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He doesn’t let himself miss her.
It should be easier, now, than it was in high school. It should be easier to ignore the small in size, but giant in every other respect, girl gone. It should be easier, because in high school, she was always there. Always in front of him. And he couldn’t quite help but look at her. Even when he had convinced himself he hated her, he couldn’t help but watch her. It was a compulsion he never understood how everyone else who ever knew her could resist. But no one else but him seemed to suffer from that particular weakness.
His life now is wholly separate from his life then. Well, for the most part. He still has Dick. He’s still obscenely wealthy. But he likes to think that he’s got a majority of his issues under control now in a way he didn’t then. He went and saw a therapist, once, after she disappeared on him at the end of freshman year; and after a little bit of too tantalizing information about how he was despondent and suicidal (yes to the first, no to the second) ended up in every major tabloid he’d ever heard of and some he hadn’t, he decided that figuring things out for himself by himself was what he’d have to do if he didn’t want to add other psychological problems to his ever growing pile.
One of the ways he’s been trying to keep himself on this path of self-actualization and realistic fulfillment is to not miss her.
After all, he’s been working on not chasing. Been working on being good about being alone. As much as it sounds ridiculous, using the “I am at home with me. I am rooted in the me who is on this adventure. This is me breathing.” exercise from Grosse Pointe Blank really works for him. He gets a lot of little tricks from movies. He likes the irony of it, taking moments of truth from a world fabricated. And he knows better than most how fake and flimsy those film worlds actually are. Murdering abusive fuck as action hero definitely helped put all that into perspective years ago.
So, in his day to day life, he doesn’t let Veronica Mars enter the equation. He doesn’t let her, because he knows how easy it would be to allow himself to be consumed by her, even in absentia. And he does his best to ignore the fact that not missing her means thinking about not missing her a lot more than is probably ideal. But life is anything but ideal, even at the best of times, so his not missing of her is just a buzz. A weird, completely self-created, completely psychosomatic tinnitus. Except it’s not so much a ringing as an ever present, low grade loop of “not missing her not missing her not missing her”.
It’s been there for so long, he’s able to give practically his entire focus to other people, other projects. He’s had girlfriends, and he’s known their favorite flowers and favorite song and the best, easiest way to get them off. He doesn’t allow her to impact those aspects of his life. Not much, anyway.
He doesn’t let himself miss her, but he dreams about her. Almost every night. A couple of girlfriends have asked about it. Not about her, because he’s never been a sleep talker, thank the fucking lord. But about this thing that he does, where he tosses and turns and then shoots awake and looks at them, apparently, like they don’t belong there. One of them left him after he did it a few times. The others generally stay when he plays the “followed/attacked by the mob plus my high school girlfriend was murdered and oh yeah my mom took a one way trip off a tall bridge” card(s). He never said he’d developed scruples.
When he dreams of her, she comes back to him.
Sometimes.
He likes those dreams the best, so he focuses on them more than the ones where he crawls back to her.
Literally.
In his dreams, when she comes back to him, she just walks back into his life with those knowing eyes and that sassy smile and a couple of aces up her sleeve to shock and amaze him. In his dreams, when she comes back to him, it’s because she wants him, and also because she is Veronica Mars and there’s some justice to be done.
In his dreams, when he crawls back to her, she’s still got those knowing eyes and sassy smile, but he needs her so much he finds her. He needs her so much he is broken without her. He needs her so much he bleeds for her. And about half of the time, she takes him back and his dream self pretends it’s out of something other than pity. The other half, she just uses that sassy smile to pull him up and then dusts him off and sends him on his way.
He has her number, still. He doesn’t miss her, so he doesn’t need to get rid of it. He has pictures of her, still, too. Girlfriends have asked about the blonde on the walls of his apartment - houses are too big, too impersonal, too... too much of a reminder that he doesn’t have that life yet, where he can fill it - and he tells them that she’s an old friend.
When he drinks, which he now does in moderation and for the pleasure of the drink rather than out of the pleasure of being almost constantly drunk, he stares at it sometimes, her number. Ten digits glowing back at him, daring him to press it, daring him to invite her back into his life, even if only over the phone.
He never does. She doesn’t miss him. He’s pretty sure; because if she did, she would do something about it. She wasn’t never one to leave a sore spot unpoked, even her own. She wouldn’t hesitate to come find him if he was what she wanted, so he holds back on letting her be everything he desires.
It’s funny, he thinks, what you start to think about when locked in a holding cell. Like a girlfriend who walked out of your life and never came back, not even to pop by ‘round Christmas. It’s funny who pops into your head when you’re, once again, a suspect in a (different) girlfriend’s murder.
It isn’t that he didn’t care about Carrie, because he did, even if they’d only recently gotten back in touch and only more recently still started seeing each other more than socially. It’s just that, what rotten sodding luck does he have that he has this happen again? He wants to just laugh with the universe, because apparently his love life is still some kind of inside joke no one will see fit to explain to him.
He makes bail, because of course he does, because Cliff argues that there isn’t enough evidence to hold him, because he didn’t kill Carrie Bishop, because why would he?
He knows what the press is going to write about - troubled poor little rich boy, so damaged. He knows they’re going to drag in the fact that he knew Carrie from high school and then some anonymous source is going to talk about his rage problems, which he has dutifully and mostly dealt with, and he knows - just knows - someone is going to bring Veronica into this anyway.
“You might want to think about hiring a different lawyer,” Cliff tells him.
“Yeah,” he responds absently, gently swiping over the number on the screen, not pressing hard enough to call, “you’ve said that before.”
“And I’m going to keep saying it until you listen.”
“I’m a lot more well liked than I used to be,” he tells the lawyer. “It’ll be easier this time to find expert witnesses to talk about what an upstanding citizen I am.”
“And it will be doubly easy to find expert witnesses to talk about what a troubled soul you were and still are. Don’t be fooled, kid. Asshole rich boys have gone to prison for less. You’re more popular now, but let’s not pretend that you’re actually actively popular in this parts.”
“That’s what I like about you, Cliff. You never sugarcoat the details.”
Cliff sighs, and he almost feels bad for still being this big a pain in the ass. But, then again, he does pay the guy significantly better than his other clients.
“Thanks for the ride.”
He gets out of the car, and Cliff sighs again, and calls through the open window. “What are you going to do?”
He shrugs. “I figure, I’ll head for the border. You think that’ll make me look guiltier?”
He watches Cliff shake his head. Watches the guy drive away. He doesn’t know why he didn’t just tell the man what he is thinking about doing, what he is about to do. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want anyone else’s input on this. It’s been nine years, and he’s not missing her. He just finally has a reason to call.
He touches her number, firmly, and he hears it ring. Clears his throat as he hears her pick up, feels his mantra of not missing her shatter at the first time he’s heard her voice in nearly a decade.
“Hey, uh, it’s - it’s Logan. Echolls.” He cringes at the fact that he threw that in there, but he’s got this undercurrent of fear now that she doesn’t remember him, except as a dulled, blurry vision of himself.
“Yeah,” she answers. “Hi.”
“Listen, I know this is - weird. I mean, calling you, out of the blue, It’s weird.”
“It is a little weird,” she answers, and he swears he’s hearing a breathlessness in her voice that’s not there. Or, if it is, it’s from running or sex or a bad connection. She continues, and a lump develops in his throat from it. “But not a bad weird. Just, unexpected. How are you?”
“Not so good, actually. Someone in Neptune has taken your traditional role of accusing me of dastardly crime.” He curses himself for being flip, curses himself for backsliding into these defense mechanisms he thought he’d gotten over, especially when he hears her little gasp at the other end of the phone. “They think I killed my girlfriend. And I didn’t. I need your help, Veronica.”
There’s just silence, and he does a little shuffle on the sidewalk outside of his apartment building, waiting for her response.
“I don’t really do that, anymore.” It’s tentative and soft, and it’s everything Veronica isn’t, and it hits him that he doesn’t know this woman on the other end of the line at all. And she doesn’t know him either. He thought he’d always know Veronica, had planned on always knowing Veronica, and now he’s let her slip away and just like that they’re strangers.
“Yeah?” He starts pacing again, nausica pulsing up through him. “What would it take for you to do it again?”
There’s another long pause, and he holds his breath. Veronica doesn’t know him anymore. Veronica may think he did do it, or could have done it. Hell, even when she did know him, she thought that. He wants to know why the hell he thought this would be a good idea. Why he thought she’d be his savior.
“How bad is it?” Her voice is still soft, but now it’s sweet and he clings to it.
“Pretty bad,” he offers, kicking a tiny pebble out into the street. He imagines it having a butterfly kind of effect, where he kicks that one pebble and it gets lodged in a tire which causes the alignment to be off which causes an accident which kills everyone on board. He thought he’d gotten away from these kinds of thoughts, the ones where he’s the cause of all the ills in the world. But apparently getting dragged in for questioning for a crime he didn’t commit is enough to make him flash back to being seventeen and scared shitless. “Cliff doesn’t seem too optimistic about my chances. He keeps humming ‘Sandman’. If you ask me, he’s missing the actual message of that song.”
He hears her fight back a snort, and smiles. “Okay. Listen, I just had a job interview, but I’ll call them and tell them that I’m going to be in transit for a little while, and then I’ll call the airports and see about flights to San Diego. I’m going to need someone to pick me up, though.”
His chest, his heart, his lungs, they’re in a vice grip, and he can’t breathe. “I’ll come. I’ll pick you up. Just, uh, let me know when you’re set to arrive.”
“Yeah, okay.”
He glares at a random passerby, blaming the guy and his dog for his sudden and inexplicable bout of total uncoolness.
You don’t miss her, he reminds himself.
But it doesn’t really work, because now he knows he does. That he always did.
When the day finally comes to pick her up from the airport, he gets there an hour before her plane is even scheduled to land and just drives around the parking lots aimlessly. He has to leave, once, to get gas, and of course that’s when she calls. But he can’t tell her that he hasn’t parked because he had this notion that if he did, if he expected her there, she wouldn’t have shown up. So, he blusters, and she makes fun of his car. Typical.
He makes it back to the airport in record time, and circles around once more.
And stares at her. She’s still gorgeous. He’d been hoping that the years had been unkind to her. That she’d gotten addicted to tanning beds. That she’d started smoking. That she’d gotten a lot of tattoos. Anything to take away from the beauty of Veronica Mars. His only consolation is that she looks gobsmacked to. But, he allows, that may just be about the car.
She confirms that when she tells him, “I misjudged you. This car is a fine piece of machinery.”
He pops the trunk as he gets out, and circles around to grab her bag, feeling like he is seventeen again and fumbling around for something to impress her. “Yeah. Weevil convinced me to buy it,” he tells her, wincing, because she’s always had a soft spot for Weevil he never understood and just because they’re on better terms now that Weevil knows he doesn’t hit women and he’s gotten over the whole, “you slept with my murdered girlfriend and lusted after the love of my life” bit doesn’t mean he wants to feed that bit of her that’s curious about the other guy.
Sure enough, her voice is going soft and sweet when she says, “Weevil?” and he wants to know what he can do to make her say his name like that, like she genuinely cares.
“Yeah,” he answers, and tries not to be too sullen about it, because he’s not going to be jealous of Weevil. For one, he’s too old for that. And for two, Weevil’s married. Which may be doing more for his mental health than point number one, actually. He closes the trunk and then turns and looks at her. What he wants is to know whether or not she’s here as an acquaintance, or as an old friend she has fond memories of and nothing more, or if she could possibly still feel anything for him beyond that. She stares back, and as much as he’s drinking the sight of her in, it feels like she’s doing the same. It gives him enough of an ego boost to say hi to her in the voice he knows used to rev her engine but good. He’s vindicated by the spread of her blush.
“Hey,” she answers back, and it’s the tone that always made him grin so he does. She’s smiling at him and he’s grinning at her and it feels like they’re the only two people in the universe. It feels like she came back for him, like she’s walking back to him. It’s a great moment.
“Hey,” she says again, still smiling brightly at him, still looking at him, in a slightly lower octave. His grin widens and he slides closer. Then a guy who’s an even bigger asshole than he is honks a horn and the moment is gone, and then killed completely when she asks, “So, Weevil?” as she slides into the passenger side of his car.
“Yeah, Weevil. He helped me out a few jams, I invested in his business. He gives me advice on which cars are just jackassy enough to satisfy my inner asshole but respectable enough to not scream jackass to the general public.”
She smiles fondly, and for the first time in at least a year he wants to punch something really hard. “A very Weevil thing to do. How is he, otherwise?”
“He’s -” He stops himself. He doesn’t want to tell her for any other reason than latent jealousy, and Weevil deserves that moment. He deserves to tell Veronica his happy news. He deserves his grown up moment. And he deserves to see her, too. Logan looks over at her, and she’s watching him. She feels settled, somehow. Less ‘Veronica versus the World’. More, ‘Veronica, doer of good’. It’s a more adult Veronica. And it looks good on her. She deserves to see Weevil, too. “You know what? He should tell you himself.”
“He’s okay, though, right?”
He has a split second where he wants to lash out, wants to ask her where the hell she’s been if she still cares so damn much. But he knows. Veronica always cared. So he tells her the truth, that Weevil has never been better, and watches her watch him. Whatever she sees, it seems like she likes it. And he’s glad for it. Because it feels like a dream come true, her being here in his car.
It feels like a dream come true, and he’s willing to be selfish enough to grab a hold of this moment for as long as he can, before tomorrow comes and they have to deal with the fact that he’s gotten himself into yet another situation where he is the prime suspect in a murder investigation. He’s going to hold onto this moment, where it’s just him and Veronica driving down the coast. He’s going to hang onto this moment, because it feels a bit like home. It’s the calm before the storm, he knows that. But he can’t help it, he’ll take the storm if he gets to enjoy the calm for just a little bit longer.