Kid Things, Chapter Four
Title: Kid Things (WIP, 4/?)
Author:
sowell
Characters: Logan/Veronica
Word Count: 2,464
Rating: R, for language
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...Three
Four
This does not mean you like him, Veronica thought to herself. You still definitely, 100% think he’s an asshole and a lunatic. She wasn’t exactly sure how he’d talked her into this, except that he had a way of turning his eyes to velvet that was too adorable to ignore. Too annoying to ignore. She meant annoying. That, and he made a good case that he would probably mess the whole thing up on his own. They were each pushing a stroller through the Neptune City Plaza, and it felt far too domestic for her comfort level. Logan’s stroller held a bouncing Percy. He kept lunging forward and pointing at different people with an excited, "Look!"
Veronica’s stroller held the $3000-plus in merchandise that Logan had purchased for his nephew. There were bags upon bags of designer baby clothes, toys, and games. Veronica calmly tried to explain to Logan that little kids didn’t care if their clothes came from The Gap, Prada or Walmart. He informed her, just as calmly, that he had never set foot inside a Walmart and he wasn’t about to ruin his perfect record now.
They got a few whispers and stares from people who recognized Logan, but if he noticed, he didn’t say anything about it. Veronica wondered, not for the first time, how he learned to deal with the attention. With perfect strangers who felt entitled to know his entire life story, to comment on his every move. Even before he started making headlines himself, his father’s fame had put him in the spotlight. Veronica thought she would have gone stark raving mad.
It was interesting to see how he shopped. Duncan’s mother always did the shopping for him, and Lilly got a kick out of foraging at the Salvation Army, so she never really got to see how rich kids spent money in public. It was all very Pretty Woman. Logan would walk into a store, flash some plastic and a smarmy smile, and the salesperson would scurry to present product after product for him and Percy to examine. All he had to do was point, and the item would be wrapped, bagged, and waiting for them at checkout.
The result was a stroller full of overpriced miniature sweaters, polo shirts, t-shirts, khakis, and few hideous pairs of brightly colored sneakers that she hadn’t been able to talk him out of. She was barely able to talk him out of buying a crib.
"He takes up the whole damn bed," Logan complained. "I’m sick of sleeping on the couch."
"Yeah, it sounds like you’re really roughing it. He’ll be gone in a week. Do you really want to spend that much money for one week?"
"Fucking kid," Logan grumbled.
They walked past the food court, and Percy’s eyes lit up. "McDonald’s!" Logan raised an eyebrow at her.
She shouldn’t be here. She’d agreed to help Logan because he could pay the fee, and because she couldn’t, in good conscience, leave this little kid to his screwed-up Echolls fate. But finding Trina did not require her to call in sick to the Tribune and take a last-minute sojourn to the mall. It didn’t require her to waste three hours watching Trina’s brother spend money like it was water and re-memorizing his expressive face. He had a perpetually surprised look in his eyes when he glanced at Percy, like he was baffled by his own affection for his nephew. Veronica could sympathize with that. She was a little baffled by it, too. He was the least competent caregiver Veronica had ever seen, but Percy clung to him like a limpet. She couldn’t help it - she was fascinated.
"McDonald’s," Percy said, a little more forcefully. "Want McDonald’s."
"I could eat," she heard herself say, and tried not to get caught up in the intent way he was studying her.
Twenty minutes later they were parked at a hard plastic table in the middle of the teeming food court. Percy was cheerfully shoving his happy meal in his mouth, and she had finished her own order of BBQ ribs and was starting on Logan’s.
He whisked his plate off the table, out of her reach. "You eat like a pig, Mars. Go buy another plate of your own."
"That is my plate. I’m tacking lunch onto your fee," she said sweetly.
He snorted. "You should be paying me to watch you eat. You have BBQ sauce on your face."
"So do you," she told him, and painted a stripe of greasy BBQ sauce down his cheek with her thumb.
He froze, staring at her like she was nuts, and she calmly reached over and grabbed a napkin to hide the fact that her hands were suddenly trembling. She wiped her mouth, then nodded at his BBQ-streaked face. "Best see to that, A-1," she suggested.
He watched her as he slowly wiped his face. What am I doing? she thought, panicked. What the hell am I doing, flirting with Logan? Last time had been disaster, and things were infinitely more complicated now. She had the beginning of a career and an almost-fiancée, both of which he could screw up royally. This was not smart. She needed to be running full steam in the other direction right about now.
But there was something magnetic about him. It wasn’t charm, exactly. It was more like a refusal to be ignored. He was tabloid fodder simply because he was a massive train crash - horrific and heartbreaking, and yet impossible to avert your eyes from. She didn’t want to become part of the wreckage again.
She was glad when he left Neptune. They had made it six months after graduation. Six months of laughter and hot, sticky sex, of Logan’s hands and Logan’s low voice in her ear, telling her she was the only thing that mattered to him. They had made it right up until the morning she walked into Logan’s hotel suite and found another girl in his bed, curled around him like she belonged there. Logan had opened bleary eyes and seen her standing frozen in the doorway. For a second he looked like he was going to make the dire mistake of apologizing to her. But he shifted modes in the blink of an eye. He stretched lazily and said, "I’m guessing that face means you don’t want to join us." When she didn’t say anything he shrugged. "Your loss."
She walked out and didn’t come back.
So she was relieved when he left. She never, ever wanted to see him again, except…he was the only person left who understood how much she’d been through. He was the only one who really remembered Lilly, the only one who missed Duncan as much as she did. As much as she hated him, his disappearance left a huge, aching hole in her life that no one had been able to fill since.
And she was horrified to discover that seeing him again was far from the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
He finished wiping his face. "I don’t know why we didn’t do this sooner," he mused. "You’re such a pleasant date."
"I have a pretty good idea."
"Because you’ve been pining away for me and you didn’t trust yourself not to succumb to my charms?"
That hit a little too close to home at the moment. "You think this is funny?" she snapped. "Let’s get this straight: The only reason I’m helping you at all is because Percy doesn’t deserve to grow up under your fucked-up supervision."
Logan shoved his leftover food hard into the nearest trash bin. "Then I guess I can take that $2500 check back."
"Screw you, Logan. You screwed around while we were dating and then disappeared for five years. Did you really think I’d jump at the chance to help you?"
"I screwed around once," he said tightly. "And you were about to dump me anyway."
Her scathing remark died on her lips. She stared at him for a moment in quiet shock.
"I didn’t know you knew that," she said finally.
"Come on, Veronica. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been through it before." He was looking down at his hands, twisting a napkin through his narrow fingers over and over again. "And I thought you’d want me gone."
"I did."
"So what’s the problem?" he asked angrily.
"The problem is that you won’t stay gone," she said, voice rising. She could feel something burning behind her eyes, something she told herself was absolutely not tears, and shit - she swore she would never, ever do this again.
"How is this my fault?" he exploded. "Trina fucked up, not me. I could have left him at the door of the nearest shelter, but I’m shelling out $5000 to drag her ass back. If you didn’t want to take the case you could have told me to shove it. I’m used to hearing that from you."
He was right, she thought in despair. He was behaving responsibly for once in his life, and maybe that’s what she couldn’t handle. He was also turning her into a raving lunatic. Percy made a tiny noise of distress, and they both looked. His eyes were wet as he watched their argument mounting, and he had a fry crushed in his little fist.
"Shit," Logan muttered. He pried open the kid’s hand and started wiping it with a napkin like a mother hen. Veronica watched him, trying to breathe around the rock lodged in her throat. She couldn’t tell if she wanted to laugh or cry. Either way, Logan wasn’t going to witness it. She grabbed her bag and stood up.
"Leaving so soon?" Logan asked acidly, not looking at her. She started walking toward the nearest exit sign. "I’ll see you tomorrow at 9AM," he called after her. "Don’t even think about going without me." She didn’t answer.
She made the mistake of glancing back at them before she walked out the door. Logan’s head was bent toward his nephew’s, his face taut. Percy still had his fingers wrapped around Logan’s thumb, and she felt an increasingly familiar shock of panic. Logan was nothing more than a bad memory at this point. He was a mistake she’d made not once, but twice, much to her humiliation. He’d been long since relegated to the back of her mind, filed under "Romantic Horror Stories." She didn’t want to see him like this, didn’t want to remember he was anything other than selfish and self-destructive. Shit. This was going to kill her before it was over.
She went where she always went when she needed distraction: Mars Investigations. She had two missing person cases that, until yesterday, seemed monumentally fascinating. Now she found herself staring off into space every few minutes. That was how her father found her when he walked out of his office just after closing time.
He took one look at her face and pulled a chair up next to her. "Why are you doing this to yourself again?"
"Doing what?" she stalled.
Her father’s face took on that expression he’d perfected over the years: skepticism and concern shot through with compassion. "He’s not a teenager any more, Veronica. You can’t save him."
"It has nothing to do with him," she lied. "It’s just a job."
Her father tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, frowning. "Then drop it. We don’t need the business, and I don’t like him around you. I know he’s had a tough life, but he’s trouble."
"I’ll be fine," she said firmly. "There’s nothing going on between Logan and me."
Her father didn’t look reassured. "I know you’ll do the right thing. Just be careful."
"In case you missed the last five years, I also am no longer a teenager, Dad."
"I’m not sure I ever bought you as a teenager," he said ruefully. He left her with a kiss on the forehead.
Careful. No problem. She was an expert at careful.
There were two messages from Jeff waiting for her. "I missed you last night, babe. Call me." Delete. "They told me you called in sick. I’m worried. Call me." Delete. She didn’t want to talk to Jeff, but visions of Logan still hovered on the periphery of her brain. She picked up the phone and dialed.
"I was wondering if you’d dropped off the face of the earth. You ok?" Jeff’s familiar voice came over the line, and she felt the tension of the last 24 hours dissolve through her veins.
"I had an emergency at my dad’s office. I- I had to take a last minute trip down to LA for a case." It was almost the truth.
"Hey, I understand. My girlfriend is a hot-shot detective."
"And a badass photographer," she said. "Don’t sell me short."
"It would be hard for you to get much shorter. Just…let me know next time, ok? I worry about you chasing bail jumpers around LA with your taser."
"Sorry," she said softly. "Next time I’ll call."
God, he was so easy. Question, answer, concern, reassurance. Done and done. She’d started to think her inability to ignore Logan was an indication of something twisted inside of her, that it was somehow her fault. But if she could manage to maintain a relationship with someone as normal as Jeff, then she couldn’t be too fucked up, right?
Which meant Logan really was just that irritating.
"Have you given any more thought to what I asked?" Jeff lowered his voice a notch to his crooner voice. The voice he made love with. The voice he proposed with.
"It’s been hard not to," she said truthfully, turning the ring around on her finger.
"And…did you…"
Her vocal cords stretched to the snapping point.
She was going to marry him; she had devoted two years of her life to him, knowing it would happen. But when he finally asked her, the steady path they’d been on seemed to drop off around her. Now she didn’t know where to take the next step. She slid the engagement ring off her finger and into her bedside drawer, struggling with the words.
"Never mind," he said quickly. "I promised, I know."
It took him five more minutes of badgering to convince her to let him spend the night at her place. The thought of sex with Jeff left her vaguely cold at the moment, but she wasn’t about to spend another night dreaming of a certain spoiled ex-boyfriend with intense eyes. She didn’t want to wake up with Logan all around her, remembering how they slammed together like magnets every time he kissed her. She just had to get by until she found Trina. Then everything would fall into place again.
Chapter Five
Author:
sowell
Characters: Logan/Veronica
Word Count: 2,464
Rating: R, for language
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...Three
Four
This does not mean you like him, Veronica thought to herself. You still definitely, 100% think he’s an asshole and a lunatic. She wasn’t exactly sure how he’d talked her into this, except that he had a way of turning his eyes to velvet that was too adorable to ignore. Too annoying to ignore. She meant annoying. That, and he made a good case that he would probably mess the whole thing up on his own. They were each pushing a stroller through the Neptune City Plaza, and it felt far too domestic for her comfort level. Logan’s stroller held a bouncing Percy. He kept lunging forward and pointing at different people with an excited, "Look!"
Veronica’s stroller held the $3000-plus in merchandise that Logan had purchased for his nephew. There were bags upon bags of designer baby clothes, toys, and games. Veronica calmly tried to explain to Logan that little kids didn’t care if their clothes came from The Gap, Prada or Walmart. He informed her, just as calmly, that he had never set foot inside a Walmart and he wasn’t about to ruin his perfect record now.
They got a few whispers and stares from people who recognized Logan, but if he noticed, he didn’t say anything about it. Veronica wondered, not for the first time, how he learned to deal with the attention. With perfect strangers who felt entitled to know his entire life story, to comment on his every move. Even before he started making headlines himself, his father’s fame had put him in the spotlight. Veronica thought she would have gone stark raving mad.
It was interesting to see how he shopped. Duncan’s mother always did the shopping for him, and Lilly got a kick out of foraging at the Salvation Army, so she never really got to see how rich kids spent money in public. It was all very Pretty Woman. Logan would walk into a store, flash some plastic and a smarmy smile, and the salesperson would scurry to present product after product for him and Percy to examine. All he had to do was point, and the item would be wrapped, bagged, and waiting for them at checkout.
The result was a stroller full of overpriced miniature sweaters, polo shirts, t-shirts, khakis, and few hideous pairs of brightly colored sneakers that she hadn’t been able to talk him out of. She was barely able to talk him out of buying a crib.
"He takes up the whole damn bed," Logan complained. "I’m sick of sleeping on the couch."
"Yeah, it sounds like you’re really roughing it. He’ll be gone in a week. Do you really want to spend that much money for one week?"
"Fucking kid," Logan grumbled.
They walked past the food court, and Percy’s eyes lit up. "McDonald’s!" Logan raised an eyebrow at her.
She shouldn’t be here. She’d agreed to help Logan because he could pay the fee, and because she couldn’t, in good conscience, leave this little kid to his screwed-up Echolls fate. But finding Trina did not require her to call in sick to the Tribune and take a last-minute sojourn to the mall. It didn’t require her to waste three hours watching Trina’s brother spend money like it was water and re-memorizing his expressive face. He had a perpetually surprised look in his eyes when he glanced at Percy, like he was baffled by his own affection for his nephew. Veronica could sympathize with that. She was a little baffled by it, too. He was the least competent caregiver Veronica had ever seen, but Percy clung to him like a limpet. She couldn’t help it - she was fascinated.
"McDonald’s," Percy said, a little more forcefully. "Want McDonald’s."
"I could eat," she heard herself say, and tried not to get caught up in the intent way he was studying her.
Twenty minutes later they were parked at a hard plastic table in the middle of the teeming food court. Percy was cheerfully shoving his happy meal in his mouth, and she had finished her own order of BBQ ribs and was starting on Logan’s.
He whisked his plate off the table, out of her reach. "You eat like a pig, Mars. Go buy another plate of your own."
"That is my plate. I’m tacking lunch onto your fee," she said sweetly.
He snorted. "You should be paying me to watch you eat. You have BBQ sauce on your face."
"So do you," she told him, and painted a stripe of greasy BBQ sauce down his cheek with her thumb.
He froze, staring at her like she was nuts, and she calmly reached over and grabbed a napkin to hide the fact that her hands were suddenly trembling. She wiped her mouth, then nodded at his BBQ-streaked face. "Best see to that, A-1," she suggested.
He watched her as he slowly wiped his face. What am I doing? she thought, panicked. What the hell am I doing, flirting with Logan? Last time had been disaster, and things were infinitely more complicated now. She had the beginning of a career and an almost-fiancée, both of which he could screw up royally. This was not smart. She needed to be running full steam in the other direction right about now.
But there was something magnetic about him. It wasn’t charm, exactly. It was more like a refusal to be ignored. He was tabloid fodder simply because he was a massive train crash - horrific and heartbreaking, and yet impossible to avert your eyes from. She didn’t want to become part of the wreckage again.
She was glad when he left Neptune. They had made it six months after graduation. Six months of laughter and hot, sticky sex, of Logan’s hands and Logan’s low voice in her ear, telling her she was the only thing that mattered to him. They had made it right up until the morning she walked into Logan’s hotel suite and found another girl in his bed, curled around him like she belonged there. Logan had opened bleary eyes and seen her standing frozen in the doorway. For a second he looked like he was going to make the dire mistake of apologizing to her. But he shifted modes in the blink of an eye. He stretched lazily and said, "I’m guessing that face means you don’t want to join us." When she didn’t say anything he shrugged. "Your loss."
She walked out and didn’t come back.
So she was relieved when he left. She never, ever wanted to see him again, except…he was the only person left who understood how much she’d been through. He was the only one who really remembered Lilly, the only one who missed Duncan as much as she did. As much as she hated him, his disappearance left a huge, aching hole in her life that no one had been able to fill since.
And she was horrified to discover that seeing him again was far from the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
He finished wiping his face. "I don’t know why we didn’t do this sooner," he mused. "You’re such a pleasant date."
"I have a pretty good idea."
"Because you’ve been pining away for me and you didn’t trust yourself not to succumb to my charms?"
That hit a little too close to home at the moment. "You think this is funny?" she snapped. "Let’s get this straight: The only reason I’m helping you at all is because Percy doesn’t deserve to grow up under your fucked-up supervision."
Logan shoved his leftover food hard into the nearest trash bin. "Then I guess I can take that $2500 check back."
"Screw you, Logan. You screwed around while we were dating and then disappeared for five years. Did you really think I’d jump at the chance to help you?"
"I screwed around once," he said tightly. "And you were about to dump me anyway."
Her scathing remark died on her lips. She stared at him for a moment in quiet shock.
"I didn’t know you knew that," she said finally.
"Come on, Veronica. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been through it before." He was looking down at his hands, twisting a napkin through his narrow fingers over and over again. "And I thought you’d want me gone."
"I did."
"So what’s the problem?" he asked angrily.
"The problem is that you won’t stay gone," she said, voice rising. She could feel something burning behind her eyes, something she told herself was absolutely not tears, and shit - she swore she would never, ever do this again.
"How is this my fault?" he exploded. "Trina fucked up, not me. I could have left him at the door of the nearest shelter, but I’m shelling out $5000 to drag her ass back. If you didn’t want to take the case you could have told me to shove it. I’m used to hearing that from you."
He was right, she thought in despair. He was behaving responsibly for once in his life, and maybe that’s what she couldn’t handle. He was also turning her into a raving lunatic. Percy made a tiny noise of distress, and they both looked. His eyes were wet as he watched their argument mounting, and he had a fry crushed in his little fist.
"Shit," Logan muttered. He pried open the kid’s hand and started wiping it with a napkin like a mother hen. Veronica watched him, trying to breathe around the rock lodged in her throat. She couldn’t tell if she wanted to laugh or cry. Either way, Logan wasn’t going to witness it. She grabbed her bag and stood up.
"Leaving so soon?" Logan asked acidly, not looking at her. She started walking toward the nearest exit sign. "I’ll see you tomorrow at 9AM," he called after her. "Don’t even think about going without me." She didn’t answer.
She made the mistake of glancing back at them before she walked out the door. Logan’s head was bent toward his nephew’s, his face taut. Percy still had his fingers wrapped around Logan’s thumb, and she felt an increasingly familiar shock of panic. Logan was nothing more than a bad memory at this point. He was a mistake she’d made not once, but twice, much to her humiliation. He’d been long since relegated to the back of her mind, filed under "Romantic Horror Stories." She didn’t want to see him like this, didn’t want to remember he was anything other than selfish and self-destructive. Shit. This was going to kill her before it was over.
She went where she always went when she needed distraction: Mars Investigations. She had two missing person cases that, until yesterday, seemed monumentally fascinating. Now she found herself staring off into space every few minutes. That was how her father found her when he walked out of his office just after closing time.
He took one look at her face and pulled a chair up next to her. "Why are you doing this to yourself again?"
"Doing what?" she stalled.
Her father’s face took on that expression he’d perfected over the years: skepticism and concern shot through with compassion. "He’s not a teenager any more, Veronica. You can’t save him."
"It has nothing to do with him," she lied. "It’s just a job."
Her father tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, frowning. "Then drop it. We don’t need the business, and I don’t like him around you. I know he’s had a tough life, but he’s trouble."
"I’ll be fine," she said firmly. "There’s nothing going on between Logan and me."
Her father didn’t look reassured. "I know you’ll do the right thing. Just be careful."
"In case you missed the last five years, I also am no longer a teenager, Dad."
"I’m not sure I ever bought you as a teenager," he said ruefully. He left her with a kiss on the forehead.
Careful. No problem. She was an expert at careful.
There were two messages from Jeff waiting for her. "I missed you last night, babe. Call me." Delete. "They told me you called in sick. I’m worried. Call me." Delete. She didn’t want to talk to Jeff, but visions of Logan still hovered on the periphery of her brain. She picked up the phone and dialed.
"I was wondering if you’d dropped off the face of the earth. You ok?" Jeff’s familiar voice came over the line, and she felt the tension of the last 24 hours dissolve through her veins.
"I had an emergency at my dad’s office. I- I had to take a last minute trip down to LA for a case." It was almost the truth.
"Hey, I understand. My girlfriend is a hot-shot detective."
"And a badass photographer," she said. "Don’t sell me short."
"It would be hard for you to get much shorter. Just…let me know next time, ok? I worry about you chasing bail jumpers around LA with your taser."
"Sorry," she said softly. "Next time I’ll call."
God, he was so easy. Question, answer, concern, reassurance. Done and done. She’d started to think her inability to ignore Logan was an indication of something twisted inside of her, that it was somehow her fault. But if she could manage to maintain a relationship with someone as normal as Jeff, then she couldn’t be too fucked up, right?
Which meant Logan really was just that irritating.
"Have you given any more thought to what I asked?" Jeff lowered his voice a notch to his crooner voice. The voice he made love with. The voice he proposed with.
"It’s been hard not to," she said truthfully, turning the ring around on her finger.
"And…did you…"
Her vocal cords stretched to the snapping point.
She was going to marry him; she had devoted two years of her life to him, knowing it would happen. But when he finally asked her, the steady path they’d been on seemed to drop off around her. Now she didn’t know where to take the next step. She slid the engagement ring off her finger and into her bedside drawer, struggling with the words.
"Never mind," he said quickly. "I promised, I know."
It took him five more minutes of badgering to convince her to let him spend the night at her place. The thought of sex with Jeff left her vaguely cold at the moment, but she wasn’t about to spend another night dreaming of a certain spoiled ex-boyfriend with intense eyes. She didn’t want to wake up with Logan all around her, remembering how they slammed together like magnets every time he kissed her. She just had to get by until she found Trina. Then everything would fall into place again.
Chapter Five