Author's Note: This picks up right in the middle of Veronica and Logan's argument in 4x05, after she found out her dad was having issues with his memory. I realize canon-Veronica isn't using the f-word these days, but cuss didn't look right in print, so I went back to the old standard for curse words for this. It's pretty angsty for a minute, but I think you'll like where that gets them.

Fight For Me

"You're not happy," Logan says, his eyes boring into mine. "And you act like you don't have the power to change your circumstances."

I really wish he'd leave his therapy bullshit with Jane. It's helped him, fine. But I didn't sign up for the self-help special and I wish he'd quit trying to rope me into the 2-for-1 deal.

"I love you. I do."

My heart gives a little choked jerk that he qualifies it, like he's reassuring me, or himself. I don't even have time to assess how bad this is before he goes on.

"But if I'm not what you want, say so." He doesn't even flicker an eyelash to say this out loud, like the possibility doesn't bother him at all.

Maybe it doesn't. He's the one with the perfect body and the sexy job and the save-the-planet bicycle and perfectly self-disciplined life dotted at regular intervals with flawlessly memorized inspirational quotes. He'd have a new Instagram-ready girlfriend by next week and in ten months they'd be cupping their hands to form a heart around her shiny new ring. I'm the hot mess here, and we both know it.

"You want to stay in Neptune, you want to leave Neptune, that's also your call," he says steadily. "It's your life, you get to do what you want."

"Are you serious right now? I do what I want!"

"No, you don't!" His voice wavers finally and he blasts off the couch. "Not really!"

I blow out a breath, telling myself not to pick a fight. "Ooh, you are really starting to piss me off."

"If I weren't around…" His voice is fully raw now, tears jumping to his eyes and I haven't seen Logan cry in so long that my throat twists closed. It's like my body responds to his before my mind catches up. This is worse than seeing him unfazed. So much worse. "If your dad wasn't around, what would you be doing?"

It hits me like a falling airplane, the image of them both gone. And fuck, I'm closer to that today than I've ever been in my life.

"I'd be sticking my head in the oven because the two most important people in my life would be gone!" I scream it at him without meaning to, and I'm choking on my own tears as he stares at me through his.

"I'm sorry." He gathers me into his arms, his voice dropping into controlled and soothing again, like he can just turn it off, all those emotions, all that terrible shit. Like he can still think, damn him. "This was the wrong time to bring this up. Your dad's gonna be fine. It's all gonna be okay."

But it's too late—my whole body's shaking, my fingers clawing into the thick muscles of his shoulders and the panic's got me now. I can't hear myself crying over the roaring in my ears but I'm lightheaded from lack of breath and I keep hearing that deep BOOM of the bomb on the beach the other day.

That sound…it's every kind of not-okay wrapped up at once so in a single instant, you know everything you took for granted can be gone, just like that.

My dad's quick, agile mind. My business. The one thing I'm really good at. And Logan…he's never, not once in the years since I laid eyes on him in that airport, brought up the possibility of us not being together forever.

It's like the boom of that first bomb wrenched a crack in my life and I don't know how to unsee the gaping blackness inside the abyss. The understanding that everything I love might be taken from me, soon.

But no, it was before that first bomb. It was the first instant I touched that ring, hidden in the right pocket of Logan's bag. No, is what I'd said and the universe is taking that no and running with it.

"Veronica, breathe."

I'm dizzy and my head feels clamped and dark, and I don't put together what that means until Logan pulls back, leaving my whole body cold. One of his hands is laid against the side of my throat and only against his palm do I feel how hard all the cords in my neck are pulling. He tugs my other hand up to his chest and takes a long, smooth breath.

"Breathe. Just like this. Just one breath."

I tip and he catches me, takes us both down to the couch because my legs are apparently just one more thing I can't count on right now.

"Vero—okay. All right. Hey. Hey, everything's going to be okay. I'm right here. Your dad's okay. Veronica."

Logan's tucked me back into his arms, holding my face hard into his neck and his steadiness is what shows me how hard I'm shaking. I'm more hyperventilating than sobbing, in these ragged airless gasps that make my chest feel ironed flat, like I can feel every one of those stones he said I kept asking them to pile on.

If I could breathe now, I'd say stop. No more weight.

"How—how could you—" I finally manage to snatch in enough air to speak and I push at his chest. Pound at it, really. "How could you say that? How could you ever fucking think that?"

His eyes tighten at the edges. "I—" He looks away, smooths my hair back. "Hey, I'm sorry. It doesn't matter right now, okay?"

"What matters?" It wasn't what I intended to say, but it howls out of me like a question way bigger than the two tiny words containing it. "Bombs and lies and fucking secret memory journals and goddamn duck hunting trips." I throw out a hand but when I try to push up to my feet my legs wobble and I fall back into the cushions and another sob wrecks its way up my throat. "Fucking people." I drop my face into my hands and I'm howling with sobs. "They lie, and they change and they drink and die and what the fuck?"

"Veronica?"

I shove my hand across my face and his eyes are wide now. Apparently not even Therapy Logan saw this shit show coming.

"I don't know," I tell him. "I tried to go back to the life that felt like mine and I know something's still not right. I know I'm a fuck up, okay? You don't see that look on people's faces thirty times a day and have to apologize for it and not realize there's something wrong with you, okay? But I don't fucking know when it happened and I don't fucking know how to fix it."

"Veronica—" He reaches toward me and I slap his hand away.

"Don't. You meant it. You can say sorry all you want, but I know you meant everything you said. But you know what, Logan? You get to do what you want, too. And if what you want isn't living in a tiny apartment with a psycho girlfriend who the whole fucking town knows doesn't deserve you, then don't."

Humiliatingly, I start to cry harder.

Logan gets up, quietly. I dig my hand into my hair, jerking at it until I feel the burn of strands coming out at the roots. I have to stop fucking crying. What the hell? I never cry, and never like this. My business is barely keeping the lights on, my father is teetering on the edge of losing his mind, and now is not the time for me to finally find the limits of what I can handle.

I can't see Logan anymore, but I know he's not leaving. Not right now, with me like this. He's too fucking polite these days. He'll pack a suitcase and fold his socks and leave once he takes down his vintage Easy Rider posters and puts them in bubble wrap. He'll leave a note, Thanks for the good times, no hard feelings. Signed with that loopy, stupid beautiful L I can't even watch him write without wanting to kiss him.

Seriously, fuck Logan.

Something nudges my hand just as I curl forward, all my ribs contracting into a fresh round of sobs that feel more like brute, pure pain than tears. It's the corner of a box of tissues. I fumble for them and they drop on the couch in front of me, and Logan sits down across from me. One knee pulled up onto the cushion. With me, but not pushing. So fucking in control, so sweet and calm and perfect.

I blow my nose, snot spewing out of the fold of the tissue and smearing up my face before I chase it down. Great. So glad I had witnesses for that.

"This was so much easier when you were the fuck up," I mutter in my clogged-nose voice.

"I know."

I shoot him a glance and he looks tired and quiet, his jaw solid in the way that matches so perfectly with the many uniforms that belong to him these days.

"It's always easier for you when you get to play the hero," he says, "and be the one who is in control. I just wish that you didn't think for you to play the hero, I have to be the villain."

"I…" I let out a long breath. I don't have the energy to do this right now. "I don't think that. I shouldn't have said that, I'm sorry. Okay? I'm sorry. Fuck, I should just wake up in the morning and give a blanket apology for everything I'll do wrong in a day, maybe then—"

"Stop." He touches my knee, just briefly, but it's long enough to realize that I'm shaking again. And that I don't want him to stop reaching for me.

I blow out a shaky breath. "I should have…the other morning when you were upset about the text from Leo and you were being all jokey about it. I should have said something instead of just letting you walk out. He's not anything, Logan. He's not anyone you should be worried about."

"It's not him I'm worried about. It's that I can't remember the last time you wanted a five-hour lunch with me."

"It was surveillance, not lunch. You know how it is."

"I used to. You haven't asked me on a stake out in a while." He pauses. "We don't have to talk about this now. I know you're exhausted. But someday, I wouldn't mind knowing what I did. What changed."

"You changed. You started wanting more and it put all this pressure between us because I—" I gesture, but my hands are all tangled up in Kleenex. "I don't have any more, Logan. You're all—what we had is all…it's all I wanted. I didn't know it wasn't enough for you until…well, you know." I glance away.

He doesn't say anything, and the tension of it squirms up from my toes, writhes in my belly, plucks at my throat until I have to look back.

He's staring at me, this anguish and want in his eyes that makes me feel so much worse.

"I didn't ask you to marry me because I wanted you to think what we already had wasn't enough." It's hushed, but not enough that I can't hear the gravel scraping his voice.

I reach for him, and almost before I've started to move, he catches my hand and we clutch tightly for one second, two. Then it's not enough and I launch myself across the couch, landing on his chest the way I used to. Back when things were good and he'd always catch me, laughing at my sneak attacks and whatever awkward way our bodies landed after I jumped at him.

"Shit, Veronica." He murmurs against my hair, in between kisses to my forehead, my hair, my ear. "How did we get so fucked up?"

"I don't know." His tee shirt is soft and it's making my head hurt a little less. "And I know you want me to go to your therapist but she's just going to tell me to do yoga and gratitude journals and shit and that I have trust issues and I just don't think—"

"You don't think you can do surveillance and hold your kombucha at the same time?" He says, but the joke comes out half-hearted. I hook my finger in his belt, comforted by how tight it is. It feels secure.

"I don't want to be worrying about what tiles to put in the bathroom," I burst out. "Or where to get my kid into preschool. I don't want anything like the lives other people seem to want, and I don't know what else there is. I don't wish I were a lawyer instead. And yeah, some days, I fucking hate Neptune and every corrupt asshole that lives here, but I've lived other places, and people are all the same, everywhere. Mostly shit."

"Well, that gratitude journal isn't going to need very many pages, apparently," he says, but he sounds amused.

"It'd need three." I pull back. "You, Dad, and Mars Investigations. It's exactly what I want, Logan. And I know you don't believe that anymore, but it's true." I try to hold his eyes, but tears are welling up from my bottom lashes again. "And I have all of those things, but I feel wrong all the time, and I don't know what the hell is going on."

He brushes my hair out of my face, his thumbs smoothing tears off my cheeks and his eyes are soft and a little confused, not so in control. I like him better this way and I kind of hate myself for liking him better this way. It's just so much easier when he's not being perfect at the same moment when I feel like I'm spinning ever more out of control.

"I just…sometimes it makes it harder. That you're so good to me." I feel awful even as I say it, and the last part comes out as a whisper.

"I mean, I can be more of a dick if you miss it," he says, his voice light, and a little sardonic. "I'm fully trained in that capacity."

I glance away, my eyes focused on our blender like it's a lifeline as I clear my throat. "I just…I don't know if you remember my mom. She's been gone for a long time. But she would go through these phases where she'd try to make up for everything, be really nice to me and cook us dinner and remember to pick me up from school. Kiss my dad. And that was how I'd know she was about to relapse."

"Ah, Veronica."

He slides a hand under my hair and pulls me close so he can rest his lips against my forehead. They're warm, and anchoring, and when he's not looking at me I don't feel quite so ridiculous for whining about my mommy issues from half a lifetime ago. Like any of that shit still matters.

"My mom did that, too," he says. "The morning after she'd get really drunk, she'd bring me fancy fruit and shit, try to hide her hangover and ask questions about school. But they were always the wrong questions, because she'd been too drunk to know what was really going on with me."

I tense. Because of course his mommy issues are worse than mine. Mine abandoned me, sure. But to a father who would care for me, not one who would beat me bloody. And his dad…

"Fuck, I'm sorry." I'm the family he comes home to now. And in some ways, I'm no better at loving him than his shitty parents were.

"Don't be sorry. I'm not trying to one-up you, Veronica. I'm just saying, I know what that's like. How when things are good, it always feels like you're waiting for the punchline."

My hands tighten where they lay on his jeans, the fabric crumpling under my grip. A lot of the reasons things are good in my life are because of him. He's the reason I'm not eating cold takeout every night at midnight, nothing to look forward to but unraveling the next crime some dirtbag has tried to hide. When I got bad news, like tonight, he was the first person I wanted to run to, and I knew he'd be there for me. Logan's my anchor, and I never stopped to think that he might need one, too.

He has even more reasons not to trust than I do. Even fewer people that have ever loved him. And he seems fine, yeah, infuriatingly so, but he wouldn't be trying so hard on this marriage thing if part of him wasn't still craving more stability. At that, something goes steady in me.

I know how to be needed—I'm good at coming through for people. I just didn't realize until right now that Logan still needed me. And in exactly what way.

I find his hand and cradle it inside both of mine. I can give him that safety his parents never gave him, ring or no ring. But he's right about something else—I'm not happy. And I have no idea why.

And if it keeps going like this, it just might destroy both of us.

"I love you," I tell him, my heart in my throat. "But I don't know what's wrong with me."

"Okay," he says.

I blink. "Okay what?"

He brings my hand up to his mouth and kisses my knuckles. "Okay, we can deal with that. I'm just glad you finally told me at least something about what's going on with you. And that it's not us that's got you looking so trapped all the time."

"But Logan, that's nothing. It's not an answer, it's not a solution. Like, who even says they have the life they want and they feel half-crazed most days? Find themselves snapping at everybody and like, incapable of even saying something simple like, 'hey, don't be jealous, you're the one I want.' I just told you there's something wrong with me and I don't know how to change it and you just think…okay?"

His eyes warm, and Jesus, he's beautiful. "I think you might have forgotten that my best friend in the world is Dick Casablancas."

I flop back against the side of the couch, half in his lap and half out of it. "I don't get the connection, but thanks for bringing up even more depressing things."

"I don't care if you're messed up, is my point. I don't need you to be perfect in order to love you. I just need to know you want me in your life. That's all." He tugs me closer, arranging me in his lap so I'm cradled in his arms and more comfortable than I want to admit to being. "I'm here for you. And I think, now that you're finally admitting that everything's not fine with you, it can't be that hard to figure out what's going on and fix it."

His hand strokes down my back, and I let out a breath without realizing how tense my muscles had been.

"And Veronica?"

"Yeah?" That breath comes right back in, holding against whatever bad news he still needs to break to me.

"Whatever you decide needs to change, I'm here for you. If you want to leave Neptune, I'll call U-haul tomorrow. If you want to move your dad in with us so we can keep an eye on him, I'll learn to watch a lot more baseball with him. If you want to go back to school and change careers, I'll help you make flashcards."

Now I'm holding my breath on purpose because I'm trying not to start crying again. I've been breaking his heart lately and he's still ready to uproot his whole life in an instant for me.

"Basically whatever you need to make you happy, I'm up for it. Unless it means getting rid of Pony." He winks. "Sorry, but I love the dog more."

I burst out laughing. "No, you don't, you dick."

"A running buddy, amusingly loud flatulence, and consistent cuddling?" He shakes his head. "Sorry, I mean, I like a cute blonde as much as the next guy, but you just can't compete with that."

I can't believe I'm smiling right now. "I hate you."

"Yes, but I'm good in bed." He taps the end of my nose.

"I do vaguely remember something about that. Way back in the annals of recorded history…" I shrug. "Then again, could have been some other guy."

"Oh, no you didn't." He stands, lifting me right along with him. "That's it, now my masculine pride has been challenged. I hope you didn't want to get any sleep tonight."

"Sleep? Sleep is for the weak." Pony bounds along behind us as we head for the bedroom, and Logan has to do a fairly undignified move using his ass to crowd the dog out and then slamming the door with his foot so we don't end up with an audience.

He lays me on the bed but I lock my arms around his neck and pull him down with me, because I don't want to lose that perfectly warm spot where my face fits into his neck and everything in the world smells just right.

"Logan?"

"Mmm?"

"I seriously can't believe you said that to me." I know it's probably my fault, for not communicating or whatever, but he's smarter than that. Too smart not to see how much I love him. And how much I really hate all those other douchebags trying to call themselves men. "Never say anything that stupid ever again, okay?"

He coughs into laughter, his chest shaking my whole body. "And people say Veronica Mars isn't romantic."

"I'll show you romantic. As soon as you lose the shirt, sailor."

He starts to smile, and then—only then—do I start to believe things might really be okay.

Author's Note: Hey everyone! I'm heading off into the desert for my biology job. I wrote a bit of stuff ahead of time so I'd have something to share while I'm gone, but I'm probably going to have to drop down to once a week updates. Twice a week if I have internet and time to edit. I'll miss you!