Whumptober 2022: No.27 Pushed To The Limit- Muffled Screams
Warnings: 18+, language, angst
Word Count: 2.5k
A/N: The way I’ve missed writing for Veronica so much is criminal. I love her.
SOA Taglist: @mijop @chibsytelford @thanossexual @anditsmywholeheart @i-just-read-stuff @bport76 @withmyteeth @garbinge @buckybarneshairpullingkink @punkgoddess-98 @black-repunzel99 @jitterbugs927 @fanfic-n-tabulous @fuckyeahopie @mijagif @frattsparty @winchestershiresauce @i-love-scott-mccall @passionatewrites (If you want to be added to any of my taglists, please let me know!)
When she rolled into the parking lot for her apartment building, she immediately noticed that there were already two bikes up front. She let out a deep sigh as she pulled her helmet off her head, propping it against her hip for a moment as she weighed the pros and cons of turning around and going for a ride, or walking right into whatever was undoubtedly taking place at her apartment.
Things had been tense all over. It had been a bit since she was even all that involved with everything that the club was doing, having been busy enough to stay on the outskirts of it all. But she knew that things were rough. She hadn’t seen Piney in weeks, and it had been a bit since she had seen Opie as well. While it wasn’t as though the men of the Winston family were the type to make a habit of weekly dinners together, she knew that if it went more than a couple days with no sightings and not hearing anything from them, calls or texts, that things were getting a little rough.
And, if that hadn’t been enough, Jax turned up on her doorstep the night before looking like an entire mess. His clothes were bloody but he was unscathed, which raised more questions than it answered. She’d had her comments for disturbing her sleep schedule locked and loaded, but she’d forgotten them all when she saw the look on his face after opening the door.
He didn’t want to talk about it. Typical. Just like her brother, just like her father. None of them ever wanted to talk about anything. She wasn’t all that much better, but she certainly wasn’t quite as bad. She didn’t try too hard to pry. She had gone enough years facing the disappointments that followed trying pull information out of any of them. Instead she gave him exactly what he had shown up for: a beer, a shower, and a spare bed to use for the night.
She didn’t know if Jax had told Opie where he was staying, or if Opie had shown up looking for her and found Jax instead. The last that she had heard, the two of them really weren’t on the best of terms. While that might have changed, she knew was that there was a slight chance that she was going to walk into a trashed apartment because of the two of them. If that ended up being the case, she was going to make them clean it up, too.
She shouldered her bag, carrying her helmet in one hand and her keys in the other. As she padded her way up the stairs, she didn’t even make it completely to the second floor before she heard the muffled yelling undoubtedly coming from her apartment. She could identify Jax’s yells from a mile away. She groaned internally the closer that she got to the door.
Instead of heading right in, she waited on the other side of the door for a moment. She pressed her ear to it, not to hear Jax, but to hear whatever it was that Opie was going to have to say in response to it. Her goddamn neighbors knew Jax’s side of the argument by this point with the way that he was yelling.
Veronica’s eyes widened, and she almost stepped back from the door. She couldn’t remember the last time that she ever heard her brother raise his voice like that. She almost put her key in the lock, afraid that Opie wasn’t going to stop at just yelling. But she was too desperate to know what the fuck was going on between the two of them that neither had taken the time to tell her about.
Opie’s voice was a little quieter when he spoke up again, but still loud. Veronica could make out the words just well enough from the other side of the walls. “You had no right to come here, to come to V of all fucking people.”
There was a long stretch of silence after that. It wasn’t often that Jax was left with nothing to say. She gave it another beat before finally slipping her key into the lock. When she pushed the door open, she was still half-expecting a mess, but surprisingly everything was perfectly in place except for the two men standing on the opposite sides of the small table in her kitchen.
She stepped in, pushing the door shut behind her but not bothering to lock it, feeling like one or both of them currently staring at her were going to leave soon. She dropped her bag to the floor, trying not to feel out of place with the way they were both staring at her so intently.
“It’s my apartment, you know.” She set her helmet down on the table between them. “If anything I should be the one looking at the two of you like that. Especially when I can hear your arguing all the way from the stairwell. So,” she tucked her hands into the front pockets of her jeans, “what’s going on?”
Neither of them said anything, each looking at the other trying to figure out who was going to say something first. Opie just wanted to hear Jax trying to explain the entire situation, no matter how slanted his pitch was going to be. He wanted to know what kinds of lies he was going to be telling everyone when they asked about it. He wanted to see Jax push Veronica, the only person in their world who was too forgiving for their own good, to her absolute limit.
She looked back and forth between them again. “Someone? Anyone?”
Jax finally broke the silence. “Opie shot Clay.”
Veronica’s eyes went wide, “What?”
Opie shook his head, clenching and unclenching his hands. “Tell her why, Jax.”
Fear shot through Jax’s body. “Ope—”
“Tell her!” he snapped.
Worry saturated Veronica’s entire facial expression as she looked at Jax. He shook his head, running his hands back through his short, messy hair. “Clay…Clay shot Piney.”
Tears sprung into her eyes, bottom lip trembling as she tried to process what she had just heard. “Wh-what?”
“Clay killed our old man,” Opie’s voice was frigid. He was speaking to his sister but he couldn’t take his eyes off of Jax.
She wiped at the teas on her face. “When, when did all of this happen?” She sucked in an unsteady breath, focusing more on her brother now than Jax. “Why the fuck am I just hearing about this now?”
Opie shook his head. “I just found out. Went to the cabin a couple nights ago.”
“You’ve known for a couple nights?!” she snapped. “Why didn’t…why didn’t you tell me?”
“Wanted to take care of Clay first.”
She let out a humorless laugh. “Jesus Christ. That’s, he’s my dad too, Ope. I should’ve been your first call after you found out.”
Jax tried to intervene on his behalf. “V, listen—”
“And you,” she cut him off, turning and walking over so that she was toe to toe with him, “you came here last night knowing all of this shit? And you didn’t tell me either?!”
Jax’s face softened a bit, knowing that he could scream in Opie’s face all he wanted, but he could never do the same to his little sister. She looked slightly up at him, tears in her eyes, and suddenly they were all kids again and they just found out that Mary took off. It felt like she had been sad ever since then. But Jax couldn’t remember the last time he saw her like this. It had been a long time since he saw her anger almost outweigh her sadness.
He wanted to be able to rattle off the reasons why he didn’t say anything, but as he looked into her big, sad brown eyes, he knew that there was nothing he could say that would be good enough. He couldn’t not answer her, though.
“I didn’t…” he shrugged helplessly, “I don’t have all the facts. Neither of us do,” he said as he motioned back and forth between himself and Opie.
“The facts?!” V brought her hands up like she was going to grab Jax’s entire skull between her hands. She clenched her fists before interlocking her hands behind her head, trying to stave off the urge to completely combust. “The facts are that my dad is dead, Jax! And it’s Clay’s fucking fault! The facts?” She scoffed, but it came out like a choked, sad sound, “Are that you knew all of that and you showed up on my fucking doorstep,” she shoved his chest, “asking me for a place to stay!” Tears spilled out onto her cheeks, “And I let you in!” Her face dropped into her hands as she sobbed.
Jax’s voice was soft, “V,” he reached to put his hand on her shoulder, “I’m—”
She jerked away from him, shaking her head. Her voice was quieter now, shaky. “Don’t touch me.”
Jax pressed his lips into a thin line for a moment as he tried to figure out how to do any damage control that he could. “I didn’t—”
But Veronica wasn’t having any of it. “I don’t want to hear anything that you have to say right now.”
“Veronica…”
“Get out of my fucking apartment, Jax.” She paused, waiting for him to start moving. When he didn’t, she said, “You have ten seconds until whatever Opie did to Clay looks like an act of mercy compared to what will happen to you.”
Tears were still spilling over onto her cheeks, and while Jax knew that Veronica didn’t have a violent bone in her body, he knew that Opie absolutely did. He wished that they were still kids, that he could hug her and she could try to be mad about it for a second but then she’d let it go because it was what she needed. Those days were long gone, though. And judging by the look in her eyes, Jax seriously wondered if they would ever have anything close to that again.
With a deep sigh, Jax nodded and stepped towards the door. He looked back at both her and Opie. He was half-expecting Opie to have something else to say, even if it was just another comment to try and twist the knife deeper into the entire situation. He stayed quiet, though, his eyes locked on Jax like he was begging for him to do something stupid. For once, though, Jax didn’t. He pulled the door open and slipped out, shutting it quietly behind him.
When it was finally just the two of them in the apartment, Opie turned and looked at his sister. He really had shown up to tell her about their dad. He would tell her what she needed to know about Jax and Clay, too, but he knew that she needed to know about their father. He hated that it all played out the way that it did, but when he showed up to her place to find Jax grabbing a drink from the refrigerator like he lived there and had never done a damn thing wrong, he couldn’t stop himself.
He walked over to her, leaving just enough space between them so that if she wanted to hug him, she could, but if she wanted space, she could have that too. He couldn’t blame her for either reaction.
“I’m not,” she shook her head as she wiped more tears off her face, “thrilled with you either right now, Opie.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
He sighed, shaking his head. “It all happened pretty quick. I went to the cabin to check on pops, found him dead, and before I could even do shit, Unser showed up.”
“Unser?”
“Yea. He’s the one who told me it was Clay.”
“Jesus. Did everyone know my dad was dead before me?”
Opie let out a quiet chuckle. It wasn’t funny, but he still couldn’t help but to laugh a little at the absurdity of it all. How did this become their lives? “Sorry, V.”
“You should be. I…I shouldn’t have had to hear that from Jax.”
He saw the way that her bottom lip was starting to tremble again and he made the executive decision to reach out and pull her into a hug. She was tense at first but she didn’t fight him on it. After a few seconds she broke, sobbing into the t-shirt that covered his chest. He wrapped his arms tighter around her, resting his chin on top of her head.
“Did you kill him, at least?” she mumbled into his chest.
Opie’s face scrunched in confusion as he tried to hear what she had just said. “What?”
She pulled away so she could look up at him. The sadness in her eyes was quickly turning back into anger. “Clay. Did you kill him?”
Opie shook his head. “No. Jax saved him.”
She scoffed, shaking her head. She couldn’t really be too surprised by it, though—the Teller-Morrow ties were tightly bound despite how messy they were. Stepping back a little more, she gestured to his arm that was wrapped in gauze. “That what this is all about?”
Opie nodded. “Yea. He said he was gonna kill me, but…”
“His aim that bad? Or did he take pity on you?”
“Whatever one makes you feel better.”
She let out a half-hearted laugh as she shook her head. Taking a deep, staggered breath, she met Opie’s eyes again. “What now, Opie?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Feels like it’s out of my fuckin’ hands now…yours too.”
“Apparently it was never in mine to begin with.”
“V—”
“If you weren’t all that I have left, Opie,” her voice was soft, sad in a thousand different ways, “I would tell you to get the fuck out of my apartment too.”
“Do you really want me to stay?”
“You’re my brother,” her voice cracked. She gave herself a moment to try and get herself together. “And I’m so, so unbelievably mad at you right now. But I want you to stay.”
He nodded, pulling her back into another hug. “Alright. I’ll stay.” He gave her a minute before he asked, “Any of your neighbors gonna call the cops because of all the yelling?”
She couldn’t help but to laugh. “I doubt it. But if they do, I’m giving the cops all of Jax’s info. Put a domestic dispute on his rap sheet along with everything else.”
Opie chuckled. “That’s fair.” He paused, his expression sobering. “I am sorry.”
She sniffled, nodding. “I know.” She raked her fingers back through her hair. “When you know what’s next, will you tell me?”
“I will. Promise.”
“Good.” She wiped the last of the tears off her face. “We’re not done talking about this. But I just, I need a minute to sit with it.”
have u ever gotten furry vibes from my art? perhaps on one of my hybrid aus? the monster aus? well now you know for sure 😂✨ Also hi, my baby Veronica looks cute here<333
Kevin Anderson - 27, 5′8″, gay ace, nonbinary trans dude, uses he/him pronouns. shapeshifter. wears glasses. is the friendliest and softest out of them so far. sometimes too soft - just wants to get on with everybody. has really bad anxiety; also has ADHD. main fidget toy is a Rubix cube. loves pasta but mainly snacks. my Windows (the Thing 1982) OC. lives on caffeine as well. can be found eating icing out of a tub. can accidentally shapeshift if overwhelmed/stressed. prone to panic attacks. favourite forms is one of the huskies so he can just chill. has been best friends with Nauls since kindergarten; ran away from parents at 16 due to his shapeshifter status becoming known.
Celpaxtri - Paxtri or Pax for short, unknown age and origin; claims to be hundreds of years old. pan pangendered half cat half humanoid alien. 5′6″. uses xe/xem pronouns. eyes are red and glow in the dark; has night vision, super agility and speed and can electrocute xyr enemies. generally curious but can lash out if xe senses a threat. lets people infodump to them if xe believes they are friendly enough. i have two aus for xem; one for the playmobil movie and the other for the thing. unfortunately both end up with xem going through scientific experimentation, resulting in physical scars and psychological trauma.
Carlisle Rivers - Carl for short, 5′10″, 28, a bi bigender secret agent, telekinetic and telepathic. uses ey/em, she/her and they/them pronouns. is the most reserved and bitter out of all of them, especially having to keep eir powers under control and under wraps because of what it could all mean. is part of a playmobil au and is found out by Rex, which creates multiple conflicts. spends a lot of time pushing people away; powers discouraged from a young age. i believe Rex is a very understanding type and doesn’t budge easily when he sees someone who needs help, despite how many times they push him away. Carl would rather not be a target for anyone who wants to keep an eye on eir powers and Rex just wants to help, so there is clear problems from the start.
Andy Summers - 5′7″ aroace transmasc enby, uses they/them pronouns (started off as a self-insert). is half-Terran, half-Celestial with Ego as their bastard father. never had a good father figure even before Ego (look, Ego’s the absolute worst, but i really don’t like Yondu either as a dad or as a character). in their 20s throughout their time with their bastard father and probs early 30s present day after they kick his ass into space.
not as bitter as Carl but incredibly troubled and often reserved; just wants to vibe in space in their ship. can be emotional. listens to music a lot; this helps with trauma and their ADHD. will not resort to violence unless they really have to. has powers including the ability to sense evil through sickness and migraines around particularly bad people, accelerated healing and heightened invulnerability.
emotions and trauma affect powers - when closer to the light, actually can tune into the core of Ego’s planet to summon their own light tendrils, eyes glow as a result. residual power after Ego’s obliteration is eyes changing colour with mood.
Veronica Coleman - 5′11 secret agent lesbian, uses she/her pronouns. has the ability to become invisible and create and manipulate fire. fiery yet kinda reserved; doesn’t take shit whatsoever. excellent at acrobatics and hand to hand combat and is on a similar level with Rex, though she doesn’t really like the comparison and tries to shrug him off at times. he’s kinda impressed though, and sometimes they get put on missions together. of course, they always have to try not to become a target, especially since her powers would be incredibly useful to certain people with malicious intentions.
