone live, the ideal that Veronica had told herself that she'd been striving for. In her mind, she had twisted their story to be a tale of her versus him, but that wasn't it at all. No one had to die, but she had chosen to. And then when he had offered himself in her place, she let him. Another body on her conscience, maybe, but it still felt more like a blank slate than anything else.
Funny. The one death that she was really responsible for—the one death she had really caused—and it actually ebbed the hate away. Not all of it but enough. Enough to live another day at the very least.
That's what she and Heather and Martha were doing. Somehow still living, somehow still toeing the line. After three attempted suicides with three unexpected interventions and an unbelievable amount of shit, they were here, still doing this life thing.
She supposed that that was the biggest difference between her and JD in the end. She was alive and he wasn't.
But…he was in a way. He had given his life to her. Entrusted her to make the world better.
But how was she supposed to make the world better when she could barely make herself better?
JD had stolen her answer. Leaving the world was how she was supposed to make it better. But now she was stuck here in the purgatory that was Earth, wondering what the next step was. She hoped that she wouldn't always hate him for that. Rather, she hoped that one day she would really, really thank him for it. That day was out there, somewhere beyond the calendar, waiting.
"Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
The tightrope she was walking now was thin as ever. She thought constantly of JD, constantly of Heather, Kurt, and Ram; and constantly of Heather, Martha, and (unfortunately) Heather. It was like there were dueling winds pushing back and forth. The hate was pushing her one way and the love pushing her the other way until she was swaying back and forth in dizziness.
But that was actually the bright side to it all. Sure, she hadn't been this dizzy since the night after Ram's homecoming party, but it wasn't all bad, as it hadn't been then. There was a sweet high: the love.
For the first time in her life, she actually had two friends. And she was actually kind of doing it right. She was giving attention to both of them, spending time with them, and letting them know how much she valued (needed) them. Two friends that for some unforeseen reason actually liked her and didn't blame her for anything.
So maybe JD was right. Maybe purging some of the hate out of the world made the world a better place, even at the loss of a human life. She didn't want them to hold that ideal (or anything else) in common but she was starting to find that they did.
The hate was what binded them together. Whether it was him hating people for her or her hating him for those people (or hating herself because of him.) And every second more that she let one of them go, the other followed.
Maybe that was how to make the world a better place.
He had loved her, and that was his demise. Her ending her hate for him (and herself) would be her rebirth.
"Anger is like flowing water; there's nothing wrong with it as long as you let it flow. Hate is like stagnant water; anger that you denied yourself the freedom to feel, the freedom to flow; water that you gathered in one place and left to forget. Stagnant water becomes dirty, stinky, disease-ridden, poisonous, deadly; that is your hate. On flowing water travels little paper boats; paper boats of forgiveness. Allow yourself to feel anger, allow your waters to flow, along with all the paper boats of forgiveness. Be human."
― C. JoyBell C.
FIN