Dénouement
Logan/Veronica 1.22 Tag PG-13
Summary: But when he looked at Veronica, when he saw the light glistening in the guilty tears in her eyes, all he could think of was sunbeams.
Complete: Yes

Veronica hung up the phone when Logan's voicemail picked up. Though she told herself she was being irrational, she couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't right. She did the only thing she could think of.

He answered on the second ring.

"Leo!" she exclaimed before he could finish his phone-answering spiel. "Leo, I need a favor."

"You always do, Veronica. You always do."

"Seriously, what do you think you can do to me?" Logan asked Weevil, his voice and his expression betraying the emptiness inside. Veronica didn't trust him, Veronica thought him capable of murder. What could be worse than that?

"I'll think of something," Weevil replied, all seriousness. Logan thought maybe he would. So he did the only thing he could do. His best Laurence Fishbourne impression, though Logan decided that he was feeling more Keanu Reeves, what with the world turned upside-down feeling and all.

"Bring it on, Chico." He sounded hopeless rather than brave, but that didn't matter to either of them. For endless amounts of time, Weevil simply sat on his bike, gang members occasionally revving their engines around him, while Logan just began to pace back and forth.

"You know," Logan intoned, "I'm not really feeling the fear here, Eli." At that, Weevil swung his leg over the back of his bike and started towards Logan, who waved his arms as if fighting for balance.

"You better promise not to kill me, just beat me within an inch of my life; otherwise I'll deprive you of the pleasure of kicking my ass and do this the easy way."

"Don't make me lie to you, White Boy." Weevil took another step toward Logan, but was halted by the arrival of a black and white Crown Victoria. Logan almost laughed when Leo jumped out, gun drawn. Later, he'd thank God and whoever else was listening that Veronica's badge-wearing lapdog had shown up when he did. In that moment, however, it only seemed anti-climatic.

"Navarro, you want to back off right now," he began. "And Logan, you want to come down." One of Weevil's gang members revved his engine and another called out the odds against Leo.

"Come on now, Deputy," Weevil said cordially, after signaling to his gang to hold. "We're just having a chat." He grinned.

Leo rolled his eyes. "Don't mess with me right now, Navarro." He might not be able to stop himself from doing Veronica Mars favors, but that sure as hell didn't mean he was cheerful about it. Keeping the gun trained on Weevil, he spoke to Logan. "Logan. I know why you're up there and I'm here to tell you that you don't need to be."

Logan laughed bitterly and balanced himself first on one foot then on the other. "Is that so, Deputy Dawg?" He spun around on his toes, causing Leo to suppress a flinch. "But then I suppose you do know a thing or two about being shot down by Veronica Mars." Even now he took small pleasure in the fact that he, Logan Echolls, had won out over someone as appropriate as the good deputy – for however short a time it had been.

"Veronica doesn't think you're guilty, Logan." He shifted his gaze to Weevil. "We arrested Lilly Kane's killer tonight. He's in the hospital, under guard." Leo spared a moment to be grateful that particular bit of information had come through his scanner just before he came out of the car. He knew it would be important with both Navarro and Logan there.

Logan went frozen on the ledge, and Weevil took a small step in Leo's direction. "You know who killed Lilly? And it wasn't this clown?" he asked, his voice deadly quiet. Leo nodded, and Weevil made to lunge at him, as if he thought he could shake the information out of Leo's mouth, but was brought up short by the click of Leo's gun. He put up his hands in a sarcastic gesture of surrender. But he shifted his attention to his gang and told them to get lost, knowing the deputy would be more forthcoming with information if it was just him and the poor suicidal rich boy there.

"I'll tell you who killed Lilly Kane," Leo said, looking at Weevil. He shifted his gaze to the still-immobile Logan. "If you come down, I'll tell you."

"How about you tell me, and then I decide which side of this ledge I want to come down on?"

"Not gonna happen."

"Gee, Deputy, why not?" Logan asked, a mock-innocent expression on his face.

"Because I lucked out and got the job of getting you down off that ledge, and we both know that my only bargaining tools are what I already told you, that Veronica knows you're innocent, and who did kill Lilly Kane."

"Well, Deputy, in that case…" Logan turned around to face the ocean and bent his knees as if preparing to jump. "I guess I'll just have to…" Weevil and Leo both lunged toward Logan. "Jump," he finished, jumping backwards onto the pavement. He turned around and tried for the fake pep squad pride look, as if showing off his latest trick; though he knew he'd have to settle for cynical teenaged male. "So," he said, smiling his bitter smile, the one he used when the last thing he really wanted to do was smile. "Who killed the first girl I ever loved?"

Weevil clenched his jaw, but said nothing.

"I'd like you to promise me something, Logan. Before I tell you." Leo looked more like he wished he didn't have to be talking to Logan at all, let alone asking him for promises.

"What, that I won't team up with Chico here for some drunken ass kicking? Or that I won't throw myself off this bridge anyway?"

"I'm not drunk, White Boy, you are." Weevil punched Logan's shoulder with what under different circumstances could almost be classified as affectionate force, causing him to sway slightly.

"Hey, we've established that your reasons for kicking my ass are now null and void, so I'd appreciate it if you left the Logan-abuse to my father for now."

Weevil blinked, looked appraisingly at Logan. "Apparently alcohol loosens your tongue," he said blandly. But he began to reevaluate his picture of Logan Echolls. For his part, Logan began to regret refilling his flask for the second (and third) times. Leo cleared his throat.

"A promise, Logan."

Logan shrugged. "What?" He was too tired, and perhaps too much in the fuzzy area between drunk and sober, to think of yet another witty response. Besides, he wanted to know the truth, for once.

"That after I tell you, you'll let me take you back to the station and sober you up, and then you'll go straight to Veronica's." Leo looked him straight in the eye. "Nowhere else," he added, his voice as firm as even he'd ever heard it. He'd have to practice the tone so he could use it to say "no" to Veronica every once in a while.

Curious now, Logan nodded. "Need to talk to her anyway," he said thickly.

"And Navarro?" Leo said, turning to Weevil, who cocked his head to the side and waited. "The murderer's already in the hospital. And he's under guard. I'd advise you to not risk your still-relatively-clean adult police record by trying to find him."

After a few seconds of stony silence and hard stares, Weevil nodded reluctantly. "Got it. No beatings until the bastard's out on bail."

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that," Leo said grimly.

"You do that, Deputy."

Leo took a deep breath, not relishing the task before him. Of all the favors he'd done for Veronica Mars, this had to be his least favorite.

"Lilly Kane was killed by Aaron Echolls," he said in a rush, as if saying the words quickly would somehow soften the blow, like you were supposed to rip a band-aid off all at once so that it would hurt less. Only it always seemed to hurt more when you really thought about it, but Leo wasn't thinking about it and he just wanted to get the truth out.

Logan swayed on his feet again, but this time it wasn't because of the alcohol coursing through his bloodstream. In fact, he felt like the vast majority of said alcohol had dissipated spontaneously at Leo's words. "What?" he managed. Weevil was silent and stone-faced.

"He was… having an affair with her. He'd taped them in the pool house, and she found the tapes and stole them, and he killed her when she wouldn't give them back."

Logan blinked rapidly for a few seconds, his mind refusing to absorb the magnitude of this new betrayal. Then his face iced over in rage, and he started toward his car, only to be stopped by both Leo and Weevil. He fought against their hold, but it was two against one. Finally he went limp.

"You promised me, Logan. You promised me you'd sober up and then go to Veronica."

At the sound of Veronica's name, Logan visibly pulled himself together. He murmured her name under his breath, then pushed out of Weevil and Leo's slackened hold. This time, however, it was Leo's police cruiser he headed to. Wordlessly, he slid into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

Leo shook his head and turned to Weevil. "I'm not going to tell you what hospital Echolls is in. For your own good. And because Veronica asked me not to." Actually, he hadn't talked to her since before the incidents that put Echolls in the hospital, but she had asked him not to tell them more than he had to. He figured this applied.

Weevil shook his head and grinned somewhat bitterly. "That Veronica Mars. She just has everyone doing her bidding." He strode back to his bike, mounted, and grabbed his helmet. "Don't worry, Deputy. Tonight I'll settle for burning all the copies of his movies at our local Blockbuster." He revved the motorcycle's engine. "Now there's some lost-video fees I am more than willing to pay." He jammed his helmet onto his head and sped off into the night.

Leo shook his head, got in his car, and drove Logan to the police station.

Veronica was floating in a pool of lilies, promising never to forget Lilly Kane, when she was woken by a knock on her door. She glanced at the clock, saw that it was just after three am. And all she could think was his name, all she could see was his face.

She walked to the door, opened it hopefully. And there he was, unscathed, bearing no bruises and shedding no blood. She smiled beatifically, her joy at seeing him standing in front of her in once piece eclipsing the guilt she knew would fill her eyes in a moment.

"I was hoping it would be you."

"I was wondering if you would be."

Veronica opened the door wider and moved aside so Logan could come into the apartment.

"I wasn't sure you'd come at all," she said as she closed the door behind him.

"Shouldn't have worried," Logan said, standing there awkwardly, his voice harsh. "Deputy Dawg made me promise that I would sober up at the station and then come straight here after I was sober before he would tell me who killed Lilly." He made a vague gesture in the air with his hand. "Which, by the way, is how he got me down off the railing of the Coronado Bridge."

"The Coronado Br… God, Logan!" Flooded with guilt, Veronica couldn't stop herself from throwing her arms around Logan's neck and clinging to him, pressing her body against his to convince herself that he was real, he was there, alive and unharmed, at least physically. With her father safely ensconced in a hospital bed, watched over by Wallace's mother, Veronica had thought of no one but Logan the entire way home.

After she had called him and only reached his voicemail, she had feared the worst, which made her realize just how deeply her feelings for him already ran. Truth be told, she'd always had a soft spot for him before Lilly's death, always felt badly when Lilly treated him poorly. He'd told her all he wanted to do was protect her, and she'd thrown it away because she was unable to trust him. Even as she fought for her life against his father, a piece of her mind was afraid that even if Weevil left him alive, she'd lost Logan forever anyway.

Now he was here, in her living room, telling her that she'd driven him to the railing of the same bridge his mother had jumped off of in order to escape the hell she'd been living in. So Veronica clung, and it took her a moment to realize that though he'd initially pulled her tight against him and buried his face in her hair as if she was the only thing he wanted to breathe in, his hands were now at his side, and he was stiff as Duncan on his bad days.

Suddenly embarrassed, Veronica dropped her arms and moved back a step. She wanted to stay close enough so that she could still smell his cologne. Somehow, in a few short days it had come to mean safety. "I'm sorry," she said softly, unable to find any more appropriate expressions of her feelings.

"I can't deny that you hurt me, Veronica. The proof of it is in the report that Deputy Dawg is turning in to Lamb right now, all about how he talked me down off the ledge like a hero." He turned away from her, ran his fingers through his spiky hair, and began to pace like a caged animal. "All I wanted," he grit out, voice breaking. "Was for you to trust me, to let me protect you. From the rest of the idiot 09ers who saw nothing in you but fresh meat. From whatever demons there are inside you that keep you running, that keep you up at night."

He whirled and stood close to her again, his voice rising with every few words in a steady crescendo. "I know you're not sleeping at night, Veronica Mars. I know you're not okay. You're almost as fucked up as I am, and I wanted to help, Veronica!" His eyes locked pleadingly with hers, and his voice dropped to just above a whisper. "I wanted to help you." He reached out and gently tucked her hair behind her ear. "I guess I thought that if I helped you heal, protected you from what was hurting you, maybe it would heal me, too."

He dropped his hand and met her stricken gaze with his own sad one. "But I guess you didn't need me, after all." As their eyes stayed locked for the space of a few breaths, Veronica decided that it was a measure of just how much she'd hurt him that he wasn't standing there insulting her. She'd cut him too deeply for even that, and she thought she would never forgive herself.

He turned away to begin pacing again, but Veronica wordlessly grabbed his elbow. He turned back to face her and waited for her to speak. Instead, she gently cupped his face in her hands and stood on her tiptoes to gently kiss him. She pulled back the space of a breath, still on her toes.

"I'll be your redemption, Logan. If you'll be mine."

He let out a shaky breath, and as his hands moved to gently rest on her waist, he let a tentative smile grace his face, the first real smile he'd allowed himself since Veronica had left him in the pool house. He kissed her then, softly, tenderly, as if to seal a pact between them. Mine, he thought, and it was different somehow than the old days when he'd thought the same thing about Lilly. With Lilly, it was all about trying to hold on to a beam of sunlight or something else equally hard to pin down. In a way, Lilly had been like Jell-o. The harder he'd tried to hold on, the more she slipped through his fingers.

With Veronica, it was like he'd found a hall of mirrors and prisms, where the sunlight could reflect and refract and create rainbows in his mind that stayed with him even when she wasn't in the room. She chased away the shadows and made him realize that "mine" wasn't about possession, but about awe and thankfulness.

But they both knew all the shadows weren't gone yet, and they both still had explaining to do. So when Logan pulled back to look in Veronica's eyes, they didn't even need to speak to know that it was time to have a serious conversation. They moved wordlessly to the couch and sat cross-legged, facing each other, their knees touching. Trust was easier when they were touching.

Veronica took a deep breath. "I'll go first. I have the most to apologize for, anyway." And she poured out the story to him, from the moment she arrived at the Kane's house the night of Lilly's murder, to the moment they'd spoken on Dog Beach that afternoon.

"I need you to know, Logan, that the only thing that kept me going for so long was investigating Lilly's death, was the search to find out who really killed her." She closed her eyes and hung her head. "I didn't want it to be you, Logan." When she raised her face and opened her eyes, they were drenched in unshed tears, twinkling and reflecting the light of the lamp next to the couch. "I never wanted it to be you."

Logan could still feel the vestiges of the ache that had started up in the vicinity of his heart when Veronica had threatened to sic Backup on him and Keith Mars had come hurrying to Veronica's aid at the beach, as if Logan were dangerous. But when he looked at Veronica, when he saw the light glistening in the guilty tears in her eyes, all he could think of was sunbeams.

"I know," he said softly, brushing the barely-fallen tears from her eyes with gentle strokes of his thumb against her cheekbones. "I know, Veronica." Then it was his eyes that turned contrite. "I'm sorry." He cupped her cheek gently. "So sorry for everything you've been through."

Fighting agitation, he dropped his hand from her face and ran his fingers through his hair instead. "We should have been there for you and instead we left you to the wolves." Resting his elbows on his knees, he buried his face in his hands. "Hell, we were the wolves. Me even more than Duncan." His head snapped up. "Duncan."

She had told Logan about the paternity tests that her father had done. "You're not his sister like he thinks you are." Veronica could practically see the walls beginning to rise around Logan's heart, so she interrupted what she was sure was about to turn into some sort of I-won't-stand-in-the-way thing, a la Han Solo in Star Wars, only she couldn't tell Logan that she was Duncan's sister and be done with it like Leia, because the point was that she wasn't Duncan's sister and that was a good thing.

"I told Duncan. Tonight, when I was at his house looking for the letter you told me about. I wanted to clear you, Logan. I wanted that so much." She mirrored his earlier gesture and touched his face gently, then dropped her hands to her lap. "So I went to Lilly's room to look in the vents and Duncan caught me. That's when we found the videos Leo told you about. We watched them until we saw… who we saw." She somehow couldn't bring herself to say your father, not when he was sitting there on her couch already breaking. Knowing was one thing. Saying out loud was another.

"Anyway," she continued, shaking her head as if to clear it. "Right before I left to go find my dad, I told Duncan about the paternity test." Logan's eyes bored into Veronica's. "Logan, I realized then that I wasn't telling him because I wanted him back. I was telling him because I wanted him to be able to move past…what happened." She took a fortifying breath. "Like I'm doing," she added softly.

She watched the hope climb into Logan's usually so guarded eyes. She made a fervent wish that she would never see it leave them again.

"I don't know what Duncan feels, Logan, and God knows we'll have to talk to him, but Logan – Duncan and I are over. What happened happened, and there's no changing the past." She framed Logan's face with both her hands now. "But this is now. And now I want to be with you."

Logan couldn't control the smile spreading over his face. It wasn't another one of his Occasion Smiles, or even a personal smile, though he knew he had one just for Veronica. This smile was more genuine than any classification, and he allowed a moment to try to think of any other issues that needed immediate hashing out between them. Unable to think of a single one, he reached up and gently circled her wrists. He drew her hand down from his face, pulling her slowly, inexorably toward him until their lips met happily in the middle.

Abandoning the angst of facing the fact that Aaron killed Lilly, that Duncan's parents believed him capable of murder, that they'd wasted a year of their lives hating each other when they should have been supporting each other to tomorrow, Veronica giggled happily as she lay down, pulling Logan down on top of her, relishing the weight of his body pressing her down against the cushions.

Logan's lips moved whisper-soft over the darkening bruise on Veronica's face. "He put that mark on you, didn't he?" His voice was soft, but Veronica could hear the undertones of dangerous steel beneath it.

"Shh," she said, pressing her lips to his forehead. "It doesn't matter. Don't think, just kiss me."

They were still kissing, and Logan's hands were just beginning to venture under Veronica's shirt, when the door suddenly opened.

"Okay, V.," Wallace said in a loud voice to the apartment, not noticing Veronica and Logan on the couch as he made a beeline for the counter to set down grocery bags. "My kid brother's with our parents, who, by the way, are disgustingly goopy, and your dad wants me to make sure you eat before you…" he trailed off when he finally turned toward the couch and saw Logan Echolls on top of Veronica, their shocked faces turned toward Wallace, and Logan's hand somewhere under Veronica's tank top.

"Oh," Wallace managed. "Umm…"

Logan finally had the presence of mind to stand up, and pulled Veronica to her feet as well. They stared awkwardly across the apartment at each other until Veronica finally cleared her throat.

"Uh, Wallace, I believe you know Logan Echolls." She laced her fingers through his and added, "My boyfriend." Logan beamed at the title, though the reality of the day ahead of them was already starting to set in.

"Yeah," Wallace managed. "I've seen him around." He smiled, but she knew she'd have some 'splaining to do. She smiled, holding on to her shreds of amused embarrassment as long as possible, because they were better than the feelings that would settle in with breakfast.

"And Logan, I believe you know my best friend…"

They looked at each other, and Veronica smiled, and Logan smiled, and for the first time in the entire time Logan Echolls had known Veronica Mars, it didn't sound wrong when she didn't say "Lilly Kane."

.finis.