Used To Be

xii. when it leaves , it's hard to know

Logan reluctantly makes his way back to Veronica's room. He has been released by the Sheriff's Department, cleared of any suspicion, and is unscathed, other than having to endure a painfully awkward, finger-wagging, be careful around scary guns lecture by the deputy. They had assured him that the (empty) gun would be promptly returned to its rightful owner, Mr. Richard Casablancas, Senior. He theatrically rolls his eyes now that he is at liberty to do so; he couldn't care less what Big Dick does with his gun. Part of him continues to agonize over whether or not he had made the right choice to bring that gun into the River Styx, whether he had made things worse or better. It is a still-raw wound that he cannot refrain from picking at.

He dallies in the corridor. Veronica's friends mean well, but in this instance, they are worse than useless. Even though he had tried to explain that Veronica has only just decided that she even likes him again, and that he desperately does not want her to shoot the messenger (which is a terrible, terrible expression to use at this particular point in time), they had concluded that he is the best one to deliver the News about Duncan, Meg, and their impending progeny. What he would really like to do is clock Duncan a good one, right in the kisser. What he would like even more is to let Veronica do it. As pleasurable as it would be to throw Duncan under the bus (oh, God, he is never going to be able to use a cliché again), he does not want that to alter Veronica's decision. He doesn't want Veronica to choose him because Duncan betrayed her; he wants Veronica to choose him because she can't imagine life without him.

I might as well buy a pint of Chunky Monkey for my pathetic ass and start watching Lifetime movies right now. Is it actually possible to nauseate yourself?

He sighs, and moves toward the door. If this backfires on me, I'm going to make Fennel's flagpole-tape job look like a kindergarten hazing. He is reaching for the door, when it suddenly flies outward. He stumbles backward, swearing, and looks into the face of Duncan Kane. Another invective tumbles from his lips, and there is a painful pause.

"Hiya, Dunc," he finally says. "How's it goin'?" The words are right, but he can't quite muster up the tone of cheesy joviality that he is going for. Duncan blinks at him, looking dazed, and he continues, all big eyes and faux-ignorance. "Bad day? Wanna talk about it?"

"Veronica – " Duncan manages with difficulty. "Veronica broke up with me."

Logan bites down on the corners of his lips to keep the joy off of his face. Burn in hell, bro code, he thinks. "What – um – what did she say, man?" There is such a soaring sensation inside of him that he checks to make sure his feet are still on the floor. Shoes. Nasty hospital linoleum. Yup.

"Don't pretend you care!"

Logan's laugh is breathy. "Oh, I'll have you know I care very much."

"I know exactly how much you care. I meant, don't pretend you care about how I feel."

"I do care how you feel." Just not enough to give up Veronica. Not this time. Duncan scoffs.

"Whatever."

"So, um…" Logan shoves his hands in his pockets, toes at the floor. "What'd she say?"

"It figures that you'd want to rub my nose in it," Duncan says stonily. Logan reflects that maybe he does.

"I'm willing to concede that I was responsible for the demise of my relationship with Veronica," he says. "But you sure were Johnny-on-the-spot to pick up the pieces, Prince Charming." He tsks at his erstwhile best friend, and thumbs imaginary suspenders. "Maybe I've learned from the best."

"I haven't torpedoed anything," Duncan protests Logan's parallel.

"Haven't you?" Logan bites off. He is letting too much dangerous emotion flicker into his face. "Didja tell her about the bundle of joy?"

Duncan looks suitably horrified.

"How the hell did you find out about that?"

Logan cocks his head, and observes Duncan from the new angle. "Translation: no," he declares, rocking back on his heels. "Regretfully, I must inform you that I have been given the arduous task of informing Veronica about said conveniently forgotten details. Her sidekicks have duly appointed me – " He sketches a jaunty little bow, complete with hand flourish. " – and here I am to answer the call."

"Because you're just that noble. C'mon, Logan, it's done. She's dumped me! I know that's what you wanted. Now you can have her back. What's the point of dragging my skeletons into the light of day?"

Logan is mildly offended. "She's not a trading card, man. Besides, if it weren't for the strangely – dare I say it? – fortuitous circumstances of the bus crash and the subsequent intervention of the coma-gods, your skeleton would already be flaunting its ass to everyone you know. Or did you think that Meg could stroll down the hallowed halls of Neptune High, eight months pregnant, and no one would notice? Especially not your private. Detective. Girlfriend?"

"But the bus did crash, Logan. Meg is in a coma. I hope to God she wakes up, but even if she doesn't… what's the point of hurting Veronica even more? Don't you think she's been through enough?"

Logan flinches as though belt leather has just made contact with flesh.

"Don't try to twist this back around on me. I've acknowledged my level of culpability as far as I'm going to. If you think I'm going to withhold information from her, information that she is eventually going to find out – and then find out that I knew and said nothing... Hiding it from her now is not going to prevent her from finding out sooner or later – my bet's on sooner – and it will be my ass if I keep this a secret. Sorry, Donut, but I'm not willing to fall on this grenade."

Duncan looks like he wants to protest, but instead wheels quickly on one heel as if to depart, "So, you're going to tell her then. Well, I'll – " He is cut off as Logan catches him by the shirt collar and hauls him back toward the door.

"I was going to tell her. But now I don't have to, because you can. And I'll be right beside you… watching you sing." He smiles brightly.

"Why should I make this easier on you?"

"Why should I make this easier on you?"

They eye each other for a moment. Before the last couple of years had happened, Logan would have sworn that Duncan would never take the easy way out, the cowardly way that showed more regard for one's own comfort than someone else's. Logan would have told the world to go to hell and spared no tears for it. But before Lilly, before his shunning of Veronica, Logan would never have ascribed his own motives to Duncan. Now, he is not as sure as he once would have been, but he stands, casually blocking most of Duncan's access to the corridor, and waits.

When Duncan sighs and says "Fine!" like a sulky six-year-old, Logan cannot help the grin that spreads over his face. He claps his hand down around the door handle, and swings it open theatrically, with a magnanimous gesture for Duncan to precede him.

Veronica sees Duncan first, and Logan hears her sigh, "Duncan…" before she catches sight of him. Her eyes dart back and forth between the two.

"What's going on?" It is her don't bullshit me voice.

"Duncan had something else to tell you… something that just happened to slip his mind." The sing-song tone of Logan's voice makes it clear that it did no such thing. Veronica slants a probing glance at him, and then interlaces her fingers in her lap, directing her attention to Duncan and blinking at him expectantly.

It's the moment of truth, Big D, Logan thinks, somewhat surprised at his amount of vindictive glee. Duncan is his best friend, and he hopes that somehow, at some point, they'll be able to get past this… but this kind of secret, this kind of selfishness, when Duncan's signature move has been his ability to seem so much more high-road than Logan, and to make sure that Veronica knows it? Logan has felt his loyalty draining away rapidly since Wallace and Mac lobbed him this bomb.

"Meg is pregnant," Duncan blurts all at once. He isn't looking at Veronica, but Logan is and he sees the way her mouth drops open in shock. Speaking of bombs, Logan thinks.

"W – what? You – you – you cheated on me? After – after all the – "

"No, no, no!" Duncan hastens to clarify. "It was – it was before we got together. She didn't tell me. I didn't know, Veronica, I swear to you."

"If it was before, then that means…"

"Yeah… she's – she's due really soon."

Veronica's eyes turn sad and introspective. "No wonder she hated me."

"She didn't hate you," Duncan mumbles, but it fools nobody in the room. Logan wonders if anyone has noticed that half the time they are talking about Meg in the past tense. He wonders what will happen to Meg, what will happen to Duncan's baby.

"Yeah, she did. I would hate me too. And you!" Veronica seems to suddenly come back to herself. "You sleep with Meg, dump her, and then come waiting around for my relationship with Logan to crash and burn?"

Atta girl, Logan grins inwardly. Go for the jugular.

"You already showed me the door, Veronica!" Duncan says, something like angry desperation in his voice. "You already chose him!" He slings one arm back in Logan's general direction. "What does this really change?"

"Is that what she said?" Logan asks Duncan, his interest perked back up, belatedly remembering that Duncan had never answered his question about what his conversation with Veronica entailed.

"Shut up, Logan!" Veronica and Duncan say in unison.

"Tell me what this changes," he insists again.

"It changes the way I look at you," she says, her eyes ineffably sad. Her gaze drifts over to Logan who is slouched with one hip against the wall, angled towards her, watching her with that upward-tilted glance that he prays is not nakedly hopeful. Duncan follows the direction of her stare.

"No," he concludes. "The way you look at me changed because the way you look at him changed." Her eyes flicker back toward Duncan for a moment, but it's as if she cannot tear them away from Logan for long. She does not deny the veracity in Duncan's statement. Logan straightens from his position propping up the wall. He only shifts toward her a matter of inches, but it's as if someone has jacked the heat in the room up to 'stifling'.

Neither of them even notices Duncan leave.

xiii. but i will not let you go.

Logan is sidling toward her, impossibly slowly, because he doesn't quite know what he's going to say. He just knows that this feels momentous, like a clash of continents or kings… or something else suitably epic. Veronica's eyes are locked with his.

"I find the timing of your arrival both suspicious and convenient. Suspiciously convenient, even," she says in an absent way.

"Suspiciously convenient with what? Your throwing Duncan out on his ass?" He smirks, but he knows that it is softened by the way he threads his fingers into her hair and brushes it back from her face, as he reaches her side.

"Figuratively," she interjects, and he concedes.

"Figuratively. Nah," he answers his own question, grinning lightly at her, and rocking forward and back on his toes. "That was just providence."

"You enjoyed it."

"Yes, I did. You would have too, if the situation were reversed." He spears her with a look that is both direct and sincere, and has the distinct pleasure of watching her flush. She would have enjoyed it, and they both know it.

"You knew?" A question, but not really. He holds up both hands in a surrendering gesture.

"As of … fifteen minutes ago, tops. Fennel and Mumbles-the-Hacker junior-sleuthed it out."

"Meaning…"

"Meaning they followed Duncan up to Meg's room and used their eyes." She shoots him a dirty look, because the eye-roll in his voice is obvious.

"Oh." It is a soft, lonely syllable, dropping from between her lips, forlorn and almost unnoticed. Her eyes are distant, and he wonders if she is seeing a pale, frail golden cheerleader, prone in a hospital bed, her stomach swollen with Duncan's child, Duncan's child.

"Are you okay? Veronica?" Something tightens in his chest, and he knows a sudden pang of fear, like the irrational wave of anxiety when one is the first to arrive at a party: it's the wrong night or the wrong house.

What if I've misread this entire situation?

Veronica flicks her eyes up at him, and seems to read everything displayed there in a fraction of a second.

"I'm not having second thoughts, Logan," she murmurs quietly. Before he can even clamp down on the traitorous smile of overwhelming relief that threatens to tremble across his mouth, she has added, teasingly, "I was already up to seventeenth or eighteenth thoughts, way back, probably even before the trip to Catalina Island – "

"—that-wasn't," he tags on, bitterly remembering the tang of the champagne, consumed alone on his father's boat, wondering how he could've have gotten everything so wrong. Wrong night, wrong house… wrong girl?

No. If there is one thing that he can bank on, stake his life on, it is that Veronica is the right girl. The only girl. If only they can get past this cycle of distrust brought on by their mutual abandonment issues.

He winds his hand around hers.

"Are we crazy?" He asks, mostly rhetorically. She gives him an are you freakin' kidding me? look, and he kisses the side of her head.

"You said you love me." It isn't really a question, but he nods in response, keeping his gaze unwaveringly on hers. If she ever believes anything he has to say, he wants her to believe this.

"You didn't say it back." He thinks that he really can't help pointing this out.

"I didn't."

"Because you don't?" Logan can feel his pulse hammering through his ear drums. It feels as if the rest of his life hinges on what she says next. And it's ridiculous. Because he knows she loves him. Whether or not she can admit it to him, to herself, to anyone, he knows.

But he really wishes she would say it, all the same.

"I… tried not to," she struggles, shifting her shoulders with a wince, and dragging her eyes reluctantly up to his. "But I couldn't help it."

"And – " He hesitates, swallows, has to know. "—if Duncan hadn't knocked up Our Blessed Mother?"

Her mouth crimps; her eyes are glossy with unspilled tears.

"Logan…" Lo-gan. His heart stutters a beat, before resuming normal rhythm. His name is a broken sigh, but the tone of it gives him pause. It is not a terrified plea, not a sympathetic apology. More like a surrender. "It was always you. I … always knew that we'd … find our way back someday."

The sudden onslaught of utter joy is making him dizzy. So he drinks her in with his eyes, falls back on the bedrock of their relationship, as one corner of his mouth tilts upward.

"You always knew, Mars? Miss-Head-for-the-hills!-Somebody-said-Commitment? Where have I put my skeptical face?"

"You better watch yerself, Mister!" She smiles, using a Western twang. "You got plenty of places I could stash a bong, and I got the law on speed dial."

"You always know just what to say to me," he simpers, one hand theatrically over his heart. "This is how all the great love stories start, isn't it?" He is only a little bit serious, and she side-eyes him skeptically.

"What movies have you been watching?"

"Just admit it," he says softly, ignoring the twinge in his elbow joint to skid his thumb over her cheekbone. "I'm growing on you."

"Yeah…" she says. "Like a fungus." She scrunches up her nose adorably, and her teeth catch her lip on the f . The laugh that tumbles from his mouth is both unexpected and genuine, and he has the distinct pleasure of seeing her eyes literally sparkle.

"Please say you mean it," he blurts, without really meaning to. Begging for things has never really been his style, his tending toward more of a Death First! attitude, but now he has done it twice in one day. With witnesses, he thinks of Fennel with chagrin. "I meant everything I said earlier. Every word. This –you - this is it for me, Veronica. Whatever we used to be, whatever – this shit with the Fitzpatricks… the witness on the bridge – we're better together. I don't want to go back to the way it was before. I won't go back."

"Well," she says in a tone of mock-reluctant concession. "I don't know where else I am going to find myself a rich and scandalous scoundrel for a boy-toy… so I guess you'll do." She winds her hand into his collar, and pulls him down for a kiss.

"I'll have you know I'm the cream of the crop," he mumbles into her mouth. "One might even say – "

" – the prick of the litter?"

He is wincing theatrically at her wordplay, even as the grin spills across his face.

"It needs work, Mars."

"What if I said I loved you?" The words tumble quickly out of her mouth, and his gaze jerks up to lock on hers with what he thinks ought to be an audible snap.

"Hypotheticals don't count," he points out over the roaring in his ears. She takes a long pull of air into her lungs, and her eyes do not leave his.

"I love you, Logan." Her face is somehow fearful and hopeful and vulnerable and trusting all at the same time. He knows – better than anybody, he thinks – how much it costs her to let someone in, to take off the mask, to reveal actual feelings… and while the fact that she loves him isn't surprising, how much she must love him takes his breath away. "So… would that get me a venue? My name in lights?"

"Come on, you know it's called sleeping your way to the top for a reason."

"I don't think the doctor's cleared me for that yet."

"Words every guy wants to hear."

"I meant them, Logan." She grows serious again, something she seems able to do on a dime, and he knows she is talking about those words, not the ones most recently out of her mouth.

"I know." Her eyes are limpid, but he sees a grin begin to twist her mouth, almost of its own volition, and he rushes to speak again, before she can tease that he has Star Wars'd their romantic moment. "I love you too."

"Quoting movies… repeating yourself… do you have any original moves, Echolls?"

"Give me a break, okay? You made me say a whole bunch of highly personal stuff in front of the Boy Wonder. That gives me carte blanche to steal Han Solo's material any time I so choose."

"Yeah…" she winces. "Poor Wallace. Mommy and Daddy may have scarred him for life."

"Poor Wallace? I was the one pouring my heart out to you!"

"Well, shame on me for believing what's written in the girl's bathroom stall – Logan Echolls, you mean to tell me you have a heart?"

"Not since I gave it to you." It's not a fantastic line, as lines go, he thinks later. But it tumbles out without forethought, and his blush and uncalculated sincerity are more than enough to make her believe him. She does believe him; he can tell by the shine in her eyes and the astonished look on her face. The resulting smile she gives him is so loving that he is filled with a heady joy, exquisite and almost painful in its intensity.

She kisses him again, her hand no longer grasping his shirt, but moving up to the nape of his neck to splay in his hair. She is pulling him to her, and he wants to… wants to more than he wants to breathe again, but she is injured and (he can't quite forget) it was because of him. So he withdraws a bit, and she makes a funny little whine of disappointment as they're gasping each other's air.

"I see you aren't insulting my material now, Mars…" he whispers.

"Silver tongue like that'll getcha anything you want, cowboy," she breathes back in the Western twang again. They stare at each other for a long moment, as Logan arches his brows at her innuendo. Finally, she snorts and he chuckles, and then they are laughing and kissing at the same time. He is trying to be gentle, but he is a little afraid that the euphoria surging through him right then might actually split him apart.

He had told her she was it for him. She had told him that she loved him. He wants to remember everything about this moment: this moment when Logan Echolls, who had never really had any reason to hope that life might work out his way, is literally holding his future in his arms. Well, one arm, really, he corrects himself.

He thinks about years into the future, what he will say when people ask them their story, how he can even put into words something so epic in scope, something so amazing and miraculous and beautiful.

A long time ago, we used to be friends…

The End

AN: Many apologies for the long wait. This story did not want to cooperate, but I finally managed to get words on a screen! Hope you enjoyed!