Kid Things, Chapter Two
I think livejournal is well on its way to ruining my life. My roommate keeps wandering through the living room, all "You're still on the computer?" Anywho, Chapter Two. Pleasing.
Title: Kid Things (WIP, 2/?)
Author:
sowell
Characters: Logan/Veronica
Word Count: 2,148
Rating: R, for naughty language and sexual situations
Summary: 5 years after graduation, Logan comes back to Neptune to ask Veronica for help.
Spoilers: Spoiled through 2.22
Disclaimer: Rob Thomas owns all. Including my soul.
Read it at
veronicamarsfic
One
Two
She was hating this, Logan thought, watching Veronica wrap two hands around her soda can. She hadn’t opened it; she kept rolling it around in her palm, passing it from hand to hand, keeping it constantly in motion. Every time she set it down he saw her hands tremble. He had been half-expecting an apology from her for assuming the kid was his. Clearly he’d been out of his mind.
"How did he end up with you?" she asked, her forehead wrinkling up like the thought of him and a toddler in the same room was some kind of universal paradox.
Fair enough.
"I came home three days ago and he was sitting on my bed. I was drunk - "
"Of course you were," she cut in.
"I thought I walked into the wrong apartment," he said through clenched teeth. "Then I found the note." Take care of him, little brother, it had said in Trina’s blunt, boyish handwriting.
Veronica shook her head, shiny blonde hair swinging around her shoulders. "How can you not know your sister had a baby?"
"We’re not exactly Donny and Marie," he said wearily. "I hadn’t seen her since I left Neptune."
"But to hide him from the tabloids…."
He shrugged. "Maybe the father got sick of taking care of him. Maybe she paid some doctor to make it disappear. Maybe she was so coked up she forgot she even had a kid. Who knows?"
She kept stealing glances at the sofa where the kid sat in front of the TV. Bringing him along was definitely one of his smarter moves. If Logan was alone she might have just walked away, but seeing this kid’s tiny little body in the flesh…well, that presented her with a moral obligation. It wasn’t compassion - it was that mystifying need she had to fix things she thought were broken. Misaligned. An innocent kid left to his clumsy ministrations wasn’t an injustice she could ignore.
The boy was watching some shitty Lifetime program that he probably couldn’t even understand. Logan would have demanded cartoons, but this kid hadn’t demanded anything as of yet. For the last three days he ate the cereal Logan put in front of him, sat where Logan told him to sit, and went to sleep when Logan put him under the covers. He hadn’t said a word; he just stared at Logan out of Trina’s eyes until Logan wanted to tape his eyelids shut. To his frustration, Trina hadn’t left an owner’s manual of any sort. To his chagrin, Trina had left a week’s worth of training diapers. Logan hadn’t even thought about it until the kid started to smell. He no longer blamed his mother for hiring a nanny to change his diapers.
"What’s his name?" Veronica asked, not taking his eyes off of the boy. His nephew. Logan had to get used to that.
Logan shrugged. "No clue. He won’t talk. You know, I think he may be retarded. I wouldn’t put it past Trina to give birth to a crack baby."
The look she shot him was so disgusted that he had to bite down on a grin. Baiting Veronica Mars never seemed to lose its charm. "Did you try asking him?"
"Yes, miss mother-of-the-year, I tried asking him. He just stares at you."
Veronica walked over to the TV and flicked off the sound. The kid obediently turned his face to her as she kneeled in front of him.
"Hi," she said, raising her voice a notch the way people do when they’re cooing at infants or puppies. "I’m Veronica. What’s your name?" she tried. Logan smirked at the kid’s silence. "Can you tell me your name?" Nothing.
Atta boy, he thought. Don’t fall for her tricks.
She tried a different tack. "Can you tell me how old you are?" The boy was starting to look a little upset now, and Veronica eased back a couple inches. "You don’t have to talk," she said reassuringly. "Are you this many?" She held up four fingers. The kid blinked at her. She folded one finger down. "Are you this many?" The kid held her stare for a couple more seconds before slowly reaching out and folding his chubby little hand around Veronica’s three fingers. "Are you three?" she asked hopefully. He nodded, and she smiled so beautifully that Logan forgot about the drink in his hand until it started to spill over the side of the glass.
"Do you want to tell me your name?" she asked again. "You don’t have to. Only if you want to."
This time the kid opened his mouth and said in the softest of voices, "Percy Echolls."
Logan didn’t know why he was so stunned. He’d seen Veronica extract information from people in a thousand varied and sneaky ways. He didn’t know why a three-year-old should be any different. Hell, he’d probably zip his soul open too if she were looking at him with that soft concern in her eyes. But damn it - it took her three minutes to accomplish what he hadn’t been able to do in three days.
"It’s nice to meet you," Veronica said solemnly. "I’d like to be your friend. Is that ok?" The kid - Percy - considered her for a second, then nodded. Veronica smiled again. "Thanks, Percy."
She flicked the sound back on the television and came back to the table. "Now we have a name," she said firmly.
"What does that mean?"
"It means that I can run some background searches. There might be a birth certificate, hospital records, something else that could be useful." She pushed her hair back in a stuttered, weary motion, and her ring glinted in the light. Her fucking engagement ring.
"Swell," he said. "He’ll be back in my sister’s cold, heartless arms in no time."
"Not so fast," she said. Her face had gone hard again. He hadn’t set eyes on her for five years, but he still felt the sting of that expression every time he screwed up in a particularly massive way. When he woke up in a jail cell, when he came off of a two week bender, or when he sat in the middle of his apartment floor, shaking for no reason at all besides a violent need to get out of his own skin - Veronica’s steely eyes followed him, reminding him that, no, he wasn’t fooling anybody.
"This is a case," she informed him. "Not a favor between old friends."
"Now I’m a friend? I’ve gone up a notch in the last hour. Also, the correct term is old lovers."
She didn’t even blink. "It’s a $5000 flat fee plus expenses."
"Ah, how I’ve missed your pillow talk."
"It will go through Mars Investigations. You’ll have to come by tomorrow and sign a contract."
"Hold up a second. A contract for what?"
"The first half is a non-refundable down payment. You pay the second half when I find her."
"And if you don’t find her?"
Her face said, Bitch, please. Her mouth said, "Then you don’t have to pay."
"What about her brat? I can’t take care of him."
"Not my problem." She sounded amused. "I’ll be at my father’s office tomorrow morning. I realize it will be difficult to drag yourself out of bed before noon, but I only work half days now."
"When you’re not taking pictures for the San Pedro County Tribune," he said politely. "I know."
"Keeping tabs?" she asked smoothly.
"I did my research before I called you," he said comfortably. "Like you said - it’s just a job."
Her mouth thinned to a tight line, and he wondered wearily if she was pissed because of his comments or because he had checked up on her. He hoped it was the former, but had a feeling it was the latter. For someone who pried into other people’s business for a living, she had a hell of a nerve being so sensitive about her own privacy. Of course, what did he know? Privacy was as distant a concept to him as moon walking. Or loving parents.
It hadn’t taken much effort to find out she was still doing PI work for her father. She was something of a local celebrity in Neptune although, unlike him, she missed out on the fun experience of having paparazzi waiting around every bend. Everyone saw her photos in the paper, everyone knew she could be found on weekends at the new Mars Investigations office downtown. Everyone knew she was dating the story editor Jeffrey Polkowski.
He didn’t like it. He had no intention of trying to get her back - he was done with little blonde dynamos with four-inch claws. But still, he didn’t like to think of her picking out curtains and china patterns for someone else’s house. He really didn’t like to think of her in someone else’s bed, and fuck, he hated that she still had the power to bother him at all.
Percy had fallen asleep on the couch, just tilted over sideways like he was a block of wood, and Veronica knelt down in front of him again, studying him. "He looks like Trina," she said softly. "I thought for a second…but he really looks like Trina."
Logan realized that was the closest to an apology he was going to get for her jumping to conclusions. He’d take it. "I’d say I hope that’s all he inherited from her," he said matter-of-factly, "but we don’t know who the father is. Given Trina’s taste in men, even her messed-up DNA might be the lesser of two evils." He picked the kid up against his hip, like he had for the last three nights, and Percy’s head dropped against his shoulder. "Any parental advice you feel like sharing?" he asked, awkwardly trying to balance the dead weight in his arms.
Veronica was staring at the two of them with a strangely arrested expression on her face. She gave her head a little shake and seemed to snap out of it.
"Try to keep him alive until tomorrow," she said.
"So maternal," he cooed. She shot him one parting glare and marched her way out of the room, always off to battle.
Well, that had gone better than expected. She might hate him, but she had agreed to help him, for whatever reason. When he left Neptune he was determined not to come back. LA had good surfing and free booze and fun drugs and more than enough distraction to curtail whatever impulse he had to see his home or Veronica. He was almost famous, thanks to his fucking asshole of a father, and that’s all anyone was looking for in LA. He gave in a few drunken nights and called her during that first year away, but she never picked up. Eventually he learned that when all he could think about was blue eyes and baby blonde hair, it was best to just find another blonde to play with.
He had been fine for five years.
Of course, the first time an excuse presented itself he had had hopped in his car and driven up to confront her, but that was beside the point.
The excuse in his arms shifted and made a little noise in his sleep, and Logan settled him under the covers of his king-sized bed. The kid looked like a little pebble in the middle of the expanse of flowered sheets, but Logan didn’t know where else to put him. The first night he left him on the couch and the kid had fallen right off. Maybe he still slept in a crib. How the hell was Logan supposed to know?
So now Percy claimed the only bedroom and Logan got to sleep on the couch that was too short for him. Kids sucked.
He poured the remainder of his drink down the drain, because once he started getting drunk he might not be able to stop, and he didn’t need a hangover to make tomorrow even worse. Veronica’s image was dancing behind his eyes, like it had been every night since he realized he was going back to Neptune. If he weren’t babysitting he would go out, find a bar, and go home with the first girl who put a hand on his thigh, but that option was out of the question at the moment.
He tried to think of someone else to jerk off to - anything, even the latest Maxim spread, but her face wouldn’t go away. He saw her five years ago, flushed cheeks and blonde hair and vibrating laughter as she arched under him. Jesus, why could he still remember the way she smelled when he couldn’t even remember the face of the girl he took home last Saturday? He stroked himself until he came, hands shaking, hating himself and her and this whole goddamn place.
Welcome back to Neptune.
Chapter Three
Title: Kid Things (WIP, 2/?)
Author:
sowell
Characters: Logan/Veronica
Word Count: 2,148
Rating: R, for naughty language and sexual situations
Summary: 5 years after graduation, Logan comes back to Neptune to ask Veronica for help.
Spoilers: Spoiled through 2.22
Disclaimer: Rob Thomas owns all. Including my soul.
Read it at
veronicamarsfic
One
Two
She was hating this, Logan thought, watching Veronica wrap two hands around her soda can. She hadn’t opened it; she kept rolling it around in her palm, passing it from hand to hand, keeping it constantly in motion. Every time she set it down he saw her hands tremble. He had been half-expecting an apology from her for assuming the kid was his. Clearly he’d been out of his mind.
"How did he end up with you?" she asked, her forehead wrinkling up like the thought of him and a toddler in the same room was some kind of universal paradox.
Fair enough.
"I came home three days ago and he was sitting on my bed. I was drunk - "
"Of course you were," she cut in.
"I thought I walked into the wrong apartment," he said through clenched teeth. "Then I found the note." Take care of him, little brother, it had said in Trina’s blunt, boyish handwriting.
Veronica shook her head, shiny blonde hair swinging around her shoulders. "How can you not know your sister had a baby?"
"We’re not exactly Donny and Marie," he said wearily. "I hadn’t seen her since I left Neptune."
"But to hide him from the tabloids…."
He shrugged. "Maybe the father got sick of taking care of him. Maybe she paid some doctor to make it disappear. Maybe she was so coked up she forgot she even had a kid. Who knows?"
She kept stealing glances at the sofa where the kid sat in front of the TV. Bringing him along was definitely one of his smarter moves. If Logan was alone she might have just walked away, but seeing this kid’s tiny little body in the flesh…well, that presented her with a moral obligation. It wasn’t compassion - it was that mystifying need she had to fix things she thought were broken. Misaligned. An innocent kid left to his clumsy ministrations wasn’t an injustice she could ignore.
The boy was watching some shitty Lifetime program that he probably couldn’t even understand. Logan would have demanded cartoons, but this kid hadn’t demanded anything as of yet. For the last three days he ate the cereal Logan put in front of him, sat where Logan told him to sit, and went to sleep when Logan put him under the covers. He hadn’t said a word; he just stared at Logan out of Trina’s eyes until Logan wanted to tape his eyelids shut. To his frustration, Trina hadn’t left an owner’s manual of any sort. To his chagrin, Trina had left a week’s worth of training diapers. Logan hadn’t even thought about it until the kid started to smell. He no longer blamed his mother for hiring a nanny to change his diapers.
"What’s his name?" Veronica asked, not taking his eyes off of the boy. His nephew. Logan had to get used to that.
Logan shrugged. "No clue. He won’t talk. You know, I think he may be retarded. I wouldn’t put it past Trina to give birth to a crack baby."
The look she shot him was so disgusted that he had to bite down on a grin. Baiting Veronica Mars never seemed to lose its charm. "Did you try asking him?"
"Yes, miss mother-of-the-year, I tried asking him. He just stares at you."
Veronica walked over to the TV and flicked off the sound. The kid obediently turned his face to her as she kneeled in front of him.
"Hi," she said, raising her voice a notch the way people do when they’re cooing at infants or puppies. "I’m Veronica. What’s your name?" she tried. Logan smirked at the kid’s silence. "Can you tell me your name?" Nothing.
Atta boy, he thought. Don’t fall for her tricks.
She tried a different tack. "Can you tell me how old you are?" The boy was starting to look a little upset now, and Veronica eased back a couple inches. "You don’t have to talk," she said reassuringly. "Are you this many?" She held up four fingers. The kid blinked at her. She folded one finger down. "Are you this many?" The kid held her stare for a couple more seconds before slowly reaching out and folding his chubby little hand around Veronica’s three fingers. "Are you three?" she asked hopefully. He nodded, and she smiled so beautifully that Logan forgot about the drink in his hand until it started to spill over the side of the glass.
"Do you want to tell me your name?" she asked again. "You don’t have to. Only if you want to."
This time the kid opened his mouth and said in the softest of voices, "Percy Echolls."
Logan didn’t know why he was so stunned. He’d seen Veronica extract information from people in a thousand varied and sneaky ways. He didn’t know why a three-year-old should be any different. Hell, he’d probably zip his soul open too if she were looking at him with that soft concern in her eyes. But damn it - it took her three minutes to accomplish what he hadn’t been able to do in three days.
"It’s nice to meet you," Veronica said solemnly. "I’d like to be your friend. Is that ok?" The kid - Percy - considered her for a second, then nodded. Veronica smiled again. "Thanks, Percy."
She flicked the sound back on the television and came back to the table. "Now we have a name," she said firmly.
"What does that mean?"
"It means that I can run some background searches. There might be a birth certificate, hospital records, something else that could be useful." She pushed her hair back in a stuttered, weary motion, and her ring glinted in the light. Her fucking engagement ring.
"Swell," he said. "He’ll be back in my sister’s cold, heartless arms in no time."
"Not so fast," she said. Her face had gone hard again. He hadn’t set eyes on her for five years, but he still felt the sting of that expression every time he screwed up in a particularly massive way. When he woke up in a jail cell, when he came off of a two week bender, or when he sat in the middle of his apartment floor, shaking for no reason at all besides a violent need to get out of his own skin - Veronica’s steely eyes followed him, reminding him that, no, he wasn’t fooling anybody.
"This is a case," she informed him. "Not a favor between old friends."
"Now I’m a friend? I’ve gone up a notch in the last hour. Also, the correct term is old lovers."
She didn’t even blink. "It’s a $5000 flat fee plus expenses."
"Ah, how I’ve missed your pillow talk."
"It will go through Mars Investigations. You’ll have to come by tomorrow and sign a contract."
"Hold up a second. A contract for what?"
"The first half is a non-refundable down payment. You pay the second half when I find her."
"And if you don’t find her?"
Her face said, Bitch, please. Her mouth said, "Then you don’t have to pay."
"What about her brat? I can’t take care of him."
"Not my problem." She sounded amused. "I’ll be at my father’s office tomorrow morning. I realize it will be difficult to drag yourself out of bed before noon, but I only work half days now."
"When you’re not taking pictures for the San Pedro County Tribune," he said politely. "I know."
"Keeping tabs?" she asked smoothly.
"I did my research before I called you," he said comfortably. "Like you said - it’s just a job."
Her mouth thinned to a tight line, and he wondered wearily if she was pissed because of his comments or because he had checked up on her. He hoped it was the former, but had a feeling it was the latter. For someone who pried into other people’s business for a living, she had a hell of a nerve being so sensitive about her own privacy. Of course, what did he know? Privacy was as distant a concept to him as moon walking. Or loving parents.
It hadn’t taken much effort to find out she was still doing PI work for her father. She was something of a local celebrity in Neptune although, unlike him, she missed out on the fun experience of having paparazzi waiting around every bend. Everyone saw her photos in the paper, everyone knew she could be found on weekends at the new Mars Investigations office downtown. Everyone knew she was dating the story editor Jeffrey Polkowski.
He didn’t like it. He had no intention of trying to get her back - he was done with little blonde dynamos with four-inch claws. But still, he didn’t like to think of her picking out curtains and china patterns for someone else’s house. He really didn’t like to think of her in someone else’s bed, and fuck, he hated that she still had the power to bother him at all.
Percy had fallen asleep on the couch, just tilted over sideways like he was a block of wood, and Veronica knelt down in front of him again, studying him. "He looks like Trina," she said softly. "I thought for a second…but he really looks like Trina."
Logan realized that was the closest to an apology he was going to get for her jumping to conclusions. He’d take it. "I’d say I hope that’s all he inherited from her," he said matter-of-factly, "but we don’t know who the father is. Given Trina’s taste in men, even her messed-up DNA might be the lesser of two evils." He picked the kid up against his hip, like he had for the last three nights, and Percy’s head dropped against his shoulder. "Any parental advice you feel like sharing?" he asked, awkwardly trying to balance the dead weight in his arms.
Veronica was staring at the two of them with a strangely arrested expression on her face. She gave her head a little shake and seemed to snap out of it.
"Try to keep him alive until tomorrow," she said.
"So maternal," he cooed. She shot him one parting glare and marched her way out of the room, always off to battle.
Well, that had gone better than expected. She might hate him, but she had agreed to help him, for whatever reason. When he left Neptune he was determined not to come back. LA had good surfing and free booze and fun drugs and more than enough distraction to curtail whatever impulse he had to see his home or Veronica. He was almost famous, thanks to his fucking asshole of a father, and that’s all anyone was looking for in LA. He gave in a few drunken nights and called her during that first year away, but she never picked up. Eventually he learned that when all he could think about was blue eyes and baby blonde hair, it was best to just find another blonde to play with.
He had been fine for five years.
Of course, the first time an excuse presented itself he had had hopped in his car and driven up to confront her, but that was beside the point.
The excuse in his arms shifted and made a little noise in his sleep, and Logan settled him under the covers of his king-sized bed. The kid looked like a little pebble in the middle of the expanse of flowered sheets, but Logan didn’t know where else to put him. The first night he left him on the couch and the kid had fallen right off. Maybe he still slept in a crib. How the hell was Logan supposed to know?
So now Percy claimed the only bedroom and Logan got to sleep on the couch that was too short for him. Kids sucked.
He poured the remainder of his drink down the drain, because once he started getting drunk he might not be able to stop, and he didn’t need a hangover to make tomorrow even worse. Veronica’s image was dancing behind his eyes, like it had been every night since he realized he was going back to Neptune. If he weren’t babysitting he would go out, find a bar, and go home with the first girl who put a hand on his thigh, but that option was out of the question at the moment.
He tried to think of someone else to jerk off to - anything, even the latest Maxim spread, but her face wouldn’t go away. He saw her five years ago, flushed cheeks and blonde hair and vibrating laughter as she arched under him. Jesus, why could he still remember the way she smelled when he couldn’t even remember the face of the girl he took home last Saturday? He stroked himself until he came, hands shaking, hating himself and her and this whole goddamn place.
Welcome back to Neptune.
Chapter Three