disclaimer: i own nothing about dark angel, though every night i and wish that i owned jensen ackles

a/n: after much thinking i have decided to turn those three little words she hated into a trio of one-shots. so here it is the sequel from Logan's POV. please read and review and let me know what you think.

Seven Words Spoken

Five months ago if someone had told Logan he would be friends with Alec and be annoyed at Max he would have questioned whether or not they'd gotten a little turned around. That was five months ago, it was before Alec and Cindy left Seattle, it was before Logan got to see the side of Max that only Cindy had seen. It was before he got to see all the reasons why Alec loved Max so much and all the reasons why he left. For five months Logan had been the only real friend Max had. For the last three months he'd only been half heartedly looking for the cure. Max was not the girl he thought she was.

Logan could look passed the fact that she wasn't entirely human. He could look passed the fact that she'd been mixed together in a lab and spent the first nine years of her life training in a government facility to be the ultimate soldier. What he couldn't look passed was her bitchy attitude, her anger at everyone around her and her inability to see anything but her family. The family that she hadn't seen in ten years, the one that had willingly left her to fend for herself at the age of nine. Five months was all it had taken for him to understand the pain Alec had been in and the reasons that he left.

After the first two months, it was Logan who reached out to Alec. He tracked Cindy down to a bike messenger service in Portland and a few phone calls later they were talking. The first few phone calls were with Cindy and mostly consisted of him asking for advice on how to deal with Max. One night Alec answered the phone. Things were awkward as they struggled to say anything at all. Alec, always able to fill the silence, managed to tell Logan three times in three different ways that Cindy was out on a date. In the end it was Logan who saved them from terminal discomfort and started them on the rocky, hesitant path to friendship.

'I understand, you know, why you left.'

Alec's response was hesitant, like he wasn't sure if he was about to be chewed out or sympathized with. 'Yeah.'

Logan didn't even realize he was taking the next step. 'She's a selfish bitch who can't see what's right in front of her.'

Logan was horrified the moment he said the words and he was actually afraid for a moment that he'd done something or said something really stupid. There was nothing on the other end of the line for a long while. And then Alec laughed. Logan knew, from what Cindy had been saying that she was concerned about Alec. That he wasn't acting like he was getting better and that he'd been using all of his Manticore training to fake it. This was a real laugh, a sign that Alec was getting better.

And as the conversation continued, as they discussed things they normally would have pretended they didn't have in common. As the phone calls to Cindy became phone calls to Cindy and Alec, Logan realized something. There was nothing wrong with Alec, there never had been. Alec was a good guy who fell in love with a girl who wasn't ready to actually experience that life she sought. And he, Logan, had fallen into the same trap. He'd fallen in love with a girl who was too afraid to be herself, who hid behind the family that abandoned her and the screwed up childhood.

They were two good men who fell in love with a girl who would never let herself be anything more than what others expected of her. She would be the pasta and wine loving do-gooder to please Logan and the girly-girl best friend to please Cindy. She would always be the bitch that Alec had fallen in love with. Alec would always be the only one that saw the true Max and she was always going to hide from that carefree and bitchy X5 she was deep down inside.

The problem wasn't that Alec was a happy-go-lucky sociopath or that Logan was an ex-rich journalist with a save-the-world complex.

The problem was Max.