Into the Blue, Part 6
Aug. 12th, 2005 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anjouficTitle: Into the Blue
Author: Anjou![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anjoufic
Pairing/Character: Logan/Veronica, Logan's POV
Word Count: 3,433
Rating: PG-13 to mild R
Summary: It's almost summer, and Logan is sinking into the blue.
Spoilers/Warnings: S1. Beyond that is just my imagination, running away with me.
A/N: Sorry to be so long with this entry. I swear we're in the home stretch. Thanks to my patient, but willing-to-nag betasuzanne_laura
~*~
I see and I hear
I realize
There is nothing to fear
And
Something so new
I arrive out of the darkness
Into the blue
Into the Blue by Ar Kane
~*~
"Veronica!" Logan's voice was sharp with surprise. On the four screens, Veronica was frozen, kneeling on the bed in the pool house in the red tank top she had been wearing the night of his un-birthday party, her hair up in pigtails. The night that he'd come back to find the pool house empty and her gone, with no explanation. He hit 'play' and watched Veronica's eyes widen further as she drew back away from the camera.
"Logan!"
He jumped as Veronica called out to him, but then pressed her hand over her mouth as if to take back the utterance. She looked down and away from the camera.
"Logan …" she said again, and he could see her hand trembling, could almost see her mind racing as she sat back on her heels. She looked up at the camera that was nearly directly above her, and when Logan looked at the square that corresponded to that camera, he could see that her blue eyes were filled with tears.
Veronica looked down and scrubbed at her eyes angrily, then got off the bed. Logan watched her move over to the bookcase which, much to his shock, seemed to be open. When she drew it closed, the angle of viewing on one of the screens changed and was now focused on her tense face in close-up. Veronica bent over and picked her jacket up off the floor. She put it on and, carefully avoiding bumping the bed in any way, walked out of the pool house, heading in a direction away from the main house.
Before the four screens went dark, the camera shot in the lower left hand corner showed the curtain with his father's face on it blowing in the breeze, like it was mocking Logan. An instant later, the cameras switched on one by one as Logan returned to the room and looked around for Veronica.
He looked like such a fool. He'd even looked under the bed for her, thinking that she was just teasing him at first. Logan could barely stand to look at himself, to see the confusion and then defeat in his posture when he realized that she had really gone. He didn't need to watch himself. He remembered exactly how abandoned and confused he had felt, how he'd called and left messages with a growing sense of dread and panic. He couldn't figure out what he had done wrong. In fact, he'd never actually understood it until now.
He pushed aside dwelling on that evening and focused instead on figuring out where the cameras were. One was obviously in the bookcase that was almost directly opposite the main door into the pool house. One was in the headboard of the bed, and one appeared to be directly opposite it. The last was clearly above the bed, but the block on the TV screen was empty for some of the time Logan was in the room, except for when he was looking under the bed and had put a hand up on top of the mattress while he knelt down next to it.
"Motion-activated," he said to himself, and rewound the tape again to watch himself come in and proceed around the room, looking for Veronica after putting their drinks down. As he moved around the room, he turned the various cameras on, one after another. It was almost imperceptible until you went frame by frame, but he had turned them on by passing them.
When he finally left the pool house in defeat, sneaking into his room without going back to the party, there was a momentary blip of black screen, and then Mrs. Navarro suddenly appeared, straightening out the bed in the bright sunshine, dusting and mopping.
The next scenes were of sheriff's deputies swarming all over the room, and as Logan watched, they immediately went to the camera over the bed and the one in the headboard, seemingly unaware that they were still being taped after those two cameras were removed. He watched, from two angles now, while they looked around the rest of the pool house, searching the vents. This must have been the day that he was at the police station being questioned while the cops searched his room. He'd forgotten that they'd searched the pool house even before the whole truth came out. Radios squawked and the work was slow and boring, so Logan sped through the scenes after watching for a few minutes.
The last few minutes on the disk were filled with more cops and the more recent searches of the room. They'd finally found the camera in the bookcase in what appeared to be an accident. Then only one square remained as cops dismantled the bed. Logan shut the disk off, but the TV screen was filled with four dark squares. He waited for a while, trying to get the TiVo to record, but the screen stayed dark. Someone must have finally noticed the last camera when they'd leaned the mattress right up against it.
Logan's thoughts were whirling as he pushed the 'rewind' button. His mother had clearly known what his father had been up to in the pool house. She'd not only installed her own cameras, but had also somehow gotten the feed from Aaron's cameras to record up here in her room. All that time, all last fall, he'd believed her when she laid in this room, drunk and depressed, saying that she was watching home movies. She'd always had one playing whenever he'd come into the room, but it wasn't that difficult to figure out how to change over from one video source to another. His mom had always been a bit more technologically adept than Aaron. But this kind of surveillance was far beyond his mother's capacity.
He stopped the disk as he appeared on the screens and thought long and hard about whether or not he wanted to go back any further. He knew what had happened between him and Veronica that night. Right?
"Right, Logan …" he said sarcastically. Just like he knew what his mother was doing up here all last fall. Home movies? Only in Bizarro World. God, it was the Echolls Family Freak Show, no matter which way he looked. And here he'd always prided himself on how jaded he was, how little surprised him. And yet, his mother had kept all of this from him, had lied to him over and over.
Was everybody always just playing him?
He punched the rewind button, and watched Veronica go from frightened to curious to relaxed and … happy? Logan saw himself on the screen and stopped the disk, took a deep breath and pushed 'play'.
On screen, he walked out of one camera's view, and into the view of the one in the bookcase, hands outstretched to Veronica. In between kisses, he spoke to her, "be right back," more kisses, "two minutes …" and he laid her down on the bed, squeezing her where she was ticklish.
Veronica laughed and pushed him away, and he disappeared from the screen.
Logan knelt on the floor in front of the TV and watched, with a dry mouth, as Veronica lay on the bed smiling, crossing her hands on her stomach. She seemed to be almost drifting into a daydream until her eyes focused on the ceiling fan above the bed. In regular speed now, he watched while Veronica became curious and then investigated. He couldn't help the twinge of admiration he felt for her as he watched her find two of the cameras. How many times had he been in the pool house and never noticed a thing? He realized he'd always taken her intelligence for granted. Veronica was an excellent student, but because she was so naïve and sweet when he first knew her, he'd believed that she wasn't smart in any of the ways that really counted. He'd underestimated her, but at least he wasn't the only one. What disturbed him even more was his dawning comprehension that somewhere along the way, he must have absorbed his father's contempt for book smart people. The thought made him feel slightly sick to his stomach. He had never wanted to be anything like Aaron.
On screen now, Logan watched Veronica become frightened, call out to him, then change her mind and disappear. His gut was churning, but he hesitated to pick up the remote and rewind the tape to where they first came into the pool house, didn't know if he could stand to watch himself confess his guilt to her. His headache had returned full force. Veronica hadn't run away from the pool house because of what he'd done to Duncan; she'd run away because she was afraid of him.
Logan sat with his head against his mother's divan for a long time, thinking. He'd like to believe that it wasn't possible for him to feel worse than he did already, but every time that thought crossed his consciousness, there was some new revelation waiting around the corner to bite him in the ass.
He had never even considered, for a minute, that Veronica was frightened of him until he'd seen it for himself. She'd thought that he was setting her up to be the star of Logan Echolls Porn Theatre. He couldn't summon up enough strength to be really angry with her about her lack of faith in him. They both knew exactly what he was capable of, and if he'd really hated her and had just been playing her, he would have taped her.
He would have.
They used to be friends, and then when he hated her, he’d used her as a salt lick. He’d degraded her, and treated her like trash in front of everyone they knew for a year. He’d wanted to hurt her, wanted to punish her because Lilly was dead and because she’d chosen her father instead of him and Duncan, and Lilly. He’d wanted to hurt her for her disloyalty and he’d made sure she knew it.
‘Congratulations, Logan,’ he thought sourly. ‘Awesome job.’
~*~
When the intercom buzzed, it was a relief to have an excuse to get up off the floor and away from the TiVo. Mrs. Navarro wanted him to know that the police were gone and that he could come out now. Logan thanked her politely, trying not to be a total jackass for once in his life.
After cleaning up and finally changing his clothes, he returned to his mother’s room. Logan told himself that it was just because it was quieter there, but the TiVo drew him like a magnet, even while he tried to ignore it. He actually finished three math problem sets before he finally caved in and turned on the TV, backing up the disk until he and Veronica walked in the door of the pool house.
The first time Logan watched them together, he couldn’t bear to listen to himself confess his sins to Veronica. He muted the audio track and just watched the two of them. All he could think was that he should have just shut the fuck up. He was talking from the minute they walked in the door of the pool house, talking in between kisses, even when they fell back on the bed. Veronica had wanted him to shut up. Some part of him even knew that he should shut up. Logan rewound the tape and watched himself move to kiss Veronica even while he still kept talking. He couldn't get over how happy Veronica looked the whole time, how she was kissing him even while he kept talking. He'd convinced himself in retrospect that she was cold and indifferent to him, but watching her now, he had to admit that it didn't look like that was true. Veronica kept kissing him, and Logan watched himself anticipating her kisses before he bobbed and weaved to avoid them so he could confess.
It made him want to leap into the TV and kick his stupid ass around the pool house and then lock it outside, so that he, the Logan from right now, could just slide back onto the bed and under Veronica. He was such an idiot.
He stopped the disk when he noticed that he had finally shut up. Veronica had reached for his hands while he was confessing and was holding them while she talked to him, something he didn’t remember her doing. He backed the disk up and unmuted it, listening to her telling him that he hadn’t known what would happen when he gave Duncan the GHB, her voice soft and sweet like the Veronica that had existed before Lilly died. He backed the disk up and listened to her forgive him again. She seemed so sincere, talking in her quiet, earnest voice. She hadn't spoken to him like that in, well, ever. And he remembered exactly how nervous he felt when he told her how he never wanted to hurt her. It was important to him that she understood that he'd changed, that he was becoming a better person, a trustworthy person, someone she could be proud to say was her boyfriend.
He'd been elated and absolutely terrified when she said that she trusted him. She'd kissed him so sweetly that he had finally given in and done what he wanted to all along. He put his hands on her, pulling her slender body to his and really kissing her. Nobody had ever kissed him like Veronica Mars did, pouring her whole self right into it.
Lilly had been all fire and light, action and reaction. They'd spent a lot of time fighting, and even more time 'making up', but there'd been very little sweetness. Lilly hadn't been the kind of girlfriend who liked to cuddle or who tolerated kisses just for the sake of kisses. She wanted to get right down to it, and hated it when Logan was 'too needy'. Of course, she also loved to make him beg for it.
Veronica had always been different. He'd watched her with Duncan, saw how sweet she was with him. Duncan used to lay his head in her lap and talk to her and Veronica would sit and listen, touching him like he was precious, like he was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.
He must have wanted her all the way back then, he realized, craved that intimacy and absolute focus that she was so capable of.
Logan backed up the disk and listened to Veronica again. She sounded so sincere, but he suddenly wished that his mother had put more cameras in the pool house, or at least one that would give him a better angle on Veronica. He wanted to study her face when she was talking to him, to see if he could figure out if she was really telling him the truth. He could only see her profile on the video, and he wanted to watch her again the way he had that night. If he could only rewrite history, he wouldn't have gotten so nervous when she forgave him, when she turned the intensity of her gaze directly on him, really looking at him, really seeing him. Looking into her blue eyes, he'd suddenly felt as if he were the virgin in the room, not her. And maybe he was, he realized. He'd never laid himself open to Lilly like he had to Veronica. He'd trusted Veronica. And it had made him more nervous than he'd ever felt.
Logan couldn't help the disgust he felt as he watched himself make a run for a bottle of something, anything, to assuage his nerves. If he'd only stayed, everything would be different.
Logan sat up when it suddenly occurred to him that if he'd stayed, his father might very well have ended up with a tape of him and Veronica having sex for the first time. His blood absolutely ran cold at the idea that Aaron would see Veronica and then want to take her from Logan, too.
Was that what had happened with Lilly?
Aaron had always been jealous of anyone who seemed to be getting more attention than him, and particularly hated it when it was Logan. In one of his mother's home movies, there was a scene of Logan just learning to walk. His mother was showing their friends at a dinner party, and one of them had filmed it as she stood Logan up a few steps away from her and then called to him. Everyone had cheered as he stumbled the few steps, shrieking 'Mamamamamama' to be swept joyfully up into his mother's arms. Everyone had cheered, except for Aaron, who could be seen scowling silently in the background.
The idea of Aaron even thinking about Veronica sexually made Logan want to break everything in the house. He was suddenly thrilled that Veronica had found the cameras.
Logan stood up and searched the room until he found his wallet next to the divan, then crossed the room to his mother's phone, dialing a number from the card tucked behind his license.
"DuBois," an electronic voice said to Logan.
Logan punched in a code.
"Voice sample," the prompt stated.
"Logan Echolls," he said clearly.
"Confirmation," the voice intoned, and he heard the line click through.
"Yes, Mr. Echolls," a woman's voice said, "how can I help you?"
"Tell Gavin to call me back," Logan answered, then added a hasty, "please," before he hung up.
He found his cell phone under the divan and turned it on for the first time in days. He had no messages.
Logan paced the room nervously for a few minutes, then sat down and submitted his completed problem sets via e-mail, hesitating before toggling over to his g-mail interface and logging in. His mailbox was stuffed full of porn spam and what looked like interview requests. He scanned down the list of senders impassively, trying to tell himself that he shouldn't expect to see an e-mail from Veronica. She hadn't left a phone message in days, so he tried not to hope, but he paged back a screen and there she was. He could feel his heart pounding as he clicked open the e-mail she'd written him last Friday.
To: Surf_dog_logan@gmail.com
From: PI_Pride@gmail.com
Logan,
I know that you said that you needed time to do whatever, and I'm trying to respect that, but I wanted you to know that I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I accused you of killing Lilly. This would be a lot easier if I could just tell you face-to-face, but since that doesn't seem like it's going to happen anytime soon, I guess this is the best alternative.
It would also be easier if I could just say that if I could take things back, that I would do them differently, but that's really not true. There are a lot of things that happened that you don't know about. That's not an excuse, but it's at least part of an explanation for why I became suspicious.
Everybody knows now that there were cameras in your pool house, but what they don't know is that I found them the night of your surprise party. I'll be honest with you, Logan. I didn't know if you knew about those cameras and it made me nervous that you had set me up. I know that you think that I should have trusted you, but the truth is that everybody had lied to me so much that it became almost impossible for me to figure out who was telling me the truth.
I wanted to trust you -- I wanted to believe that you had told me the whole truth about Shelley's party because you wanted there to be no secrets between us, but I couldn't just believe you because I wanted it to be true. I knew that there was a possibility that you had lied to the police, and to me, about your alibi and the fact that you had lied to me already made me wonder what else you had lied about.
The one thing that I do regret is how much you've been hurt by everything that's happened. I want you to know that I had no idea what Lilly was doing. I know that you probably won't believe me, but I would have told you if I knew. I would have.
I wish that you would call me.
Veronica
Minutes later, when Logan answered his ringing cell phone, he could still taste the salt on his lips.
~*~
Part 7a
Author: Anjou
anjouficPairing/Character: Logan/Veronica, Logan's POV
Word Count: 3,433
Rating: PG-13 to mild R
Summary: It's almost summer, and Logan is sinking into the blue.
Spoilers/Warnings: S1. Beyond that is just my imagination, running away with me.
A/N: Sorry to be so long with this entry. I swear we're in the home stretch. Thanks to my patient, but willing-to-nag beta
suzanne_laura~*~
I see and I hear
I realize
There is nothing to fear
And
Something so new
I arrive out of the darkness
Into the blue
Into the Blue by Ar Kane
~*~
"Veronica!" Logan's voice was sharp with surprise. On the four screens, Veronica was frozen, kneeling on the bed in the pool house in the red tank top she had been wearing the night of his un-birthday party, her hair up in pigtails. The night that he'd come back to find the pool house empty and her gone, with no explanation. He hit 'play' and watched Veronica's eyes widen further as she drew back away from the camera.
"Logan!"
He jumped as Veronica called out to him, but then pressed her hand over her mouth as if to take back the utterance. She looked down and away from the camera.
"Logan …" she said again, and he could see her hand trembling, could almost see her mind racing as she sat back on her heels. She looked up at the camera that was nearly directly above her, and when Logan looked at the square that corresponded to that camera, he could see that her blue eyes were filled with tears.
Veronica looked down and scrubbed at her eyes angrily, then got off the bed. Logan watched her move over to the bookcase which, much to his shock, seemed to be open. When she drew it closed, the angle of viewing on one of the screens changed and was now focused on her tense face in close-up. Veronica bent over and picked her jacket up off the floor. She put it on and, carefully avoiding bumping the bed in any way, walked out of the pool house, heading in a direction away from the main house.
Before the four screens went dark, the camera shot in the lower left hand corner showed the curtain with his father's face on it blowing in the breeze, like it was mocking Logan. An instant later, the cameras switched on one by one as Logan returned to the room and looked around for Veronica.
He looked like such a fool. He'd even looked under the bed for her, thinking that she was just teasing him at first. Logan could barely stand to look at himself, to see the confusion and then defeat in his posture when he realized that she had really gone. He didn't need to watch himself. He remembered exactly how abandoned and confused he had felt, how he'd called and left messages with a growing sense of dread and panic. He couldn't figure out what he had done wrong. In fact, he'd never actually understood it until now.
He pushed aside dwelling on that evening and focused instead on figuring out where the cameras were. One was obviously in the bookcase that was almost directly opposite the main door into the pool house. One was in the headboard of the bed, and one appeared to be directly opposite it. The last was clearly above the bed, but the block on the TV screen was empty for some of the time Logan was in the room, except for when he was looking under the bed and had put a hand up on top of the mattress while he knelt down next to it.
"Motion-activated," he said to himself, and rewound the tape again to watch himself come in and proceed around the room, looking for Veronica after putting their drinks down. As he moved around the room, he turned the various cameras on, one after another. It was almost imperceptible until you went frame by frame, but he had turned them on by passing them.
When he finally left the pool house in defeat, sneaking into his room without going back to the party, there was a momentary blip of black screen, and then Mrs. Navarro suddenly appeared, straightening out the bed in the bright sunshine, dusting and mopping.
The next scenes were of sheriff's deputies swarming all over the room, and as Logan watched, they immediately went to the camera over the bed and the one in the headboard, seemingly unaware that they were still being taped after those two cameras were removed. He watched, from two angles now, while they looked around the rest of the pool house, searching the vents. This must have been the day that he was at the police station being questioned while the cops searched his room. He'd forgotten that they'd searched the pool house even before the whole truth came out. Radios squawked and the work was slow and boring, so Logan sped through the scenes after watching for a few minutes.
The last few minutes on the disk were filled with more cops and the more recent searches of the room. They'd finally found the camera in the bookcase in what appeared to be an accident. Then only one square remained as cops dismantled the bed. Logan shut the disk off, but the TV screen was filled with four dark squares. He waited for a while, trying to get the TiVo to record, but the screen stayed dark. Someone must have finally noticed the last camera when they'd leaned the mattress right up against it.
Logan's thoughts were whirling as he pushed the 'rewind' button. His mother had clearly known what his father had been up to in the pool house. She'd not only installed her own cameras, but had also somehow gotten the feed from Aaron's cameras to record up here in her room. All that time, all last fall, he'd believed her when she laid in this room, drunk and depressed, saying that she was watching home movies. She'd always had one playing whenever he'd come into the room, but it wasn't that difficult to figure out how to change over from one video source to another. His mom had always been a bit more technologically adept than Aaron. But this kind of surveillance was far beyond his mother's capacity.
He stopped the disk as he appeared on the screens and thought long and hard about whether or not he wanted to go back any further. He knew what had happened between him and Veronica that night. Right?
"Right, Logan …" he said sarcastically. Just like he knew what his mother was doing up here all last fall. Home movies? Only in Bizarro World. God, it was the Echolls Family Freak Show, no matter which way he looked. And here he'd always prided himself on how jaded he was, how little surprised him. And yet, his mother had kept all of this from him, had lied to him over and over.
Was everybody always just playing him?
He punched the rewind button, and watched Veronica go from frightened to curious to relaxed and … happy? Logan saw himself on the screen and stopped the disk, took a deep breath and pushed 'play'.
On screen, he walked out of one camera's view, and into the view of the one in the bookcase, hands outstretched to Veronica. In between kisses, he spoke to her, "be right back," more kisses, "two minutes …" and he laid her down on the bed, squeezing her where she was ticklish.
Veronica laughed and pushed him away, and he disappeared from the screen.
Logan knelt on the floor in front of the TV and watched, with a dry mouth, as Veronica lay on the bed smiling, crossing her hands on her stomach. She seemed to be almost drifting into a daydream until her eyes focused on the ceiling fan above the bed. In regular speed now, he watched while Veronica became curious and then investigated. He couldn't help the twinge of admiration he felt for her as he watched her find two of the cameras. How many times had he been in the pool house and never noticed a thing? He realized he'd always taken her intelligence for granted. Veronica was an excellent student, but because she was so naïve and sweet when he first knew her, he'd believed that she wasn't smart in any of the ways that really counted. He'd underestimated her, but at least he wasn't the only one. What disturbed him even more was his dawning comprehension that somewhere along the way, he must have absorbed his father's contempt for book smart people. The thought made him feel slightly sick to his stomach. He had never wanted to be anything like Aaron.
On screen now, Logan watched Veronica become frightened, call out to him, then change her mind and disappear. His gut was churning, but he hesitated to pick up the remote and rewind the tape to where they first came into the pool house, didn't know if he could stand to watch himself confess his guilt to her. His headache had returned full force. Veronica hadn't run away from the pool house because of what he'd done to Duncan; she'd run away because she was afraid of him.
Logan sat with his head against his mother's divan for a long time, thinking. He'd like to believe that it wasn't possible for him to feel worse than he did already, but every time that thought crossed his consciousness, there was some new revelation waiting around the corner to bite him in the ass.
He had never even considered, for a minute, that Veronica was frightened of him until he'd seen it for himself. She'd thought that he was setting her up to be the star of Logan Echolls Porn Theatre. He couldn't summon up enough strength to be really angry with her about her lack of faith in him. They both knew exactly what he was capable of, and if he'd really hated her and had just been playing her, he would have taped her.
He would have.
They used to be friends, and then when he hated her, he’d used her as a salt lick. He’d degraded her, and treated her like trash in front of everyone they knew for a year. He’d wanted to hurt her, wanted to punish her because Lilly was dead and because she’d chosen her father instead of him and Duncan, and Lilly. He’d wanted to hurt her for her disloyalty and he’d made sure she knew it.
‘Congratulations, Logan,’ he thought sourly. ‘Awesome job.’
~*~
When the intercom buzzed, it was a relief to have an excuse to get up off the floor and away from the TiVo. Mrs. Navarro wanted him to know that the police were gone and that he could come out now. Logan thanked her politely, trying not to be a total jackass for once in his life.
After cleaning up and finally changing his clothes, he returned to his mother’s room. Logan told himself that it was just because it was quieter there, but the TiVo drew him like a magnet, even while he tried to ignore it. He actually finished three math problem sets before he finally caved in and turned on the TV, backing up the disk until he and Veronica walked in the door of the pool house.
The first time Logan watched them together, he couldn’t bear to listen to himself confess his sins to Veronica. He muted the audio track and just watched the two of them. All he could think was that he should have just shut the fuck up. He was talking from the minute they walked in the door of the pool house, talking in between kisses, even when they fell back on the bed. Veronica had wanted him to shut up. Some part of him even knew that he should shut up. Logan rewound the tape and watched himself move to kiss Veronica even while he still kept talking. He couldn't get over how happy Veronica looked the whole time, how she was kissing him even while he kept talking. He'd convinced himself in retrospect that she was cold and indifferent to him, but watching her now, he had to admit that it didn't look like that was true. Veronica kept kissing him, and Logan watched himself anticipating her kisses before he bobbed and weaved to avoid them so he could confess.
It made him want to leap into the TV and kick his stupid ass around the pool house and then lock it outside, so that he, the Logan from right now, could just slide back onto the bed and under Veronica. He was such an idiot.
He stopped the disk when he noticed that he had finally shut up. Veronica had reached for his hands while he was confessing and was holding them while she talked to him, something he didn’t remember her doing. He backed the disk up and unmuted it, listening to her telling him that he hadn’t known what would happen when he gave Duncan the GHB, her voice soft and sweet like the Veronica that had existed before Lilly died. He backed the disk up and listened to her forgive him again. She seemed so sincere, talking in her quiet, earnest voice. She hadn't spoken to him like that in, well, ever. And he remembered exactly how nervous he felt when he told her how he never wanted to hurt her. It was important to him that she understood that he'd changed, that he was becoming a better person, a trustworthy person, someone she could be proud to say was her boyfriend.
He'd been elated and absolutely terrified when she said that she trusted him. She'd kissed him so sweetly that he had finally given in and done what he wanted to all along. He put his hands on her, pulling her slender body to his and really kissing her. Nobody had ever kissed him like Veronica Mars did, pouring her whole self right into it.
Lilly had been all fire and light, action and reaction. They'd spent a lot of time fighting, and even more time 'making up', but there'd been very little sweetness. Lilly hadn't been the kind of girlfriend who liked to cuddle or who tolerated kisses just for the sake of kisses. She wanted to get right down to it, and hated it when Logan was 'too needy'. Of course, she also loved to make him beg for it.
Veronica had always been different. He'd watched her with Duncan, saw how sweet she was with him. Duncan used to lay his head in her lap and talk to her and Veronica would sit and listen, touching him like he was precious, like he was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.
He must have wanted her all the way back then, he realized, craved that intimacy and absolute focus that she was so capable of.
Logan backed up the disk and listened to Veronica again. She sounded so sincere, but he suddenly wished that his mother had put more cameras in the pool house, or at least one that would give him a better angle on Veronica. He wanted to study her face when she was talking to him, to see if he could figure out if she was really telling him the truth. He could only see her profile on the video, and he wanted to watch her again the way he had that night. If he could only rewrite history, he wouldn't have gotten so nervous when she forgave him, when she turned the intensity of her gaze directly on him, really looking at him, really seeing him. Looking into her blue eyes, he'd suddenly felt as if he were the virgin in the room, not her. And maybe he was, he realized. He'd never laid himself open to Lilly like he had to Veronica. He'd trusted Veronica. And it had made him more nervous than he'd ever felt.
Logan couldn't help the disgust he felt as he watched himself make a run for a bottle of something, anything, to assuage his nerves. If he'd only stayed, everything would be different.
Logan sat up when it suddenly occurred to him that if he'd stayed, his father might very well have ended up with a tape of him and Veronica having sex for the first time. His blood absolutely ran cold at the idea that Aaron would see Veronica and then want to take her from Logan, too.
Was that what had happened with Lilly?
Aaron had always been jealous of anyone who seemed to be getting more attention than him, and particularly hated it when it was Logan. In one of his mother's home movies, there was a scene of Logan just learning to walk. His mother was showing their friends at a dinner party, and one of them had filmed it as she stood Logan up a few steps away from her and then called to him. Everyone had cheered as he stumbled the few steps, shrieking 'Mamamamamama' to be swept joyfully up into his mother's arms. Everyone had cheered, except for Aaron, who could be seen scowling silently in the background.
The idea of Aaron even thinking about Veronica sexually made Logan want to break everything in the house. He was suddenly thrilled that Veronica had found the cameras.
Logan stood up and searched the room until he found his wallet next to the divan, then crossed the room to his mother's phone, dialing a number from the card tucked behind his license.
"DuBois," an electronic voice said to Logan.
Logan punched in a code.
"Voice sample," the prompt stated.
"Logan Echolls," he said clearly.
"Confirmation," the voice intoned, and he heard the line click through.
"Yes, Mr. Echolls," a woman's voice said, "how can I help you?"
"Tell Gavin to call me back," Logan answered, then added a hasty, "please," before he hung up.
He found his cell phone under the divan and turned it on for the first time in days. He had no messages.
Logan paced the room nervously for a few minutes, then sat down and submitted his completed problem sets via e-mail, hesitating before toggling over to his g-mail interface and logging in. His mailbox was stuffed full of porn spam and what looked like interview requests. He scanned down the list of senders impassively, trying to tell himself that he shouldn't expect to see an e-mail from Veronica. She hadn't left a phone message in days, so he tried not to hope, but he paged back a screen and there she was. He could feel his heart pounding as he clicked open the e-mail she'd written him last Friday.
To: Surf_dog_logan@gmail.com
From: PI_Pride@gmail.com
Logan,
I know that you said that you needed time to do whatever, and I'm trying to respect that, but I wanted you to know that I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I accused you of killing Lilly. This would be a lot easier if I could just tell you face-to-face, but since that doesn't seem like it's going to happen anytime soon, I guess this is the best alternative.
It would also be easier if I could just say that if I could take things back, that I would do them differently, but that's really not true. There are a lot of things that happened that you don't know about. That's not an excuse, but it's at least part of an explanation for why I became suspicious.
Everybody knows now that there were cameras in your pool house, but what they don't know is that I found them the night of your surprise party. I'll be honest with you, Logan. I didn't know if you knew about those cameras and it made me nervous that you had set me up. I know that you think that I should have trusted you, but the truth is that everybody had lied to me so much that it became almost impossible for me to figure out who was telling me the truth.
I wanted to trust you -- I wanted to believe that you had told me the whole truth about Shelley's party because you wanted there to be no secrets between us, but I couldn't just believe you because I wanted it to be true. I knew that there was a possibility that you had lied to the police, and to me, about your alibi and the fact that you had lied to me already made me wonder what else you had lied about.
The one thing that I do regret is how much you've been hurt by everything that's happened. I want you to know that I had no idea what Lilly was doing. I know that you probably won't believe me, but I would have told you if I knew. I would have.
I wish that you would call me.
Veronica
Minutes later, when Logan answered his ringing cell phone, he could still taste the salt on his lips.
~*~
Part 7a
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:08 am (UTC)There's one, maybe two parts left to go, according to my scene map. However, since I'm away on vacation this week, chances are there's going to be a bit of a break. I tried to finish up before I left, but ... you know what they say about good intentions!
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 10:59 pm (UTC)When will there be more?
no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:11 am (UTC)Thanks for your nice comments!
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 01:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 01:37 am (UTC)He had never even considered, for a minute, that Veronica was frightened of him until he'd seen it for himself. She'd thought that he was setting her up to be the star of Logan Echolls Porn Theatre. He couldn't summon up enough strength to be really angry with her about her lack of faith in him. They both knew exactly what he was capable of, and if he'd really hated her and had just been playing her, he would have taped her.
He would have.
That's just perfect.
Take Care
Mara
no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:19 am (UTC)Thanks, Mara!
no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 03:39 am (UTC)Now, I'm wondering who this mysterious Dubois is? Hmm....
no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:30 am (UTC)As for DuBois, I actually went back and changed the name of the security service that was referenced in an earlier chapter. I decided that I should use a pseudonym to represent the service.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 03:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:32 am (UTC)I'm on vaca this week, but I'll update as soon as possible.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 04:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 05:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 07:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 08:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 10:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 11:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 12:29 pm (UTC)Logan being able to watch and scrutinize what happened that night is a great way to let him come to terms with what happened and understand her motivations. Shame this is nearly finished, but looking forward to more regardless!
no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 02:49 pm (UTC)The only false note, to me, was this:
He must have wanted her all the way back then, he realized, craved that intimacy and absolute focus that she was so capable of.
I can totally see Logan wanting that, but I can't ever imagine him wanting her at that point. I guess it's just a matter of how you see the character.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 11:16 pm (UTC)Looking forward to the next chapter. Loved the closing sentence. :)
no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 02:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-14 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-15 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-15 06:01 am (UTC)I like that this is heading towards a reconciliation in a way that seems natural and unforced.
Anyway, good job as always. Thanks!
no subject
Date: 2005-08-17 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-15 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-17 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-04 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-06 01:43 am (UTC)