Warnings: Mentions of M/M sex, M/F sex/sexual situations, angst, drug use, alcohol use by minors, Dick being himself (again!), Piz being himself (kinda boring), Logan being himself (super-angsty), etc.
The Love That We Leave Behind
By Lymie Eros
Chapter 3: Veronica Mars is One Pizzed-Off Motherfucker!
As I stared into the eyes of my boyfriend—quite possibly, considering my current situation, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend—I heard a noise coming from Dick, whose head rested above mine. From just above the point where our lips touched, I heard a strange sound coming from the general vicinity of his nose.
Dick was snoring.
No wonder his eyes were closed. He wasn't trying to kiss me—he'd just fallen asleep conveniently on top of me.
What the Hell?
"Mmmfff!!" I exclaimed as I tried to push him off of me while not in any way damaging my already damaged head or the IV that was precariously connected via needle to my left arm.
Piz, standing frozen in the doorway, seemed to respond to my call for help, and all at once he rushed into the room and pulled Dick off of me by grabbing the back of his shirt and dragging him into the chair beside the hospital bed, where Dick had originally been sitting when I first awoke.
Dick awoke suddenly, chuckling. "Dude, Ronnie" he exclaimed, "You taste like bed pans and benzoil!" He started laughing hysterically.
Both Piz and I stared at Dick, then looked at each other, then back to Dick.
"What the Hell, Dick," I exclaimed, still unable to move my head for fear that the intense pain would return, "What's wrong with you?"
Dick was laughing so hard that he had to gasp for air. He turned to Piz, still laughing and gasping, and said, "Dude, she totally came on to me! I didn't want it, she just pulled me down and had her way with me. I feel so … used!" He doubled over, roaring with laughter after that last line.
Piz blinked and looked back and forth between the two of us. "Umm … did I miss something here?" he asked.
I thought that Piz was terribly cute when he was confused. Absolutely adorable—unlike certain jerkwads like the one who sat in the visitor's chair beside my bed, laughing his ass off at something that wasn't even funny.
"I can't even move my head," I explained to Piz, choosing to ignore Dick rather than deal with his shit. "As you can see," I said as I waved my non-IV-drip arm around to point out all the hospital paraphernalia surrounding me, "if he falls on top of me there's nothing I can do about it."
"Right, I can see that," Piz said before glancing at Dick again, then choosing the same path as me—to ignore the crazy man in the room. "But what's wrong with him? Why is he laughing like that?"
"You're asking the wrong person," I said, "He was here when I woke up. Unfortunately."
"Oh, uh, these are for you," Piz held out the flowers.
At that moment, before I could take the flowers and thank Piz for them, Dick grabbed them and vomited directly into the bouquet.
"Ew! Dick!" I exclaimed, disgusted.
Dick sat back with a sigh, now apparently finished with his laughing-spree. "I feel so much better now," he said. He turned to Piz, a serious look on his face. "I apologize for sucking face with your girlfriend," he said, "but I stand by what I said before—she totally came onto me!"
"Stop being a dick, Dick," I bit out, unable to hide the venom behind my words.
"Are you mad at me?" Dick looked hopeful, and started guffawing. "Veronica Mars is onePizzed-off motherfucker!" He doubled over laughing again. Unfortunately, this time the bouquet of flowers in which he had just deposited his lunch—or whichever meal he'd had before coming here—fell from his hand to the floor, and his vomit scattered over the hospital floor. Not a very appealing sight—or smell.
Dick's vomit definitely reeked of alcohol.
"Have you been drinking?!" I asked in disbelief. "It's not even noon yet! What kind of grief counselor are you supposed to be?" I couldn't believe I'd just said that. Since when had I started taking Dickseriously? Grief counselor my ass! Dick was just trying to have some fun at my expense while I was in a vulnerable state, unable to harm him or seek revenge. Well, I thought, just wait until I get out of this hospital, Dick—I will make you regret using me for your little game!
"Well," he ran a hand through his messy blond hair, "I haven't been drinking per se. It's more of a drug cocktail. Hey—when in Rome, right?" He shrugged and then gestured towards the surroundings of the hospital room. "We're in a hospital! They've practically got pills flowing out of the drippy-tube things!" He pointed to the fluid-filled bag that hung above my bed attached to my IV. "Do you know how high that thing is going to make you, Ronnie? Huh? Do ya? I mean, look at me, I am high as a kite!"
He seemed to ponder that last statement for a moment as Piz and I watched on in stunned silence, then suddenly began to wax philosophical in a way that only Dick can.
"You know, I don't know why it's 'high as a kite,'" he said, "It's supposed to mean that you're high to a great extent, but a kite really isn't all that high, when you come to think about it. I mean, airplanes are a lot higher than kites. Why isn't it 'High as an airplane'? Or 'high as a helicopter'? Or 'high as a fighter jet'?" He asked. "Wouldn't that make a lot more sense? Or maybe, you know what gets really high, is a spaceship, they go all the way up and out of the atmosphere." He frowned. "But once you get into space, it's not really high anymore, is it? It's more like far instead of high, because there's no up or down or gravity or anything. So shouldn't it be 'as far as' a spaceship instead of 'as high as'? But then," he added, "there are different degrees of highness. Like right now for example, I said I'm high as a kite, but really, this is nothing compared to a nice long bong hit of some good weed. So why aren't there different degrees of height within the metaphors? Like, high as a kite would be kinda high, high as a plane would be higher, and high as a spaceship would be the highest? That makes a lot more sense to me." He crossed his arms over his chest and frowned, lost in his own little world—a world that completely boggled my mind.
"Dick" I began, unsure of exactly what to say. Right now, I thought, I should be the one rolling around on the floor laughing my ass off—except that would probably be against Doctor's orders for my head.
Ignoring my small interruption, Dick suddenly perked up and said, in a perfect non sequitur fashion—which, at least in my mind, perfectly matched his current mental state—"You wouldn't believe the stuff you can get around here just by sweet-talking the nurses!" He grinned. "And the nurses!" he flopped backwards in his chair and I dared not look anywhere below his waist, lest I find an unwanted surprise poking up from his crotch.
"Just which pills did you take?" Thankfully, Piz had somehow managed to keep his head on his shoulders in a way in which I had not—but then again, my head was injured, so I think I had a pretty good excuse for my own incoherence in a bizarre situation like this.
"I dunno, uh … I think Adderol," he began ticking off on his fingers, "Vicodin, Oxy-something-or-other, something else, and three cans of beer."
"Don't you think that combining all those meds might be, uh, fatal, or something?" Piz asked hesitantly. He leaned over, in what appeared to be an attempt to pick up the forgotten bouquet of ruined flowers off the floor.
"Dude!" Dick launched towards Piz faster than either of us could react, and soon held my boyfriend by the collar, pressing him back across my legs atop the hospital bed. Things were getting way out of hand here.
"Dick, stop it!" I exclaimed, but he paid no attention to me.
"Don't tase me, bro!" he exclaimed as he slammed Piz against the hospital bed—and my legs! "Don't tase me!" Finally with what seemed to be super-human strength, he lifted Piz into the air by his collar and flung him across the bed. Piz landed on the far edge and then tumbled off the side, crashing into the carts there and spilling their contents to the floor—as well as causing the stand beside my bed to tumble over, ripping my IV painfully out of my arm as the bag with the intravenous fluids burst open on the floor.
"Piz!" I shouted as I struggled to lift myself into a sitting position. My head was throbbing, my arm was aching and bleeding where the IV had been ripped out of my veins, and I felt like I was going to pass out. But I had to make sure that Piz was ok. If anything happened to him—if something happened to him, I—
On the other side of the bed, I heard a loud plop as Dick fell to the floor, unconscious. I didn't know what was going on here, but I knew something had to be done. Both Dick and Piz were lying on the floor, and neither of them appeared to be moving or even awake.
"Nurse!" I called out, hoping that someone outside in the hallway would hear my cries for help, "Nurse!! It's an emergency!"
"Say 'ahhhhh.'"
"Ahhhh," I said as I opened my mouth and stuck out my tongue.
Even though tongue depressors were seriously old-fashioned and not really even necessary anymore, the doctor peered into the darkness of my throat.
"Alright, that does it," he said as he pulled the tongue depressor out of my mouth and began to pack his things away. "You've got a clean bill of health, young lady." He smiled at me. "I wouldn't be surprised if you lived to be a hundred!"
"Thank you, Dr. Smith," I said.
It was three days after that terrible incident in my hospital room. My head was feeling much better, my symptoms of headaches and dizziness had gone down, and I was finally ready to be released from the hospital. After this one last check by the doctor, I could finally go home.
"Be sure to contact me if you have any relapse symptoms, Miss Mars," Dr. Smith said sternly. He was short and round and bald, and kind of looked like Santa Clause without the beard.
I sat on the edge of the examining room table, swinging my legs back and forth in front of me. Sometimes being petite has its advantages—like when your feet aren't forced to touch the ground when you're seated.
"By the way," I said as I stopped swinging my legs and looked at the doctor seriously, "What exactly was my diagnosis when I first came in?"
The doctor checked his chart. "Oh, that was just a mild concussion," he said brightly. "It's nothing to worry about—there was no extensive damage, and no permanent injury to the brain. But you still have to be careful—no impacts to the head, and if you have any recurring symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, or memory loss, you must contact meimmediately. If it turns out you have PCS—that is, post-concussion syndrome—it's best if you notify me as soon as possible." He patted my knee and added, "I wouldn't worry about that in your case though, Miss Mars—you're as healthy as a horse!"
"But what about all the blood?" I asked. I still wanted to get to the bottom of what exactly happened that night. Although the doctor said that everything was fine, but with that diagnosis—things just didn't add up. "After I hit my head, I thought I felt blood—a lot of it. If that wasn't an injury, then what—"
"Oh, that," Dr. Smith said, "that was from an old injury on the back of your head that reopened when you hit your head. We stitched it up as soon as you were brought in, and removed the stitches a few days later while you were still unconscious." He leaned behind me and pulled back some of my hair to examine the spot he was talking about. "Yes, it seems to be all better now," he said before lowering my hair and moving back to the task of packing up his tools.
"But—wait—what do you mean, a few days later while I was still unconscious?" I'd had a sneaking suspicions for awhile, but no one had said anything to me outright. Had I really been unconscious for over a day?
The doctor sighed. "Well, when you came in we thought at first that the injury might be more severe than it was due to the fact that you wouldn't wake up, but—" he glanced at me from the corner of his eye and then looked away. "It seems as though the unconsciousness was not directly caused by the concussion. Rather, you seemed to have suffered from some sort of mental trauma, such as receiving a big shock—a mental one, not the physical one caused by your head injury. If you were to receive both the mental and physical shocks at the same time—well, that would tend to magnify the effect of receiving the mental shock alone."
"How long?" I asked. I felt as though the past few days of my life since I'd found out—well, since I'd found out about that—was like a big puzzle, and only now was I finally able to piece together a solution. And with every piece of information I received, one more piece was being added to the puzzle.
But what the puzzle would turn out to be when it was finally completed … there was no box top with a picture of what the completed puzzle would look like. And to even think about what it might look like scared the living daylights out of me.
"Six and a half days," came Dr. Smith's simple answer.
It felt like my whole world was crashing down around me. Almost a week of my life had been spent unconscious, recovering from that huge mental shock? And then the scene when I woke up—it felt almost like it had all been staged.
"Did my Dad come to visit me even once?" I could barely keep my voice from breaking as I said it, but somehow I managed. The nurse had told me after I woke up that they had called my dad to tell him the good news—but he never came to visit, not even once. Neither did Logan.
"I don't know," the doctor said honestly, "I don't handle visitation. You'll have to ask the attending nurse about that. Now, if you'll excuse me," he said with a smile and a brisk though gentle pat on my arm, "I have to go see my other patients. And you, Miss Mars, are free to leave the hospital whenever you want."
The doctor left the examining room after that, but I stayed. I sat there, staring across the room at nothing in particular. My legs still dangled off the end of the table, but they were still now. I sat there, unmoving, for more than an hour.
I felt … numb. Completely numb. The more I kept trying not to think about the moments before I hit my head that fateful night, the more they kept forcing their way into my mind. It almost made me wish I had retrograde amnesia—if I could forget that one night, and remember everything before it, I could live my life happily without any knowledge of what was going on between two of the most important people in my life.
But it didn't seem like I was going to be forgetting about it any time soon. Dammit, why can't the defense mechanisms in our brains work when we want them too? I didn't want to deal with this. I didn't want to deal with a situation in which my father was sleeping with my ex-boyfriend. But I didn't have a choice. I felt as though my whole world had just turned upside-down. I felt … helpless.
I'm Veronica Mars. Ihate feeling helpless!
There was a light knock on the door, and Piz stuck his head in.
I forced a smile for him. "Hey, Piz. Come to take me home?"
"Yeah," he smiled back. "It's okay for you to leave the hospital, right?"
"Mm-hmm." I hopped off the table and sauntered over to the door. Yes, in spite of the Hell I was about to face, I didn't have to face it alone. I had someone on my side that would support me through thick and thin. That felt … really good.
Suddenly, I didn't want to go home at all. I wanted to stay here, and …
"Come here, you," I murmured seductively as I wrapped my arms around his neck, leaned up, and kissed him on the lips.
"Mmph?" he asked questioningly as my tongue invaded his mouth.
Seconds later, he was fully inside the examining room, the door had slammed shut with the force of our bodies, and his back was pressed against the closed door, with my entire body pressed up against his.
"Mmmm … Veronica ... wha…" I knew exactly what he was asking, and I didn't want to answer. I didn't want to talk, I didn't want to think. I just wanted to fuck.
I don't know what came over me. No, that's a lie. I know exactly what came over me. I was avoiding the truth, avoiding the confrontation that was sure to happen the minute I set foot in my home. I was using Piz as a means to an end—I wanted him to erase the memories that I didn't want. I was using him to clear my mind.
But it didn't work.
Whether the problem lay with Piz or with me, I don't know. But it didn't work. It didn't work, and that frustrated me. The harder I kissed him, the more that scene kept replaying in my mind—the two bodies, silhouetted in the moonlight, making love.
Yes, love.
Perhaps that was what hurt most—the thought that Logan and my dad weren't just sleeping with each other. They were in love. It was like … Brokeback Mars or Brokeback Neptune or something. A forbidden love between two men … and I was the woman that came between them.
It hurt. I had convinced myself so many times that I wasn't still in love with Logan Echolls. I was sure of that. But that didn't erase the fact that it hurt.
If I didn't love him, then why did it hurt so much? Shouldn't I be happy to know that my dad had fallen in love—even if that person was half his age? Even if that person was a guy? Even if that person was my ex-boyfriend?
Everything kept pointing to the fact that I was still in love with Logan. I didn't want to be—but there it was. And here I was, making out with Piz—myboyfriend Piz—and all I could do was think about another guy.
I don't think I'd ever felt more pathetic in my whole life.
By now Piz's body was supporting mine, and my legs were wrapped around his waist. I could feel his hard-on pressing into my thigh, and I rubbed my body against it, eliciting a moan from him. His hands were firmly planted on my ass, kneading the soft skin through the fabric of my jeans. My own hands were frantically trying to pull off his t-shirt, when I slipped a little, and one of my legs bumped painfully against his.
"Ouch!" he cried, and a moment later his legs seemed to give out. He nearly dropped me, but I managed to hang on to him and we collapsed together to the ground.
"Piz? Are you ok?" I'd completely forgotten about his injury. Three days ago, after their fight in my hospital room, both Piz and Dick had suffered some minor injuries. Piz had a large gash on his thigh, while Dick had to have his stomach pumped to get all the alcohol and drugs out of his system. Both had been released from the hospital shortly thereafter, but Piz still had to take care of his wound and re-bandage it twice a day.
Blood was clearly seeping through his jeans now—I had accidentally reopened his wound.
"Oh, Piz, I'm so sorry," I pulled down his jeans—which were already unzipped due to our previous activities—without even thinking and started to unwrap the bandages around his thigh. "I'll go get the doctor—"
As I tried to stand up, Piz grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to his chest.
"Don't go," he whispered into my ear, "I … don't want the doctors to see me like this."
He sounded embarrassed and when I looked down I saw that he was still very much erect, in spite of what had just happened.
"Piz," I said, "you're injured. I think the doctor should have a look at—"
He turned my head to his and kissed me forcefully. This move was unexpected, and somehow … it felt wrong.
The mood had been completely destroyed for me, and my earlier desire for sex was completely gone.
Worrying about Piz's re-opened wound had wiped my mind clean of all other thoughts in a way that having sex with him never could. And that was what I had really wanted out of him the whole time.
I felt incredibly selfish now, as though I were reneging on a promise. But my needs were already fulfilled—and for some reason, I didn't think I could go any further right now. I didn't want to go any further.
If I knew then what I know now, I could have told myself clearly that it was because I didn't love Piz as much as I thought I did. But back then I thought I was in love with him. And nothing could have persuaded me differently. At least—not yet.
I pulled away from his kiss, and extricated myself from his arms. "If the doctors don't take a look at that, it could get infected," I told him sternly. "I don't want to be the one responsible for you having to get your leg amputated!"
Piz just smiled lazily up at me. "It would be worth it, though," he said as he tried to reach for me again.
I stepped back. "No way," I said, putting my foot down. "I'm getting the doctor. You stay right there and don't move," I ordered. "We don't want to make it any worse than it already is."
"Yes, ma'am," he said with a hint of mockery and sulkiness in his voice, like a child who's just been denied the chance to play with his favorite toy.
It didn't feel like the beginning of the end to me. If I had known the signs, I guess that it would have. But how could I have known that at the same time my feelings for Piz were fading, my feelings for someone else had already begun to blossom?
Next Chapter: Veronica has a talk with this "blossom" person, Dick shows regret for his actions and actually appears to have a (gasp) HUMAN side, Logan is contrite but not THAT contrite, and Parker is ONE PIZZED-OFF MOTHERFUCKER who has the wrong idea and is not afraid to let everyone know that she thinks it!!