A/N: I wrote this around the same time as "Summer on Mars". I found this again, and I want to write it now, but I'm really not brave enough to post it over at veronicamarsfic on LJ, so I'm posting it here instead, basically sums this up. Please review! I'm an even bigger coward without reviews (seriously, my antisocial tendencies are boderline mildly autistic). Also, 'Rams' is mentioned by Dick in 'Normal Is The Watchword' as being the fourth person helping them burn Pan's football field (or burn down a pool, as it actually turns out). He is never mentioned again.
Donut Run Down (A.K.A. Logan's fantasy AU)
She's at home eating dinner when he calls. Head bowed down, trying not to notice her father glaring at her mother, she's only too happy for the reprieve. Telling her father the reason, she picks up her phone and leaves the table, finger only clicking the 'talk' button when she's safely in her room.
"Hello?"
"Veronica?" Oh crap, she immediately thinks. Logan sounds like he's drunk and pressed the wrong number again. He probably meant to call Dick's imaginary friend Rams to cheer him up with a boatload of strippers, but ended up clicking on 'Ronnie' instead. She can't help it; she snaps. He'd been mean to her all week about the Yolanda thing.
"What the hell do you want?"
"Veronica!!" he practically screams now, and her blood runs cold at the knowledge he doesn't even sound half drunk anymore. He just sounds like he'd been crying. A lot. But that can't be right. Even after all the shit he'd been through with Lily, and all the missing clothing and weeks of wearing t-shirts by the pool she was almost certain his father was responsible for, she'd never seen him cry.
"Yeah?" she asks, trying not too sound too concerned about the jackass who more likely than not he was the one responsible for the "snitch" spray painted across her locker in bright red ink Friday morning.
"What's up?"
He takes a deep breath before answering. Before diving.
"Could you please pass the phone onto your- onto Sheriff Mars, please?"
Her father's eyes refuse to meets hers from behind the steering wheel. When he asks her- for the forth time- what exactly Logan and her had talked about before she handed over the phone, she had huffed indignantly and told him 'the abortion of their lovechild.'
Then she had paused and feigning secretiveness had said, "Logan was just calling to confirm his presence at the clinic as my hand-holder hadn't been found out by the press." Keith scowled. So she could piss off her father, as much as he'd pissed off her!
"Blood tests had proven it'd been a Kane after all."
She doesn't notice the way her father's face whitens at the joke.
He drives to the Kane's in near-complete silence. He keeps glancing over at her half worriedly, half suspiciously, and it's making her paranoid, but he wouldn't answer her questions before leaving the house, so she doesn't bother asking them now. All he had said before calling the station was that it might be nothing, but that it might be something, and that he needed to check up on it. He leaves the phrase and I don't trust to leave you with your mother unspoken, but she picks up on it anyway. Why else would he take her along?
And if he's so scared to leave her alone with her mother, what does that mean? Is he worried her mother'll bolt or pass out before the stint of motherly obligation is over, or is it something more? Is there a reason he's so afraid to leave her alone with her mother while she's tipsy?
Like maybe she'll be needing a real parent soon?
They pull up at the house, and to her surprise there's already a few police cars there. Her father tells her to stay in the car no matter what, and she nods her head agreeably, but she doesn't really mean it. She's too busy worrying.
Logan stands off to the side crying. Logan Echolls. Sobbing.
Logan Fucking Echolls is sobbing like his whole world is over while managing to stand up straight enough to actually appear quite sober while doing it.
Now I've seen everything she thinks, before walking over.
He never told her what he meant by love. It had always meant affection with necessary fidelity in her world.
The moment she stepped in his house she knew something was off with him. When a sleep-tousled Yolanda stepped out in his clothes, he had told her he loved Lily, and she'd believed him.
She'd just believed in the wrong definition of love.
"Can I ask what's happened?" she said beside him with eyes widened in a way he knew meant she really didn't want to know, but knew she had to. She'd settled beside him without a word, a whimper or a whisper unlike all their other other meetings that month. She was acting nonchalantly, but he could see the way her back was rigid beneath her hoodie, and knew she was gearing up for the worst.
He knew so fucking much about Veronica Mars he could write one godawful book.
He thought about waiting until she snapped, or at least until she walked away disappointed by his silences. He thought about kissing her and delaying the invitable. Instead he just continued the progress of the tear tracks by stamping out his cigarette and letting gravity push him down. Down upon the grass with all the insects of the ground, life didn't seem as long somehow. He didn't want to live so very long right now. Not when there was no innocence left in the world to lose.
"Duncan's dead. Lily still won't talk to me, but I'm pretty sure it's my fault."
She lets gravity push her down too.