Logan
All Logan Huntzberger wanted to do was get back to his office, lock the door and go to sleep. It had reached the time of the week where not even his regular midday workouts were enough to combat the tiredness constantly gnawing at him.
It didn't help that he'd worked out more intensively than he probably should have, given that his side was still mottled purple and aching after a miscalculated leap from a building a couple of nights before. He'd hoped the adrenaline that usually followed a good workout was enough to get him through the rest of the day, but that and a shower didn't seem to have helped.
The last thing he wanted to find was someone at his assistant's desk demanding a meeting with him, but that was exactly what the elevator doors opened onto. For a moment, he considered staying in the elevator and taking a trip back downstairs. He could go out, pick up a coffee, answer some emails, and wait out the angry woman, but he was just so tired.
He grimaced, ran a hand through his damp hair, and stepped out of the elevator. The woman at the desk seemed too fixated on Tess to notice anything, and he sent Tess a grateful nod over the woman's shoulder as he started towards his office.
"I've already told you, Miss Gilmore," Tess said, only a hint of exasperation in her voice. "We're not hiring."
"Ugh, you're not listening." Logan turned in the doorway of his office just in time to see the woman stomp her foot. Tess wouldn't have been able to see Miss Gilmore's outburst, not from where she sat, but he could, and suddenly his office couch seemed less appealing. Not that he was going to intervene. "That's not why I'm here."
Why was she here? He definitely didn't have any meetings scheduled and, after a cursory glance over her body, he was almost positive she wasn't someone he'd had sex with during one of his increasingly rare nights out.
He couldn't think of any reason she'd be so insistent on seeing him.
"I don't care if you're not hiring," she continued. "I have a job, and maybe writing for the New York News Bulletin isn't as respectable as being a secretary here at the Ledger, but that doesn't mean you should assume I'm going out and begging for another job. I'm here because I have a few questions for your boss."
"Mr Huntzberger doesn't respond to ambush journalism," Tess said. "If you want an interview, you'll need to organise one."
"I tried, but no one replied to my email and I don't have time to wait for an appointment," she said. "I'm going to stay here until Huntzberger gets back from his ridiculously long lunch-break and if he really doesn't want to respond, then he can tell me that to my face. I'm not walking away until he rejects me himself. And if he does, then I'll just-"
"You'll what?" She jumped at the sound of his voice, and he had to smirk when she spun around and glared at him. "Make something up? I hear that's the modus operandi over at the New York News Bulletin."
She glared at him. His smirk just widened, his attention drawn to her blue, blue eyes and her slightly flushed cheeks. She was beautiful. She was furious.
"I'll say 'no comment'." Her eyes narrowed, and he felt like she was sizing him up and thinking something not very complimentary. "It's not a lie, but it is something people tend to read into."
Logan laughed and tilted his head in the direction of his office. Her eyes widened, as though she hadn't expected him to give in that easily, but seeing as she'd made him smile more than he had in a while, the least he could do was give her a few words.
He stepped aside to let her enter the office first, and then he closed the door behind him. He didn't get further than one step into the room - she had stopped just through the door and turned to wait for him, her hand outstretched.
"Rory Gilmore."
He shook her hand, her palm soft against his. "Logan Huntzberger."
The moment their handshake ended, she settled in the chair opposite his desk and took her phone out of her pocket. "You don't mind if I record this, do you? I don't want to misquote anything."
"Don't get too comfortable," he warned her, sitting on his own, much larger, leather chair. "You're not going to be here long."
"You're not going to answer my questions?"
"I'll give you a quote," he said, smirking once again. "Not an interview. How about 'I think Honor can achieve anything she puts her mind to and if this is what she's interested in, I'm sure it will be a success'?"
"What?" Rory looked thrown, her eyes wide as she stared at him. "Honor? What are you talking about?"
"You're here for a tabloid, aren't you?" he asked. "The only time tabloid reporters decide to hunt me down is when my sister the socialite has done something tabloid-worthy. What is it this time? The fashion line for toddlers that she was talking about over Christmas?"
"I'm not here about your sister."
That was a surprise. Honor and her husband, Josh, had fully embraced the New York social scene when they moved there to be closer to his family, and although they didn't seek out the paparazzi - Honor wanted her daily life kept private - she attended enough glamorous events to have a frequent presence in the tabloids and on the gossip sites. If any journalist had a question for him, it was always about her.
But Rory wasn't here for that, or for any of the other possible reasons he'd thought of. He rested his elbows on his desk, leaning towards her and quirking one eyebrow. "Why then?"
"The Life and Death Brigade."
He must have heard wrong. She couldn't have said what he thought she had, but the smug look on her face suggested otherwise. His hands flexed, almost clenching into fists, but he forced himself not to visibly react. "The what?"
He hadn't reacted fast enough, hadn't managed to hide his first response to her words. Considering the wide smile on her face, it was too late for his faux confusion to convince her he really didn't know what she was talking about.
"It's a society from Yale," she said, although he was certain she knew he didn't need an explanation. "One of those secret ones. You went to Yale, didn't you?"
"That's what my Wikipedia page says." Rory rolled her eyes. "Although it's been more than a few years since I was last there, so I'm sorry if I'm not up-to-date with the different fraternities. If you want to know anything about that sort of thing, you've hunted down the wrong person."
Rory shook her head, a short, disbelieving laugh falling from her lips. "Have I?" She placed her phone on the desk, the voice recording app on its screen, and, after rummaging through her bag, slid a sheet of paper in a plastic wallet across the desk to him. "Because I'm pretty certain your grandfather knew quite a bit about it, and that makes me pretty certain that both you and your father know about it too."
He turned the paper over, his eyebrows rising at the image of a young man in a suit, leaping from a bridge. The name Elias Huntzberger was scrawled over the picture, identifying him, and Logan had to force himself not to grimace. It wasn't exactly proof that he was involved with the Brigade, but it was proof that his family had been
"Alright, so I might have heard of it," he said. He probably should have been more annoyed about the whole thing - an article of the Life and Death Brigade would be trouble, even if it was only published somewhere like the New York News Bulletin - but she looked so proud of herself that he could only smile. "I don't know why you'd be interested. Shouldn't things that happen at college stay at college?"
"You're thinking of Vegas." Logan chuckled, handing the picture of his late grandfather back to her. She didn't even glance down at it as she took it back. "And I'm interested because I don't think it stayed at Yale. I think some of the members are here, running around New York."
"You do, do you? And why's that?"
Rory bit her lip. Logan watched her as she gazed down at her knees, his eyes drawn to her fingers as she pulled nervously at the hem of her skirt. His question seemed to have drained her of some of the confidence she'd had when she was glaring at him or demanding an interview.
"This isn't the sort of story I usually write," she said suddenly, earnestly. "I know I shouldn't say this but if anyone else at work said they wanted to do a story like this, I'd be rolling my eyes and discounting it as fiction. I cover politics and I try to pretend I don't work somewhere that publishes stories about UFO sightings as though they're not made up. I definitely don't bother with stories like this."
He was surprised by how endearing her rambling was, her words so fast that, if he wasn't a quick speaker himself, he'd have trouble keeping up. "Stories like what?"
"Stories like a masked man in a cape dropping down from a building and landing in front of me." Logan tensed, his eyes wide, and he just hoped that she thought his shock was due to how ridiculous it should sound, not the realisation that Finn had finally made a memorable impression on the wrong person. Luckily, she seemed to read it as the former. "Look, I know it sounds ridiculous. I'd think the same thing if I hadn't seen it myself. But a man in a cape abseiled down from the roof of my building, scared a guy away and then left me with the words 'In Omnia Paratus'. If I didn't look into it, I'd deserve to be at the Bulletin."
Logan took in a deep breath, trying to figure out what to do. Finn's ill-conceived goodbye had to be what had led her to the photo of his grandfather, and then to him. He couldn't tell her it was nothing when she'd seen and spoken to Finn, and he wouldn't want to. As important as it was to keep their late-night activities private, he wasn't going to try and persuade her that she hadn't seen what she thought she had or try to fool her into doubting herself.
What had Finn been thinking?
He reached out and turned off the voice recorder. Rory was just a moment too slow to stop him, her hand swiping out to try and bat his away after he'd already started to draw it back. "What are you-"
"This is off the record."
She shook her head, her eyes impossibly big. "But Mr Huntzberger-"
"Logan."
"Logan, please," she said, her fingers gripping the edge of her skirt again - was that something she did when she was nervous? - as she leant towards him. "I need a quote. I have a deadline. Please. If you don't give me something, I'll be back to writing small paragraphs on Obama and hoping that a few of the readers actually bother with the politics section. Hasn't there ever been anything you just have to write? Because that's what this is for me. I need to do this, and I need to do it properly. It can't just be another front page article that everyone treats like a joke. I don't… I don't need to know everything. I'm not going to ask for a list of names from the Life and Death Brigade. All I need right now is to prove it's true. That this guy is out there and he's saving people. You're the only lead I have."
It was a new approach to an interview, the desperation, but it was working. He understood her. He'd been in the same place once, trapped in a job he hated - and she did hate her job, her words had made her disdain for the New York News Bulletin very clear - only to find an escape in something he was passionate about. For him, it had been a return to the thrill seeking he'd left behind at Yale. For Rory, it was writing. It was this story.
He wanted to help her, he really did, but he couldn't risk it.
"I have a question for you, Rory," he said slowly. "If I know anything about the Life and Death Brigade and about New York's own caped crusader, why would I tell you? If New York really does have its own superhero, that's not just tabloid news. Not if there really is proof. Why would I give you the story instead of running it here?"
"Because you're one of them."
"And why would that stop me? Being the story never seemed to trouble Clark Kent or Peter Parker."
"They're not real," she snapped, her cheeks growing pink with what Logan assumed was irritation. "And you're not a superhero."
"You just said I was. I'm flattered, by the way."
"I didn't say… Ugh, I mean that you were in the Life and Death Brigade. At Yale. Not-" she paused, pressed her lips together and breathed in. "Okay, I get it. You're not going to help. You're not going to give me anything. Fine. I'm still going to write it. I'm still going to find proof. And when I do, I'm going to publish everything I find out. Names, faces, everything."
"Good luck with that," Logan said, forcing a smirk. He stood up, waiting a few moments for her to pack up her phone and her picture of his grandfather, before rounding his desk, gently taking hold of her elbow and leading her out of the office. "I can't wait to read the article. Front page of the Bulletin, right? I'm sure your exposé will be the talk of the town."
The moment she was through the door, he released her, and she spun around to scowl at him. "You're a jerk, Logan Huntzberger."
He couldn't do anything but smile. Despite the topic of conversation, the last ten minutes had been the most fun he'd had in a very long time, and he couldn't be anything but amused by her anger. He knew he deserved it - he'd provoked her - but her eyes were glittering again, her hands on her hips, and, whatever happened with her article, he couldn't regret their conversation. "Very professional."
She took a few deep breaths, the red fading from her cheeks, and then she reached into her bag and pulled out a thin metal case. "Here," she flicked the case open and offered him a business card. "In case you change your mind."
Rory didn't give him the opportunity to say anything more. The moment he took the card from her, she slammed the small case, spun around, and started back towards the elevator. He watched her walk away, gaze lingering on her legs and ass for longer than it should, until she stepped into the elevator. It was only then that he closed his office door.
He put the card in his pocket and decided not to check the time before lying down on the couch, one cushion folded beneath his head.
He dreamed of blue.
After he finally left the office, Logan was still thinking of Rory Gilmore. He'd spent the entire day regretting how he'd dismissed her and wondering if there was a better way he could have handled her and her potential story.
That, plus a voicemail from Nick and a fight with his dad about the Ledger's revenue, had led to him finishing his day at a local bar, going straight from the office without bothering to stop for dinner.
He really needed a drink.
Logan wasn't sure what to do. Her card was still in his pocket, and he was growing more and more tempted to call her and give her something to work with. Once he'd finished arguing with Mitchum that the Ledger didn't need a harder paywall, he'd started searching for every article Rory Gilmore had ever written, and the more he read, the more he wanted to tell her.
She was a good writer, a very good writer, especially with regards to topics she was interested in. Her older work occasionally used too many similes, but it gave it a nice, almost lyrical, quality that he didn't see in many articles. Her increasing disillusionment with the Bulletin was clearer with each new article, especially compared with her articles on Obama's campaign in the Providence Journal and her feature pieces in the Harvard Crimson, but it wasn't her work for any of those papers that was stuck in his mind.
It was another article, one he'd been surprised to find online, that he couldn't stop thinking about. It was a few paragraphs below the fold of a paper called the Stars Hollow Gazette, just under a decade old, on the mysterious appearance of the chalk outline of a body on the main street of the small town. The outline had appeared in a blink of an eye, in front of several townspeople who all stated that they didn't see anyone draw it, not that anyone could possibly draw anything so quickly.
It wasn't exactly the most exciting story -with this making front page, Logan doubted there was much news in Stars Hollow - but it intrigued him. It read strangely, as though Rory was neatly reporting the story without providing all the facts. She made ridiculous leaps from one point to the other, as though she had knowledge that explained the event that she wasn't willing to share.
If she had known more, she'd chosen not to print it. Maybe, if he helped out, she'd be willing to do the same thing again - that was, if he wasn't just reading too much into it.
God, he needed to stop thinking about her.
He ordered a second scotch and smiled over at one of the women sat at the other end of the bar. She returned the smile, twirling a strand of her dark hair around her finger, but before he could join her and let her distract him, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
"This is a sight we haven't seen in a while." Finn was standing next to him, his other arm slung across Colin's shoulders. "You doing alright there, Huntz?"
"Took you long enough to get here," he said. "Want a drink?"
"I slept in." Finn smiled innocently, oblivious to the way Colin was rolling his eyes. "And yeah, I'll have some whiskey, if you're offering."
"Finn." Colin's tone was stern, but that didn't phase Finn. "You're going out tonight. Maybe a drink's not the best idea."
Finn laughed loudly, his arm sliding further along Colin's shoulders as he pulled him closer. "I punch better when I've got some booze in me. Do you want me to break my nose too?"
Colin shrugged Finn's arm away, his fingers rising to press gingerly against the faded bruises around his nose and under his eyes. "As a matter of fact-"
"He has a point, Finn," said Logan, gesturing for the bartender as he spoke. "Maybe you'd be better at the whole secret vigilante thing if you weren't always tipsy on patrol?"
"What does that mean?"
"Did you run into a beautiful, blue-eyed woman sometime over the last few days?" Logan ignored Colin's question and kept his eyes on Finn, who only replied with a shrug. Logan shouldn't have expected anything more from him - he knew that Finn struggled to remember faces, although if Rory had made half the impression on Finn as she had on him, he wasn't sure how Finn could possibly forget her. "You used In Omnia Paratus to say goodbye?"
Recognition dawned on Finn's face. "I remember now. She wouldn't give me her number."
"So you told her about the Life and Death Brigade?" Colin asked, shaking his head in disbelief. "Right, that makes sense."
"She was asking a lot of questions. I used the latin to bamboozle her and then I went back to the rooftops. I didn't tell her anything about the Life and Death Brigade."
Logan sighed and took another sip of his scotch. "Of course she was asking a lot of questions. She's a reporter."
"For where?" Colin asked sharply, clearly much more worried than Finn. That didn't surprise Logan - he'd always suspected that Finn wouldn't mind if their vigilantism became public knowledge. He'd love the attention. "For one of HPG's papers? Can't you just pull the story?"
"It's not one of our papers. She works at the Bulletin."
Colin barked out a laugh. "Then there's nothing to worry about. No one's going to take her story seriously when it's printed alongside yet another headline claiming that aliens are coming."
"She's a good reporter, Colin. She's already been to see me, and started asking questions, trying to get names," he said. "What if she finds another member? Robert's on Wall Street. What if she goes to him? He doesn't know what we're doing. Why wouldn't he help her narrow things down to the only Australian? And once she identifies Finn and realises there's more than one of us, it's not going to take much to lead her right back to my door."
"And then what? She publishes it?" Colin shrugged. "No one will read it. No one who matters."
"I don't see the problem," Finn said, returning to Colin's side and once again slinging his arm around Colin's shoulder. "As long as she doesn't get our names, what's wrong with her printing a few stories?"
"That we don't want people going to dangerous streets to try and spot us?" Colin suggested. "And we really don't want the police looking for us. I don't think they'd be happy with us going around and doing their jobs for them."
"We'd just have to be a bit more careful. I'm happy for a bit more risk if it means we get a bit of appreciation for what we're doing. We're giving up our evenings to help people. Why shouldn't that be acknowledged somewhere?"
Colin sighed. "How many times do we need to have this conversation?"
"I'm tempted to tell her," Logan said quietly, stopping his friends' bickering before it started.
"Tell her what?"
"Everything." Logan downed the rest of his scotch, ignoring Colin's horrified gaze. "We give her the story. We give her more than she could ever expect to find by herself, so long as she keeps it anonymous."
"And why would she do that? She'll get more attention if she reveals who we are," Colin argued. "And even if she does agree to that, the last thing we want is for people to know we're out there. What if the criminals start arming themselves better?" He gestured at his healing nose. "They're already enough trouble."
Logan nodded. Colin was right, Colin was making sense, but Logan didn't really want to listen. He thought of Rory, and her email address in his pocket, instead. His whole life was spent at work or on the streets of New York. Why shouldn't he get some recognition for the life he'd chosen?
He wasn't doing a very good job of not thinking about her.
"Enjoy last night, Finn?" he asked eventually, eager to move the conversation away from Rory Gilmore.
Finn shrugged. "Not really. Life's boring when I'm not jumping off buildings. I had a few beers and had an early night."
"You had an early night?" Colin asked, rolling his eyes again. "You? The man who sleeps all day and lives off the family fortune?"
"I don't sleep all day. Sometimes I go to the gym."
"So you slept while Logan and I were at work, went to the gym, had a few beers, and then fell asleep yet again while we were patrolling? I'm surprised you're awake right now."
"I can't help that I'm getting old." Finn sighed dramatically,
"We're not getting old. We're just getting tired," Logan protested. "Maybe we should take a break. We could do a week in Monaco or a weekend in Vegas. Get the bong out of storage, buy the most expensive bottle of scotch we can find and join the poker game with the highest buy-in. Like in the old days."
Colin smiled nostalgically. "We'd get to the suite, share a few drinks and sleep for days. Besides, as nice as the thought is, we all know we'd never do it. We're in too deep to walk away now, even for a week."
Logan gestured for another scotch - he didn't need to watch what he was drinking, not when it was his night off. Colin was telling the truth. He'd never be able to take a break, not when he'd be too aware that there were people who needed saving.
It was too tiring. They'd started abseiling off buildings and freerunning over rooftops as a way to keep up the thrills they'd enjoyed at university without having to find the time to get away from work, but it had grown bigger than that. It had become time-consuming and stressful and his social life had been reduced to the odd evening with Colin and Finn and attending his mother and sister's many parties and fundraisers.
It had been too long since he'd felt in control of his life. His time belonged to his father and to the city, and any time he wasn't with them, he was sleeping or training.
Finn and Colin continued to banter but Logan didn't listen. He sat and swirled his scotch, falling quickly into the sombre contemplation that always overtook him after a few too many drinks.
Why did they go out each night? They weren't obligated to save people, it was just something they'd started doing. Why was it the three of them who were sacrificing their time and their safety to protect people they'd never met, only to get tired and bruised and lonely?
Why shouldn't they get some recognition? Didn't they deserve their pictures - or at least their silhouettes - on the front page?
Talking to Rory seemed more and more reasonable with each sip of his scotch. By the time Finn and Colin left him, he was certain enough - and drunk enough - to dig his phone and her business card out of his pocket and send her a brief email saying he'd reconsidered and would be willing to discuss further details of a potential meeting the following day.
With that message sent, he forced thoughts of Rory Gilmore and the possible consequences of talking to her out of his head. It was his night off. He should be relaxing, not dwelling on anything to do with his two full-time jobs.
He only managed to empty his mind after another couple of drinks, some brief conversation with a woman at the bar, and a quick fuck in the bathroom - it might have been the same woman he'd smiled at hours earlier, but things were fuzzy and he wasn't sure. They hadn't bothered to exchange numbers and then he'd let Frank help him into the car to take him home.
Logan was only just aware enough to turn his usual five a.m alarm on, the screen showing the numbers 01:57, before collapsing into bed.
He fell asleep, suit and shoes still on.
