thiswholeflight | Fic: swing the focus (Logan) R

Title: swing the focus
Author:

duckytears
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,700
Character/Pairing: Logan (with mentions of D/V, K/L, L/L and V/L)
Summary: "It's okay, Logan," she says, a sob cut off thickly by her voice - but that, Logan knows, is something people say when things are not okay.
Spoilers/Warnings: AU after Donut Run.
Disclaimer: They're not mine. They belong to Rob Thomas. Also a line belongs to Charles Dickens. :)
Author's Note: Written for

missambs. Titles of each section come from the song "Lying Is the Most Fun A Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off" by Panic! At The Disco.

i. i hope to god he was worth it.

She's standing by her locker and there he is, lingering over and kissing away the sleep from her eyes before the early morning classes. Logan mockingly takes a picture of them, his finger pressing down on the button after adjusting the zoom of his invisible camera. His tongue makes the click of the camera sound before the white light engulfs them whole.

They don't notice.

Logan's not the guy in the image. He's not the one who fits in the picture she wants to paint, affectionately - like a poodle - carrying her books to class. It's so sweet that he wants to gag on the scent of the arsenic he can taste in the air. No, Logan is stuck drawing stick figures in thick black ink, with a pen that leaks and smears over his fingers. That's the way his sky turns black: dirty fingers.

He can't help it. They're everywhere - a constant reminder of what he doesn't have, but used to have, in his life. They're everywhere and he's nowhere.

Veronica wants the works of Van Gogh and he's Munch or Warhol.

Out of the two of them, Duncan's more likely to cut off his ear anyway.

ii. sweetie, you had me.

He sees Lilly every day.

Ever since Veronica dumped his sorry ass for setting a community pool on fire, Lilly has shown up to mock him at every interaction (every time she's near/gone). He can't help but wonder if this is exactly like the exes that never let you live anything down. Logan can't blame Lilly. She doesn't have much of a life anyway.

"I'm gonna miss you," Logan tells Veronica before she boards the yellow cheesewagon of a bus with Duncan. He says it to dig at her. No, he says it to dig at the both of them. He's possibly one of those abusive exes and he doesn't quite give a shit. The irony is the fact that he's the only one of them who promised to leave and he's the only one who hasn't. There is no successful disappearing act for Logan Echolls.

You see him and then he's...

"Still lusting after Veronica, lover?" Lilly cackles as Logan waves to Veronica from outside the bus before heading to his X-Terra. He hates Lilly, but he'll never admit it. If she existed he'd be flushing right now.

"Burning in hell?" he retorts, slamming the driver's side door, locking and hooking in. Lilly's in the passenger seat anyway. Locked doors don't keep ghosts out.

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" She lounges, her breasts rising with a long cat-like streach. She occasionally moves to play with the reverse stick - holding it like she used to hold him - just to piss him off. "I mean, at least I'd have some form of a tan that way, you know..."

Lilly doesn't burn, he remembers this.

"Charbroiled. It's all the rage," he says anyway.

"Maybe she would have stayed with you if you'd gone down on her."

He'd tried. She didn't want him like that - not yet.

"Maybe you'd still be alive if you hadn't given my dad a blowjob, did you ever think of that?" He says in a tone to convey that not everything is sex, but even he doesn't believe that - because everything is sex. It matters more than it should.

Lilly laughs - laughs like there's something beyond his words, more than a blowjob - and it shoots pains and a squirming feeling down from his chest to his stomach. "Touche!" Lilly replies. He gets the feeling that it's all some big game to her - a game that he can never win.

He turns on the ignition and heads to the Casablancas residence.

"There, that's it," Lilly says. "That's right."

iii. let's get these teen hearts beating [faster, faster]

Burning is becoming all the rage, whether it's Veronica storming into his house, jealousy heating within her, or a literal fire that burns that mother of a house down. Burn, motherfucker burn, he chants silently to himself as his eyes fill with the flames that just consume years and floods of memories. It's all just steam, anyway.

He'd like to say he was surprised, but even he wasn't. That fire was going to start one day and thank god it's not by him because at least he can now collect the insurance.

It's relief that burns with the ashes. That, fragments of double sided movie posters (his father's face), an Avril CD that Veronica left at his house (he's been meaning to give back), and epitaph that he's been writing for himself.

Here lies Logan Echolls, it said in careless chicken scratch scrawl. He fucked up, but at least he was honest.

He doesn't get the chance to write how he could make girls (or Laker girls) scream in bed from pleasure. The language is a statement of finger print marked light purple bruises over his hips - a streak of nails down his shoulder in red. He doesn't get the chance to write it, but he doesn't need to. It's written in all the places that matter. Clothing covers marks which cover old scars and everything that needs to be masked is.

Logan doesn't visit the rubble. Barely anything from that life is saved: his father's lifetime achievement award, an unlabeled video which he throws away and various other accessories that mean nothing to him. Anything that survives he sells or leaves to Trina to take care of.

He doesn't ask but Duncan - without words - tells him to stay over, he does and then he never leaves.

It occurs to him once while watching some pay-per-view movies with Duncan that the leather belts in his father's closet were among the first things that melted away. He thinks, for a moment, that that is why the whole assault of scent made him turn away. His eyes watered like there was burnt rubber on a long road. The long road is supposed to be some fucking metaphor for his life. The belts were his dad's weapon of choice, just as platinum cards were Lynn's. Logan vocalizes it, without thinking.

Duncan doesn't know what to say. He doesn't even look at Logan. Logan imagines him saying Show me - but the evidence is gone. It's just up in flames. Duncan has already seen his skin.

"I'm going to order a pizza," Duncan says, getting up, but there's something warm and affectionate in his voice and something Logan is reminded of when he thinks of the first day of school.

Slowly, a smile tugs at Logan's own cheeks, his voice and body betraying him. "Don't forget the pineapple," he calls after Duncan.

iv. exchanging body heat in the passenger seat.

They're touching. Not touching, but touching when he reaches over almost timidly to comfort Veronica while she's crying. Months ago, they were making out heavily in the backseat and today he's so scared that she's going to slap away his hand - which she does. She shoves him away and he can still feel the soft sensation of her jacket, her back, against his fingers.

Veronica Mars, he has settled, is much like a broken tap. She goes hot and she goes cold and there is nothing in between. Thinking about how she tastes, he swears that he tastes copper because she is like blood. She's everywhere and she's essential without the brains to know it.

"A gun, Logan? A gun! What are you doing with a gun?" She screams at him, rocking him back against his seat with the force of her words. Her eyes are at him with and it stirs some guilt in the bottom of his stomach. "You're going to get yourself killed, don't you understand that?"

He can feel her water burning hard against his skin, turning his flesh red in an instant as he takes the gun out with a sigh and tosses it into the glove compartment with some comment about how the gun isn't even loaded. Minutes ago she was about to go under tattoo needle and she's complaining about him owning some gun that just saved their ass. She would have been dead and it would have been because of him.

"Given your situation... you should just move out of Neptune," Veronica spits harshly towards him.

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replies the Ghost in the backseat, sounding too much like Lilly as he pulls his leg up to reveal the ankle monitor to Veronica. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."

His chains aren't some metaphysical prison like Marley's ghost. He hasn't built them up in life. He did nothing to deserve this.

Christmas is coming soon along with anniversaries he'd rather forget. He watches Veronica retreat without a look back towards him and he lets devastation settle within him before taking out his cell phone to call Kendall. Lilly might be saying something witty to cut him down, but he's learned to stop hearing her. He just hasn't figured out how to stop seeing her.

v. oh, camera man, swing the focus.

Days are like flashcards and Logan's have been tossed elsewhere - mixed up in a blink of a moment - because he's trying to pick them up one by one off of the floor. It's fucking lonely and, even though he made the most noise in the presidential suite of the Neptune Grand, Duncan's absence has just left another empty space to fill.

There's a part of him that's still amazed - not with the whole baby making process, but with the fact that Duncan has some kid out there. A baby girl, he said, belonging to him and Meg. Logan sits there instead of tearing the place to bits and is merely astounded - not by the miracle of life, but by the fact that for the past year or so he has not known his best friend.

Yet, they were best friends. Out of everyone, Duncan did know him the best. Even when Duncan abandoned his life, chose not to believe in the impossible and look at Logan as if he was the crazy one out of the two of then, Duncan knew him more than anyone else.

This whole baby thing feels like some sort of slap in the face. He knows that it's not that. Duncan's just moved ahead and he's still stuck in second gear.

"You're an Aunt," Logan says to the invisible space. Lilly is long since gone. Three weeks before Duncan took off into the sunset with his sweet baby girl - leaving Neptune not once, but twice - he stopped seeing Lilly entirely.

Because Lilly's not there, he starts to fill in for her. "Don't remind me. Donut's too young to be raising any form of offspring."

"I know. I'm worried."

"Don't be. He'll do fine without you." A minute later, her brilliant smile flashes cheekily. "He named her after me," she says with more affection the real Lillian Kane would ever have.

Logan unscrews the cap of his flask and downs the leftover drop of Sir Jack of Daniels.

vi. where was it we last left off.

It's the point in which he's supposed to find solace within Veronica because they're the only ones left - only she doesn't quite realize that. Logan's waiting on the sidelines and she's still standing there playing the game out of some unrelenting effort to never give up. It's useless and she hasn't seen that yet.

He's known it since he was seven.

Logan stops by every day at the coffee shop that she works at - and some days she glances at him, bothers to help him. Customer service, my ass, he thinks. Mostly, Veronica ignores him like he used to ignore Lilly before she disappeared.

One night he stays there until closing and until she closes up. "I'm cutting you off," she says, and her tone is almost joking. He's had eight cups of coffee and hasn't once gotten up to use the bathroom. For once in his life he has no words. There is no clever retort, just a small smile on his face that he long since forgot could exist.

She scoops up his half empty eighth cup in her hand, along with the small plate underneath. The other customers have long since left. He leaves a fifty dollar tips and, when he goes to leave, she shakes the money towards him.

"What is this?" She asks, shaking in anger or fear - like he's mocking her because she's lost the Kane scholarship.

"You work with a cash register and I need to tell you what it is?" Logan answers amused. "I'm glad I didn't ask for change this time."

"Keep your money, Logan," Veronica says, trying to shove it into his hand, but he has closed fists.

"It's a tip, Veronica. Keep it."

"I...-" she starts, but he cuts her off too sharply. Her fingers are still attempting to thrust the bill back into his hand and her nails manage to scratch at his wrist by accident.

"Keep it," he repeats.

vii. you know it will always just be me.

She's panicking now. He can see the rise in her throat like bile coming up, but she's not going to start throwing up on him. It wouldn't be fitting. He opens up his mouth to let out some form of a comment with some heated bullet behind it, but that, he thinks, is what possibly got him in this mess.

A bubble of saliva and blood makes a thin stream out of the corner of his mouth. Instead of words, he coughs and his cough brings up everything else.

Veronica's fingers fumble over his chest, trying to put pressure where there's blood gushing out of a deep wound in his chest. It's too slippery. There's not enough material to block the wound and he can feel himself quickly grow too dizzy and too wet.

He thinks she's crying, but he can't actually tell because his eyes are watering too. The rush of pain is delayed, but it rips through him in an instant, his body arching sharply in an open mouthed gasp for air he's unable to bring in.

"It's alright. It's alright," she keeps saying, pressing down harder on him and on the wound. "It's okay, Logan," she says, a sob cut off thickly by her voice - but that, Logan knows, is something people say when things are not okay. He can't breathe now and that's certainly not okay. He knows this doesn't fit her image - her vision of the brilliant painting that her life is supposed to resemble, but she was Munch in the beginning anyway. She was like him, "The Scream" and she knew that.

Her colors are white and blinding - eggshell - and form a horrifying image of a dead girl by a swimming pool, the cool blue reflecting off of her pale skin. Her colors are brown and green - dark - and form the image of a girl trying to press down the black that keeps pouring out of him. Because it won't stop.

"Don't do this, you jackass," she says.

He wonders when she thinks he's ever listened to her.

Current Mood: relieved
Current Music: "When I Am Queen" - Jack Off Jill

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Date: 2006-03-08 08:43 am (UTC)

From:

first kiss and the first time that i felt connected to anything

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