The Ghosts of Who We Once Were
Logan looks down at his sleeping wife in the bed beside him, thinks back on the evening he's just had and wonders how his life has come to this.
Veronica laughed at him, earlier, because she thinks he's got the typical woes of the high-school-manwhore-turned-father-of-teenage-daughters. She's always been the one who softened his strict rules, helped their girls slip around daddy's conservative taste in fashion, or talked him into special occasion curfew extensions. Logan lets her get away with it mostly because he wasn't raised that way, and sometimes worries that he doesn't have a proper sense of how being an involved parent is supposed to work. Veronica, on the other hand, was raised by Keith Mars, possibly the only halfway decent parent ever to come out of Neptune, California. And even he let his sixteen year old daughter go on stakeouts and carry a Tazer and wear some pretty criminal outfits, if Logan recalls correctly.
Sometimes he worries he should have more of this figured out by now, considering he's got four kids at this point, but Logan's been learning on the fly, and while changing diapers and reading bedtime stories and all that soft little kid stuff is pretty easy to pick up, he's been struggling with the dilemmas of the teenage years quite a bit. What it boils down to, he thinks, is that he didn't go into parenting with a long term plan in place; he's never really considered the prospect of being the father of teenagers before.
Which isn't entirely his fault. Their eldest daughter, Alex, was a drunken-island-honeymoon-sex baby, Veronica and Logan's surprise take home gift that screamed into their lives after less than a year of marriage. Elsie and Ava, their twins, came next, a scantly respectable eleven months later, the result of Logan and Veronica's first night away from their newborn daughter. A little more than a year after that, a birth control miscommunication lead to their youngest, Jack, and shortly thereafter, Logan's vasectomy.
He loved all four of his children unconditionally, of course, but Logan sometimes thought that if it had ever been a matter of having to choose, he and Veronica would probably not have ever become parents. He was happy now, of course, but he couldn't picture himself at twenty-eight, freshly married, calmly discussing the idea of starting a family with Veronica. Back then, everything was still a little tentative, and everyone was waiting to see if this time they'd stick, after so many past failures. Logan wouldn't have consciously chosen to add a kid to all that uncertainty, and he knew Veronica would probably have walked out on him for even suggesting it.
"Are you still brooding?" she mumbles beside him with an exasperated sigh. "It's after midnight."
"Well, you know if I don't moodily contemplate the darker side of life for the requisite number of hours they'll revoke my bad boy status," he retorts, because even after all this time, this is still how they communicate.
Veronica responds with a look that says I've seen you having tea parties with dolls, and doesn't further address his comment. "The kids are growing up, Logan," she tells him sympathetically, "We have to let them. Alex will be fifteen in a couple of months; it's normal for her to have a boyfriend."
Logan nearly snarls picturing the punkass kid who'd come to dinner that night with clear designs on his daughter.
"I was twelve when I started dating Duncan," Veronica reminds him, "And you were with Lilly around then, too."
"We weren't normal, Ronnie," he retorts, "At least, I hope to god we weren't."
Logan watches as understanding dawns on Veronica, and he can actually see the moment where she starts to take the gnawing pit of worry inside him seriously. "Logan," she murmurs, "Of course the things that happened to us won't happen to them."
He doesn't bother debating that statement, but rather marshals his chief worries for presentation. "I was thirteen when I had sex with Lilly for the first time," he tells his wife, "And I have no idea who her first was, but it sure as hell wasn't me."
"Cliff Dawson," Veronica responds, that faraway Lilly-look in her eye. "He was a couple of years older than her; they dated for most of her first month of high school."
"How old is that kid Alex dragged home?" asks Logan abruptly, because he'd never thought to consider older boys before, probably because Logan had done more of the Mrs. Robinson type promiscuity than the cradle robbing type when he was a kid.
"Josh is in Alex's grade in school, which you might know if you'd worried less about intimidating the boy and more about talking to him like a reasonable human being," Veronica replies drily, "They're both fifteen."
"Fifteen," he scoffs, "Fifteen is too young, too."
"Yes," Veronica agrees softly, and Logan feels guilty for reminding his wife about what happened when she was that age, about going to a party and being drugged and raped-but-kind-of-not, and then just plain raped. "But we can't exactly wrap her in bubble wrap because of all the crappy things that happened to us as kids."
"How old do you think Lilly was when she started fucking my father?" Logan asks brutally, because these things he worries about, they aren't trivial. He's not some sitcom-plot-device-overbearing-dad; he's seen enough of life to have legitimate claim to his paranoia. "She was nearly seventeen when her slutting it up with the wrong guy got her killed."
"Lilly's death wasn't her fault!" Veronica declares angrily, because she will always come to her best friend's defence, "She was murdered."
"By her older, married lover," Logan responds, and holy fuck, he's coming pretty close to sounding like he's defending his father, and he feels a little sick, but still, "Who was also her boyfriend's father."
Veronica concedes him the point, closing her eyes for a moment and making an obvious effort not to be drawn into this weird, weird fight. "Alex isn't Lilly; she's responsible, and level-headed and mature."
"So was Duncan," Logan rejoins petulantly, "And he ran away with his dead girlfriend's illegitimate daughter before finishing high school, and that was only after having drugged sex with the girl he believed was his half-sister."
"I give up," Veronica declares, which seems extremely unlikely to her husband of sixteen years, "I'll help you start researching convents to send them to in the morning."
"Don't be ridiculous, Veronica," Logan rejoins, "We're not Catholic."
"So I should, what? Go out and buy us matching shot guns for the next time one of our daughters brings a boy home?"
"No," Logan sighs, because he knows full well that the fact that Keith Mars's reputation for being armed never stopped Logan from trying to get in Veronica's pants in high school. "But you could share the extremely thorough background check you've done on Josh with me."
For a minute, Veronica seems to be considering playing dumb, but she wisely gives it up and reaches into her nightstand to retrieve a thick folder. Logan had figured she was holding out on him; his wife's trust issues had always been even more crippling and ingrained than his own. "He appears to be a good kid, Logan," she summarizes reluctantly.
"Has it ever occurred to you that it's not actually the boy she brings home to dinner that we have to worry about?" Logan asks as he flips through the details on Alex's boyfriend.
Veronica smiles at him, and it's that rare smirk, the last real remnant of the bitter girl she was at sixteen, and produces another stack of files, names of boys he's heard his daughters mention in passing written neatly on the top corners. Logan smirks back and tells his wife, "See, gorgeous, this is why I married you."
"For my impeccable research skills and raging paranoia?" she asks archly, and god, she's sexy.
"Nah," he says, "It's because you get me, Mars; deep down, we're coming from the same place."
"Same thing, then," she says, leaning in to kiss him over the stacks of background checks, "Except for the research skills."
ooOoo
A.N.: So this? Also not the multi chapter fic I teased nearly a year ago. That's still, remarkably, underway. As in, twenty-one and a half chapters written, one and a half left to write. This story is, instead, a little one shot that popped into my head somewhere around chapter thirteen of that other story, and which I'm now sharing as proof that I haven't, like, died or something, and that I am still writing and will, someday publish that other story. Also, I solemnly vow never again to so much as mention an in-progress fic again.