A/N: It's been a while, I know. Sorry. I don't own Dark Angel.

-2014-

For the next weeks, Logan couldn't get the underside of that school bus out of his head. He and Darius lay side by side for over three hours, listening to the sounds of each other breathing and the ambient noise of life going on in the Lot around them. They never heard sirens.

They left the hiding spot separately, without discussion. When Logan pushed his way out of the trash he'd used to barricade them into the space between the bus and the world, he felt like Rip Van Winkle, emerging from a bed of drifted leaves after decades asleep.

None of the people he passed on the way out looked at him strangely. His jacket was black, and didn't show where he'd bled. He pulled up his collar and put his glasses in his pocket, flattening his hair with his hand before he headed for the gap in the north side of the fence, near the empty, scuffed plastic-and-aluminum box where a guard had sat in order to watch over the parked busses in better days. He didn't know who, if anyone, was watching for him now, but he wasn't challenged. His car was right where he had left it, like nothing had happened.

Logan decided not to go to the Emergency Room for the gunshot wound -- which was, after all, a graze. He had his friend Tejas, a second year resident at Metro, take care of it in his bathroom on her afternoon off. He thought of this as a favor to Darius, although he couldn't say why he felt he owed the man anything.

Nothing showed up about Lydia in the papers, of course, or in the Free Press editors' trash cans. Logan didn't know if she'd gotten out OK, although the rational part of him doubted it. He wasn't sure if the incident had been reported to the cops at all -- there were ways he could find out, but he didn't. He didn't want to alert anyone who might be watching these channels, for his own sake and his paper's, as well as for Darius. Logan didn't know if the May 22nd founder had escaped the Lot alive.

He thought about it sometimes: Jon Darius's body lying underneath that bus, arms at his sides, fingers relaxed, flies in his eyes. A bullet in his left temple -- the side of his body closer to the perimeter fence, the side Logan's absence had left exposed when he crawled painfully out of the space next to the terrorist. He could be there, still.

Mostly, though, Logan thought about those three hours when they were both under the bus, how they had lain there waiting to be found, two bodies in a coffin, Darius with his arms crossed over his chest, a sharp elbow digging into Logan's side. It was a good thing he was afraid of heights, not tight spaces.

It's the job, Logan reminded himself. Comes with the territory.

Part of him had always hoped to become the kind of journalist who was worth enough for bad people to want to stop him. Now, Logan had had guns pointed at him, had almost taken a bullet, but it hadn't been about him. It was the company he kept. Jon Darius was the kind of stoney-eyed idealist that put off even people like Logan Cale, and the May 22nd Movement had murdered innocent people. For all Logan knew, he had more in common, politically or ideologically, with whoever put the hit on Darius than he did with Darius himself, but because he had agreed to interview the man, he had become a target.

The shooting was a taste of something to which he'd secretly aspired for his whole censored, Pulse-fucked career, and it was sobering to remember how scared he had been. He was still scared now, every day. He had hoped he would be braver, when it came down to it.

Logan had the interview saved as an mp4 on his desktop. Maybe these constituted Jon Darius's last words, or maybe, if they weren't, an article to that effect published by the Free Press would have been a welcome decoy for the man who had, again, dropped below the radar.

Maybe, but Logan wasn't suicidal. It wasn't like Darius was his friend.

No, Logan had confronted his own death under that bus, as best he could, and now he had to get back to business. He was a journalist. Jon Darius's enemy list was a long one, with no obvious leads. Assuming that the man and the woman who attacked them inside Two Cousins were hired guns, Logan focussed on them, hoping the trail might then connect back to their employers. Logan researched hit men and assassins, concentrating his search first on North Korea, then on South Korea, too. He didn't find much. He searched the Seattle court records for adoptions of white children by Korean parents. There were none. He even asked his Korean-American friends, who were mostly amused or insulted by his questions.

Then one day about two months after the shooting, a man knocked on the side of Logan's cubicle. He was a white guy in his thirties with curly brown hair and a beard, wearing a tattered sweatshirt, and Logan had never seen him before. "Logan Cale?"

"That's me."

"He wants a meet." The man put a white paper envelope on his messy desk.

Logan didn't ask who. He reached for it as the man retreated toward the door of the newsroom. "What if I don't want to meet?" Logan called to him.

The man glanced at him, puzzled, and shrugged.

Logan looked around to make sure that none of his colleagues were paying attention, then opened the envelope.

October 15, it said. 8:00 PM. Wild Waves theme park, Federal Way, Washington. Logan knew it: the home of the highest roller coaster in the state.

TBC