Title: Silence
Author: freak-pudding
Disclaimer: Veronica Mars is the property of Rob Thomas and UPN. No copyright infringement intended.
Summary: "Where do you imagine me, Veronica, in your normal life? Where am I in that big picture?" AU S.2
Author's Notes: Follows Point/Counterpoint. See that for this crap. Standard I'm-not-switching-fandoms-again disclaimers apply.
Silence
Rain sluices over your windshield; the caramel-colored light of oncoming cars splinters into spectral glow. You scream at the buzz of disconnection and scratch out a different number. A woman's robotic voice, varnished in caffeine, answers.
"911 Dispatch; please state your emergency."
"It's not mine," you blurt, and bite your lip.
It's nearing dawn outside and your water-splashed windows are streaked in trembling blue, a spattering of glitter in the dead of cold California spring. Ghostly goldfish wave past the glass, liquid streaming over fog, and Meg glares at you, waifish, sallow, Lilly leering from the brown of her eyes.
You jerk the wheel sharp left, tires crunching and popping as you swerve off the shoulder, shaking yourself awake.
"Miss, are you there?"
The dispatcher's voice bleeds through with a little less than humanity this time, filtering along the beams of a waning moon. You watch it dip and quiver, pausing on your lagging wipers like a bird coming to roost.
"Yeah, I'm—"
"State your emergency, Miss."
"It's not mine—me. It's my—"
The words waffle on your tongue, flapping, drawing bile—
"He's gonna jump."
"What?"
"You have to send someone to the Coronado. He's going to kill himself!"
"Who is, Miss?"
"My—my boyfriend!" you scream at her, knowing the pretext is ridiculous now. An ethereal horn blares you away from the centerline; you swerve hard right, hydroplaning. The LeBaron's pushing eighty-five, and you know you'll be too late.
"You think he's on the Coronado Bridge?"
"He is! He's going to—!"
"We'll send someone there, Miss," she tells you plaintively.
"That's not good enough!"
"It's never good enough for you," Logan drawls.
The wheels screech, highway swerving wildly beyond the silver screen of rain. Logan laughs from your right, stretching his arm catlike over the back of the seat.
"Miss! Miss, are you—?"
The phone clatters out of your hand, bouncing off the sputtering console and into the darkness hiding Logan's absent feet.
"Jesus, Veronica. Don't you know how to drive?"
He's so calm about all this and you don't scream—can't, really—feeling the walls and windows and water pushing in on you. The pressure of it slams into your chest, compressing, crushing, and then you're leaning out of the window of Logan's penthouse, nauseous, watching his laptop fall to the sidewalk below.
"You know, you should really look into therapy," he drawls.
"You're not here," you whisper, eyes blurring over. "You're not here."
"I'm always here," Logan shrugs. "You just never want to talk."
The highway twists, swirling around in caramels and grays, and the tears on your face smear the lines of here and then, and Logan's fingers reach for yours curled over the steering wheel.
"Why can't you love me?" he asks gently.
"I do, Logan, I love—"
"You're such a bad liar."
He draws his fingers back, sighing, running them through the tuffs of gold-tipped chestnut over the top of his head.
"That's what I like about us, you know," he says, as if you've never stopped talking, like you'd stayed yesterday instead of running away like you always do, scared and lonely and so selfish. You watch the school bus sidle quietly over the cliff, Meg's fingers clawing blood across an exit blocked by your ambition. "The truth is, I'm more of an in-betweener than you are."
"Please, not this again," you beg.
"I'm serious. Admit it. Me and Meg—we were just placeholders for you and Duncan, like Alicia was. A stand-by for your dad to fuck with until your poor, drunk mother came home."
"I never told you her name," you say accusingly. The weight of the rain presses down on you, and you feel your head get heavier. Mr. Wu said that centripetal force keeps you spinning in a circle.
"Earth to Ronnie. Not my psychosis."
"I'm not psy…psychotic."
"And yet you can't pronounce it."
The weight pulls down on your eyelids, like lead mascara is what's streaking across your cheeks and how did you get so tired all of a sudden? An object will keep moving in a circular path unless its acceleration causes its velocity to exceed the centripetal force.
"Do you think they have margaritas in Hell?"
"They have everything in Hell," you mumble.
A man stood on the corner of your street once, holding a sign.
"Do you think they have you in Hell?"
Your head lolls. I won't judge you, he declared to the world.
"Logan, I…"
"You grew your hair out," he says, absent affection.
"I wanted to."
"Why?"
"Because, I just…"
"Why don't you ever answer me?"
You recognize this, now, as the place where it always ends for you. Midnight, wrapped in sheets and Logan, eyes closing, sleep coming, and then he starts to talk.
Funny. You always imagined yourself as the cuddler.
"I can't do this, Logan. I can't."
"You never could," he sighs.
You want to reach out, to touch him. You're awake now, head lighter. You must be at the top of the circle.
He stares ahead, zombie-ish, face hidden from you.
"I love you, Veronica."
Your eyes float in a fishbowl of absinthe tears.
"I love you, too, Logan."
"No, you fucking don't!"
His scream is frail, and it's the same thing, the same fucking fight you're always having and you just want to yell and cry and beat him up and run away forever, and he's glaring at you, angry, always angry, and everything inside you just pleads for this to stop stop stop STOP—
"Stop it!" he shouts. "Just stop it, okay? I don't know what you want from me, Veronica!"
"I want it to be normal again!" you sob. "I want everything to go back to the way it was! I want you to be okay again!"
"Okay?" he snarls. "What the hell are—? What the fuck are we—?"
He cuts himself off each time, beryl and emerald streaks of rain tinting his face, and you blink rapidly, sucking the tears in again, drawing yourself back to here and now. You hate the way your dreams are so ambiguous.
"Don't get mad at me," you beg. Your windshield wipers scrape at nothing, smoothing the watery mess over the window. It splatters like a drowned Monet, lily pads and soft green Japanese bridges crisscrossing over you and Logan.
"You think I don't have the right?"
He leans toward you then, face bathed in the glow of waning moonlight. His deadened brown eyes smolder at you from two deep pools of blue.
"Where do you imagine me, Veronica, in your normal life? Where am I in that big picture?"
Fog creeps along the edges of the window, smudging the last streetlights on the block. You stare at him, only him, fingers whitening over the wheel.
"Yeah," he says, leaning back. "That's what I thought."
There is nothing to say then and you close your eyes, not because you're upset—never enough to get upset—because you're exhausted, so exhausted, so fucking tired and why can't he just stop talking to you for one fucking second—
"Best part of the day I killed her," Aaron leers, shoving you against the wall of a well-packed elevator.
Getting all of you to just shut the hell up.
Logan leans back in the seat, arms crossing over his sunken chest. There's a wild screech, a scream you hear leave your lips, and then nothing.
You wake hours later, slumped over the steering wheel. The windshield before you is splintered, a crystalline spider web, diamond-dust dewdrops sparkling in the frozen coral sun. There's a fine mist of blood over the console, a throbbing ache on the top of your head, a dabble of red on your lips that turns copper and soaks into the sleeve of your shirt.
Blinking the haze to oblivion, you lift yourself off the dashboard and slide back into the seat. One stiff arm bends delicately at the elbow, lithe muscles fluttering softly, fingers tracing around the blood-plated lump growing on your head. Your vision is bleary, and you twist your head slowly around, taking in the candy-pink hues of morning reality. Sunlight drapes gold over your shoulder, and your fingers slip on the damp door handle. The driver's side window has exploded inward, raining starlight over your lap.
The world you step into isn't the one you left the night before, and you understand this subtle, terrifying change long before you spot the pinprick of yellow fifty yards ahead.
You lose your sandals near the front of the LeBaron, somewhere before you pass the smashed-in fender, glass shards from the shattered headlight biting into the bottoms of your feet. You leave bright red footprints, blurred at the edges, weaving a frantic trail as you cross the bridge.
Logan's Xterra is nestled beneath the crux of two support beams, headlights winking lazily at the guardrail. The driver's side door hangs open, limp, swinging forlornly on a broken hinge. The dimming buzz of dying radio reaches your ears as you stop on the pavement, feet burning, head throbbing, throat thick and tight.
The sun rises, slowly, behind your head, illuminating the blood sprinkling his dashboard.
Water drips from the suspension cables above your head, plink-plink-plink across the buckled yellow hills of the Xterra's roof. It pools in the dents and dips, cascading from ebbing little swells, spilling across the slumped-in windshield.
You realize with a start that the engine is still running.
Sirens swell in the distance; the faint flashing of blue light paints your blood-speckled arm momentarily purple. The music leaking from Logan's car sputters in dead monotone, battery dying, engine giving two feeble coughs and cutting out with a forlorn fizzle.
You imagine how he must've looked, ghost-like, drifting through the haze of crimson and clove cigarettes, you mirrored in his pose, slumped across the steering wheel. You see him stand then, fingers groping for his phone, cursing, crying, begging for the second chance he knows will only come from you. It all filters through a bad television, sound muted; Logan's mouth forms anger around soundless screams.
The wailing siren punches through your flailing daydream, pain shooting up and down your thighs, and you realize that you've fallen to your knees, shaking, sobbing. You see the silhouette of Logan climbing the rail, blood-soaked fingers slipping, sliding, feet numb as he tumbles to the top. You imagine him, one hand wrapped around the support post, arms outstretched, on top of the world. You can't bear to see him fall.
Tires squeal behind you, grinding over gravel as a car stops; you hear the staccato blast of slamming doors. A gun cocks, and you feel sick.
"Stand up slowly, hands in the air!"
You wonder, rising, if jumpers scream on the way down.