Title: Bright, Chapter Five
Author: Lois Fogg (Utsusemia on LJ)
Pairing/Character: Logan/Veronica, ensemble
Word Count: around 8,800
Rating: R
Summary: Post 2.17 AU. Logan's been poisoned, and the stakes have just gotten a lot higher.
Spoilers: Through 2.17
Warnings: A bunch of cursing.

Author's Notes (more at the bottom): I finished another chapter! This one is long, so I hope those of you who've managed to stick with me so far like this installment. This sucker takes some energy to write.

Chapter Five: Keep Still

He checked his email when he woke up the next afternoon, his head still aching from nightmares he didn't remember and in possession of what he suspected was some truly stupendous morning breath. He still felt exhausted, but marginally less shitty than he had when he dragged himself into bed last night, too tired to even bother unbuckling his jeans. Veronica's face when he left her in the parking lot seemed to have chased him through the night and into this morning, so that his hand had a slight but unmistakable tremor when he opened his email. "Put some passive into your aggressive" he had told her, a bit of deliberate cruelty he'd regretted in the pitch, solitary black of night, let alone this harsh morning. Because he wanted her the way he always had--like he had a gaping, bloody cavity in his chest that only she could staunch. Only, these days it seemed as though they might just be better off if she left him to bleed to death. One of them was better off without the other, but he just couldn't work out who.

Three new messages. None from her, and the immediate twist of disappointment was so visceral he had to laugh. Well, fuck, what did he expect? It took him a minute of staring blankly at the computer screen before he realized that one was from an address he had never expected to see. From a person he might have cared about a thousand years ago, for a second.

Hi :) was the innocuous subject line. It was really too bad for Hannah that emoticons didn't come in pink.

i'm sooo sorry i didn't email u sooner, logan! its been crazy busy over here -- new school yadda yadda. u know we have to wear uniforms? yuck, except some of the girls cut the skirts shorter so its a little better. anyway, i heard u were sick and maybe in the hospital too?!? omg i hope your feeling better now! actually that's why i decided to write u now because i thought of how horrible i would feel if u died and i'd just ignored u like some toddler. your not going to die, right?

anyway, i think i might have left something at your place. my mom can't find it anywhere and i'd feel so awful if i lost it. think u could look for me? its a gold charm bracelet. really old, i only keep it because an old boyfriend gave it to me. if you do find it, could you be dreamy and give it to my dad? i think my mom still doesn't like you.

ttfn, xxoo

Hannah

He spent a minute wondering if Hannah was being passive aggressive, but he finally settled on clueless. It was probably a bit hard to manage passive aggressive when you couldn't even manage punctuation.

He refreshed his email, and was rewarded with a note from a friendly Nigerian financial institution. Maybe Veronica was really hard up for cash? Right. Time to cover up the hole and pretend to be normal. Fuck, he was going to find out who did this and beat the goddamn crap out of them.

It'll probably kill me, he thought, quite calmly.

He didn't care. He waited for Weevil to call and looked for Hannah's charm bracelet to pass the time.

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She knew there was a problem when even Great Expectations wouldn't put her to sleep. She hadn't thought anyone could withstand the soporific lure of Miss Havisham's interminable creepiness and Pip's endless mooning. She finally gave up after a hundred pages--three times as much as she had ever managed to read continuously--and lay for hours, staring sightlessly into the dark. She didn't dream, precisely, but her mind was a jumble of confused, searing images she wished she could escape. Logan's hands around her waist a week ago, before he got sick. The physical jolt she felt at just the memory blended with his words and his face last night--the harshness, the cold anger, until she felt her throat close up with all the effort at not crying. She officially declared it morning at 5:30 am--still dark, but not unreasonable--and practically ran to the shower. She didn't know how anyone could be so simultaneously exhausted and unable to sleep.

The trial was in four days and she had promised Cliff she'd find him a case. At least she had some busy to keep her mind off the horrible.

Her father caught her at 6:30 am, making omelets and squeezing orange juice.

"I would have called the aliens in sooner if I'd known the whole body-snatching thing would work out so well," he said and yawned. His words were light, but Veronica saw the wary concern in his eyes. She wished that there was something she could do to dispel it, but he wasn't stupid, and he must have some idea of what the last few days had done to her.

Logan sitting on the hood of the car, Logan in the hospital bed...she shook her head and poured juice into a glass a little too energetically, so some slopped over the sides.

Her dad took a few steps closer. "Honey," he said tentatively, "are you--"

She turned and handed him some juice, forcing a smile she knew he would see straight through. "June Cleaver, I know. Anyway, I've got to go. People to intimidate, minors to emancipate."

"And school."

Her smile grew a bit less brittle. "Would June Cleaver miss school? Hey, this is Aaron Echolls, remember? I'll be drowning in people who think he's an asshole before first period. "

He seemed to relax. "Okay, June. Let me know how things go."

She grabbed her bag and walked to the door, and was grateful that her dad couldn't see her smile falter when she followed the metaphor to the end.

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He found the bracelet an hour later, peeking between the cushions of his television couch. He didn't ask himself how it got there--he remembered too much and too little of that night. Hannah being led away half-naked by her father, horror ripping across her eyes...he didn't think he was a good man, but he'd spent half of the night bent across the toilet, retching stomach acid as though it were guilt.

Someone knocked on the door, and he walked unhurriedly to open it, twisting the cheap, tarnished copper chain around in his fingers. It was very small, but he supposed Hannah was tiny enough. It must have sentimental value, because the charms were battered and almost unrecognizable. One, especially, that might have once been a pony, was nearly smashed flat. An old boyfriend, huh?

He opened the door and was only mildly surprised to see Weevil lounging against the wall, hands in the pockets of his low-slung jeans.

"I thought you were going to call," Logan said, moving aside so Weevil could come in.

"Wanted to make sure you were alive."

"My dad's offering a finder's fee?"

Weevil grinned. "Nah, but I think Lamb would pay some good money." He paused to take in Logan's still-haggard appearance, but didn't say anything. Instead, he gestured to the trinket looped around Logan's fingers.

"Nice bracelet. My little cousin's got one just like it. My Little Pony--very retro."

Logan stuffed it in his pocket and gave a faint smile. "I think your cousin should meet my ex. Does she like pink?"

Logan watched Weevil digest this and then put it together. "That Sophomore girl you screwed over?" he said, finally.

Logan nodded.

Weevil whistled. "And they call me an asshole. Seriously, My Little Pony?"

Logan had been thinking the same thing. It wasn't nice to hear it said aloud, but then again, he'd invited it. "I didn't know about that."

"And you would have stopped if you did? Yeah, I thought so. Let's go, Casanova."

"You have a lead?" Logan asked, pocketing his wallet and room key.

"A hunch. We're going back to basics: write what you know."

"Weevs, I think '101 Unconventional Ways to Use Duct Tape' might be a hard sell."

"Method 1: making smart-mouthed jackasses shut up...I don't know, there may be more demand than you think. Anyway, fortunately for you, my expertise extends beyond duct tape."

Logan shut the hotel door behind him and they started walking towards the elevators.

"Such as?"

"Drugs, campadre. I hate the shit, but I know who deals. Whoever is trying to set you up seems to have a lot of it. Someone must have heard something."

"Ah, the unassailable logic behind shakedowns everywhere."

They walked through the lobby, and Logan made a point of ignoring the concierge staring at Weevil and his uncovered tats as though he thought he might steal the silverware. Asshole.

"How do we get them to talk?" Logan asked, when they walked into the bright early-morning sun.

"Intimidation," Weevil said, walking to his car. It was parked brazenly across two handicapped spots, as flamboyant and out of place in this sea of luxury status statements as a bumper car.

He looked at Logan across the hood and something made him wince. "But maybe you should wait in the car."

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Veronica walked into first period English five minutes late, clutching an extra large black coffee like she might fall down without it and an expression so stormy even her teacher refrained from saying anything. Aaron Echolls--man-whore, womanizer, wife beater, child abuser, and (let's not forget) truly atrocious B list actor had somehow managed a veritable metamorphosis behind bars. Apparently while she hadn't been paying attention, the man who had ruined her life had been rehabilitated by the press into an innocent patsy, victimized by his status and accused of a horrible crime he was of course incapable of. Even the women he had used like dirty tissues stood up for him now. Veronica couldn't tell if it was cynicism or star-struck gullibility, and she didn't fucking care. Without the tapes and without any witnesses, how was she going to convince a judge that Aaron was an unsuitable father? How was she going to get Aaron away from Logan in time, in case he got worse, in case he decided to assert control of Logan's medical decisions?

She drank an inadvisably large mouthful of coffee and felt it sear the roof of her mouth before settling in her empty stomach. It was an old trick, using pain to make sure you're alive. She had always noticed how much more...vibrant Logan seemed than anyone else around him. She had never thought that might be why.

She had promised Cliff a case. Logan needed a case, though she doubted he would thank her for it. It all depended on how far she was willing to go, didn't it?

They were on William Blake in English, and though she had not been paying the slightest attention to a word her teacher said, her eyes snagged on a few lines from a poem on the page in front of her.

I dried my tears, and armed my fears

With ten-thousand shields and spears.

How far was she willing to go?

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"You're skipping out?"

Wallace hurried after her through the school parking lot, still chewing the brownie he had nabbed from the lunch table when she left.

Veronica turned to him and tapped her watch. "You have class in five minutes."

"So do you."

"Do I? It's Friday. I'm sure someone told me that class is optional on Friday."

"Was she really old and selling apples? 'Cause I don't think you should trust her."

"Wow, Wallace," she said, opening the car door and tossing her bag inside. "Way to cram in the threatening female archetypes."

"Thank Disney. You'll have detention for a week if you skip."

She closed the car door and smiled up at him as she rolled down the window. "No I won't."

Wallace paused, suddenly wary. "Why not?"

"Because you're going to tell them I got sick. Cafeteria meat didn't agree with my stomach."

"Why should I?"

"Because I'm your bestest friend and you wouldn't want to see me stuck in yucky detention?"

He raised his eyebrows and rocked back on his heels.

Veronica sighed. "Snickerdoodles?"

"Now that's what I'm talking about! Hey, you should get some rest. I told you not to eat that mystery meat. Probably pigs' knuckles or something." He gave a mock shudder and Veronica had to laugh.

She was about to drive off--her smile already fading--when Wallace put his hand on her arm.

"Hey," he said. "Call me if anything happens, all right?"

After a moment she nodded. It was reassuring, she thought as she drove through Neptune's streets into a more unfamiliar area of town, that Wallace was worried for her. She was too busy to do it for herself.

The house was small, the front-yard garden abundant, the Spanish omnipresent. A few of the kids playing in the street outside gave her curious looks, but no one else seemed to notice her presence. A gringo in this neighborhood was an oddity, but nothing too remarkable. Her car kept her anonymous--as long as she wasn't one of the 09ers they worked for, they didn't much care.

She walked up the steps and cooled her heels on the small porch while she waited for the slow, shuffling steps to answer her knock. Her stomach twisted and shivered and she wondered frantically, even as the woman inside pulled back the deadbolts and chains, if she should leave--run away and stop this before she couldn't turn back. But she stayed where she was, she armed her fears. She even managed to summon up a smile when the small, surprisingly frail woman opened the door.

"Veronica Mars?" the woman said, peering at her through her glasses.

Veronica was surprised she recognized her, though she didn't know why.

"Leticia Navarro," she said, her voice as steady as she could make it. "I need to ask you a question."

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So, shaking down contacts with Weevil went something like this. First, Weevil would pull into the stoop or back lot or car shop where the stooge was ('stooge' didn't really sound like the right word, but it did sound like something Humphrey Bogart would say, which put it somewhere in that hazy region between retro-cool and embarrassing). They'd both get out of the car and Weevil would go up to the guy while Logan stood in the background--hopefully affecting a menacing presence with his wrap-around aviator sunglasses and deliberately obvious bulge in his pants from the unloaded gun. Weevil would be all chummy and Spanglish and "my grandma was just asking about your second niece's boyfriend." The chump (also of hazy coolness, but so lovely to pronounce) would smile warily and thump Weevil's back or offer him a cigarette and ask about how his grandma was doing. Semi-hostile formalities concluded (circling each other like tigers, he swore, although he wondered what that made him. Probably the fucking gazelle--the one that doesn't make it across the river), Weevil then dropped a line about wanting to know the word on the street about a big shipment of meth, suspected dirty. At that point, muscles tensed and the chump/stooge/unsavory character inevitably focused on Logan, leaning against a nearby wall (a dual benefit of looking both casually menacing and staving off exhaustion). The first three times this technique produced unsatisfactory results--i.e. Logan and Weevil chased away by preteen hoods, Spanish curses and/or junkyard dogs.

The fourth time they finally got some goddamn information. At Weevil's pointed suggestion, Logan waited in the car while he went out to shake down some poor kid still in the throes of adolescent acne. The kid was attempting, not very successfully, to ride his trick bicycle up on one wheel. He had fallen on his back, wheels still spinning beneath him, when Weevil approached him.

"Hey, Carlos, your mother know you're skipping school again?"

The kid scrambled to stand up, but his jeans got caught in the gears of his bike and tore with a loud rip. He fumbled to disentangle himself a bit too long and Weevil summarily picked him up by his collar and pushed him against a nearby wire fence.

"Hey, you got school too," he said, squirming against Weevil's grip.

Weevil grinned. "Yeah, but I'm bigger than you, nino. Besides, I'm here on business. You heard anything from your brother, lately?"

"Yo, Weevil, Tomas don't tell me nothing! You know that. I'm just riding my bike--"

Weevil nodded in mock sympathy. "Minding your business, I know. Still, funny that you just happen to be skipping school out here the day your brother has a big shipment due, huh? And this," Weevil casually dipped his hand into the boy's shirt pocket and pulled out a chunky cell phone. He clucked his teeth against his tongue and Logan had a moment of grudging admiration. But then, he guessed that well-honed intimidation techniques were part of the required skill set of teenage gang leaders.

"Wow," Weevil said, turning the phone over in his hand. "This is some piece of shit. It was new when, '99? Funny, I thought I'd heard Tomas was doing pretty well for himself, these days."

The kid glared at Weevil, but he looked too embarrassed to be intimidating. Key shakedown technique number one: poke where it hurts. If that fails, kidnap them and threaten permanent damage to their extremities with loaded guns. Well, if it came to that, at least Logan knew Weevil's cronies had very nice cell phones.

"What do you want?" the kid said sullenly.

Weevil relaxed his grip. "There was a big shipment of meth sometime in the last few weeks. Possibly tainted. Tomas got his fingers in it? Any rumors?"

"I've heard some. Something big came in with an issue, but it was an upfront deal, no one to take it back."

"Who?"

The kid lowered his voice. "Fitzpatricks, I heard."

Weevil laughed briefly. "The micks, huh? Figures, something this dirty. So what'd they do?"

"Popped a cap in whoever sold it to them."

"Anything else?"

"That's all I know, I swear! Come on, let me go."

Weevil looked at him for a moment and then released his grip with a slight shove. The kid stumbled to his bike and pedaled off around the corner, his knees comically almost as high as his shoulders on the tiny bicycle.

Weevil's face was big with a self-satisfied smile when he climbed back in the car. "I knew I should have left you in the car," he said, grimacing at Logan.

"I'm wearing sunglasses."

Weevil turned the key in the ignition and started to navigate his way through the local streets. "A well-accessorized corpse."

"They're still stuck with the meth," Logan said, changing the subject. "They killed the dealer, but they're still stuck with tainted meth. What are they going to do with it?"

"Sell some to us, of course," he said, turning down a side-street that ended in a cul-de-sac. Logan recognized the little house immediately. After all, he had just bought it, and now he had to turn the deed over to the woman who had lived there for the past fifty years.

Logan turned to Weevil and arched his eyebrows over his sunglasses. "Wow, so how does your grandma like the meth business?"

Weevil shrugged and parked the car across the street. "Well, the pension your parents gave her was so generous!"

Logan didn't pay any attention to the cars parked on the street but he still felt a strange subconscious frisson when he and Weevil climbed the steps to his grandmother's porch.

There were voices inside. Both he recognized, and one he wished to all fucking deities he would never have to--

She opened the door before Weevil even had a chance to go in, before Logan had prepared himself to do more than stare and ache and long.

She paused in the doorway, one hand still draped over the knob, and met his gaze. The vertiginous free fall was so familiar, so fucking exhilarating that he shivered. God, could he just touch her jaw, kiss her until her breath grew uneven and her hands strayed to the belt on his jeans and they both thought they might die if they just didn't fucking do it, right there, against the lime-stained bricks of Leticia Navarro's house?

"Hi," she said, softly.

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"Is this about my grandson?" Leticia had said when she opened the door and led Veronica to the kitchen. "Is he in some trouble again?"

Veronica sat on the edge of the plastic-covered seat and slowly sipped her glass of sweet powdered ice tea. Leticia looked...old, and sort of beaten into frailty. Veronica had never thought of her as young, but she had always been vigorous. Now, she moved with a cane and her smile was strained with a layer Veronica immediately recognized: pain. It made her feel worse about what she was going to ask, but she knew she would do it anyway. All her other choices were even worse.

"No," Veronica said, "Weevil's fine. I need to ask you about your old employers."

Leticia looked surprised. "The Echolls? Weren't you dating their boy for a while?"

Veronica's hands started shaking so she put the glass down on the table. "Not very long," she said, attempting to keep her expression neutral and knowing she was failing, "just a few months. How long did you work for them?"

Leticia's mouth twisted and she leaned back in her chair. "Fifteen years. And then they fire me like I've known them fifteen days. At least Lynn made sure I got my pension, rest her soul."

Deep breath, Mars. "So, you've known Logan for a while."

"I changed his diapers."

"And you know Aaron."

"Cleaned his house for fifteen years, but I don't think he would even remember my name." She gave Veronica an appraising look. "But, yes, I know him."

"You know what he did to Logan." It came out in a breathy rush, shaking around the pounding of her heart. She needed the details and she didn't want to know them.

Leticia met her gaze for a moment and then looked away through the barred window to the street beyond, where a few kids just home from school were playing hopscotch.

"Lynn gave me the pension," she said, still looking through the window. "She helped me keep my health insurance. I wouldn't have survived this past year without that."

"Do you really think she'd want you to protect him after all he's done?"

"She was so afraid of it coming out."

"She's dead. And Logan...he needs your help."

Leticia sighed and turned to face Veronica as though it hurt her just to move. "He was five, the first time. Aaron mostly ignored him before that, left him to Lynn or me. But when he was five, he went to his dad's room. He tried to put on one of Aaron's silk shirts, but he ripped it--a big tear, right by the collar." Leticia's voice was quiet, her eyes distant, but Veronica could feel her intensity like heat on her skin. "He was so upset. He started crying, right over the shirt, in the middle of the room. If he'd just come to me or Lynn, we could have...but he didn't. He was like that, then--impulsive and guilty. When Aaron found him in the room he told him what happened. He said he was sorry."

She stopped and it took Veronica a precious few seconds to find her voice. "What...happened?"

"Aaron threw him down the stairs and broke his arm. The first time."

Veronica concentrated on Leticia's legs--the thick ankles, the circulatory hose, the purple veins standing delicately beneath fragile skin--and forced back a rush of bile. Five years old. When she was five her parents had taken her to Disney World. They got into a fight over whether Veronica should be allowed to go on the Briar Rabbit ride, and Veronica had cried. Their first fight. She'd had stitches once, when Bud Crick pushed her off the swing set in third grade. She'd never broken a bone.

Making out with Logan last summer, the hazy glow from the pool only faintly illuminating the curly bleached hair on his chest. The uneven ridges on his arm she'd fingered while he slept.

But Leticia was speaking. "Who would it help? You can't make everything right. Not even for the ones you love."

"When he broke his arm, did he go to the emergency room?" Her voice was so rough she hardly recognized it.

"They took him to Dr. Finegold, just like every time."

"His pediatrician?"

"Lynn's plastic surgeon. Idiot with big muscles who wanted to be a movie star. Aaron strung him along with money and small gigs, he kept his mouth shut."

"Is he still around?"

"Busy cutting faces in North Neptune, last I heard." She shrugged. "But I don't get around much, these days."

And why didn't you tell anyone? she thought furiously, unfairly. Why didn't Lynn or Finegold's receptionist or Logan's teachers or any other goddamn adult tell anyone? A perfect storm of silence. A festering, gangrenous wound that no one could bear to show the public. And now she would be the one forced to rip off the dressing to protect Logan from the man who had done this to him in the first place.

"On Monday," she said, standing slowly, "there's a trial to declare Logan an emancipated minor. Will you testify?"

"Against Aaron?"

Veronica didn't even try to hide the fury in her voice. "Yes."

Leticia held her gaze for a moment and then turned away. "I needed the job. I was raising three kids on my own, just a few years older than you are now. I didn't know what to do."

"Do you now?"

"Oh yes. I'll be there, Veronica Mars."

Veronica let herself out, still shaking and dizzy and entirely too affected by what she had heard. Anyone would be horrified at child abuse, but she knew her reaction went beyond that. She found herself in possession of an unreasoning, consuming rage--the kind that made you want to equally murder someone or break down and weep. She supposed she knew what it meant, but what good would it do to think about it? Like going emotionally unhinged was really going to help him? So she opened the door.

His eyes.

"Hi," was all she could think to say.

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She tried to mask it, but he heard the desire there, the intimacy. Like they were the only two people in the world, he smiled at her.

"Damn, is anyone in school today?" Weevil said, cutting across the moment.

Veronica looked gratefully up at Weevil as she stuffed her hands hastily inside her jeans. "I know," she said, scrunching her nose in that way that never failed to make Logan feel like death may be preferable to living without her (and that when he wasn't feeling melodramatic). "Kids these days."

"So, what are you doing here?" Weevil asked, his bulk blocking her exit. "I think you're in the wrong neighborhood for Girl Scouts."

"I brought extra Tagalongs for the barrio?"

"Seriously."

Veronica shrugged uneasily. "I needed to ask Leticia a question. A case I'm working on."

And the way she very deliberately didn't look at Logan as she said this made him realize it had something to do with him. So, fuck. The girl really didn't know when to quit, did she?

Weevil considered this and then stepped aside from the door.

Veronica moved quickly past them, but not before Logan noted the deepening bags under her eyes that her hastily applied foundation didn't do a good job of covering up. She was pale, too, under the makeup and Logan wondered how much sleep she had been getting lately. Jesus, she looked almost as bad as he did.

Weevil seemed to notice it, too. "Hey, you doing okay, Veronica?"

She smiled too brightly and opened the door to her car. "Just a little stressed. I swear, I don't get combustion reactions at all. Anyway, I'll see you two around."

They stared after her, bemused, for a few moments after her car had vanished around the corner.

"She's nuts, you know that, right?"

Logan shrugged. "She's Veronica."

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Logan finally had a chance to give Hannah's dad her charm bracelet that evening. The meth-buying had been surprisingly straightforward. Everything seemed to work better when he just stayed in the car--which he was happy to do in the case of the Fitzpatrick's anyway. At least no one would notice if Weevil got another tattoo. Turns out he'd just needed to stop by his gramdma's to drop off some medicine, which Logan thought was rubbing it in a bit, but was also, he supposed, fair. It was a hard habit to get out of, really--being an ass when he wanted something. His mother had been so fucking guilty all the time that she'd do whatever he wanted when his father wasn't around. He'd smiled bitterly at the thought in the car outside The River Styx. He was such a fucking stereotype--blaming his mother for his father's horrors. She'd been far from a saint, but at least he was alive and not rotting at the bottom of a river. At least he had a shot at redemption.

Logan had left the two-ounce bag with Weevil, since he couldn't afford to get caught with any on him. Weevil, he assumed, had places to stash. Next week they'd find somebody who could test the stuff. He got his car back from the police--a hefty fine attached for illegally parking it in the ambulance zone when he was about to die--and drove to Hannah's. He was glad, in a clean and sincere way that shocked him, that she seemed to have forgiven him for what he did. He didn't deserve it. He had known it was wrong every moment he was with her, flirting and laughing and calculating. He had known it was wrong even when he fought to keep her--he couldn't make it right just by deciding to really want her. Nothing would make it right, but he could hope nothing would ever put him in that position again. He was too honest to pretend that he wouldn't do it again if the back were pushed against the wall, the loaded gun to his head.

He pulled in front of Dr. Griffith's house and rang the doorbell. He felt way too tired to be nervous, which was good since the doctor looked none too pleased to see him.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, his hands clenched at his sides like he was seconds away from slugging him.

Logan backed up a step and slowly--so as to hopefully avoid any physical violence--held up the charm bracelet.

"Hannah left this at my place. She asked me to come by and give it to you. I'll leave now..." he trailed off. Dr. Griffith was staring at him like he was Banquo's ghost, which didn't really rate high in his list of comfortable situations.

"Uh, Dr. Griffith?" he said, when they'd been standing like that for nearly a minute. "Are you okay? Could you just take the--"

His voice seemed to shake Hannah's father from his stupor and he roughly yanked the bracelet from Logan's fingers.

"Thank you for bringing this," he said, voice low but relatively pleasant. "It's just a childhood trinket. I hadn't expected to see it, that's all."

Logan didn't quite know what to say to that, so he just smiled awkwardly and walked away--not fast enough to avoid hearing the door slam behind him.

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The good doctor Finegold was dead. Well, more like "despicably evil" and he'd technically been murdered, but the end of the story was the same: she couldn't get information out of a corpse. But if there was anyone Veronica desperately wished she could bring back to life for the solitary pleasure of killing him again, it would be the late Dr. Finegold, plastic surgeon to the not-quite stars. He had been killed in a rather grisly murder-suicide a year ago that she vaguely remembered from the local news. A former client, her health ruined when a clamp left in after a hasty tummy tuck turned septic, had marched to his front door, shot him in the head and herself in the throat. The girlfriend had been in the next room, and the girlfriend had been ten years old when Logan first came to see him.

Ah, Neptune. Nothing but pristine beaches, beautiful people, existential pain and dramatic exits. It was dark when she made it back to school, driving slowly because her vision had decided to make like taffy and leave smears of afterimage across whatever she saw. Her head pounded and her skin felt entirely too sensitive, as though she could feel every cheap synthetic strand in the LeBaron's driver seat. Slowly, she got out of the car and walked back into school. Well, at least she'd be playing her part if any of the teachers who thought she'd left sick saw her. If she looked even half as bad as she felt...

The receptionist said his old medical files were in storage, but Veronica hadn't been very surprised when a check of the electronic file didn't reveal a record for Logan--or any Echolls, for that matter. When you're getting paid hush money, you don't make medical files for your abused patient. Without a doctor to intimidate, she only had her word and Leticia's. She hoped it would be enough.

For now, however, she still had some leads to follow. She retrieved her camera from her locker first, immediately reassured with its weight in her hands. From where she stood, she could hear odd noises coming from around the corner--heavy breathing, and something ripping. Cautiously, she peered around, praying it wasn't a situation that would warrant a call to the police--because, really, she didn't need that hassle in her life right now--but it was just Beaver. He looked a little flushed, and he was standing in front of the lockers, surrounded by torn paper.

"Beaver?" she said, walking towards him. For a moment, something odd crossed his face, but then he smiled awkwardly at her and she relaxed. The school could be really eerie at night. "Getting an early start on this year's homecoming confetti?"

She looked at the lockers next to him and realized, with a start, that he had been tearing down the elaborate collage decorating Gia's locker. Sure, she had found the fairy posters and "My Heart Will Go On" lyrics a little nauseating, but this reaction seemed extreme.

She raised her eyebrows. "Let me guess, Gia asked you out?"

Beaver blushed and stared at the floor. "No, it's just I got stuck in detention with Clemmons and Gia's dropped out for the semester and he told me to clean her locker."

Veronica stepped closer and saw her big name card--the kind you get made on the Santa Monica pier with the cheesy Chinese-style calligraphy and pastel colors and animal illustrations--had been ripped in two. Cleaning out her locker? Veronica looked at Beaver and wondered, not for the first time, if Mac hadn't been better off getting out of this relationship when she did. She couldn't imagine having Dick for a brother made for easy social adjustment. She shook her head and casually opened up the locker--nothing inside.

"Where's her stuff?"

Beaver bent down and started picking up the torn up paper. "Goodman came by and picked it up earlier."

Too bad, since that's why she'd come back in the first place.

"She's really leaving?" Veronica said, when the implications of Beaver's rambling explanation finally hit her.

"Dick says she had a nervous breakdown."

But why? What did Woody mean by "alone time," anyway? Veronica made some excuse to Beaver and ran back outside, where the air was easier to breathe and she could see anyone before they got close enough to overhear.

Gia shaking and moaning on the toilet seat, apologizing for something she couldn't even say. It had to have something to do with Logan, didn't it? But what could Gia possibly know? Why would it make her leave school? Veronica shivered though it was nearly eighty degrees outside. This was bad. Something bad had happened to Gia and though she didn't want to believe that her own father would be a danger to her, that's exactly what this felt like. That creepy smile, that practiced handshake...oh fuck. She stopped walking, abruptly, a few feet from her car. She must really be tired if it had taken her this long to notice what should have been obvious immediately.

"I appreciate the offer, Veronica, but sorry. I think Gia's going to need a little alone time for a while."

He had looked to the left while he said it, the muscles in his shoulder and neck tensed like a linebacker's. He was covering something up. He knew what Gia was so sorry about, and he had taken her out of school before she could tell anyone. And what would he do to her now?

Frantically, Veronica hunted through her cell phone for Gia's number. She'd called her at some point in the last few weeks, right? She found it right at the end of her call log--one more ring and she'd have lost it entirely. The line rang only once before a recording picked it up.

"We're sorry, but this number has been disconnected. Please hang up, and try your call again."

Maybe Gia switched phone numbers a few weeks ago. Somehow, she doubted it. Something told Veronica that Woody had made his daughter disappear, and she was too late to find her.

------------------------------------------------

He drove by her apartment for absolutely no decent reason except to see if her car was in the lot. She needed to sleep. It wasn't possible for anyone, even Veronica, to keep going like this. He wondered when she had last really slept, and had the nauseating conviction that it was probably when he got sick. Over a week ago.

But she wasn't at home and Logan's emotions were way too much of a fucked-up tangle for him to brave talking to her father. Hell, what would he say: "Your daughter is about to pass out if she doesn't get some sleep and I know it's probably my fault anyway, but I can read her better than you so trust me?" Logan snorted. No need to get thrown out of the same apartment twice.

He was debating between looking for her at the school and giving into his own exhaustion when his phone rang. For a ludicrously giddy moment, he thought it might be Veronica. Maybe she had a lead and they could snark at each other and she would hang up in a huff and he could go to sleep with a smile on his face that he knew was stupid but couldn't get rid of.

But it was Cliff.

"Jesus Christ, did I get charged with something else?" he snapped, more annoyed than he should have been.

"I don't object to the worship, but the ending's a bit morbid. And no, you're still only facing possession, much to the delight of your future parole officer. I'm calling about the trial."

Logan would have hit his head against the steering wheel if it didn't entail swerving into oncoming traffic. "Lamb set a date already? Doesn't he need, you know, evidence?"

Cliff paused a moment, and Logan wondered if he sounded surprised. "Ah, not that trial date. This Monday, children's court."

Logan laughed. "They're charging me as a juvenile drug kingpin? Talk about ruining my street cred."

Cliff's pause this time was longer. "Veronica didn't tell you? She told me she had."

Logan sat up straight, suddenly alert. Anger was always great for temporary fixes. "About what, Cliff?"

Cliff sighed. "You have a date Monday to divorce your father. She's trying to revoke his right to make medical decisions for you."

Oh, that trial. "Funny, it just slipped my mind. What about it?"

"Will you take the stand against your father?"

Logan shrugged. "Do I get to say what fucking asshole he is?"

"I trust you'll clean up the language in the court?"

"Sure. Anything to screw with him."

"Great. Just don't gouge out your eyes beforehand, okay?"

But my mother's already dead, he wanted to say, as Cliff hung up.

Anger vanished. Jesus, he needed to sleep.

------------------------------------------------

8:45 Monday morning, Veronica walked into the already-crowded courtroom of the venerable 10th Circuit Family Court. Logan's hearing wasn't set to start for another hour, but she huddled on a bench in the back, clutching a coffee and trying to ignore the disjointed images that shot through her head whenever she closed her eyes. She still couldn't sleep. She'd spent the weekend bouncing between Leticia and Cliff, practicing testimony, planning for contingencies. And in her spare time, she hunted through the yellow pages for labs sophisticated enough to check for poisons in her illicitly obtained cookie crumbs. Unfortunately, it appeared that "sophisticated" was a little-known antonym to "affordable."

It was funny, but once Cliff had heard Leticia's story, he hadn't said another word to Veronica about the time he was putting in. She was grateful--what Cliff had done for her went way beyond snickerdoodles, and she wasn't really sure how to pay him back. Unfortunately, the side effect of narrowing Leticia's stories down to the punchiest and most harrowing was that Veronica's own personal nightmare never seemed to abate. She knew she hadn't led the most relaxing life since Lily's death. She'd had plenty of things to keep her up at night, but always before there'd been some down time, a moment to forget about the hell and pretend to be normal. Moments where she could sleep without being afraid of the nightmares that might find her. But now...

She hadn't seen Logan once this weekend, and she hadn't spent a moment without him in her thoughts. She was helpless in the face of her horror. She had long since lost any claim to plausible deniability about her feelings for him. This was not lingering affection. This was not guarded friendship. This, she thought, staring down at what was probably her tenth coffee that weekend, was abject, helpless, die-saving-him-in-a-fire love. Love for the boy who would vomit at the smell of pears and had been permanently cured of any temptation to sneak cigarettes. Love for the man who would stare at her until she forgot her name, who would burn down swimming pools and use innocent girls like inflatable toys if the stakes were high enough.

Unscrupulous, passionate, self-sacrificing, selfish, damaged, brilliant, raw, beautiful--maybe they'd been doomed the moment they met.

No wonder she couldn't sleep.

------------------------------------------------

Lavoie and Logan walked in just as the Honorable Judge Thalia Gonzalez was calling the court to order. Had they been talking? Veronica glared at him, but he avoided her eyes and squeezed in next to Cliff at the plaintiff's table. It was hard to tell through the crowd, but he looked pale...maybe even afraid? She wondered how much his dialysis was taking out of him. She wondered if he would ever forgive her for what she was about to do. The court was packed, of course, since Aaron Echolls himself had been trotted out for the trial. He looked remarkably well-coiffed for a man who had spent the better part of the last year in prison, and just looking at him made Veronica feel simultaneously infuriated and terrified. It was hard to be calm when you looked at the man who almost burned you alive inside a refrigerator. Even when completely helpless, something about his malevolence itself seemed threatening.

Judge Gonzalez instructed Cliff to give his opening remarks, and he rose with what Veronica thought was a remarkable air of dignity--a word she didn't normally associate with her favorite lawyer in a cheap suit.

"Your honor," Cliff said, his voice a picture of resigned sadness, "Logan Echolls grew up in the home most of us think we dream of. Famous parents, privileged friends, virtually endless access to money and material wealth. But we intend to show that there has been a dark side to Logan's childhood, a pervading menace, a threat that first caused the suicide of his mother, the murder of his first love and near-death of his second."

Veronica sank low in her seat as dozens of eyes turned to stare at her incredulously. Oh fuck, she was going to kill Cliff when this was over. She could see, however, that the judge was appreciative of the poetry of the situation, which she supposed was something.

"We intend to show, through the testimony of Leticia Navarro, the housekeeper to the Echolls family for over fifteen years that Logan spent his childhood in and out of doctor's offices with a series of injuries and ailments deliberately inflicted upon him by none other than his father. Yes, a victim of childhood abuse with the threat of its continuance even today. It is imperative that we emancipate this boy from his father, and take him out of this monster's control once and for all."

There was an eerie silence in the courtroom after Cliff's speech--one punctuated only by the furious clicks of cameras and the sudden rush of blood in Veronica's head. Logan was staring at her now, his mouth twisted in a smile so bitter she almost choked on it.

"Et tu, Brutus?" he mouthed.

"I had to." No sound left her throat, but he understood.

Lavoie's responding speech was strident in its denials and recitation of washed up C-list actors who would come to the stand to testify on Aaron's behalf, but Veronica barely heard it. Betrayal. Oh, Logan had his faults, but she always had his loyalty. He always gave her exactly what she didn't deserve.

She caught a faint, grudging smile cross his face when Leticia first took the stand. Of course, all emotion quickly fled when she began to speak. Cliff led her through it chronologically, and the cumulative effect of these stories (only five of what had felt like decades, glacial ages of torture--she could hardly endure it for a weekend, how had he managed for his entire life?) was devastating. Ten minutes into Leticia's testimony, Lavoie and Aaron were deep in whispered conversation and Logan's face was so deliberately impassive she thought it might shatter.

When Leticia finished, Veronica felt her muscles go slack and she closed her eyes in quiet, silent thanks. She saw the Judge's expression. That had to have worked. If it hadn't...she would not allow all this to have been for nothing.

Cliff turned to her and gave her a tight smile when Lavoie declined the opportunity to cross-examine. She tried to catch Logan's eye, to convey...something of what she was feeling, to show that this hadn't been easy for her either, but he was still staring straight ahead. He looked like he was preparing himself, like whatever he was afraid of hadn't actually happened yet.

Cliff called Logan, and Logan walked stiffly to the witness box. Stoic, you might think, if you didn't know him, if you didn't know that something was scaring him so much he was close to physical violence.

What did you do? That quiet space, before the nightmare.

"Logan," Cliff asked, his voice strident in the hushed courtroom. "Can you confirm for the judge the testimony we just heard from Leticia Navarro?"

Logan cleared his throat and leaned into the microphone. "No," he said, looking straight at his father, his voice hoarse with hatred. "No, he never did any of those things. He never beat me, he never abused me, he was a model father."

He didn't mean a word of it. It didn't matter.

In the midst of the following clamor--Cliff's shouted objections, Lavoie's smug answers, the frantic buzzing of a hundred voyeurs and court reporters--Veronica stumbled from her seat. She dropped her coffee cup and the black dregs splattered over her shoes. The sound of her breathing, the smack of her sandals against the marble floors, the weight of the doors as she pushed them open, struggling to get outside. Only those discrete sensations, devoid of any context but the desperate, unreasoning need to get out.

She wasn't sure how long she'd been standing outside when she came back to herself. She was in the back parking lot, away from the reporters who had congregated by the front of the building. She looked around for her car, but realized that she had left her keys in her bag back in the courtroom. So she looked around--aware she was very far from okay, but not sure what to do about it. There was a car in the lot with a surfboard strapped to the top that she was pretty sure she recognized. Dick was here? She hadn't seen him in the courtroom. Then again, she hadn't been paying much attention.

She blanked again. Next thing she knew, she was leaning with her back against a palm tree on the edge of the lot, swaying. Oh, fuck Logan. She was going to puke or she was going to crash and she didn't have her keys and she couldn't go back into that courtroom and fuck Logan. The associated images came just a bit too clearly.

She laughed and leaned her head back against the bark. And when the tears slid across her temples and dripped into the hollows of her ears, she was surprised, though she guessed she should have known.

------------------------------------------------

The note had made him laugh, at first, and then punch his dashboard hard enough to leave a dent and bruise his knuckles. He supposed that was a character trait--first inappropriate humor, then unnecessary violence. They could get into his car. But he supposed that if they could get into his hotel room, the car wasn't much harder. At least they weren't long winded.

Don't testify against your father. This is a warning.

And there, beneath the neat, typewritten note (text a little faint, as though the toner was low) was a picture. Veronica in her underwear in her bedroom, working late at night on her computer.

She was drinking a diet coke.

He got it.

In the middle of the chaos, the judge just gave up and called a recess until the following day. Logan ran out a second later, wondering where Veronica had gone.

Through her fucking bedroom window. He got it.

He saw her almost as soon as he went outside. She was leaning against a palm tree, her head tilted towards the fronds. She looked down slowly as he approached, her eyes sliding away from him as though she couldn't quite focus.

"Veronica," he said, and fuck, couldn't his voice have picked a better time to go all raw and unguarded? He tried again, but it was worse than before, "I can't explain, but--"

"I didn't want to," she said, but her expression was distant and Logan wasn't entirely sure who she was speaking to. "Someone had to say something. You were only five."

And before he could register that--which was good, because he could see a lot of great benefits to never registering that--she pitched forward.

He caught her, but he wasn't prepared for it and he wasn't exactly Popeye at the moment either, so they both sort of fell into the grass and mulch, her head and arms splayed awkwardly across his chest and stomach.

Before he could sit up, she moved closer to him and reached for his left hand. He froze.

"Veronica?" he whispered. What was happening? What the hell was she doing? He closed his eyes and tried to will his heart to slow down, his arms to stop trembling his fucking dick to, ah, stop (though he was enough of a teenager to take reassurance from the fact that it didn't).

It didn't work. He opened his eyes again and looked at her. Her tangled hair was draped across his arm, her mouth was open and he could feel her steady breathing graze his stomach.

She was asleep. For the first time in how long?

Keep still.

Gently, gently, he wrapped his free arm around her.

For the first time in how long?

Keep still.

END Chapter Five

Author's Notes: Okay, I know this is the most slowly updated fic ever, but even though it might take me a while, I promise I'll finish it. In other happy news, my fic Nightfall won Best Short Story in the last round of Pirate Pride Awards. Pretty nice, and you should just check out the rest of the winning stories since they're awesome. Also pretty nifty (and this is my own fic, so yeah I can self-pimp) is my blog Two Fangirls (the address is really obvious). We're having a fun weekly VM fanfic contest during the hiatus, so come by and vote and nominate. Okay, plug over. Hopefully, you'll see chapter six in a month or so. And I love feedback!