(no subject)
Veronica Mars Fic: Post Partum
A Veronica Mars FanFic
Title: Post Partum, Part 1~6/?
Author: Zaftig_darling
Pairing/Character: Logan/Veronica
Word Count: 6,059
Rating: R (this part)
Summary: motherhood changes Veronica
Spoilers: All three seasons
Warnings: This may turn fetishy in future parts. I'm posting what I have written in an effort to shake loose some writer's block.
Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of Veronica Mars. No copyright infringement is intended.
Many thanks to vanessagalorefor the beta, and to chynajand p2880for the encouragement.
Part I
Logan Echolls pulls his green Jaguar XJ into its spot in the garage, next to the black Lexus belonging to his wife. The Jag is new, recently replacing his Ferrari Scaglietti, his beloved coupe benched in favor of the sedan with its (necessary) back seat. Logan glances back at the rear seat, and considers the ridiculously expensive car seat that is its only occupant ~ a car seat that has transported its intended passenger a grand total of three times.
As he exits the car, he examines his wife’s Lexus (a compromise between the “ridiculous” armored Hummer he wanted for her, and theToyota hybrid she wanted.) The car, with a infant seat identical to the one in his own back seat, does not appear to have moved from the garage since he left, five days ago.
Logan runs his hands nervously through his hair. He is anxious. His conversation with Elsa, this morning, has made him tense.
He opens the door into his home, the enormous kitchen deserted and spotless. He finds Elsa in the family room, watching an old Seinfeld rerun.
“Where is she?” he asks her.
“In your room,” she answers, the slight lilt of her Swedish accent just barely noticeable.
“Has she eaten anything today?”
“She had, perhaps, a few bites of scrambled egg that Mrs. Navarro cooked for her this morning. And she had some crackers, about an hour ago.” Elsa smiles at him apologetically.
Logan grabs a Yoplait Smoothie from the refrigerator and navigates the staircase and two long hallways, before coming to the door of the master bedroom suite.
He cracks the door slowly. He sees her, lying on the bed, her back to him. She is wearing Hello Kitty pajama pants and a white tank top. She is so small, from this angle, she could be a twelve-year-old girl.
He approaches the bed quietly - she is sleeping, although she has pushed all of the blankets and pillows off the end of the bed. Next to her, the baby, eight weeks old now, is nestled against her, tiny fingers holding the fabric of her tank top, nursing enthusiastically.
At the sound of Logan’s footsteps, the baby stops feeding, pulling his mouth away from his mother’s breast. He is smiling goofily, happily drunk on his mother’s milk - a small trickle sliding down his chin.
Logan shifts his gaze back and forth, from the plump, happy baby to his wife’s exposed chest. He is struck by competing emotions - overwhelming tenderness for the infant and overwhelming lust at the sight of his wife’s engorged breasts. His groin tightens involuntarily, but he tries to push those thoughts away.
His wife has not moved, and Logan doesn’t want her to wake up. Her sleeplessness has been a terrible problem these past weeks. Putting the yogurt down on the bedside table, he leans over, carefully, and gently picks up the baby, dressed in a green sleeper covered with tiny, grinning frogs. The cotton is incredibly soft to the touch as he lays the child against his chest.
“Hey there, Jonah,” he whispers, pressing a tiny kiss against the baby’s temple. “How about you give your mom a break for a few minutes?” He leaves the bedroom and walks back down to the living room.
Elsa is waiting for him.
“Do you think you could take him to the playroom for a bit?” Logan says to Elsa, indicating a room far on the other side of the house - a room that has been decorated with whimsical murals and filled with every toy imaginable for the 0-to-6-month-old set. “If he cries, I don’t want him to wake her. She’s asleep now.”
“That's good, because she hasn’t really slept in days, Logan,” Elsa says. “I think she only falls asleep when she lies down to nurse him…”
“You’re the nanny,” he says, quietly, so as not to upset the baby. “You’re supposed to help her. She's not supposed to be so exhausted when she has a full time nanny...”
“I’m JONAH’S nanny, not hers,” she replies, equally frustrated. “I’m the nanny to a baby whose mother won’t put him down. What would you like me to do, precisely? Wrestle him away from her? This is why I telephoned you this morning. She's making herself sick.”
Logan looks down at Jonah, cuddled against shoulder. He is chewing on Logan's shirt in an extremely adorable way. Logan nuzzles his forehead against his son's, and for a few minutes is lost in simply watching him.
Elsa reaches up her capable hands to take the baby from him, and he hands him to her, after kissing Jonah's forehead lightly.
"She was just nursing him now?" Elsa asks, and Logan nods his head.
Elsa thinks for a moment and says, "Maybe we can get her three or four hours of sleep before he needs her again."
"Let's try that," Logan says.
He watches Elsa disappear down the hallway with his son. He heads back up the stairs to the bedroom he shares with his wife.
She has not moved at all, seeming to have dropped into a deep sleep.
He slides his shoes off and lies down on the other side of the bed and watches her sleeping.
Part 2
Logan lies on his side watching his wife sleep. Her white tank top had been pushed up to allow Jonah access, and now the shirt barely covers the tops of her breasts. Logan eyes his wife's newly impressive cleavage hungrily, but is also possessed with a desire to pull the shirt down to cover her. In sleep she looks incredibly vulnerable, and, aside from her heavy breasts, she has become too thin too fast, and he can count her ribs beneath skin faintly scarred from where her tiny body stretched to accommodate her pregnancy.
Looking at her, he is amazed to think that her body produced an entire human being ~ an entire human being who embodies pieces of the two of them. He is amazed that she continues to nourish Jonah’s body with her own. He is in awe of what she has brought to him, to them. But he is afraid that she is putting so much of herself into Jonah,that she herself is fading away. He is terrified of losing her into the darkness that is haunting her these days.
He wants to pull a blanket over her but fears that any attempt to do so will wake her, and so he simply watches, feeling very far away from her, feeling as if the three feet between them in the bed is as wide and impassable as the ocean.
Nine months earlier
Veronica walked out of their bathroom already dressed for work in a conservative gray pant suit. She had only been with the Federal Prosecutor's Office for a year but was already assisting a senior Prosecutor in handling some of the most difficult cases in the Narcotics division. Her daily involvement investigating drug mules and outlaw motorcycle gangs made Logan extremely nervous.
Logan was still in bed, reading through some script revisions on his latest project. He shot Veronica a leering look as she walked toward him.
"Hey pretty lady, how ‘bout you let me make you late for work?" he waggled his eyebrows.
Veronica bit her lip and handed him a white pen-like stick she had been holding in her hand.
"What's this?" he asked, furrowing his brow as he examined the device.
A look of concern and distress passed over Veronica's face.
"Um...remember a few weeks ago when I had food poisoning?"
Logan nodded his head, remembering an extremely unpleasant three days that his wife had spent puking constantly. Logan had ultimately taken her to the emergency room where they had diagnosed her with food poisoning and dehydration.
Veronica looked at the floor. "I think I must have, um, 'lost' some of my pills. I, uh...that's a pregnancy test. It's a POSITIVE pregnancy test."
Logan appeared to have been slapped in the face as he dropped the pregnancy test on the bed.
He stood up and began pacing in the area between their bed and a massive armoire that housed a panel television and a stereo system. He looked at her, disbelief on his handsome face.
Abruptly he stalked from their bedroom, slamming the door behind him.
"Logan!" she called after him, but she heard his heavy footsteps continue on down the hall, then the echo of another slamming door.
She followed him out the room to the heavy mahogany door that led to the den. She tried the handle but found it locked.
"Logan!" she banged her hand against the door.
"LOGAN!" She banged again.
"I cannot talk to you right now, Veronica," she heard him say from the other side of the door.
"Why are you acting like this?" she demanded.
There was no answer from the other side of the door.
Veronica checked her watch, a delicate Movado Logan had given her for her birthday last year. She didn't have time to do this right now.
"Logan," she said, a note of practicality and no-nonsense in her tone. "I have a unit meeting in 25 minutes and I can't miss it. But we’ll be done by 11:30 and I’m coming home for lunch to talk about this."
Silence.
"I love you," she said, quietly, and she walked downstairs, to the kitchen, where Mrs. Navarro greeted her with a travel mug of coffee and a banana. "Have a good morning, Mrs. Veronica," she said, "and is your Logan awake yet? Maybe he wants some pancakes this morning?"
“Um...I don't think he's hungry right now," she said. "I wouldn't waste your time cooking anything unless he asks. He's....not himself this morning," she finished, as she walked out the door, worried about Logan and anxious not to be late for her unit meeting.
************************************************************
Veronica returned home at lunch time to find that Logan had remained barricaded in the den for the entire morning. At the end of her rope with his antics, she located a hairpin and picked the lock.
Logan was slumped in the heavy leather chair in front of his desk, a silver flask in front of him. From experience, Veronica knew the flask was full of Captain Morgan's rum, although it had been quite a long time since she had last found him with the flask in hand.
"It’s 11:45 in the morning, Logan. Don't you think it’s a little early to go ‘sailing with the Captain’?" she said, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice.
She assumed that he had spent the morning tormenting himself with thoughts of Aaron, and what a lousy father he had been~ no doubt worried that Aaron would forever color Logan's own ability to be a father to this unexpected child.
At the sound of her voice, he looked up, but seemed to gaze right through her.
He ran his fingers through his hair, his voice very cold as he angrily demanded, “How did this happen, Veronica? How?"
His wife stared at him, stunned by his reaction.
In all honestly, Veronica was still in state of shock about the news herself. She had only been out of law school for a year, she was only 24, and she was still getting her feet under her at the Justice Department. A pregnancy had not even been on her radar. She expected Logan to be worried about what kind of father he would be. She expected him to be surprised, even dismayed, but his apparent anger over the news is entirely unexpected.
"I just told you, I was so sick, the birth control pills must not have gotten into my system, I know it's not something we ever talked about..." she stopped speaking as she watched barely suppressed rage cross over his features.
"No, Ver.on.i.ca." he said, each syllable clipped and angry. "How. Did. THIS. Happen?"
His anger was contagious and she snapped, "Well, gee, Logan. I don't know, but, I seem to remember something from sex ed. about sperm meeting egg, and I'm pretty damn sure I didn't get pregnant BY MYSELF!"
His thinly controlled anger was uncaged, and, abruptly, the man in front of her became the boy who had smashed her headlights, the boy who had broken a lamp in her father's apartment.
He stood up from the chair and slammed his body against a small table holding a delicate vase. The vase wobbled and fell to floor, where, miraculously, a small area rug prevented it from breaking.
"That's a fucking Labino vase!" she hissed. "A fucking Labino vase that YOU HAD TO HAVE to finish your mother’s collection and that you paid way too much for and that you FLEW TO CLEVELAND to buy. What the fuck is wrong with you? This is unexpected for me too, but, evidently we're about to be parents, so, you need to stop acting like a 3- year-old!"
"WHO IS IT?" he smashed his fist against the wall.
Veronica, confused and overwhelmed by this entire morning, began to shake. "What are you talking about? What do you mean? I don't know who this baby is, it's, like, 3 millimeters long and I just found out about it this morning. What is the matter with you?" Her voice cracked.
Logan looked at her, his face purple with rage and hurt. "Who is he, Veronica? Who the hell have you been fucking?"
Part 3
Logan wakes with a start, realizing that he has drifted off to sleep watching over Veronica's slumber. Glancing at the clock he sees that he's been dozing for about 45 minutes, having a bad dream about the day Veronica told him she was pregnant. Thinking about that day ~ and the ugly days that followed, the only time in the long roller-coaster ride of their relationship that it had ever even crossed his mind that Veronica might have cheated on him ~ nauseates him and gives him a headache at the same time. He gets up as quietly as he can and walks into the bathroom to find an aspirin and a drink of water.
Coming back into their bedroom he finds a frantic Veronica, on her knees beside the bed, reaching beneath the dust ruffle and making a small, barely audible, sound of distress.
She is startled by the sound of him re-entering the room and, seeing him, begins to shiver.
Her chin quivers as she says, "Logan, I..." her lips purse and brow furrows, exhaustion and confusion playing across her pretty face.” I was just lying down for a minute, I was so tired, and...Oh, god, Logan, I lost the baby."
She dives back under the bed, reaching desperately for a child that isn't there.
"Veronica," he says quietly, crossing the room quickly. He pulls her up off the floor and into his arms, but she fights him weakly, still trying to wedge her whole body beneath the bed. "Logan, he must be under there, I don't..."
Logan presses his mouth against her ear and says, "Veronica, honey, calm down. Jonah is downstairs with Elsa. He's fine. I wanted you to get some sleep, he's fine. He's fine."
Veronica stares at him blankly for a few seconds.
“He’s with Elsa?” she says finally, her voice quiet, as if speaking is an enormous effort.
For a moment she allows Logan to hold her in his arms. “I’m just so tired,” she whispers.
He picks her up like a child and starts to lay her down on the bed. “You need to go back to sleep for a little while,” he murmurs into her hair.
Her eyes snap open and she struggles to sit up. “Wait a minute, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Vancouver, you had to go, it was urgent, they only had a few days to get it right, you left us here to go take care of it…” She is shaking her head, trying to make sense of things, and unable to focus.
She does not remember the last time she slept for more than a few minutes.
She does not remember the last time she did not feel like she was drowning.
“I flew back from Vancouver this morning," he says, omitting the fact that Elsa called him home with the news that Veronica's insomnia and refusal to eat had worsened in his absence.
"Everything is under control on the set, and, honestly, Veronica, I was worried about you. I was worried about leaving you here, but I thought that having Elsa here full time would help you. I thought maybe having her here would let you relax a little, maybe you would be able to go meet Mac or Wallace for lunch. I thought maybe you would feel better without me in your hair.”
She stares at her husband as if he had suddenly begun speaking Japanese.
“I need to go get Jonah,” she says, “he must be hungry, what if he’s crying…”
“Veronica,” he interrupts her. “He’s fine. He’s absolutely fine, but, you need some rest. Please lie down. Elsa will bring him to you when he needs you, I promise.”
She looks at him, almost gratefully, but she is clearly torn by her desire to sleep and her need to know whether Jonah needs her.
(And he always needs her, she thinks to herself. He always needs her and she feels tremendously guilty as she allows sink back into the comfort of her bed as Logan picks the duvet off the floor and pulls it up over her shoulders.)
Part 4
Nine Months Earlier
Veronica Echolls sat at her desk in her small, but neatly organized, office. Although it was extremely unlike her, she had closed the office door, shutting her off from the assistant she shared with three other prosecutors.
Allegedly, she was writing a brief regarding the circumstances surrounding a border search that had resulted in the seizure of two kilos of cocaine from the wheel wells of a Mercedes Benz belonging to the daughter of a prominent San Diego businessman. In reality, she was composing an email to her husband, trying to make sense of his outburst at lunch.
Veronica had fled the den after his bizarre, and totally unfounded, demand that she tell him who else she had been “fucking”. She had run past Mrs. Navarro in the kitchen, who had called after her, “Don’t you want your lunch, Miss Veronica?” Veronica had not even turned around to respond, instead slamming the door and jumping into her car, gunning the engine in her haste to get away from Logan.
In the two hours that had passed, she had rocketed through a range of emotions, from fury to despair, but, above all, she was extremely confused. Why on earth would Logan immediately jump from the news of her pregnancy to an assumption that Veronica was having an affair? Her feelings were deeply hurt. She was offended.
Veronica carried a lot of baggage as far as her mother was concerned. She had never forgiven Lianne for so many things, but, at the top of the list of “Things I Cannot Forgive My Mother” was Lianne’s long time affair with Jake Kane, Lianne’s betrayal of Keith Mars. Veronica made a point to distinguish herself from her mother in almost every aspect of her life. Logan knew how hurt Veronica had been when she learned of Lianne’s affair; Logan knew how she ached for her father over this. How could Logan possibly suspect Veronica could do the same thing? And why?
As she was editing her email to Logan for the third time (trying to reach a happy medium between shrill fury and levelheaded inquiry into Logan’s reasoning (or lack thereof), her computer “dinged,” indicating a new message had been received. She clicked on her email program to find a message from her husband’s assistant.
From: Gabe.Skow@LillyLynnProductions.com
To: Veronica.Echolls@usdoj.gov
Re: attachment
Mrs. Echolls,
Attached please find a newspaper clipping that your husband requested I send to you. He asked me to tell you that he has to be in L.A. this evening to meet with the people from Warner Brothers.
Thanks,
Gabe
Gabriel Skow
Assistant to Logan Echolls
LillyLynn Productions
San Diego, California
Veronica clicked on the attachment, which revealed two small newspaper articles that had been scanned into an Adobe Acrobat file. The snippets did not reveal which newspaper they had been cut from.
Veronica quickly read the two articles, which did little to calm her growing distress.
Louisville, KY - The fourteen year old son of action star Aaron Echolls has been rushed from the set of his father's new movie, Wild Horses, after an apparent accident involving one of the movie's equine stars. An emergency crew was summoned to the set late yesterday evening, where, reportedly, Aaron Echolls found his son unconscious and injured in the stall of the horse barn where the film’s animals are being housed. Initial reports indicated that the boy may have been kicked by one of the horses. The teenager, Logan Echolls, had been with his father on the set of the movie for several weeks during his summer break from Neptune High School.
The second article had evidently been written a week or so later.
Memphis, TN - Logan Echolls, the teenage son of movie stars Aaron Echolls and Lynn Lester Echolls, has been released after a six day stay at Memphis Children's Hospital. The boy suffered two broken ribs and numerous other internal injuries when he was kicked by a horse on the set of his father's new movie, Wild Horses. The boy was transferred to Memphis Children's after doctors in Louisville determined his injuries needed specialized care.
For the first time since running from their home after their fight, Veronica tried to dial her husband's cell phone. It rolled over immediately to voice mail, where, for the first time that Veronica could recall, Logan failed to share an insightful quote, instructing any callers to simply leave a message at the beep. "It's me," Veronica said quickly. "I just read the information you had sent to me. I'm angry with you, I don't understand what this has to do with anything, but, if you want to talk to me, you know how to reach me."
Part 5
Nine Months Earlier
Logan had been missing for three days ~ the e-mail from had been the last she’d heard from him.
Veronica had given up on calling his cell phone and had started calling their condo in L.A., but there was no answer.
There was also no answer at the apartment (inherited from Aaron) in Chicago or at the one in New York. She ransacked the safe in the den, finding his passport, relieved to know he had not left the country. She was dismayed to find about $10,000 in cash missing. (More dismayed by the fact that she was unable to track his credit card purchases if he was using cash instead of his Black Amex, than she was about the cash itself. Money was something that came with the territory when she married Logan, but, it wasn't something that she spent a lot of time thinking about.)
Out of desperation she had phoned Trina, and tried to subtly ask if she had spoken with Logan. Trina, surprised, told Veronica that she hadn't spoken to her brother in over two months. In typical ‘clueless-Trina’ fashion, she didn't appear to pick up on the fact that Veronica hadn't spoken to him either and was actually looking for him.
While she had her on the phone, Veronica astonished herself by asking Trina if she remembered anything about Logan being injured by a horse on the set of one of their father's films. Trina was uncharacteristically quiet for a few seconds, and then said, "That's just something we don't talk about, Veronica. Ever. I've got to go, so, um, give my brother a big kiss from me, okay?" Veronica had hung up the phone more confused than ever.
***********************************
Logan had pulled a disappearing act on her once before, almost six years ago. After leaving the Hearst cafeteria, after bringing the wrath of the son of a Russian mobster on his head, after sharing a look with her that Veronica had interpreted to mean that they would probably be naked in his bed at the Grand within a few days time, Logan had taken off without a word to anyone.
Veronica would later learn that he had left Neptune with no real idea of where he wanted to go, or why, but simply knowing that he needed to come to grips with everything that he had lost - Lilly, his mother, Aaron...(to the extent that he gave a damn about Aaron). He had gotten into his Land Rover and had just kept driving. He had ended up weeks later in Montreal, a city his mother had always loved visiting.
He holed up in a hotel in the old quarter, and he began to write, obsessively, sometimes for more than fourteen hours a day. Logan told Veronica later that he had never pursued anything with such purpose. He didn't stop writing until two months later, when he emerged with a screen play that he tried to sell to any number of Hollywood studios, through a contact his mother's old agent had given him, using a pseudonym.
One studio offered to buy the screen play after learning it was, in fact, written by Aaron Echolls son, but they insisted that Logan relinquish creative control over the project. Logan had turned them down, and instead had taken a loan against his Trust Fund and inheritance, and LillyLynn Productions had been born. Calling in favors from people in the industry who had liked and respected his mother, Logan put together a cast and a crew and, on a shoestring budget over a ten-week period, his movie had come to life. Taking an enormous creative risk, they shot the film in black and white, with a deliberate film noir feel.
In the meantime, Veronica, who had tracked Logan's location by following his credit card charges, assumed that he was drinking, partying, and, probably snorting coke off the bellies of French-Canadian hookers. (Her feelings towards him, and his abandonment of her (as she saw it), were rather unkind at the time). She had thrown herself into her sophomore year studies, broken up with Piz, and spent most of her free time with Wallace and also Mac, who had, inexplicably, begun dating Eli Navarro.
Then one night, in May of 2008, after final exams had just ended, Veronica, Wallace, Mac and Eli were preparing for a mindless movie marathon, when a news blurb on Entertainment Tonight caught them all by surprise.
It seemed that the son of murdered (and murderous) Aaron Echolls had premiered his movie and his new production company at the Cannes Film Festival to overwhelmingly positive reviews. The movie ~ the story of the viciously abused daughter of a US Senator, who discovered that her father had orchestrated her mother's alleged suicide by forcibly throwing her off a bridge into the Potomac ~ had received Cannes’ prize for best screenplay, nearly unheard of for a first time screen writer .
The Entertainment Tonight clip showed Logan Echolls, standing on Cannes’ famed red carpet, with his arm wrapped around the shoulders of his film's star, an actress who was, without a doubt, a dead ringer for Veronica.
As they stared, dumbfounded at the television, Mac had looked at her friend and asked, "Veronica? Did you go to the French Riviera last week and not tell us?"
Veronica, surprised at the jolt of seeing Logan again, even just on television, after all these months, shook her head.
"No, that's that actress from Heroes. Kirsten Bell or Kristy Bell or Kristen Bell or something. What's Logan doing with her? She's WAY too old for him," she had huffed, denying the extreme jealousy that had overcome her.
(In fact, the following week, PEOPLE ran a cover story featuring a shot of Logan with the actress, as well as file photos of two other stars from the NBC hit show, with a headline that read, "THE BARELY LEGAL ROMANCES OF NBC's HEROES." The actress later sent out a press release stating that she was not romantically involved with Logan Echolls, that they were friends and that she 'greatly admired his astonishing creativity.' (Veronica had actually growled when she read that statement, assuming (wrongly) that the actress was alluding to Logan's undeniably creative skills in the bedroom.)
For weeks afterward, Veronica had poured through news articles ("Echolls Films Brings New Life to American Noir"), and time and time again she had dialed his cell number, but always hung up before hitting "SEND".
In mid-June, she had received an email of only one line, "Please come to L.A. to see my movie," with a time and a date, and the address of a small art house theater that was showing Logan’s film. Veronica had arrived to find him waiting for her in front of the movie theater, and the next day numerous paparazzi had run photographs of the lip-locked couple, proclaiming, 'Echolls and Bell have teary and passionate reconciliation on Los Angeles street." (Bell's boyfriend, a comedian who had not found the pictures funny, had released an angry statement insisting that the HEROES star had been in Rome with him at the time and demanded a retraction.)
Since that afternoon in L.A., when they had watched his movie, alone, together, she and Logan had rarely been separated for more than a few days, and even then, they were always in contact by phone and text. The last three days had been the longest period of time they had been incommunicado since the year they had spent apart so long ago.
(Veronica also reflected on the fact that they were MARRIED now, so, his choice to vanish at this point seemed significantly more hurtful, not to mention his accusation of her unfaithfulness.)
*********************************************
Veronica sat in her kitchen, staring into a bowl of Rocky Road, trying to decide what to do next to locate her wayward (and clearly confused and misguided) husband, when she heard the doorbell ring.
A few moments later, Mrs. Navarro came looking for her.
"Mrs. Veronica, there is a man here. He says," Mrs. Navarro looked concerned and made the sign of the cross over her chest, "he says that he is a doctor and that he needs to speak to you about Mr. Logan."
Veronica's eyes widened in fear. "Where is he?" she asked.
"In the sitting room, at the front of the house."
Veronica made her way towards the front of the sprawling Spanish style mansion that she and Logan had called home for the past two years. They rarely used the front entry way or the formal sitting room, where she found a thin man of about 60.
I'm Veronica Echolls," she said hurriedly. "Do you know something about where Logan is? Is he okay? Has he been hurt?"
The man extended his had to shake hers. "I'm Dr. Eugene Gallagher," he said. "Logan is fine. Well, physically, Logan is fine. He arrived at my office yesterday afternoon, in state of great distress. After speaking with him for some time, he asked me to come and talk to you. I hesitate to get so personally involved in a private matter, but...to be honest, I do feel a sense of obligation to Logan."
Veronica stared at the doctor without a word, and raised one eyebrow questioningly.
"There were...things...in Logan's medical history...I probably should have asked more questions."
"What kind of doctor are you, exactly, Dr. Gallagher?" she inquired.
"I'm a pediatric urologist. Logan came to me as a patient after he returned to California after being released from Memphis Children's Hospital when he was 14 years old. He had been, or so I was told, attacked by a horse."
Part 6
In the waning afternoon light, Logan stares at the back of Veronica’s head, where she has crumpled back down into their king size bed.
He is expecting her to fall back to sleep immediately, considering the extent of her exhaustion, but, instead, he hears her breathing become rapid and erratic.
He slides himself onto the bed behind her, and tentatively reaches out to rub her back.
Her shoulder blades tense as he begins to rub slow circles on her skin.
“What are you doing?” she whispers.
He stops rubbing her back. “I was just…trying to make you feel better.”
“You’re not getting laid right now,” she says, her voice cracking, her breathing still rapid.
He pulls away from her, hurt. “That wasn’t…I was just…trying to calm you down. Can’t I touch you without you assuming it’s about sex?”
(Internally he adds, “Which we haven’t had in almost 10 weeks, but who’s counting?”)
He starts to push himself off the bed when he hears a small strangled sound from her - she is crying. Very, very quietly, Veronica is crying.
He wraps his arms around her and pulls her towards him, despite her resistance, until he has pulled her body into him, her forehead resting against his chest.
“Please don’t cry, Veronica. Please don’t. I’m sorry. Whatever I did, whatever I did that’s making you cry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it, I don’t know what it was or is, but, I swear, I didn’t want to make you cry.”
He feels her body relax against him, but, her tears come harder, and louder. They lay together, entwined around each other, for fully ten minutes, as Veronica cries herself out.
Logan is bewildered, and uncertain. He knows only that he is tired of letting her push him away, and that he wants to keep holding her tight.
In the quiet aftermath of her crying jag, he hears her whisper his name.
“Logan?”
“Yes?”
“I’m so tired,” she says.
“I know, hon. I know you are. You need to sleep. That’s what you need to do right now,” he answers, sliding his fingers through her hair, pulling through some tangles.
“I’m afraid,” she says, so softly he almost missed it.
He is surprised. Veronica? HIS Veronica? The woman who took on his father? And the boy who had killed their classmates? The woman who regularly stared in the faces of vicious narcotics dealers and sent them to prison? His Veronica wasn’t afraid of anything, a fact that, on more than one occasion, terrified Logan.
“What are you afraid of?” he asks, curious.
She doesn’t answer him for so long that he wonders if she has fallen back to sleep, before being able to tell him what it is she is so afraid of that it is keeping her from sleeping.
But then he hears her.
“I’m afraid,” she pauses. “I’m afraid….I’m afraid that if I fall asleep Jonah will stop breathing.”
He doesn’t answer her, so she repeats herself. “Logan, I’m afraid, I’m…I’m petrified that if I fall asleep Jonah won’t be able to breathe.”
Logan pulls her in closer to him and kisses the top of her head. He wants to tell her that her fear is unfounded. He wants to tell her that babies don’t just stop breathing simply because their mothers fall asleep. Instead he picks up the phone from the bedside table and pages the extension in the playroom.
“Elsa,” he says, when she picks up. “How’s Jonah?”
“He’s fine, he’s having a bit of a nap and enjoying his binky,” she answers.
“Thank you, Elsa,” he says.
He turns back to Veronica, “he’s fine. He’s breathing. Elsa won’t let him stop breathing.”
“You don’t understand,” she turns away from him.
“Explain it to me, then,” he whispers.
“It doesn’t matter that I KNOW that he’s fine right this second. It doesn’t take away the FEAR that he won’t be, in the next second, in the second I fall asleep. He might stop breathing, Logan. He might stop, anytime I fall asleep…he might.”
As Logan gently strokes his hands up and down her arms, Veronica begins to cry again. Having no answers, Logan holds her tighter, and wonders, helplessly, what to do.
TO BE CONTINUED
On to part 7 http://zaftig-darling.livejournal.com/4777.html
A Veronica Mars FanFic
Title: Post Partum, Part 1~6/?
Author: Zaftig_darling
Pairing/Character: Logan/Veronica
Word Count: 6,059
Rating: R (this part)
Summary: motherhood changes Veronica
Spoilers: All three seasons
Warnings: This may turn fetishy in future parts. I'm posting what I have written in an effort to shake loose some writer's block.
Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of Veronica Mars. No copyright infringement is intended.
Many thanks to vanessagalorefor the beta, and to chynajand p2880for the encouragement.
Part I
Logan Echolls pulls his green Jaguar XJ into its spot in the garage, next to the black Lexus belonging to his wife. The Jag is new, recently replacing his Ferrari Scaglietti, his beloved coupe benched in favor of the sedan with its (necessary) back seat. Logan glances back at the rear seat, and considers the ridiculously expensive car seat that is its only occupant ~ a car seat that has transported its intended passenger a grand total of three times.
As he exits the car, he examines his wife’s Lexus (a compromise between the “ridiculous” armored Hummer he wanted for her, and theToyota hybrid she wanted.) The car, with a infant seat identical to the one in his own back seat, does not appear to have moved from the garage since he left, five days ago.
Logan runs his hands nervously through his hair. He is anxious. His conversation with Elsa, this morning, has made him tense.
He opens the door into his home, the enormous kitchen deserted and spotless. He finds Elsa in the family room, watching an old Seinfeld rerun.
“Where is she?” he asks her.
“In your room,” she answers, the slight lilt of her Swedish accent just barely noticeable.
“Has she eaten anything today?”
“She had, perhaps, a few bites of scrambled egg that Mrs. Navarro cooked for her this morning. And she had some crackers, about an hour ago.” Elsa smiles at him apologetically.
Logan grabs a Yoplait Smoothie from the refrigerator and navigates the staircase and two long hallways, before coming to the door of the master bedroom suite.
He cracks the door slowly. He sees her, lying on the bed, her back to him. She is wearing Hello Kitty pajama pants and a white tank top. She is so small, from this angle, she could be a twelve-year-old girl.
He approaches the bed quietly - she is sleeping, although she has pushed all of the blankets and pillows off the end of the bed. Next to her, the baby, eight weeks old now, is nestled against her, tiny fingers holding the fabric of her tank top, nursing enthusiastically.
At the sound of Logan’s footsteps, the baby stops feeding, pulling his mouth away from his mother’s breast. He is smiling goofily, happily drunk on his mother’s milk - a small trickle sliding down his chin.
Logan shifts his gaze back and forth, from the plump, happy baby to his wife’s exposed chest. He is struck by competing emotions - overwhelming tenderness for the infant and overwhelming lust at the sight of his wife’s engorged breasts. His groin tightens involuntarily, but he tries to push those thoughts away.
His wife has not moved, and Logan doesn’t want her to wake up. Her sleeplessness has been a terrible problem these past weeks. Putting the yogurt down on the bedside table, he leans over, carefully, and gently picks up the baby, dressed in a green sleeper covered with tiny, grinning frogs. The cotton is incredibly soft to the touch as he lays the child against his chest.
“Hey there, Jonah,” he whispers, pressing a tiny kiss against the baby’s temple. “How about you give your mom a break for a few minutes?” He leaves the bedroom and walks back down to the living room.
Elsa is waiting for him.
“Do you think you could take him to the playroom for a bit?” Logan says to Elsa, indicating a room far on the other side of the house - a room that has been decorated with whimsical murals and filled with every toy imaginable for the 0-to-6-month-old set. “If he cries, I don’t want him to wake her. She’s asleep now.”
“That's good, because she hasn’t really slept in days, Logan,” Elsa says. “I think she only falls asleep when she lies down to nurse him…”
“You’re the nanny,” he says, quietly, so as not to upset the baby. “You’re supposed to help her. She's not supposed to be so exhausted when she has a full time nanny...”
“I’m JONAH’S nanny, not hers,” she replies, equally frustrated. “I’m the nanny to a baby whose mother won’t put him down. What would you like me to do, precisely? Wrestle him away from her? This is why I telephoned you this morning. She's making herself sick.”
Logan looks down at Jonah, cuddled against shoulder. He is chewing on Logan's shirt in an extremely adorable way. Logan nuzzles his forehead against his son's, and for a few minutes is lost in simply watching him.
Elsa reaches up her capable hands to take the baby from him, and he hands him to her, after kissing Jonah's forehead lightly.
"She was just nursing him now?" Elsa asks, and Logan nods his head.
Elsa thinks for a moment and says, "Maybe we can get her three or four hours of sleep before he needs her again."
"Let's try that," Logan says.
He watches Elsa disappear down the hallway with his son. He heads back up the stairs to the bedroom he shares with his wife.
She has not moved at all, seeming to have dropped into a deep sleep.
He slides his shoes off and lies down on the other side of the bed and watches her sleeping.
Part 2
Logan lies on his side watching his wife sleep. Her white tank top had been pushed up to allow Jonah access, and now the shirt barely covers the tops of her breasts. Logan eyes his wife's newly impressive cleavage hungrily, but is also possessed with a desire to pull the shirt down to cover her. In sleep she looks incredibly vulnerable, and, aside from her heavy breasts, she has become too thin too fast, and he can count her ribs beneath skin faintly scarred from where her tiny body stretched to accommodate her pregnancy.
Looking at her, he is amazed to think that her body produced an entire human being ~ an entire human being who embodies pieces of the two of them. He is amazed that she continues to nourish Jonah’s body with her own. He is in awe of what she has brought to him, to them. But he is afraid that she is putting so much of herself into Jonah,that she herself is fading away. He is terrified of losing her into the darkness that is haunting her these days.
He wants to pull a blanket over her but fears that any attempt to do so will wake her, and so he simply watches, feeling very far away from her, feeling as if the three feet between them in the bed is as wide and impassable as the ocean.
Nine months earlier
Veronica walked out of their bathroom already dressed for work in a conservative gray pant suit. She had only been with the Federal Prosecutor's Office for a year but was already assisting a senior Prosecutor in handling some of the most difficult cases in the Narcotics division. Her daily involvement investigating drug mules and outlaw motorcycle gangs made Logan extremely nervous.
Logan was still in bed, reading through some script revisions on his latest project. He shot Veronica a leering look as she walked toward him.
"Hey pretty lady, how ‘bout you let me make you late for work?" he waggled his eyebrows.
Veronica bit her lip and handed him a white pen-like stick she had been holding in her hand.
"What's this?" he asked, furrowing his brow as he examined the device.
A look of concern and distress passed over Veronica's face.
"Um...remember a few weeks ago when I had food poisoning?"
Logan nodded his head, remembering an extremely unpleasant three days that his wife had spent puking constantly. Logan had ultimately taken her to the emergency room where they had diagnosed her with food poisoning and dehydration.
Veronica looked at the floor. "I think I must have, um, 'lost' some of my pills. I, uh...that's a pregnancy test. It's a POSITIVE pregnancy test."
Logan appeared to have been slapped in the face as he dropped the pregnancy test on the bed.
He stood up and began pacing in the area between their bed and a massive armoire that housed a panel television and a stereo system. He looked at her, disbelief on his handsome face.
Abruptly he stalked from their bedroom, slamming the door behind him.
"Logan!" she called after him, but she heard his heavy footsteps continue on down the hall, then the echo of another slamming door.
She followed him out the room to the heavy mahogany door that led to the den. She tried the handle but found it locked.
"Logan!" she banged her hand against the door.
"LOGAN!" She banged again.
"I cannot talk to you right now, Veronica," she heard him say from the other side of the door.
"Why are you acting like this?" she demanded.
There was no answer from the other side of the door.
Veronica checked her watch, a delicate Movado Logan had given her for her birthday last year. She didn't have time to do this right now.
"Logan," she said, a note of practicality and no-nonsense in her tone. "I have a unit meeting in 25 minutes and I can't miss it. But we’ll be done by 11:30 and I’m coming home for lunch to talk about this."
Silence.
"I love you," she said, quietly, and she walked downstairs, to the kitchen, where Mrs. Navarro greeted her with a travel mug of coffee and a banana. "Have a good morning, Mrs. Veronica," she said, "and is your Logan awake yet? Maybe he wants some pancakes this morning?"
“Um...I don't think he's hungry right now," she said. "I wouldn't waste your time cooking anything unless he asks. He's....not himself this morning," she finished, as she walked out the door, worried about Logan and anxious not to be late for her unit meeting.
************************************************************
Veronica returned home at lunch time to find that Logan had remained barricaded in the den for the entire morning. At the end of her rope with his antics, she located a hairpin and picked the lock.
Logan was slumped in the heavy leather chair in front of his desk, a silver flask in front of him. From experience, Veronica knew the flask was full of Captain Morgan's rum, although it had been quite a long time since she had last found him with the flask in hand.
"It’s 11:45 in the morning, Logan. Don't you think it’s a little early to go ‘sailing with the Captain’?" she said, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice.
She assumed that he had spent the morning tormenting himself with thoughts of Aaron, and what a lousy father he had been~ no doubt worried that Aaron would forever color Logan's own ability to be a father to this unexpected child.
At the sound of her voice, he looked up, but seemed to gaze right through her.
He ran his fingers through his hair, his voice very cold as he angrily demanded, “How did this happen, Veronica? How?"
His wife stared at him, stunned by his reaction.
In all honestly, Veronica was still in state of shock about the news herself. She had only been out of law school for a year, she was only 24, and she was still getting her feet under her at the Justice Department. A pregnancy had not even been on her radar. She expected Logan to be worried about what kind of father he would be. She expected him to be surprised, even dismayed, but his apparent anger over the news is entirely unexpected.
"I just told you, I was so sick, the birth control pills must not have gotten into my system, I know it's not something we ever talked about..." she stopped speaking as she watched barely suppressed rage cross over his features.
"No, Ver.on.i.ca." he said, each syllable clipped and angry. "How. Did. THIS. Happen?"
His anger was contagious and she snapped, "Well, gee, Logan. I don't know, but, I seem to remember something from sex ed. about sperm meeting egg, and I'm pretty damn sure I didn't get pregnant BY MYSELF!"
His thinly controlled anger was uncaged, and, abruptly, the man in front of her became the boy who had smashed her headlights, the boy who had broken a lamp in her father's apartment.
He stood up from the chair and slammed his body against a small table holding a delicate vase. The vase wobbled and fell to floor, where, miraculously, a small area rug prevented it from breaking.
"That's a fucking Labino vase!" she hissed. "A fucking Labino vase that YOU HAD TO HAVE to finish your mother’s collection and that you paid way too much for and that you FLEW TO CLEVELAND to buy. What the fuck is wrong with you? This is unexpected for me too, but, evidently we're about to be parents, so, you need to stop acting like a 3- year-old!"
"WHO IS IT?" he smashed his fist against the wall.
Veronica, confused and overwhelmed by this entire morning, began to shake. "What are you talking about? What do you mean? I don't know who this baby is, it's, like, 3 millimeters long and I just found out about it this morning. What is the matter with you?" Her voice cracked.
Logan looked at her, his face purple with rage and hurt. "Who is he, Veronica? Who the hell have you been fucking?"
Part 3
Logan wakes with a start, realizing that he has drifted off to sleep watching over Veronica's slumber. Glancing at the clock he sees that he's been dozing for about 45 minutes, having a bad dream about the day Veronica told him she was pregnant. Thinking about that day ~ and the ugly days that followed, the only time in the long roller-coaster ride of their relationship that it had ever even crossed his mind that Veronica might have cheated on him ~ nauseates him and gives him a headache at the same time. He gets up as quietly as he can and walks into the bathroom to find an aspirin and a drink of water.
Coming back into their bedroom he finds a frantic Veronica, on her knees beside the bed, reaching beneath the dust ruffle and making a small, barely audible, sound of distress.
She is startled by the sound of him re-entering the room and, seeing him, begins to shiver.
Her chin quivers as she says, "Logan, I..." her lips purse and brow furrows, exhaustion and confusion playing across her pretty face.” I was just lying down for a minute, I was so tired, and...Oh, god, Logan, I lost the baby."
She dives back under the bed, reaching desperately for a child that isn't there.
"Veronica," he says quietly, crossing the room quickly. He pulls her up off the floor and into his arms, but she fights him weakly, still trying to wedge her whole body beneath the bed. "Logan, he must be under there, I don't..."
Logan presses his mouth against her ear and says, "Veronica, honey, calm down. Jonah is downstairs with Elsa. He's fine. I wanted you to get some sleep, he's fine. He's fine."
Veronica stares at him blankly for a few seconds.
“He’s with Elsa?” she says finally, her voice quiet, as if speaking is an enormous effort.
For a moment she allows Logan to hold her in his arms. “I’m just so tired,” she whispers.
He picks her up like a child and starts to lay her down on the bed. “You need to go back to sleep for a little while,” he murmurs into her hair.
Her eyes snap open and she struggles to sit up. “Wait a minute, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Vancouver, you had to go, it was urgent, they only had a few days to get it right, you left us here to go take care of it…” She is shaking her head, trying to make sense of things, and unable to focus.
She does not remember the last time she slept for more than a few minutes.
She does not remember the last time she did not feel like she was drowning.
“I flew back from Vancouver this morning," he says, omitting the fact that Elsa called him home with the news that Veronica's insomnia and refusal to eat had worsened in his absence.
"Everything is under control on the set, and, honestly, Veronica, I was worried about you. I was worried about leaving you here, but I thought that having Elsa here full time would help you. I thought maybe having her here would let you relax a little, maybe you would be able to go meet Mac or Wallace for lunch. I thought maybe you would feel better without me in your hair.”
She stares at her husband as if he had suddenly begun speaking Japanese.
“I need to go get Jonah,” she says, “he must be hungry, what if he’s crying…”
“Veronica,” he interrupts her. “He’s fine. He’s absolutely fine, but, you need some rest. Please lie down. Elsa will bring him to you when he needs you, I promise.”
She looks at him, almost gratefully, but she is clearly torn by her desire to sleep and her need to know whether Jonah needs her.
(And he always needs her, she thinks to herself. He always needs her and she feels tremendously guilty as she allows sink back into the comfort of her bed as Logan picks the duvet off the floor and pulls it up over her shoulders.)
Part 4
Nine Months Earlier
Veronica Echolls sat at her desk in her small, but neatly organized, office. Although it was extremely unlike her, she had closed the office door, shutting her off from the assistant she shared with three other prosecutors.
Allegedly, she was writing a brief regarding the circumstances surrounding a border search that had resulted in the seizure of two kilos of cocaine from the wheel wells of a Mercedes Benz belonging to the daughter of a prominent San Diego businessman. In reality, she was composing an email to her husband, trying to make sense of his outburst at lunch.
Veronica had fled the den after his bizarre, and totally unfounded, demand that she tell him who else she had been “fucking”. She had run past Mrs. Navarro in the kitchen, who had called after her, “Don’t you want your lunch, Miss Veronica?” Veronica had not even turned around to respond, instead slamming the door and jumping into her car, gunning the engine in her haste to get away from Logan.
In the two hours that had passed, she had rocketed through a range of emotions, from fury to despair, but, above all, she was extremely confused. Why on earth would Logan immediately jump from the news of her pregnancy to an assumption that Veronica was having an affair? Her feelings were deeply hurt. She was offended.
Veronica carried a lot of baggage as far as her mother was concerned. She had never forgiven Lianne for so many things, but, at the top of the list of “Things I Cannot Forgive My Mother” was Lianne’s long time affair with Jake Kane, Lianne’s betrayal of Keith Mars. Veronica made a point to distinguish herself from her mother in almost every aspect of her life. Logan knew how hurt Veronica had been when she learned of Lianne’s affair; Logan knew how she ached for her father over this. How could Logan possibly suspect Veronica could do the same thing? And why?
As she was editing her email to Logan for the third time (trying to reach a happy medium between shrill fury and levelheaded inquiry into Logan’s reasoning (or lack thereof), her computer “dinged,” indicating a new message had been received. She clicked on her email program to find a message from her husband’s assistant.
From: Gabe.Skow@LillyLynnProductions.com
To: Veronica.Echolls@usdoj.gov
Re: attachment
Mrs. Echolls,
Attached please find a newspaper clipping that your husband requested I send to you. He asked me to tell you that he has to be in L.A. this evening to meet with the people from Warner Brothers.
Thanks,
Gabe
Gabriel Skow
Assistant to Logan Echolls
LillyLynn Productions
San Diego, California
Veronica clicked on the attachment, which revealed two small newspaper articles that had been scanned into an Adobe Acrobat file. The snippets did not reveal which newspaper they had been cut from.
Veronica quickly read the two articles, which did little to calm her growing distress.
Louisville, KY - The fourteen year old son of action star Aaron Echolls has been rushed from the set of his father's new movie, Wild Horses, after an apparent accident involving one of the movie's equine stars. An emergency crew was summoned to the set late yesterday evening, where, reportedly, Aaron Echolls found his son unconscious and injured in the stall of the horse barn where the film’s animals are being housed. Initial reports indicated that the boy may have been kicked by one of the horses. The teenager, Logan Echolls, had been with his father on the set of the movie for several weeks during his summer break from Neptune High School.
The second article had evidently been written a week or so later.
Memphis, TN - Logan Echolls, the teenage son of movie stars Aaron Echolls and Lynn Lester Echolls, has been released after a six day stay at Memphis Children's Hospital. The boy suffered two broken ribs and numerous other internal injuries when he was kicked by a horse on the set of his father's new movie, Wild Horses. The boy was transferred to Memphis Children's after doctors in Louisville determined his injuries needed specialized care.
For the first time since running from their home after their fight, Veronica tried to dial her husband's cell phone. It rolled over immediately to voice mail, where, for the first time that Veronica could recall, Logan failed to share an insightful quote, instructing any callers to simply leave a message at the beep. "It's me," Veronica said quickly. "I just read the information you had sent to me. I'm angry with you, I don't understand what this has to do with anything, but, if you want to talk to me, you know how to reach me."
Part 5
Nine Months Earlier
Logan had been missing for three days ~ the e-mail from had been the last she’d heard from him.
Veronica had given up on calling his cell phone and had started calling their condo in L.A., but there was no answer.
There was also no answer at the apartment (inherited from Aaron) in Chicago or at the one in New York. She ransacked the safe in the den, finding his passport, relieved to know he had not left the country. She was dismayed to find about $10,000 in cash missing. (More dismayed by the fact that she was unable to track his credit card purchases if he was using cash instead of his Black Amex, than she was about the cash itself. Money was something that came with the territory when she married Logan, but, it wasn't something that she spent a lot of time thinking about.)
Out of desperation she had phoned Trina, and tried to subtly ask if she had spoken with Logan. Trina, surprised, told Veronica that she hadn't spoken to her brother in over two months. In typical ‘clueless-Trina’ fashion, she didn't appear to pick up on the fact that Veronica hadn't spoken to him either and was actually looking for him.
While she had her on the phone, Veronica astonished herself by asking Trina if she remembered anything about Logan being injured by a horse on the set of one of their father's films. Trina was uncharacteristically quiet for a few seconds, and then said, "That's just something we don't talk about, Veronica. Ever. I've got to go, so, um, give my brother a big kiss from me, okay?" Veronica had hung up the phone more confused than ever.
***********************************
Logan had pulled a disappearing act on her once before, almost six years ago. After leaving the Hearst cafeteria, after bringing the wrath of the son of a Russian mobster on his head, after sharing a look with her that Veronica had interpreted to mean that they would probably be naked in his bed at the Grand within a few days time, Logan had taken off without a word to anyone.
Veronica would later learn that he had left Neptune with no real idea of where he wanted to go, or why, but simply knowing that he needed to come to grips with everything that he had lost - Lilly, his mother, Aaron...(to the extent that he gave a damn about Aaron). He had gotten into his Land Rover and had just kept driving. He had ended up weeks later in Montreal, a city his mother had always loved visiting.
He holed up in a hotel in the old quarter, and he began to write, obsessively, sometimes for more than fourteen hours a day. Logan told Veronica later that he had never pursued anything with such purpose. He didn't stop writing until two months later, when he emerged with a screen play that he tried to sell to any number of Hollywood studios, through a contact his mother's old agent had given him, using a pseudonym.
One studio offered to buy the screen play after learning it was, in fact, written by Aaron Echolls son, but they insisted that Logan relinquish creative control over the project. Logan had turned them down, and instead had taken a loan against his Trust Fund and inheritance, and LillyLynn Productions had been born. Calling in favors from people in the industry who had liked and respected his mother, Logan put together a cast and a crew and, on a shoestring budget over a ten-week period, his movie had come to life. Taking an enormous creative risk, they shot the film in black and white, with a deliberate film noir feel.
In the meantime, Veronica, who had tracked Logan's location by following his credit card charges, assumed that he was drinking, partying, and, probably snorting coke off the bellies of French-Canadian hookers. (Her feelings towards him, and his abandonment of her (as she saw it), were rather unkind at the time). She had thrown herself into her sophomore year studies, broken up with Piz, and spent most of her free time with Wallace and also Mac, who had, inexplicably, begun dating Eli Navarro.
Then one night, in May of 2008, after final exams had just ended, Veronica, Wallace, Mac and Eli were preparing for a mindless movie marathon, when a news blurb on Entertainment Tonight caught them all by surprise.
It seemed that the son of murdered (and murderous) Aaron Echolls had premiered his movie and his new production company at the Cannes Film Festival to overwhelmingly positive reviews. The movie ~ the story of the viciously abused daughter of a US Senator, who discovered that her father had orchestrated her mother's alleged suicide by forcibly throwing her off a bridge into the Potomac ~ had received Cannes’ prize for best screenplay, nearly unheard of for a first time screen writer .
The Entertainment Tonight clip showed Logan Echolls, standing on Cannes’ famed red carpet, with his arm wrapped around the shoulders of his film's star, an actress who was, without a doubt, a dead ringer for Veronica.
As they stared, dumbfounded at the television, Mac had looked at her friend and asked, "Veronica? Did you go to the French Riviera last week and not tell us?"
Veronica, surprised at the jolt of seeing Logan again, even just on television, after all these months, shook her head.
"No, that's that actress from Heroes. Kirsten Bell or Kristy Bell or Kristen Bell or something. What's Logan doing with her? She's WAY too old for him," she had huffed, denying the extreme jealousy that had overcome her.
(In fact, the following week, PEOPLE ran a cover story featuring a shot of Logan with the actress, as well as file photos of two other stars from the NBC hit show, with a headline that read, "THE BARELY LEGAL ROMANCES OF NBC's HEROES." The actress later sent out a press release stating that she was not romantically involved with Logan Echolls, that they were friends and that she 'greatly admired his astonishing creativity.' (Veronica had actually growled when she read that statement, assuming (wrongly) that the actress was alluding to Logan's undeniably creative skills in the bedroom.)
For weeks afterward, Veronica had poured through news articles ("Echolls Films Brings New Life to American Noir"), and time and time again she had dialed his cell number, but always hung up before hitting "SEND".
In mid-June, she had received an email of only one line, "Please come to L.A. to see my movie," with a time and a date, and the address of a small art house theater that was showing Logan’s film. Veronica had arrived to find him waiting for her in front of the movie theater, and the next day numerous paparazzi had run photographs of the lip-locked couple, proclaiming, 'Echolls and Bell have teary and passionate reconciliation on Los Angeles street." (Bell's boyfriend, a comedian who had not found the pictures funny, had released an angry statement insisting that the HEROES star had been in Rome with him at the time and demanded a retraction.)
Since that afternoon in L.A., when they had watched his movie, alone, together, she and Logan had rarely been separated for more than a few days, and even then, they were always in contact by phone and text. The last three days had been the longest period of time they had been incommunicado since the year they had spent apart so long ago.
(Veronica also reflected on the fact that they were MARRIED now, so, his choice to vanish at this point seemed significantly more hurtful, not to mention his accusation of her unfaithfulness.)
*********************************************
Veronica sat in her kitchen, staring into a bowl of Rocky Road, trying to decide what to do next to locate her wayward (and clearly confused and misguided) husband, when she heard the doorbell ring.
A few moments later, Mrs. Navarro came looking for her.
"Mrs. Veronica, there is a man here. He says," Mrs. Navarro looked concerned and made the sign of the cross over her chest, "he says that he is a doctor and that he needs to speak to you about Mr. Logan."
Veronica's eyes widened in fear. "Where is he?" she asked.
"In the sitting room, at the front of the house."
Veronica made her way towards the front of the sprawling Spanish style mansion that she and Logan had called home for the past two years. They rarely used the front entry way or the formal sitting room, where she found a thin man of about 60.
I'm Veronica Echolls," she said hurriedly. "Do you know something about where Logan is? Is he okay? Has he been hurt?"
The man extended his had to shake hers. "I'm Dr. Eugene Gallagher," he said. "Logan is fine. Well, physically, Logan is fine. He arrived at my office yesterday afternoon, in state of great distress. After speaking with him for some time, he asked me to come and talk to you. I hesitate to get so personally involved in a private matter, but...to be honest, I do feel a sense of obligation to Logan."
Veronica stared at the doctor without a word, and raised one eyebrow questioningly.
"There were...things...in Logan's medical history...I probably should have asked more questions."
"What kind of doctor are you, exactly, Dr. Gallagher?" she inquired.
"I'm a pediatric urologist. Logan came to me as a patient after he returned to California after being released from Memphis Children's Hospital when he was 14 years old. He had been, or so I was told, attacked by a horse."
Part 6
In the waning afternoon light, Logan stares at the back of Veronica’s head, where she has crumpled back down into their king size bed.
He is expecting her to fall back to sleep immediately, considering the extent of her exhaustion, but, instead, he hears her breathing become rapid and erratic.
He slides himself onto the bed behind her, and tentatively reaches out to rub her back.
Her shoulder blades tense as he begins to rub slow circles on her skin.
“What are you doing?” she whispers.
He stops rubbing her back. “I was just…trying to make you feel better.”
“You’re not getting laid right now,” she says, her voice cracking, her breathing still rapid.
He pulls away from her, hurt. “That wasn’t…I was just…trying to calm you down. Can’t I touch you without you assuming it’s about sex?”
(Internally he adds, “Which we haven’t had in almost 10 weeks, but who’s counting?”)
He starts to push himself off the bed when he hears a small strangled sound from her - she is crying. Very, very quietly, Veronica is crying.
He wraps his arms around her and pulls her towards him, despite her resistance, until he has pulled her body into him, her forehead resting against his chest.
“Please don’t cry, Veronica. Please don’t. I’m sorry. Whatever I did, whatever I did that’s making you cry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it, I don’t know what it was or is, but, I swear, I didn’t want to make you cry.”
He feels her body relax against him, but, her tears come harder, and louder. They lay together, entwined around each other, for fully ten minutes, as Veronica cries herself out.
Logan is bewildered, and uncertain. He knows only that he is tired of letting her push him away, and that he wants to keep holding her tight.
In the quiet aftermath of her crying jag, he hears her whisper his name.
“Logan?”
“Yes?”
“I’m so tired,” she says.
“I know, hon. I know you are. You need to sleep. That’s what you need to do right now,” he answers, sliding his fingers through her hair, pulling through some tangles.
“I’m afraid,” she says, so softly he almost missed it.
He is surprised. Veronica? HIS Veronica? The woman who took on his father? And the boy who had killed their classmates? The woman who regularly stared in the faces of vicious narcotics dealers and sent them to prison? His Veronica wasn’t afraid of anything, a fact that, on more than one occasion, terrified Logan.
“What are you afraid of?” he asks, curious.
She doesn’t answer him for so long that he wonders if she has fallen back to sleep, before being able to tell him what it is she is so afraid of that it is keeping her from sleeping.
But then he hears her.
“I’m afraid,” she pauses. “I’m afraid….I’m afraid that if I fall asleep Jonah will stop breathing.”
He doesn’t answer her, so she repeats herself. “Logan, I’m afraid, I’m…I’m petrified that if I fall asleep Jonah won’t be able to breathe.”
Logan pulls her in closer to him and kisses the top of her head. He wants to tell her that her fear is unfounded. He wants to tell her that babies don’t just stop breathing simply because their mothers fall asleep. Instead he picks up the phone from the bedside table and pages the extension in the playroom.
“Elsa,” he says, when she picks up. “How’s Jonah?”
“He’s fine, he’s having a bit of a nap and enjoying his binky,” she answers.
“Thank you, Elsa,” he says.
He turns back to Veronica, “he’s fine. He’s breathing. Elsa won’t let him stop breathing.”
“You don’t understand,” she turns away from him.
“Explain it to me, then,” he whispers.
“It doesn’t matter that I KNOW that he’s fine right this second. It doesn’t take away the FEAR that he won’t be, in the next second, in the second I fall asleep. He might stop breathing, Logan. He might stop, anytime I fall asleep…he might.”
As Logan gently strokes his hands up and down her arms, Veronica begins to cry again. Having no answers, Logan holds her tighter, and wonders, helplessly, what to do.
TO BE CONTINUED
On to part 7 http://zaftig-darling.livejournal.com/4777.html