AN ~ Hello everyone. I guess I'm a little late to this party (10 years!) but after binge watching the show and movie on the recommendation of the crazy talented Lorien829 (if you haven't already please check out her awesome story, 'A Joy You Can't Keep In') I just had to try my hand at a Veronica Mars ficlet myself. The following is a missing moment from season 2.

'Regrets'

by Witherwings

Vindicated, the case against him officially dismissed, Logan Echolls walked out of court a free man.

Deja Vu all over again, he thought ruefully. Having elected not to go with the matching 'I'm With Stupid' T-shirt his lawyer, Cliff McCormack, had facetiously threatened to wear, Logan realised he was even dressed in the same dark suit and gray shirt he had worn to his arraignment hearing several months earlier.

Then as now the judge had accepted their motion to dismiss due to a lack of evidence. Without Dr. Griffith's testimony – the town's most well-respected cokehead – the case against him was weaker than one of Dick's pick-up lines.

The air-conditioned cool of the courtroom behind him, Logan lifted his hand to shield his eyes. Not against the oppressive glare of the Californian sun, but instead from the sea of flashlight bulbs that erupted the moment he emerged from the foyer.

"I told you you'd've been better off back in that den of depravity you insist on calling a home," muttered Cliff as they were jostled down a handful of steps on their way to a waiting car.

In hindsight, Logan found that he agreed with the sardonic lawyer's remarks – strictly speaking there had been no need for him to attend the hearing in person – or at least he would have if he had heard them over the swell of noise that accompanied their appearance at the top of the steps. Overwhelmed by the wall of noise, he could only process snatches of the many shouted questions from the assembled reporters that fought for his attention.

" – what do you say to the people who say you've bought your freedom?"

" – any comment for the family of – "

"Do you have any regrets, Mr. Echolls?"

Logan stopped in his tracks.

Pretty much standard fodder for courtroom reporters the world over, it was the timing rather than the content of this last question that pulled him up short; it just so happened that it reached his ear at the very moment he caught sight of her. Almost completely hidden by the mass of humanity, he had only caught a glimpse; it was all he needed. Veronica.

That she had come at all should have been a great comfort to him, but there was something in the manner in which she observed him, her blue eyes cold like tundra, that made him realise that there had never been a greater gulf between them. He knew in that moment that he had to speak to her, to properly apologize for all the hurt he had caused her. But how? And would she even listen?

Perhaps sensing that she had created an opening, the reporter, also a petite blonde, but equally everything that Veronica was not, thrust her microphone further over the metal railing. "Korri Mathews, K-BEX news," she said by way of introduction. "Do you have any regrets, Mr. Echolls?"

Only one that matters, he thought in response. Sure, if he were gifted a do-over there were plenty of things he might change: baiting the PCH-ers who hated him, torching a public pool, indulging in an adulterous affair with his best friend's step-mother, seducing an innocent girl to manipulate the wheels of justice in his favor. Each act of rebellion worse than the last and yet somehow each paling into insignificance next to the one thing he had not done – fight for her.

He hesitated. These people were vultures picking over the carrion of his family's torrid and very public lives. No matter what he said he was an Echolls, forever tarred with same brush as his sister, a liar, and his father, a murderer. That he was even considering uttering more than a monosyllabic 'no comment' on the off chance that his words might reach her was the height of stupidity. And yet ... and yet ...

Decision made, Logan stepped closer to the surging wall of reporters, dozens of lenses following his every movement like a bloom follows the sun. "Korri, Korri, Korri," he said with a shake of his head. "Don't we all?" and he directed a boyish smile straight into the television camera pointed over Ms. Mathews' shoulder. "I think it was Mark Twain who once said that we should all be more disappointed by the things we have not done than by the things we have. I apologize to the late Mr. Clemens if I have butchered his words – you know how the public school system is – but I have never believed in the sentiment behind those words more than I do today." Another toothy grin was accompanied by a smattering of laughter.

A performer accepting the applause of the crowd, Logan raised his hands for a silence that duly fell. However, far from uttering the next quip already poised on his lips he stopped and forced himself to take a breath.

This was not who he wanted to be anymore. The façade he projected to the rest of the world of the smarmy little rich kid with a bad attitude, that was the real performance; his own inability to banish the persona for good the real reason he and Veronica had broken up in the first place. If there were any hope of reaching her, any chance to reconcile their relationship he had to be better than that and be the man only she had ever glimpsed before.

His eyes slid shut and he released a rush of air through his mouth, the ramparts erected long ago falling like castles made of sand on a beach washed clean by the tide. When next he next opened them they shone with a sincerity he prayed would reach her.

To his right he could sense Cliff trying to make his way back to his side. Initially unaware that his client was no longer at his heels, several security guards had filled the ensuing gap created when Logan had come to an abrupt halt.

I'll only have a moment, he realised. It would have to be enough.

"Look, I have my regrets," he said and length. "And I'm an Echolls, so some of them are doozies," he added, but in a voice devoid of his earlier disingenuous tone. "Yet it is the things, the one thing really, that I wished I had done that cause me the most anguish.

"I have wronged someone, someone who could see past my surname, someone who has always been there for me, and I want to take this opportunity to tell them that I am – "

"We're done here."

"Cliff!" Logan hissed in response to his lawyer's interruption. "I just need one more second."

"I said we're done," he replied in kind, his tone, though hushed, brokering no arguments. Aloud he added, "No comment," and began to steer Logan away to the black sedan's now open rear door.

For a fleeting moment Logan considered resisting but when he twisted his head around it was to see Veronica's already retreating back. Had she heard anything? Did she even care? He supposed it didn't matter either way; in walking away had she not made her choice clear?

Adrift, Logan's shoulders slumped in defeat and his feet carried him blindly to the waiting car.

"Want to tell me what the hell that was all about?" Cliff demanded the moment the car raced away but Logan wasn't listening. Instead his eyes were riveted upon the little black convertible parked at the kerb they were fast approaching. That she hadn't driven away already sparked a little flare of hope in his chest.

Ships in the night they passed. For the briefest of moments their gazes met, the tinted glass ensuring that only one party was aware of that fact. Logan felt a jolt in his solar plexus, a long held belief ossifying into a concrete certainty in that instant. Theirs was an epic story, he was sure of it; no matter what course the wind may carry them, safe harbor could always be found in the arms of the other. The doldrums would pass, the trade winds would return to guide them back to one another. Their song was not over.

AN ~ Thanks for reading!