This is an updated version of a story that I previously posted in preparation for adding additional chapters in the future.
Suit Coats, Black Lipstick, and Coffee
Logan stared out the window at the rain for a long time. It came down in sheets and muted the sparse city lights that were visible from his penthouse apartment. He stared into the pouring rain and he remembered what life had been like before. There was a time before the pulse when he lived on the other side of the country on a completely different coast. A time before wheelchairs and glasses and the frustration of not being able to move the way his brain told his body it should. Before the pulse and before the accident too. On nights like tonight, he could remember the things he'd left behind.
He had a different name then and a family, if not by blood than certainly by affection. He'd been Anthony Dinozzo, Special Agent for NCIS. He'd had two sisters, a Goth forensics specialist and a former secret service agent, and he'd had a brother who was also an MIT grad and computer geek. He'd had a grandfather who was a coroner and told the most incredible stories about everything and nothing. Later, after one of his sisters was shot dead, he made a friend who kicked ass and asked questions eventually, if she felt like it. And then there was Gibbs. He wasn't his brother or his father but he was family just the same. Gibbs never needed a label. He just was.
Logan had left the family he'd chosen on another coast. He'd let them believe that he was dead. After the pulse hit, he'd only wanted to get back to them. He needed so desperately to help them, to make sure they were safe. There hadn't been a way to let them know that he was all right. After the accident and after the world started to reorganize itself, he'd had the opportunity to let them know that he was alive. He didn't. He told himself that it was because they had more important things to worry about than him, terrorists and criminals and survival in a world turned upside down by violence. He'd let them believe he was as lost to them as they were to him. He was a burden now. Someone to be taken care of by others. After that, it seemed completely impossible to even contemplate a life and family he'd left so far away in a world where the ability to travel across the country in hours had been taken for granted and then taken away in a moment.
The accident changed his world just as completely as the pulse changed everyone else's. He was alone again. Just as he was before he'd become a part of NCIS. He didn't choose to be that way but it was his reality and he'd learned to live with it. Maybe, eventually, he'd even begin to believe it.
There were many things that Logan liked about the life that he had made for himself. He had a new reputation. He had success and his mission and his fledgling relationship with Max. He was self-sufficient and helping people again and he'd found a bit of the peace he thought he'd lost for good. He'd learned he was capable of things that he'd never dreamed he'd be able to do, things McGee would never believe he could do. And he could smile just a little now when he thought about his family. They'd be proud after they got over being angry. But when it was dark outside and the rain muted the city's lights, he still stared into the pouring rain and thought of suit coats, black lipstick, and coffee.