Author's Note: Thanks for the reviews – and thank you for the additional suggestions, nightmaster000!
Vicky may seem like an unconventional choice for this sort of story, but the VicTim ship is actually my OTP. Just as Cosmo has green hair and Wanda has pink hair, so the fact that Vicky wears green and Timmy wears pink proves they were meant for each other. Sort of.
Nevertheless, I find their relationship incredibly fascinating. Most of the time they seem to hate each other, but the show has moments (such as "Snow Bound," "Love at First Height," "Frenemy Mine" and "Oh, Brother!") that hint at an underlying concern for each other. I like to think that Vicky's sadistic tendencies are simply meant to cover up the slightly inappropriate feelings she has towards the boy who is six years younger than her. Maybe Vicky is the real mother of Tammy and Tommy in "Channel Chasers!"
Enough rambling. Enjoy!
But before that (don't worry, there will be a chapter, I promise), there's an FOP game called "Breakin' Da Rules" where Vicky's mother Nicky appears. She looks nothing like the mother we see on the show, so I'm going to try to explain why that is. I also hope to give a reason why the brother Vicky mentioned in the first Oh, Yeah! Cartoons short was never seen again.
Vicky Valentine
Is this a joke?
Seriously, is this a joke? What moron came up with this survey?
"How much do you love Timmy Turner?" That question assumes everyone's head-over-heels in love with the twerp. It doesn't allow for someone hating his guts.
Someone like ME!
He's the worst kid I've ever had to babysit. He pranks me all the time, he humiliates me in front of my crushes and he keeps trying to blow my sugar-sweet cover to his parents. (Plus, he once read my diary. Show me a girl who wouldn't beat up a boy for reading her diary and I'll show you a pushover.) And he's always getting so dirty! It takes a screwdriver to clean his ears and a flamethrower to dry him off after a bath. But he still screams and cries and asks me why I have to do it. IT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE FILTHY, TWERP!
I am the supreme ruler of hating Timmy.
Why am I so vicious? I don't know! I just am, okay? It's definitely NOT to cover up how much I want to give him a big hug and cry on his shoulder and never let him go. It's definitely NOT a distraction from the feelings I don't understand. No siree bob.
I'm not fooling anyone, am I? I'm barely fooling myself.
I don't mean to be mean to him. I just am. And I … I wish I wasn't.
I'm not sure how it happened – how I started, well, liking the twerp. But it's something to do with that cave we were trapped in when his dad took us to that ski resort. We were freezing, and I was frightened, and he was furious. I was all set to pin the blame on him, the way I blame him for wrecking the Turners' house. But he wasn't taking it this time. He gave me this grand speech about what an awful human being I was. And there's one part in particular that always jabs at my mind when I recall it.
"If I go down, at least you're going down with me!"
I knew I hated his guts, but I had no idea how much he disliked me in return. Well, now I know. He would have been very happy to see me die in that cave, leaving an icy corpse behind. That's how much he hated me.
That's also kind of why he's the first kid I felt guilty about torturing. The only kid, actually.
Why do I torment him more than anyone else? And what pushed me towards feeling sorry for him and not one of the other little brats?
Everyone has a light. I'm not talking about how everyone carries a flashlight or something like that. I'm talking about this light that's within them. Yeah, it doesn't make that much sense. I think I mean – well, everyone has something that makes them special. It could be sports, or poetry, or babysitting. When they do that special thing, they shine. There's this light inside Timmy as well, the brightest I've ever seen. It's almost blinding. Not because he's sporty or poetic or a fantastic babysitter (like me – NOT), but because he's so darn nice to everyone else who isn't me.
I notice it the most when he's around my stepsister. He used to push her away when she tried to hug him, but he's toned it down now. He even kissed her on Valentine's Day. (Yep, it turns out Tootie has more luck with boys than I do.) When that happened, it was like the Sun was rising for the second time that day. That light is a sign of what a good person he is, and it sickens me.
I'll never have such a bright, beautiful light. Why not? Am I diseased? Am I an alien? Was I hit in the head as a baby? (Actually, I wouldn't put it past her. She despised me from the moment I was born.) Whatever it was, I never developed that kindness which everyone else apparently has. I can't care that much about anyone. I don't have a warm glow. The most I can muster up is a flickering candle.
When this babysitting gig started, I had my chance to put out the other lights around me so I wouldn't feel so bad about my own gloom. You know, like those women who make themselves feel thinner by hanging out with fat friends. But Timmy Turner is indestructible. And now I'm having second thoughts about what I'm doing.
I'm going to share a secret. And if you tell anyone what I'm about to say, I will come to your house with a mace and a creepy organist to set the mood while I slowly kill you. You have been warned.
The thing is … I'm jealous of Timmy.
Hear me out, okay? He has girls throwing themselves at his feet and goldfish that don't die on him and parents who are clueless about parenting but don't love him less because of it. I'm never going to have anything like that. I can't get a guy to stay with me unless I tie him up. Doidle was great until he needed to be "fixed" (read: neutered), and now he's no fun at all because he bites me too much. As for my mother…
Don't even talk to me about Nicky Valentine. I hate her. She never gave a hoot about me. She never hugged me when I got good grades or put a Band-Aid on my knee when I fell off my skateboard. She made me do the dishes and clean the toilet, and my so-called reward was going to bed early. She even melted down my first sports trophy to make herself a necklace. (It was only a Participation trophy, but it still made me cry.)
She wasn't much kinder to Dad, either. They argued all the time, usually about me. He wanted to stand up for me, but she kept telling him he was a useless waste of space, and he welled up and agreed with her, the coward. That's why he started spending so much time with Judy. He left me alone with Nicky, knowing pretty darn well what she was capable of, while he frolicked through the flowers with some dork he met at a coffee shop.
The times when he wasn't there to defend me were the times when she hit me the hardest.
When Nicky found out about this other woman, she called Dad and said he'd be in so much trouble when he got home. So he never went home. He and Judy ran away. He didn't even come back when Nicky said she was pregnant again. (I don't know what my brother Todd is doing these days. He and Nicky can crawl into a hole and die for all I care.)
I almost thought Dad had forgotten to take me with him. But he didn't; he snuck into my room in the middle of the night and drove me to their new place while I was sleeping. It's a miracle he found it in his heart to save me.
Just after I turned seven, Gertrude was born. A.K.A. Tootie. A.K.A. the original twerpette. A.K.A. the stepsister I wish was never born. I bet Dad can't believe his luck. Now the Valentine family has a man and a woman who care for each other and a daughter born out of love. It's the prefect family unit.
Except for me.
I look like Nicky, I sound like Nicky – come on, we even have rhyming names. Vicky and Nicky, both of them icky. I don't fit anywhere in this happy ending. I'm a reminder of everything bad that happened before. I'm like a zit on a model's face, a glitch in a video game, a typo in a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
No-one understands me. No-one has a hope of understanding me until they feel what I felt: the fear, the hurt, the shame, the sense of abandonment.
When the kids beg me for a reason why I make them do chores and give me pedicures, I tell them I'm showing them how cruel the world is now so it doesn't shock them later. But I'm also secretly searching for someone who gets me, for someone who'll sympathise with me, for someone who doesn't call me a monster without trying to figure out why I'm a monster.
Maybe Timmy Turner is that person. Maybe some of his light will shine on me. Maybe, if we were friends, or at least acquaintances, I won't be such an evil, lying, troublemaking shrew.
Yeah, right. Like that's going to happen. I'm too far gone.