August sneaks up on him before he is ready for it. Life has a habit of doing that.
Title: August and Everything After (1/1)
Author: BuffyX
Pairing/Character: Logan POV; shades of Veronica/Logan, Veronica/Duncan
Rating: R for language and masturbation.
Spoilers/Warnings: All of season one.
A/N: This can be seen as a kind-of sequel to The Rain King, though is just as easily read as a stand-alone. Apologies for any typos, if they exist-- it's almost three in the morning, and I was hoping to get it posted before going to bed, so I may not have proofread as well as I should've.



we’re getting older and older and older / and always a little further out of the way
you look into her eyes / and it’s more than your heart will allow
and august and everything after / you get a little less than you expected somehow.
-- “august and everything after,” counting crows

**

August sneaks up on him before he is ready for it. Life has a habit of doing that.

**

On the first day of the new school year, Logan cuts his last class and walks out to the parking lot, only to discover that someone’s vandalized the X-Terra. The front windshield’s been egged, but that’s not the worst of it; no, that comes from where he made the damning mistake of leaving the backseat window open a crack. Somehow someone was able to jimmy the lock open and gutted a fish and left the insides on his backseat, and now the whole car smells like ass.

He tries not to breathe through his nose as he drives across town to some nondescript gas station with a garage attachment-- the one working attendant only speaks broken English, but somehow between the emphatic hand gestures towards the backseat and windshield, and pulling his wallet out to flash two crisp twenties, the guy gets the idea and starts to work.

Inside the mini-mart, Logan raids the snack aisle for two packs of Doritos and a liter of Mountain Dew. Goes to the cash register, keeping his black shades on. The last thing he needs is to get identified. No matter; the twenty-something acne-ridden girl behind the counter isn’t even looking at him. She rings up his things and asks him in a bored voice if that’s all.

A brief pause, and then he’s nabbing a tabloid with the face of Aaron Echolls plastered across the cover off the rack and tossing it in.

“That, too,” he says, and takes off his sunglasses, looking at her again. Hesitates for a moment to see if she says anything. Watches for any flicker of recognition on her end. But she just scans the paper, stuffs his things into a plastic bag, gives him the total and holds out her hand, waiting.

He hands her a ten and scoops up his bag and doesn’t wait for the change, even when she calls after him.

Outside it is too bright, so he slides his shades back on and squints against the sun to see the Hispanic worker drawing one of those squeegee things across his windshield, then wiping the remaining wetness off with a paper towel. He sits down on the pavement and leans back against the ice storage box, the one kept under lock, and pops a handful of Doritos into his mouth, swigs down some Dew.

When the guy’s all done, he backs off and Logan climbs into the front seat and drives off without saying anything else. The car doesn’t really smell like fish guts anymore, but it does smell like car grease and sweat. There’s one of those tree-shaped freshner kelly green things sitting on the dash, still in its package; the attendant must’ve thrown it in as an extra. He takes one hand off the wheel and rips the plastic off with his teeth. Loops the flimsy thing over the rearview mirror.

Now it smells like he’s spent the past year living in a fucking pine tree, but it’s still better than dead salmon and gasoline, so. So there’s that.

**

The first time Logan saw Veronica and Duncan after-- well, after everything-- was an accident.

One of his father’s lawyers was driving him back from a court hearing when he stopped to get some gas. For some reason the air conditioning wasn’t working in the lawyer’s sleek sedan, and it was one of those days that is unbearably hot, the kind of heat where the air gets that watery look to it, like a mirage. When the lawyer went in to pay, Logan had taken his water bottle and opened the passenger door and leaned out, dumping it over the top of his head, but by then the liquid was only lukewarm anyway and didn’t offer much reprieve.

That was when he heard it: her laughter. The sound of it startled him, and his head shot up for a moment, neck craning to look for her on instinct, before he remembered that having a heat stroke sounded like heaven in comparison to being spotted by Veronica Mars.

But it didn’t matter because she wasn’t looking in his direction anyway. She was standing by her car, filling up the tank, looking the same as ever. Well, not exactly the same-- her hair had grown out a little, just past her shoulders, bangs clipped back with a simple silver barrette that caught and gleamed in the high noon sun. Duncan was positioned behind her, one of his hands lingering on her waist, ducking his mouth down by her ear to whisper something in her ear, intimate. Whatever it was, it set her into giggles again, and then Duncan was, too, both of them laughing and touching and Logan was just staring and unable to comprehend.

Happiness-- theirs, his. All foreign to him. It didn’t fit in his brain anymore. Maybe the idea of it never had. At the very least, not since Lilly.

And when Duncan bent his head down and kissed Veronica on the shoulder, wrapped one arm around her middle, both of them shaking with the closeness and the laughter, it surprised Logan at how unsurprised he was by the picture. The two of them. It made sense. They made sense.

It’d be easier, maybe, if he could just hate her, the way he used to. But things had changed, lines were crossed, boundaries passed, and there is no going back now. He’d never learned to love inside the lines, never learned to love by the rules. And she might be the biggest bitch around, might have given Lilly a run for her money, and he sure as hell doesn’t like her, but he maybe kind of is in love with her, sometimes, as much as he hates himself for it.

But not really.

Because maybe Logan is lost beyond maps and constellations, maybe he is fucked-up beyond belief, maybe he’s been falling apart on an everyday basis, but at least he sees Veronica Mars a little more clearly now.

**

On the third day, Logan comes out to the parking lot only to see that there’s a rock-sized crack in his passenger seat window and the two front tires are sliced clean through, and Veronica’s pulling up in the Le Baron and fixing him with a weird look which he is pointedly ignoring, and he thinks that if the earth wanted to open up from under his feet and swallow him whole, right now would be as good a time as ever, thanks.

“Need a lift?” she asks, carefully neutral.

“I think I can somehow manage on my lonesome.” Logan tries for a leer to accompany the sarcasm, but it feels strange, like he’s been so out of practice that he’s forgotten how to do it. He whips out his cell phone and holds it up for her to see before turning his back to her, hoping she’ll get the hint to leave him the fuck alone.

“I just thought I’d give you a heads-up,” she explains, continuing anyway. She is not known for taking hints. “I saw a few photographers headed this way. Thought maybe you’d want to bail.”

He mulls it over in his head, which is the greater hell: being trapped in a car with Veronica Mars, or being hunted down by paparazzi, circling him like vultures around dead carcass. It’s like a no-win coin toss: heads bad, tails worse.

And heads it is. Logan tosses his bag into the back and hops swiftly over the side, and his ass has barely touched the seat before she’s peeling out of the lot, tires screeching against dry pavement. He steals a glance over his shoulder just in time to see a handful of photographers flocking around the X-Terra, cameras clicking away furiously.

“I’m guessing they’re still gung-ho, huh?” Veronica asks as they turn onto the main avenue; her eyes don’t drift off of the road. “They’ve pretty much stopped popping up behind every bush and trashcan in sight a few weeks ago for us, thank god. Drove me insane.”

Logan doesn’t know exactly who she is actually referring to with the us. It could be her and Keith, or her and Duncan. He tries not to think about it too much.

The truth is that the media attention has tapered down since the end of the trial. At first, Trina announced in a press release that the family would be declining all interviews, that they would be keeping their grief during this ordeal private. But it took her all of three weeks before she was taking phone calls. Waiting for the highest bidder. A full-length interview for People, complete with exclusive photoshoot at the Echolls mansion. Whenever the hype began to fall into a lull, there was Trina, making a spectacle of herself: tearful hour-long interviews on Dateline and 20/20, fainting in front of all the cameras outside the courthouse, supposedly overcome from the “stress” of the situation, and when the Aaron Echolls and Lilly Kane sex tapes found their way onto the world wide web in mid-July, Logan was pretty convinced she had to be behind that stunt, too.

“Yeah, well, you get used to it.” He turns his head to the side and stares at the scenery as it rushes by in an indistinguishable blur; he can feel her eyes on him.

“Still, can’t be exactly a bucket full of fun,” she comments, queen of the obvious.

“Maybe you should pull over here and let me walk the rest of the way,” he snaps. “The sympathy cards are over at Hallmark, in the opposite direction.”

Veronica shuts up, mouth drawn in a tight line, and doesn’t say anything more after that.

**

She left him five voicemails, before he had his number changed. No more daily inspirational quotes. What can he say; he doesn’t feel so inspired these days.

The messages ranged from calm and patient to worried and distraught to frustrated and exasperated to quiet and soft.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do if you aren’t even willing to talk to me,” she had said in the last, resigned and just a little broken; at the time he’d briefly thought her voice was thick with tears, maybe, but that couldn’t be right. It had to be something else.

**

It started over the summer, when he was jacking off on occasion in the bathroom, because even then in the black fucking hole that had become his life, he’d still had needs. He’d be standing beside the sink and staring at a magazine photo spread of Alyssa Milano at her hottest that was placed open on the edge of the tub, but in the back of mind he was always thinking of something else.

Logan found himself imagining how it would’ve gone down if Weevil had never shown up. If he’d had the balls to just go through with it, fall straight back into dark still waters, disappearing forever. And then he would go further, imagine his funeral. Namely, Veronica, dressed in a heavy black dress. Mourning with reddened eyes and mascara tracks running down her cheeks. Throwing her arms over his coffin, her body shaking with sobs, her entire being wracked with guilt.

“I’m so sorry,” she would weep, and she would hurt the way he did, the way he still does. Would want to die the way he wanted to, the way he still wants to.

Of course this is just one of his fucked-up fantasies. Veronica Mars will never cry for him.

That doesn’t keep him from thinking about it, thinking about her collapsing with grief as his casket is lowered into the ground, her tears salting the earth, but it is too late because he is gone, gone, gone. And maybe the most fucked-up part about all of this is that he doesn’t know what gets him off more: the idea of Veronica crying over him, or the idea of death itself.

**

On the seventh day, he catches the vandalizer in the act. It’s some random boy, a faceless sophomore, keying the side of the car, scratching up the yellow paint. Just some punk probably hoping for attention by screwing with this year’s pariah. Well, Logan has spent half the day underneath the bleachers hanging out with his dear old trusty friend Jack Daniels and his whole body is buzzing with it, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do to the kid, but he does know that he’s going to make it hurt.

But before he can reach him, there’s Weevil, grabbing the kid by the scruff of his t-shirt collar and slamming him up against the car door.

Logan hasn’t said anything to Weevil since their last encounter-- the encounter that left him with a black eye, near-broken jaw and a limp that stuck with him for three weeks after. He doesn’t remember all of it, just that he’d been plastered out of his mind and teetering and started scream-singing London bridge is falling down before Weevil had yanked him down for an ass-kicking he’d been all too happy to receive. Admist the chaos he’d driven home to that night, it seemed unimportant, in the grand scheme of things.

“You better keep your bitch ass away from this car,” Weevil warns the boy, twisting his arm around his back. He has a pocketknife held up to his throat.

“Fucking A!” the kid gasps. Squirms from underneath Weevil’s steel-tight grip.

“You hear me, boy?” Weevil says, digging the blade in deeper against the skin.

The kid fucking whimpers, says yes yes please anything yes, pleads and begs to be let go of. Weevil slams him once more against the door, hard, and watches as the boy stumbles off at breakneck speed.

And Logan doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he’s pissed. It’s not fair, it’s not fucking fair, no one can let him have anything. He wanted to lay his hands into that kid and feel his knuckles cracking against bone and let him have it. Now his hands are on Weevil, grappling with him, fingers itching to get around his throat.

Well, Logan might be taller but Weevil is Weevil, after all, and he gets one blow in that sends him slumping to the ground. Weevil stands over him until he gathers himself up on his knees. Everything is bright and swirling and he thinks he’s going to puke on Weevil’s leather boots.

He must’ve said something like that out loud, because Weevil growls, “Not in this lifetime,” and hauls him to his feet. Throws open the back door of the X-Terra and tosses him in like he’s nothing.

Before Weevil closes the door, Logan sees-- just for a moment or two-- Duncan, standing nearby, watching. His face is blank, eyes unreadable, and they’re the last thing he sees before he passes out.

**

When he and Duncan were younger, they underwent all sorts of stupid best friend cliché rituals, among which included poking holes in their fingertips and proceeding to press the open cuts together, which Logan swore would make them blood brothers forever and ever amen. It was either that or spit into each other’s mouths, and Duncan was more afraid of someone else’s germ-ridden saliva than sharp pointy objects, so safety pins to index fingers it was.

Now he and Duncan have stopped talking-- there is only dead silence between them, the way someone can look through you, and it becomes painfully clear that everything you are and everything you represent is appalling. And Logan knows he deserves that, and worse, yet sometimes he wants to go up to Duncan and hold up his finger and ask him if he remembers. Wants to say, Hey, remember that time when we swore to be best friends for eternity, no matter what? What a crock, huh? Guess we forgot to include a disclaimer for if one party’s father kills the other party’s sister.

But it’s completely possible that he just made the whole memory up anyway. There is no scar, after all. And he never asks, because if Duncan-- if he’d deign to acknowledge Logan’s presence in the first place-- had looked at him and said, I don’t know what you’re talking about, it would mean that maybe it had never happened, that there was never a bond to be severed in the first place, and that isn’t something Logan can afford to lose.

**

The next thing he knows, he’s sitting on the edge of his bed, though how he got there is still a big long blur that he’d rather not attempt to recall at the moment. He is aware, however, that he’s still drunk enough that he can’t feel his feet. Everything is dim and white and cool, silent, save the sound of the overhead fan whirring softly.

Veronica is there, and he blinks a couple of times before he realizes that he’s not just seeing things. She’s on the floor, kneeling down and loosening his laces, sliding the shoes off his heels. She sets them neatly in side-by-side at the foot of the bed. Her mouth is set in a half-frown, but her face isn’t giving anything away, and that’s the same as it used to be, too. When she looks up at him, her eyes are hard.

“Duncan saw you and Weevil, and he came and told me,” she explains without preamble, and then, “I won’t do this again.”

The words sting, wasps rattling inside his chest. He is an obligation, to her. A walking, talking breathing drunken guilt trip. Nothing else. Of course.

“Good,” he spits back. Belligerent. “I didn’t realize I asked you.”

Veronica Mars is not a superhero, and she is not his keeper, and she is not his mother. No. Logan has no mother. He has no father. He is an orphan now, with only a famewhore of a sister as a pale imitation of family; no one else will take him in. He’s overheard Trina, talking to the laywers, when they think he can’t hear-- they’ve already tried passing him onto his grandparents, but they won’t take him, either. He is unwanted.

“When you act like this-- what am I supposed to do?” she demands, pissed, and stands up. “I can’t make it better. It doesn’t work that way.”

“I never asked you for anything,” he shouts at her, his words slurring and vision swimming. “So just go nail yourself to a cross already and fuck off.”

Veronica becomes very still and quiet and serious. “Is that what you really want?”

No. What he wants is for her to stay. To hold him and tell him that he’ll be okay. That she doesn’t hate him, that she never did, that it wasn’t all a sham and that she could even love him someday, eventually. That things may be shitty now, that he might be fucked-up beyond imagination, but that it won’t last forever. That he’s strong enough to pull through. Because he doesn’t think he will. He really, really doesn’t.

But since when has what he wanted ever factored into the equation?

“Yeah,” he lies, “yeah, it is.”

It is a lie, yes, but it is easier. Easier than the truth. Easier than falling apart. What else could he possibly say?

A long moment passes between them, with her just standing there and staring at him, jaw clenched tight. For a second he could almost swear there was a glimmer of something in her eyes, but that can’t be it, of course, and anyway, she’s turning from him and walking out the door without a word.

**

The truth would not have set him free, would not have brought her back to him. And if he can’t have that, then he can only hold onto the white and the stillness and the silence.