Author's Note: As you all know, from my extensive NO SPOILERS PLEASE warnings, I'm on my first watch through of Veronica Mars, and I just got to the end of the 3x19 Weevil Wobbles episode where Logan beat up Piz and showed up to see Veronica with blood dripping from his knuckles and pain in his eyes. I died twice watching that scene. Woke up in the middle of the night and was up for hours with this fic writing itself in my head. The next morning I woke up and peeked at the next episode only to find that this moment played out in (unsurprisingly) a very different fashion than I would have preferred it. So let's fix this, shall we?

This is my version of what should have happened when Veronica found out about the sex tape. I haven't watched most of the S3 finale and will make no attempts to adhere to canon because I am sure I'll like my own ending better.

This story dedicated to LV_4_Eva because I always look forward to her detailed and enthusiastic reviews, and because she really wanted a new version of this moment.

The song for this fic is Soldier by Gavin DeGraw, which is kind of an all around great LoVe song.

I'll Be There

Logan

I walk into Mars Investigations, and every part of my body hurts. I wish it hurt more, because that's the only thing that feels right for this moment. The DVD of Veronica's sex tape sits square and ugly in my back pocket.

As soon as I smell the nonchalant fake butter of microwaved popcorn and I see her light and unconcerned expression, I know she hasn't heard yet. I stop, dreading this. Blood drips down my fingers and spatters to the floor. Her eyes jump from my bruised face to my hands and she hurriedly shuts the door to her dad's office, like she's protecting me from whatever the acting sheriff might think about the assault I've obviously just committed.

"Veronica. There's something you need to know."

She clicks back into action, strides across the room, and zips around me like I'm not even there. Instead, she flips the deadbolt and peeks out the glass to the street.

"The guy—or guys—you just fought with, are they coming after you?"

"Even if he was still walking, he wouldn't follow me here." My voice rumbles with fresh anger, like I've got an endless volcano of it still welling up in me.

"Okay." She's all business, snatching a huge first aid kit out of the desk and then squatting to rummage in the mini fridge. "We don't have any ice." She grabs the only cold thing, which is apparently a strawberry yogurt. Generic brand, because of course Veronica wouldn't let twelve extra cents out from under her thumb if she could help it. She gestures me to the tiny bathroom. "Follow me. Before my dad sees you like this."

"Veronica, you need to know—"

"What?" she snaps. "Who you beat up? I'm not sure I want to know. You argue with Piz at the beach, and suddenly you're getting in fights again? I know this Logan all too well, thank you very much."

She yanks me down the hall and into the bathroom they share with the nail salon next door, then locks the door behind us.

"You're not going to like this," I tell her.

"I know." She slams the first aid kit down next to the sink. "Which is why I brought this, because at least if I can't stand to look at you after you tell me what you did, then you can patch yourself up so you won't bleed on the rug on the way out."

She won't look at me as she bites off the words, but that doesn't mean I don't see the tears glittering in her eyes.

I touch her shoulder softly, not sure what to think of her reaction. She's taking care of me. Even pissed as hell and broken up and throwing all my old sins back in my face to try to keep distance between us, she's making sure I'm bandaged, and she's upset enough about the state of me that she's actually crying. What the fuck?

"Did you break anything?" she raps out, her chin coming up.

"Maybe his ribs. I heard a crack, but that could have been a table."

"On yourself," she hisses. "Never mind, you're such a caveman, you probably didn't even notice." She reaches up impatiently and her fingers press at my cheekbones, my swollen jaw. I'm so shocked I don't even think to move. Her fingers are so gentle, it barely hurts. And they're shaking, which murders me a little.

Her hands slide down my bloody shirt, checking the line of my ribs for any breaks.

"Deep breath."

I obey, because yeah, I definitely need the extra oxygen all of a sudden. It doesn't hurt to inhale, since Piz hadn't gotten enough of a shot in to even leave a mark on my ribs. The only twinge is a bruise near my spine, where I hit…something. I remember that part clearly because Piz shoved me, made a run for it and almost got away, before he turned it into an ambush, which might have been the only shot he got in the whole fight. In that moment, my vision zeroed in and I went after Piz so fast I don't even remember my feet touching the ground.

Veronica has hold of my hands now, and it's like someone is pressing my heart between two huge stones. I can see those delicate hands on Piz's chest, the soft playful tones of her voice that only get like that when she's alone with someone she trusts. The corresponding rage is blinding, so I miss registering several precious seconds of her touch in the flaming red desire to go back. I should have kept kicking Piz, even after he stopped getting back up.

Piz had Veronica's trust, the thing I've been trying to win for half my life. And he threw it away like garbage. For the bragging rights of a fucking sex tape.

Veronica is testing the bones in the back of my hand, surprisingly practiced at the movement. "Show me the range of motion in your fingers," she says, and my hand closes into a fist like it was invented just to take that shape.

Fuck, I want to hit him again. At least when I was hitting him, I didn't feel so fucking helpless as I do now, with that DVD in my pocket and the words rising like a dry heave in my throat.

"Okay, nothing's broken." She makes this tiny, coughing sound and steps away, looking everywhere but me as she folds her arms across her chest. "Now you can tell me who you beat up and why, so I can decide if I still feel like patching the rest of you back together, or if you deserve to have to do it yourself.

Bile boots up into my throat, and nevermind the dry heave because for a second, I think it might be a really convenient thing we're in a bathroom.

I don't want to see her face when she finds out about this tape. I never want to see what Veronica's eyes look like when she realizes people have seen her naked without her permission. I already know how they'll shutter and become distant, leaving her alone behind her walls. But that tape is out there and I'd rather her hear this from me, while we're alone and safe in her dad's office, than when she's out and exposed to the rest of the world.

"There's a video of you. Dick got ahold of it somehow."

Her eyes flicker to the cut on my lip and it's like I can see her connect the pieces. Video. Blood. Her arms wind tighter, like she's bracing. "Am I singing karaoke?"

"No. It's you and Piz, having sex."

She twitches, squirms a little like she's embarrassed, but she also looks a touch relieved. She rolls her eyes. "And of course you would go off the rails about me doing something so crazy as having sex with my boyfriend." She sighs. "Well, you can stop taking out your crazy on the innocent townsfolk, because unless it's a video from the future, that's not possible. We haven't…had sex." She glances away, and there's a strange loosening in my chest that she trusted me enough, even now, to tell me the truth.

And also, I think, a little because I'm a terrible fucking person and I've spent more than one night, lying awake picturing her with Piz. Hating that he can hold her when I can't, obviously. But also hating it because I know her. It takes a lot to figure out what she needs in bed, because she's more hesitant than she wants to let on. He's too inexperienced to know how to bring her enough pleasure to unwind her so she can start to really enjoy herself. She'll have started faking her orgasms again, I know she will, and he won't be man enough to call her on it the way I did. He'll be too insecure, too quick to want to tell himself it's fine and he's doing a great job.

Which means she'll feel too self-conscious to admit it takes her a long time to warm up to orgasm. She'll never get what she needs from him, and she'll go home with that stiff, brittle posture, and that look in her eye that I saw for the first time in the hall of the Neptune Grand, back when it was Duncan and not me inside her hotel room. I've known Veronica when she didn't have a friend in the world, but I've never seen her look so alone as she does after bad sex.

Jealousy is the least of my problems with her and Piz, not that she'd believe it. But for all the nights I've spent awake, worrying about Piz not taking care of her, apparently it never happened at all.

Somehow, it makes her look more like the girl I thought I knew to hear that she hasn't felt comfortable having sex with him yet. Veronica doesn't let people in that easy. Not even when it's not me. And I'm glad, because at least now she won't have given that piece of herself to a guy that betrayed her so publicly.

Except fuck, that doesn't change the facts.

"Well, I mean you were naked, and fooling around." And that in itself was hard enough to watch, so I didn't look too much for the specifics. "I assumed." I say it out loud, so she'll know everyone else will assume, too.

She shakes her head. "Logan, that couldn't have been me. Maybe it was a blurry tape, somebody who's mad at me for a former case or something, and they put my name on it. But Piz would never—"

"Veronica," I interrupt softly. "I saw the tape. I'd know you anywhere."

She should remember no one else on earth knows her naked body as well as I do, not even the guy touching it on that tape. But then, she doesn't have a whole lot of reasons to trust me, these days.

I pull the DVD out of my back pocket, hand it over. "You should probably see this. It was going around in an email. I called Mac on the way here, asked if there was any way to make the emails disappear, but she said once they've been sent, they're pretty much out there, no way to call them back. She said maybe if we'd shut down the whole college server before anybody had seen them but now…" I nod to the DVD in her hand. "I had a chance to burn a copy. I guarantee you a whole lot of other guys had the same thought, for very different reasons."

She swallows, tucks the DVD in her jacket pocket.

I nod to the first aid kit. "I can finish up here, if you…" I have no idea what she can do about this, but then, I'm not Veronica Mars. "If you want to get a start on damage control." I want to give her the option to be alone when she has to see that tape, too.

Instead of leaving the room, she steps in and takes my hand. The right one, that's the most tattered. She turns on the cold water and adjusts it to a gentle flow before she guides my knuckles under the water. Blood is splattered all the way up the back of my wrist, dried in layers over my fingers. Most of it isn't mine. I grit my teeth as I watch it wash away, because I wanted to keep it. The sight of it is the only thing that kept me sane on the drive over.

My fingers twitch, and Veronica's grip tightens a little, holding mine steady under the water. "I know it hurts," she murmurs. "But we've got to get the wound clean."

She moves it so the water flushes over my fingers next, rubbing a little to get the layers of dried blood off. She never asked whose blood it was, and I realize it's because she knew, as soon as I said who must have made the video. And now she's washing her boyfriend's blood off my hands, touching me more softly than anyone has in months. Since her, actually.

Like her mind has gone back to the exact same point in the past as mine, she murmurs, "You don't have to keep trying to shield me, you know. I'm not your problem anymore."

She switches hands, begins to wash my left.

"I can't stop caring about you just because we're broken up. That's not how I work."

She doesn't respond, and she won't look up at me. She's so much shorter than I am that her long lashes screen any peek I might have gotten at her eyes.

"This is going to sting," she warns, retrieving a pair of sharp scissors from the first aid kit. But when she snips away a scraped-up flap of skin, she does it so gently I barely feel a thing.

I wish more of me was bloody because I want this to go on forever. I can feel every individual nerve ending in my fingers touching hers as she lifts my right, dabbing antibacterial cream on my knuckles. It soothes the raw skin even before she wraps white gauze around and around my hand, the pressure easing the pain of the tattered skin enough that I start to feel the ache in the bones beneath. As the adrenaline ebbs away, I can feel every pound of pressure I hammered into Piz's body. I hope he can feel them all, too. Every one a reminder that he betrayed a woman who deserved his loyalty. Who deserved a fuck of a lot better than him.

I shift my weight as she moves to my left hand, dabbing cream onto it. It feels amazing, and my throat is a little tight like it got the one time—the one single time—that I scraped my knee on the nanny's day off and my mom had to bandage it herself. Taking care of me has always been a job we had to pay people to do. It kind of fucks me up on the infrequent occasions anyone has ever looked after me just because they wanted to. It's only been Veronica, mostly. And I wish today could end like that other terrible night had, with my head in her lap and her stroking the back of my neck, whispering that I was safe and could sleep.

But she's got places to be and vengeance to inflict. We're not that different, she and I, and as much as she has never bloodied her hands, her forms of revenge usually cut even deeper and last even longer than mine.

"I'm fine," I assure her. "If there's anything you can do, tricks you can pull, favors you can call in to get it taken down before more people can see it…you should do that." I've gotten worse scrapes from surfing, and regardless, I'd rather bleed out than cost her minutes that might mean more eyes crawling over her body, seeing parts of her she can never take back out of their memories.

"Give me a minute, would you?" Her voice catches and she cradles my hand in both of hers, winding gauze around it far more slowly than she needs to.

Oh.

I needed this quiet moment with her so much that it didn't even occur to me that she might need it, too.

I don't think she'll let me hold her. Not now, and especially not because that would be like admitting she's upset, which of course she won't. So I step a little closer, widening my stance so my shoes hold the ground outside hers. Dipping my head so when I exhale, it stirs the hairs at the crown of her head. I'm here for her. Even without breaking our fragile peace by attempting an embrace, she knows it from every drop of blood she's washing off me. I can tell she understands by how careful she's being of hurting me as she pats the tape in place to hold the gauze.

She steps away and I swallow, hating the loss of even that tiny moment where I might be able to ease her pain. But she just cranks the paper towel dispenser, wets a towel, and comes back even closer, tipping my face down to hers. She's only inches away as she dabs at my lip and even though my jaw is swollen and mouth is cut all to fuck, I'd kiss her if she'd let me. No matter how much it made me bleed.

"The blood's all dried," she murmurs as she wets the paper towel again, then holds it to my lip. "If I wipe it away it'll break the scab. I'm going to try to soak off the worst of it. Just hold still, okay?"

I wouldn't move for anything, except maybe another shot at Piz. It's literally below the belt, but I'm just now wishing I'd have kicked the fucker in the balls, too. Poetic justice and all that. I twitch, the heat of anger rising in me, and Veronica frowns.

"Careful! I told you to hold still. You're going to make it worse." She cups her other hand around the back of my neck to hold me in place, and the warmth of her hands drains my anger into a slow sleepiness, like my body thinks this means I get to fall asleep in her lap now, like I usually do when I'm hurt.

Not this time, buddy. Trust me, I'm as sorry as you are.

"Where was the camera?" she asks me quietly.

"His dorm room." I realize what she's really asking halfway through my answer, and think back. "High up on Wallace's side. Maybe if they have high book shelves, or if they don't, possibly hidden in a heating vent. The lens was trained front and center on Piz's bed."

She tosses the paper towel in the trash, along with the worst of the clotted blood. It soaked away without making me bleed again, just like she said it would. She gets a new towel and wets it, tilting my head away from her so she can wipe at the smears of blood in the bruise on my temple. I watch her in the mirror and she's troubled and tiny and beautiful. I would kill for her. I think I'm lucky, today, that I managed not to.

"It won't matter, you know. In the end. Who saw you do what. It doesn't change anything." I sound unconvincing, even to myself, and I clear my throat. "One of my nannies, growing up. She had a huge crush on my dad, planted a nanny cam in our house. That's irony for you, right?"

"Is that where your camera paranoia comes from?" She winces. "I always thought it was the paparazzi. That's…a lot worse." She hands me the yogurt. "Here. It's not as good as ice, but at least it's cold. Might feel good on your hand."

I hold the yogurt to my knuckles, feeling ridiculous but not ridiculous enough to turn down her efforts to help me. Veronica doesn't much like to nurture in public, so I always pretend I don't notice how awkward she is, even for her most fumbling attempts.

"She caught a real gem of a moment, once. My dad giving me a bath, when I was really little. Or, more like, she was giving me the bath and Aaron showed up just long enough to give his best mimicry of parenting by yelling at me for using up too much of the shampoo trying to make a bubble bath, and then to wrap me in a towel to show how loving and fatherly he was." My busted lip twitches. "He always was a pretty half-assed actor."

"The video is of you in the tub?" Veronica's voice quivers with sympathy, and it's like I can hear her brain whirring into motion, wondering if she can find the nanny all these years later and make her pay. Honestly, I should let her. It'd keep her mind off her own video scandal, and that nanny worked for us for so long I called her Mommy for three years before my own mom found out and threw a fit.

"Yup. Little tiny kid Logan in the tub. Probably just one more gem in her extensive personal collection, but because Dad made me cry over the shampoo thing and it played pretty badly on screen, that's the one she chose to release to the gossip channels in retaliation. After she got fired for stealing Aaron's underwear, that is."

"How old were you?"

"When the video released? Unfortunately, much much older. About ten, I think." I wish it would have come out when it was taken, so I would have been too young to know what it meant.

I swallow. I've never said this part out loud, and she would never have to know about this video, because it happened before we moved here. But I want her to know she's not alone, that even when you're purely fucking humbled in front of thousands of strangers, you can come back from it. Unfortunately, with how hard it is to think of this video right now…it might not be proving my point all that well. I say it anyway, for her.

"I was playing with my little peepee in the tub. Flapping it around and laughing, pretending it was quacking like a duck."

Veronica's hands freeze on the paper towel, and her eyes jump to mine. "But you were just a little kid!"

I shrug. "Tabloids didn't care. The shit they said about me…Let's just say it wasn't an accident we moved further from LA after that."

I hold her gaze, humiliation pumping through me. Sickeningly strong at first, peaking at the hint of pity in her face. And then easing when she doesn't look away.

She touches my cheek, the part that's not bruised, just for a second. Then visibly collects herself, letting us both act like it's okay as she goes back to her work. Because we both know now, that I know all too well what she's going through.

"You know it's funny," she says absently as she wipes a smear of blood out of my eyebrow. "I used to think you were so paranoid, checking all over your hotel room for cameras. Asking me to teach you all the shapes and sizes they could be and where they could be hidden…The joke there is definitely on me." She steps back and tosses out the paper towel. "There. All done. Guess I better go face the music. Or the video, more like." She smiles, bitterly. "Actually, that'd be a pretty good test of whether it was Piz or not. If it was really him, he'll have added a soundtrack."

I exhale. "Veronica, you know if there's anything I can do… Anybody I can kill," I only half-joke. "I can get lawyers, get the fucker expelled. Rent you a house in Spain so you can get away until this blows over. I know we're broken up, that we're barely friends even on a good day. But anything you need, I'm here. I hope you still know that."

Her mask cracks, and I glimpse the hurt she's desperately trying to gloss over. She glances down, and then slips into my arms so quietly I almost don't believe she's doing it. My arms close around her, though, and my battered lips find the top of her head. It's what I do. It's my place in the world where I feel right, even if she kicked me the hell out of it.

Now, she squeezes me tight around the waist, her head tucking against my chest. I drop the yogurt so I can hold her more closely, and it bounces off the sink and lands somewhere on the floor.

"Just give me a minute," she whispers. "Let me pretend Piz never happened and everything is still right in the world. That we're alone back in the Neptune Grand and there's not a camera in sight."

I kiss her head again, my lip cracking and leaving a spot of blood on her golden hair. I lay my cheek atop it, hiding the mark as I squeeze my eyes closed, pretending right along with her.

"I love you, Veronica," I say hoarsely, and I feel the shock go through her because we both know I'm not saying it to that past version of her, the one that still loved me back. I'm breaking the fantasy of our shared time out because I have to let her know there's someone she can still trust, who has seen the fucking tape and doesn't look at her any differently.

She grips me tighter.

I have so many feelings at once my knees go a little fucked up and I have to lean my ass against the sink behind me, still cradling her in my arms as softly as I can. My raw knuckles throb where I'm pressing my bruised hands to her thin back.

She steps away and swipes at her eyes, clearing her throat as she straightens up. "I uh, have a few things to take care of. Boyfriend to dump, vengeance to wreak." She waves a hand. "You know, the usual."

"Even if the video doesn't have a soundtrack?"

I shouldn't ask. I have no right to ask, and I know better than to push her when I just blurted that I loved her. But there's a sinking feeling in my gut now that I can think past my own rage, and it says that polite, emo-haired pussy isn't kinky enough to want a sex tape, and even if he were, that he's not the type to share with the class. And if it wasn't him, Veronica seeing what I did to him is going to switch her from my side to his faster than you can say "Visiting hours at the hospital."

She looks up at me, her eyes sad and so, so blue, but with a spark in them I haven't seen in a while. She searches my face.

"Even if he didn't make the tape," she says.

She takes a deep breath and opens her mouth. My heart skips about three beats, because holy fuck, she kind of looks like she's going to say it back. Something's shifted in her expression and she's never looked at me exactly like this, not even when we were together.

But then she closes her mouth, tugs at her jacket, and says, "It wouldn't be fair to him. Not now that I realize I—" She breaks off again, then busies herself closing up the first aid kit. "I might come by. Tonight," she tosses off, then ruins her casual intonation by hurrying to add, "If that's okay. After…whatever is gonna happen with all this."

My heart starts pounding, rushing hot red blood through my veins like it needs to hurry and make up for all the beats it lost to terror while she was fumbling through her words. And all I can do is nod, because there are no words on earth big enough for how much I want that. For how much I want her, in my life, in any way I can get her.

So instead I tell her the simplest, most basic truth I know.

"I'll be there."

#

Author's Note: If you don't like how S3 ended up, I've got a LoVe happily married fic going right now. They still have their issues but they're slowly working through them using a lot of sex and a little bit of talking, so if you're into a lot more flirting and steam along with your angst, come on over and have a read. That story is called Lemonade.

Please no spoilers for S4 in the reviews, I haven't watched yet.