July, 2006
Between bong hits and jello shooters, a merry-go-round of skanks, Dick offers this advice: Dude. Stop being such a pussy. She's gone. Deal with it. Get some somewhere else.
"Of all the shit that's happened to you…" He shakes his head, disgusted, pops a pill that may or may not be a breath mint. "I thought you were done with this crap…"
Dick checks himself out in the hallway mirror. He adjusts the collar of his jacket with pushed out lips doing his best Blue Steel while Logan lazily pitches empty Fat Tire bottles into the trashcan from the couch missing more often than not but not really caring all that much because he's drunk and feeling dark and likes the sound the glass makes either way.
"I thought you were "over it" or whatever."
"Are you?" Logan mutters, squints at the label on the last bottle, the hairline crack that disappears behind it and Dick pauses from his grooming, his mouth falling into a hard thin line at the question.
He's being a shit.
He knows it. He doesn't care.
He picks at the label, peels it away.
Dick gives his collar a final sharp tug in a non-answer and Logan fits his hand over the jagged line in the glass disappointed not to be drawing blood when he feels the edge, because it's right there and it's sharp.
"I'm out for the night," Dick says and he rummages in his pockets, glaring at an area somewhere over Logan's left shoulder, because he can't look him in the eye.
He flicks a condom at him hard as he passes, "Do a brunette or a redhead sometime. Stop torturing yourself, man," and slams the door behind him when he leaves making it clear that Logan has effectively pissed him off.
Which, fair enough.
There's only one thing Dick asks of him and that's to leave him the fuck alone when it comes to that night.
Logan can relive, rehash, and replay all he wants, but Dick does. Not. Want. To. Talk. About. It.
What he wants is for Logan to pretend that fucking a girl who, for once, bears absolutely no resemblance in any shape or form to Veronica Mars will get her out of his system, will get all of it out of his system, like sex is the answer to everything, just like booze is the answer, just like drugs, when all it is is the wrapping on something really ugly and Logan can't not look at ugly close up. He has to tear the paper off and face the fucking pears even if it kills him. He has to search for the bloodstains beneath the Porsche, the Mercedes whenever he looks down from his balcony onto the parking lot. Never mind that it happened on the other side of the hotel, he's still gonna look. He's still gonna drive to Veronica's empty apartment and remember being inside it with her, remember being in her bed and holding her while she cried, while she slept, and promising himself that he was going to take care of her, he was going to be strong for her. And then he'd make himself remember her not being there, her not leaving him a note, her not leaving him anything like it meant nothing what they did, what they said to each other.
Logan presses ugly into himself like invisible tattoos all, that which doesn't kill me only makes me… while Dick prefers to shove it into safes and lockboxes and forget the combinations, lose the keys.
Dick deals by not dealing at all, and that includes pretending that Beaver's been shipped off to boarding school or, fuck, even jail (he's not dead, he's not just gone). Logan's father is on location for some new multimillion-dollar seen-it-a-billion-times-before action flick (he did not have his brains blown out all over some flat screen on the 27th floor). Mr. Mars is on a case somewhere far, far away in like, Bumblefuck, USA (his ashes did not rain down over Neptune while Veronica broke into a thousand little pieces right before his eyes). And Veronica… maybe she went with Keith on the case.
Or maybe she went to Stanford after all.
He leans his head back against the arch of the couch feeling empty like one of his broken bottles, jagged.
He hates that he's doing this again.
He's gone through the fucking stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance…
He's pretty sure he's not supposed to be going through them on a loop.
He really thought he was done with it.
It's been two months, and here he is. Picking at the scabs.
But maybe that's not so surprising. Maybe it was inevitable that he'd be here again, Howard Hughes-ing it to the best of his ability short of saving his pee in the bottles littering the floor. He's rich and unemployed and not in school anymore. Really, there's not much else to do but sit around and drink and think about the sorry state of his life and kind of marvel at how spectacularly sucky it has turned out to be.
That and there was a dog on the beach this afternoon that looked exactly like Backup.
He followed the fucking thing all over the place until it loped up to it's owner who was definitely not Veronica and then he got drunk again for the first time in weeks.
It set him off, that damn dog, it made him come home with a case of expensive beer and silently begin to put them away one after the other after the other while Dick did his business as usual thing and got ready for another night out leaving Logan on the couch in a stupor wondering how the fuck he does it.
Dick's always been emotional Teflon, he's told him before that he actively tries to be, it's only lately that he can see the effort it takes and instead of being understanding about it he's feeling the need to be confrontational. Because yeah, his father was murdered, and truthfully he's a little disturbed by how upset he's not, apart from the fact that he is alone now, completely and utterly, but the twisted up sadness he feels over it has more to do with Veronica than anything else. He lost a girl he never had, but Dick lost his brother. And while Logan can't think of Cassidy anymore without thinking about what he did to Veronica (and yes those kids on the bus, but really, he didn't know any of them so the grief he felt at the time was admittedly a little forced. Plus he'd been too concerned with trying to keep his ass out of jail for the better part of the year.), which fills him with a white hot rage he knows he inherited, it was still Cassidy. Scrawny Cassidy Casablancas who Logan had known for years, who had been a part of their inner circle. Cassidy, his friend, who shot a gun at him. Raped… Veronica. Murdered her father and a busload of innocent students, a teacher, someone's father, the fucking pedophilic Woody Goodman who, personally, he would much rather have seen in jail getting regularly assraped by any number of burly, scarier-than-shit horny ex-cons.
He wants to hate Cassidy, wants to be glad he's gone, but when he's not torturing himself over Veronica he's thinking about the look on his face when he asked him to give him a reason not to jump and he couldn't do it.
He hasn't told Dick about that.
He told him Cassidy didn't say a word, that he just jumped and that was it. Dick had nodded, just once, and then went on pretending that the funeral he was getting dressed for was just another party, albeit one with a stricter dress code. When he came back he pulled out the X-Box and played for four hours while Logan sat there waiting for him to talk about it, about anything.
"Dick, Cassidy-"
"Is an asshole. You playing or not?"
And that was that.
Dick moved in a week later saying that since his dad was still "in hiding", his mom was going back to Europe with her new husband (whom Dick didn't know but could tell was a tool) and Kendall was MIA probably looking for her next sugar daddy, he had the house all to himself and that, surprisingly, it sucked. Mostly due to the lack room and maid service.
So Logan invited him to stay, invited him into his den of depression. Hell, he welcomed the company, but Dick stubbornly insisted on pretending that all that had happened in the last few weeks was that Logan had been dumped and he was just talking it badly.
Because that's what Logan does.
He takes things badly.
Exhibit A: Lilly's death.
He used to sneak into the Kane's backyard in the middle of the night to sit by the pool in the very spot she died. A spot where he'd had sex with her, where he'd told her he loved her while the sun shone over her shoulder and she smiled and told him how whipped he was.
He'd sit there in the dark and he'd drink and he'd think about her, about that last fight and how he doesn't remember the last thing he ever said to her, but he's 90 sure it wasn't very nice.
And then he'd go out, he'd fuck girls.
Blondes.
He'd call them his girlfriends like that meant anything other than a warm body who's name he actually bothered to remember.
Lilly would have hated Caitlyn.
He thinks it's why he said yes when she slithered up to him, when she tossed her hair and touched his chest, and I want you to fuck me Logan Echolls.
He thinks he wanted to punish Lilly.
He wanted to hurt her for leaving him and not giving him a chance to tell her one last time that as much as he hated her sometimes he loved her. He loved her so fucking much it scared him.
He'd sit there in the dark and think he had been right to be scared, because life without Lilly Kane, life without the one person who knew him and how ugly he really was inside but wanted him anyway was terrifying.
Exhibit B: His mother's suicide.
A year after Lilly's murder he spent countless nights on the Coronado Bridge toasting Lynn with a flask, his legs dangling over the side, swinging through the blackness. He'd heard somewhere that a fall like that could break every bone in your body the second you hit, the water hard as concrete and he'd swing his legs a little harder, feeling the momentum jerking him closer to the edge, wanting to punish himself.
For not being enough to stick around for.
For not protecting her, for not being a better son…
For being just like him in too many ways.
Which brings us to Exhibit C.
Every once in a while he finds himself standing outside room 27A thinking about buying it for a night just so he can sit there in the last place Aaron ever was and show whatever is left of him there that he survived, that he's fine. Better than he's ever been.
But he's not. He's not fine. He's not anywhere in the vicinity of being fine.
He's on the bridge swinging his legs harder, harder. He's drinking too much, sleeping with too many girls.
And Veronica's not here to pull him back from the ledge this time, to stop the momentum, and he tells himself he doesn't care that she's not but he's gotten really good at lying to himself and he doesn't really know anything anymore.
So he backslides, he buys another case of beer and he works on Exhibit D, adds it to the list of heartaches and tells himself that even though Lilly's murder, his mother's death, still stings, he's learned to live with it. He can learn to live with this too, but not yet, not yet. He still sees her too clearly. He still remembers everything way too clearly.