Fic: Who Was Crying Or What They Were Crying For (PG-13) Logan, Veronica
Title: Who Was Crying Or What They Were Crying For
Author: sadiekate
Characters/Pairings: Veronica, Logan, several others
Rating: PG-13
Length: 2459
Spoilers/Warnings: Season One; also, character death
Summary: If she’s learned anything in five years, it’s that you can’t run from your problems. Even if they’re smaller from a distance, they’re still there.
Notes: I don't know where this came from. Apparently I'm feeling pretty morose today. This is some sad, sad fic. I got all sad and teary just writing it. Posted at fic_from_mars, and cross-posted to veronicamarsfic. In a way, kind of the mirror image of the fabulous new fic by sexycereal entitled Trying Not To Look Down - I read it, and was immediately inspired.
It’s been years. Veronica got out of Neptune, and she’s mostly gotten Neptune out of her.
It turned out that Stanford wasn’t far enough away, and when she signed up for a semester abroad in Paris, she wound up staying five years. She doesn’t do those Parisian things that everyone thinks of. She can’t spend all afternoon in a café drinking espresso. She still has to work, to make money, and caffeine makes her nervous.
It’s nice, in her neighborhood. She knows the doorman at her building, and he likes her, because she helps him with his English, even though she mostly speaks French now. She always had an aptitude for language, and when she doesn’t speak in her native tongue, it makes her feel like she’s put more between her and the past than just miles. She has her routine, and she likes it. Work during the day - a nice safe job, lots of filing, little legwork. Dinner at the restaurant down the street, or soft bread and good cheese at home while she reads a book or talks on the phone to Keith or Wallace.
They’re the only ones she still talks to from home. It’s funny that when you’re young, you think the people in your life will be there forever. Everyone who mattered (who isn’t dead) has fallen by the wayside.
Then again, maybe other people keep in touch with their high-school classmates. She’s the first to admit she didn’t exactly have reasons to be scrawling “keep in touch” in anyone’s yearbooks.
Veronica gathers bits and pieces of gossip from her dad, and she still thinks of it as intel. Duncan is married now, and living down the street from the house he grew up in, in another mansion just like the one where he spent his life. His parents moved the business farther north, and there’s no legacy left of their name in the town, except the one that Duncan is trying to build. Logan’s traveling around the world, and no one sees him much back home. She’d probably have a higher chance of running into him in Paris. They don’t talk about Lianne, and they probably never will.
She doesn’t have many friends - a few women from the office she has lunch with
sometimes, but that’s all. Anything she wants to do, she prefers to do alone. She’s had enough complexity in her life. She likes small talk with strangers in a language not her own. Paradoxically enough, it’s the only way she feels like she’s really being herself. Like if no one knows her too well, they won’t get any notions about the things that make her up, the broken pieces that she hides.
She thinks she could go her whole life without stepping a foot back in Neptune.
Keith doesn’t call her when he finds out, just sends her a newspaper clipping. He still knows her well, even though she put oceans in between them in an attempt to escape that old life. He figures she’ll bring up the clipping if she wants to, and she does; the third phone call after she’s received it.
“His final appeal was denied?” she asks casually, like murderers being put to death is a casual thing, especially murderers who struck at her best friend and cast a schism through her whole life.
“The execution is scheduled for next month,” he tells her, and she wonders why she never noticed how tired he’s been sounding lately. It’s not just this moment; every word in the last year catches up to it, and she realizes he is getting older, more fallible.
“Good,” she says, her voice clipped, ready to change the subject.
“Come home, Veronica,” he says, and he never asks for much of anything. He’s the only one who ever stayed with her, and she rewarded him by leaving. She’d be the villain in this piece if he believed in things black and white like that.
“I don’t know if I can,” she says, and she’s horrified to hear her voice break, like she’s still a child.
“You can. It’s not as bad as you’ve made it out to be in your mind. Come home. Please, just come home.”
* * *
So she gives her notice and packs her bags, and it’s like the last five years didn’t matter. She’s surprised to find how easy it is to leave; her lease was month-by-month, the furniture came along with the apartment. There was no one to throw her any kind of going-away party, except her lunch group, who bought a cake for her last day. She’s more surprised by her own surprise; how did she never notice that everything in her life was bubble-wrapped?
Keith picks her up at the airport and brings her to the house he shares with Alicia. They’re still together, but they never got married, and Veronica can understand that. They’ve both been pretty soured on the whole concept. He’s made up the guest room for her, and it occurs to her for the first time that now she doesn’t have a room of her own anywhere. It hurts her more than she would like; that sense of not belonging.
The next morning, they sit on the front porch and drink juice, and she waits for the other shoe to drop. He doesn’t look at her when he tells her about the tumor they found two years ago, and how the first round of treatment went well, but that now it’s back and the prognosis isn’t good. She can’t look at him either - she sits with her head bowed, and silent tears fall onto hands that she clenches tightly in her lap.
She looks for an apartment the next day. There’s no need for her to be 25 and living at home, and she’s gotten used to having her own space. But she’s not leaving town again. If she’s learned anything in five years, it’s that you can’t run from your problems. Even if they’re smaller from a distance, they’re still there. Her dad tells her she and Wallace can borrow the truck if they want to hit some yard sales and look for furniture. He’d help her, himself, but. But.
In her minds eye, all she can see is the man that ran through fire for her. She can’t accept how small he seems now.
* * *
Every day is a red x on a calendar, and every day panic rises in her, bubbling up like lava. She can feel it in the back of her throat, and she tears bread into small bits before she eats it, like it can keep the anxiety down.
The bread was better in Paris.
Two men are dying, and one of them she loves, and one of them she hates, and if she had a choice, she’d let a killer live forever so that her father might too. She’s tired of the wrong people dying. Even the fact of the right person dying, the man who set so much destruction into motion, is tainted by this.
She hears a rumor that Logan is back in town, but she doesn’t try to track him down. Her days of chasing trouble are over. She and her dad sit outside and play cards. Even in the sun, he keeps a blanket around his shoulders to ward off a chill. She reads to him sometimes because his eyes are failing, and it helps her to keep her voice strong.
He hands her an envelope one day, and when she opens it up, her face twists a little.
“I can’t go there,” she says.
“You should. You need some kind of closure. You’ve been running all your life.”
He’s tucked into bed in the middle of the afternoon, because every day he wakes up later and goes to sleep earlier. She sits in a chair next to him, and when he reaches out to stroke her hair, his hand feels as strong and warm as ever. It’s not right that all his strength is put into comforting her, but it’s a relief nonetheless.
“You used to get me tickets to the ballgame. Now you get me tickets to an execution.”
“The way the Padres have been playing lately, it’s pretty much the same thing,” he confides, and she laughs around the threat of tears.
* * *
She thinks about wearing a red dress, but she settles for wearing all black. Best not to draw attention. She’s seated in the last row, and she’s not sure why she was so worried about being noticed; everyone is so wrapped up in their own pain. All this time, and she still forgets how much it must hurt them, too.
Duncan is sitting between his mother and his wife. Veronica never noticed how much Duncan and Celeste look like one another, all icy stoicism. She’s relieved for some reason to see his wife is a brunette; the dark-haired woman keeps a death grip on Duncan’s hand, like she’s trying to infuse him with strength.
Only Jake is betraying his emotions. His face is twisted in grief, but he doesn’t lower his head to hide it, just stares through the one-way glass at the man strapped to the table, and Veronica’s surprised he didn’t pay someone an exorbitantly large sum so that he could administer the lethal injection himself.
Out of the corner of her eye, she catches a movement, and she looks over to see Logan. He’s grown up, and she realizes she’s always thought of him as a teenager. It seems wrong that he’s shifted into this adult version of himself without her there to witness it. She wonders for a moment if he’d feel the same way about her.
He catches her eye, and there’s no sarcastic gleam in his look, just something dark and raw that mirrors something in herself. He gives her an almost imperceptible nod, and they both turn away.
There’s a priest in the room, and it makes Veronica angry, because if there is a God, he has no place in this room, no cause to give comfort to the man on the gurney. Even if that man does look stripped down of everything but childlike fear.
The clock ticks past midnight, and the phone on the wall is silent. Someone in the room lets out a sob, but Veronica couldn’t say who was crying or what they were crying for. The priest murmurs something into Aaron’s ear, and the warden asks him if he has any last words. He shakes his head mutely, and his body tenses up as the man with the needle approaches.
Veronica doesn’t even realize that she’s closed her eyes until the door to the room swings open and her eyes fly open with it. Logan is gone, and before she can really think about it, she’s on her feet after him. He’s in the hallway, retching into a trashcan, and when he sinks down on the floor she is there with him, pulling his head into her lap.
“I hate him so much, but he’s my father. He’s my father,” Logan chokes out, and she brushes her hand across the back of his neck like she can keep him anchored. He rocks back and forth, holding back sobs, and she presses kisses into his hair, and they’re both crying now, and she can’t tell where her tears end and where his begin.
She’s not sure how long they sit there, but when they finally uncurl themselves, her feet have fallen asleep. The Kanes file out of the execution room, and no one can look at anyone else. She opens the passenger side door of her car for Logan in a bizarre act of chivalry and they drive to her apartment in silence.
The yard-sale couch she bought is uncomfortable to sit on, much less sleep on, and so she takes him by the hand and leads him into her bedroom. They take off their shoes and get into her bed fully-clothed, and she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to speak again. Neither of them sleeps, but she feels oddly comforted listening to him breathe. She wants to know that there will always be someone breathing around her.
* * *
The funeral for Aaron Echolls is a media event - there are more photographers than mourners, not that that means much. Photos are splashed on front pages, and grainy video footage is played across every station.
Veronica is glad she doesn’t own a TV.
* * *
A month later, at the funeral for Keith Mars, he gets a policeman’s sendoff, even though he hasn’t been a cop in years. Alicia is silent and drawn as she buries another man she loves, and her sons stand tall at her sides. Lianne doesn’t show up; there’s no reason she would have heard. Veronica wonders if she’s even still alive.
The only thing Veronica remembers about the service is that Logan’s hand is on the small of her back the whole time, like he could hold up the weight of her with just that one thing. She thinks that maybe he could.
When the gun salute goes off, she puts her fingers in her ears and tries to pretend her world hasn’t exploded around her.
* * *
That night, Logan helps her pack her things, and they stop by her father’s house - no, Alicia’s house - to say goodbye. Veronica holds on tight to Alicia and Wallace and promises to come back soon, not to go so far.
“It’s just too fresh,” she says, and they nod like she isn’t always running from something. At least this time she has a good reason.
Her throat is raw from crying and they stop at a gas station to get bottled water. When they pull onto the interstate, Logan reaches his hand out and strokes her hair for a moment, and every time she thinks she can’t break again, she does.
“You’re going to like this place,” he says quietly. “When I saw it, I knew it would be perfect for us. There’s nothing around for miles but the ocean. I think we could belong there.”
“Okay,” she says, and she wishes she could tell him that she knows she belongs anywhere as long as he’s there wrapped tight around her, breathing into her skin. She’s never been good at saying what she means.
“It’s going to be okay,” he says, and she reaches out and takes his hand. It’s the only way she knows how to tell him that she understands. It’s the only way she can say that she believes him.
Author: sadiekate
Characters/Pairings: Veronica, Logan, several others
Rating: PG-13
Length: 2459
Spoilers/Warnings: Season One; also, character death
Summary: If she’s learned anything in five years, it’s that you can’t run from your problems. Even if they’re smaller from a distance, they’re still there.
Notes: I don't know where this came from. Apparently I'm feeling pretty morose today. This is some sad, sad fic. I got all sad and teary just writing it. Posted at fic_from_mars, and cross-posted to veronicamarsfic. In a way, kind of the mirror image of the fabulous new fic by sexycereal entitled Trying Not To Look Down - I read it, and was immediately inspired.
It’s been years. Veronica got out of Neptune, and she’s mostly gotten Neptune out of her.
It turned out that Stanford wasn’t far enough away, and when she signed up for a semester abroad in Paris, she wound up staying five years. She doesn’t do those Parisian things that everyone thinks of. She can’t spend all afternoon in a café drinking espresso. She still has to work, to make money, and caffeine makes her nervous.
It’s nice, in her neighborhood. She knows the doorman at her building, and he likes her, because she helps him with his English, even though she mostly speaks French now. She always had an aptitude for language, and when she doesn’t speak in her native tongue, it makes her feel like she’s put more between her and the past than just miles. She has her routine, and she likes it. Work during the day - a nice safe job, lots of filing, little legwork. Dinner at the restaurant down the street, or soft bread and good cheese at home while she reads a book or talks on the phone to Keith or Wallace.
They’re the only ones she still talks to from home. It’s funny that when you’re young, you think the people in your life will be there forever. Everyone who mattered (who isn’t dead) has fallen by the wayside.
Then again, maybe other people keep in touch with their high-school classmates. She’s the first to admit she didn’t exactly have reasons to be scrawling “keep in touch” in anyone’s yearbooks.
Veronica gathers bits and pieces of gossip from her dad, and she still thinks of it as intel. Duncan is married now, and living down the street from the house he grew up in, in another mansion just like the one where he spent his life. His parents moved the business farther north, and there’s no legacy left of their name in the town, except the one that Duncan is trying to build. Logan’s traveling around the world, and no one sees him much back home. She’d probably have a higher chance of running into him in Paris. They don’t talk about Lianne, and they probably never will.
She doesn’t have many friends - a few women from the office she has lunch with
sometimes, but that’s all. Anything she wants to do, she prefers to do alone. She’s had enough complexity in her life. She likes small talk with strangers in a language not her own. Paradoxically enough, it’s the only way she feels like she’s really being herself. Like if no one knows her too well, they won’t get any notions about the things that make her up, the broken pieces that she hides.
She thinks she could go her whole life without stepping a foot back in Neptune.
Keith doesn’t call her when he finds out, just sends her a newspaper clipping. He still knows her well, even though she put oceans in between them in an attempt to escape that old life. He figures she’ll bring up the clipping if she wants to, and she does; the third phone call after she’s received it.
“His final appeal was denied?” she asks casually, like murderers being put to death is a casual thing, especially murderers who struck at her best friend and cast a schism through her whole life.
“The execution is scheduled for next month,” he tells her, and she wonders why she never noticed how tired he’s been sounding lately. It’s not just this moment; every word in the last year catches up to it, and she realizes he is getting older, more fallible.
“Good,” she says, her voice clipped, ready to change the subject.
“Come home, Veronica,” he says, and he never asks for much of anything. He’s the only one who ever stayed with her, and she rewarded him by leaving. She’d be the villain in this piece if he believed in things black and white like that.
“I don’t know if I can,” she says, and she’s horrified to hear her voice break, like she’s still a child.
“You can. It’s not as bad as you’ve made it out to be in your mind. Come home. Please, just come home.”
* * *
So she gives her notice and packs her bags, and it’s like the last five years didn’t matter. She’s surprised to find how easy it is to leave; her lease was month-by-month, the furniture came along with the apartment. There was no one to throw her any kind of going-away party, except her lunch group, who bought a cake for her last day. She’s more surprised by her own surprise; how did she never notice that everything in her life was bubble-wrapped?
Keith picks her up at the airport and brings her to the house he shares with Alicia. They’re still together, but they never got married, and Veronica can understand that. They’ve both been pretty soured on the whole concept. He’s made up the guest room for her, and it occurs to her for the first time that now she doesn’t have a room of her own anywhere. It hurts her more than she would like; that sense of not belonging.
The next morning, they sit on the front porch and drink juice, and she waits for the other shoe to drop. He doesn’t look at her when he tells her about the tumor they found two years ago, and how the first round of treatment went well, but that now it’s back and the prognosis isn’t good. She can’t look at him either - she sits with her head bowed, and silent tears fall onto hands that she clenches tightly in her lap.
She looks for an apartment the next day. There’s no need for her to be 25 and living at home, and she’s gotten used to having her own space. But she’s not leaving town again. If she’s learned anything in five years, it’s that you can’t run from your problems. Even if they’re smaller from a distance, they’re still there. Her dad tells her she and Wallace can borrow the truck if they want to hit some yard sales and look for furniture. He’d help her, himself, but. But.
In her minds eye, all she can see is the man that ran through fire for her. She can’t accept how small he seems now.
* * *
Every day is a red x on a calendar, and every day panic rises in her, bubbling up like lava. She can feel it in the back of her throat, and she tears bread into small bits before she eats it, like it can keep the anxiety down.
The bread was better in Paris.
Two men are dying, and one of them she loves, and one of them she hates, and if she had a choice, she’d let a killer live forever so that her father might too. She’s tired of the wrong people dying. Even the fact of the right person dying, the man who set so much destruction into motion, is tainted by this.
She hears a rumor that Logan is back in town, but she doesn’t try to track him down. Her days of chasing trouble are over. She and her dad sit outside and play cards. Even in the sun, he keeps a blanket around his shoulders to ward off a chill. She reads to him sometimes because his eyes are failing, and it helps her to keep her voice strong.
He hands her an envelope one day, and when she opens it up, her face twists a little.
“I can’t go there,” she says.
“You should. You need some kind of closure. You’ve been running all your life.”
He’s tucked into bed in the middle of the afternoon, because every day he wakes up later and goes to sleep earlier. She sits in a chair next to him, and when he reaches out to stroke her hair, his hand feels as strong and warm as ever. It’s not right that all his strength is put into comforting her, but it’s a relief nonetheless.
“You used to get me tickets to the ballgame. Now you get me tickets to an execution.”
“The way the Padres have been playing lately, it’s pretty much the same thing,” he confides, and she laughs around the threat of tears.
* * *
She thinks about wearing a red dress, but she settles for wearing all black. Best not to draw attention. She’s seated in the last row, and she’s not sure why she was so worried about being noticed; everyone is so wrapped up in their own pain. All this time, and she still forgets how much it must hurt them, too.
Duncan is sitting between his mother and his wife. Veronica never noticed how much Duncan and Celeste look like one another, all icy stoicism. She’s relieved for some reason to see his wife is a brunette; the dark-haired woman keeps a death grip on Duncan’s hand, like she’s trying to infuse him with strength.
Only Jake is betraying his emotions. His face is twisted in grief, but he doesn’t lower his head to hide it, just stares through the one-way glass at the man strapped to the table, and Veronica’s surprised he didn’t pay someone an exorbitantly large sum so that he could administer the lethal injection himself.
Out of the corner of her eye, she catches a movement, and she looks over to see Logan. He’s grown up, and she realizes she’s always thought of him as a teenager. It seems wrong that he’s shifted into this adult version of himself without her there to witness it. She wonders for a moment if he’d feel the same way about her.
He catches her eye, and there’s no sarcastic gleam in his look, just something dark and raw that mirrors something in herself. He gives her an almost imperceptible nod, and they both turn away.
There’s a priest in the room, and it makes Veronica angry, because if there is a God, he has no place in this room, no cause to give comfort to the man on the gurney. Even if that man does look stripped down of everything but childlike fear.
The clock ticks past midnight, and the phone on the wall is silent. Someone in the room lets out a sob, but Veronica couldn’t say who was crying or what they were crying for. The priest murmurs something into Aaron’s ear, and the warden asks him if he has any last words. He shakes his head mutely, and his body tenses up as the man with the needle approaches.
Veronica doesn’t even realize that she’s closed her eyes until the door to the room swings open and her eyes fly open with it. Logan is gone, and before she can really think about it, she’s on her feet after him. He’s in the hallway, retching into a trashcan, and when he sinks down on the floor she is there with him, pulling his head into her lap.
“I hate him so much, but he’s my father. He’s my father,” Logan chokes out, and she brushes her hand across the back of his neck like she can keep him anchored. He rocks back and forth, holding back sobs, and she presses kisses into his hair, and they’re both crying now, and she can’t tell where her tears end and where his begin.
She’s not sure how long they sit there, but when they finally uncurl themselves, her feet have fallen asleep. The Kanes file out of the execution room, and no one can look at anyone else. She opens the passenger side door of her car for Logan in a bizarre act of chivalry and they drive to her apartment in silence.
The yard-sale couch she bought is uncomfortable to sit on, much less sleep on, and so she takes him by the hand and leads him into her bedroom. They take off their shoes and get into her bed fully-clothed, and she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to speak again. Neither of them sleeps, but she feels oddly comforted listening to him breathe. She wants to know that there will always be someone breathing around her.
* * *
The funeral for Aaron Echolls is a media event - there are more photographers than mourners, not that that means much. Photos are splashed on front pages, and grainy video footage is played across every station.
Veronica is glad she doesn’t own a TV.
* * *
A month later, at the funeral for Keith Mars, he gets a policeman’s sendoff, even though he hasn’t been a cop in years. Alicia is silent and drawn as she buries another man she loves, and her sons stand tall at her sides. Lianne doesn’t show up; there’s no reason she would have heard. Veronica wonders if she’s even still alive.
The only thing Veronica remembers about the service is that Logan’s hand is on the small of her back the whole time, like he could hold up the weight of her with just that one thing. She thinks that maybe he could.
When the gun salute goes off, she puts her fingers in her ears and tries to pretend her world hasn’t exploded around her.
* * *
That night, Logan helps her pack her things, and they stop by her father’s house - no, Alicia’s house - to say goodbye. Veronica holds on tight to Alicia and Wallace and promises to come back soon, not to go so far.
“It’s just too fresh,” she says, and they nod like she isn’t always running from something. At least this time she has a good reason.
Her throat is raw from crying and they stop at a gas station to get bottled water. When they pull onto the interstate, Logan reaches his hand out and strokes her hair for a moment, and every time she thinks she can’t break again, she does.
“You’re going to like this place,” he says quietly. “When I saw it, I knew it would be perfect for us. There’s nothing around for miles but the ocean. I think we could belong there.”
“Okay,” she says, and she wishes she could tell him that she knows she belongs anywhere as long as he’s there wrapped tight around her, breathing into her skin. She’s never been good at saying what she means.
“It’s going to be okay,” he says, and she reaches out and takes his hand. It’s the only way she knows how to tell him that she understands. It’s the only way she can say that she believes him.