orange_crushed | Fic: Devotion (L/V, season 2, PG)

Devotion. This is VM-fic, set in Season Two; somewhere before One Angry Veronica. PG for language and cheap innuendo (thanks, Echolls.) L/V, of course, since last year Rob Thomas and I agreed on something.

Logan is holding the elevator at the end of the hall.

"Are you coming ?" he says, spoiled child edging into his voice; and then as quickly he gets his own joke. "Right, of course you're coming. Gosh, you've only just arrived !"

Here's what she wants: a biological explanation of what he's doing to her. A latin name and a chart for the reaction. She thinks she must be an inside-out valentine, empty lace filling her stomach and lungs and eyeballs, like the hollows in bird's bones; while her outside reddens and blurs. BEE MINE.

Logan is holding the elevator at the end of the hall.

"Are you coming ?" he says, spoiled child edging into his voice; and then as quickly he gets his own joke. "Right, of course you're coming. Gosh, you've only just arrived !"

"I should kill you," she mutters at him, and takes the stairs.

It's eleven-thirty on the quad and Duncan is somewhere being student body president or captain or knight or whatever. She wants him to lean against while she suffers through homework, but nothing doing. Mac waves at her, and she waves back.

"It's a lonely life," she calls out, and flips through Ethan Frome. Mac shrugs.

Logan, not that she would notice, is also sitting alone.

She watches him unwrap his lunch, hands at angles she remembers; thirty-five degrees, eight-nine; at seventy-eight degrees he cups her face and tells her that he loves her, that he'll always love her, that she's something he believes in. Can't she give him a chance, try to understand what he's-

He wads up the cellophane, and sees her.

"Are you hungry ?" He grins, homicidally cheery. She looks at the asphalt and tries to memorize things that aren't him. "Or does my chalupa just totally bring you to the yard ?"

"No." It sounds sharper than she means it to. "No, no yard." He's staring at her, and she's staring at the ground, and she has to look up sometime. When she does, the grin is gone, and there's a face she remembers, an authentic one. It needs chasing away. "Doesn't fast food, like, kill people ?"

"Read the paper, Veronica," he says, and shakes his fist at her, mock-outraged. "I kill people." He wanders off towards the shade of the stairs.

She's not thinking about Duncan anymore.

She remembers when the bus went off the cliff. Veronica wonders if she'll be able to phrase it the same way later, when the shock has worn off; will she frame the whole day like a bad horror writer, and then the bus went off the cliff ? And then the bus went off the cliff. It doesn't make any sense, does it ? Who would write, and then the bus goes off the cliff ?

Duncan held onto her in the back of the limo. They were still waiting for the paramedics to tell them to leave, not that there was anything they could do. Her phone rang. It had been ringing. She didn't even say hello, just held down the button until his voice sprang to life.

"Veronica, pick up. Fucking- pick up the goddam phone. Say something."

"I'm here."

"Jesus Christ," he said quickly, and hung up before she could ask him what he's doing, why he's calling her, how he can still be happy that she's alive.

Boys are the luckiest; they land a couple of punches and the probem is solved, erased, no big. All they need to do is touch each other, even in anger, and the tension is lifted and they're friends again. Then he moves in, and it's a goddam rerun of Perfect Strangers, and now she has to see Logan's socks on the floor near the couch, Logan on the couch, Logan everywhere. She doesn't understand. And she can't touch Logan. No, not ever. Even if they'd be friends again.

"He's going to the movies, with me, when he comes back," she says, and puts her feet up on the coffee table.

"Wrong night, wrong number, girlfriend." He leans on the sideboard, and cracks his knuckles. "DK and I have a little catching up to do. Man stuff- fast women, speedy cars, extremely rapid food and drink. You might as well scoot."

"Aw, scoot ?" She wrinkles her nose in a smile. "How Archie comics of you."

"I am a loveable scamp," he agrees. They stare at the television set, which is muted, and not at one another. Her lungs are ballast in her chest, her head swims. He stands very still and folds his sleeves over his hands; she can see this and know that it's happening without turning her head.

Duncan comes home, and looks at the two of them, and says nothing.

"Let's go," she says quickly, and grabs her bag, and grabs Duncan; they leave Logan standing against the wall, alone. She doesn't remember what movie they see, and it doesn't matter, not with Duncan's tongue down her throat.

The only time her heart slows down is when he's kissing her.

She knows he was fucking Kendall, and what's worse is that she doesn't think she cares. She could blame him for making bad decisions, except she's seen his role models; meaningless sex with an idiot gym bunny seems like the healthiest coping his genes have thought of yet.

At least he's not burning down any pools.

She lets him drive her to the Grand, and she doesn't know why, except for the lame reason that she gives: the LeBaron needs brakes. Again. Logan lets her fiddle with the radio and roll down the windows and doesn't ask her anything. It's nerve-wracking. They sprawl into the living room and wait for the missing link to come home; she sits in Duncan's room and flips through her homework, listening to him play Donkey Kong until his hand should, by all rights, fall off. When a shadow falls over her, she looks up.

"Your phone," Logan says, and hands it over. "Guess you didn't hear it." He shuffles back out again.

Hey babe, Duncan's voice murmurs into her ear. Gonna be late. My mom sure has a lot of... opinions. Maybe I'll just see you tomorrow, if that's okay. Love you. She lies face-up on the bedspread for a while, listening to the message repeat.

Eventually, she pads out in sock feet and sits beside him on the floor, crossing her arms over her knees and resting her forehead on top. He looks her way, briefly, and misses a pixellated banana.

"Duncan ?" he asks, and she shakes her head. "Oh." The ape swings from a rope bridge while Veronica stares past the television screen. "So- you need to go home ?"

"No," she says, into her sleeve.

"I can give you a ride home, Veronica."

"It's okay." He pauses the game, looks at her; she can feel her reflection blinking back from his eyes, reduced to an upside-down image of herself, fragmented and re-connected, unreal. "It's really okay. But thanks." What is she saying ? She can't stay. If she stays, she's going to fall off a cliff. Be shot into space. Evaporate. She's going to lean against him in a minute, his boy smell and his boy hands and the solid softness that she remembers, fuck, remembers all the time, until she's passed an exam in Logan and majored in Logan Studies.

He hands her a controller.

"Are you guys okay ?" he asks, after she announces she's tired of being the little dead ape and they've moved on to dirtbike racing. She stares at him for a long minute, and then lets out a humorless little laugh.

"Yeah, we're great. Thanks for asking."

"I wasn't- you know what, fuck it." He stands up, tosses the controller away, and stalks into the opposite bedroom. She follows him, startled, leaving the game to run down on its own. In the darkness she steps on socks and abandoned shoes, and a sturdy hotel mug crusted with soup.

"Wow."

"What ?" He scowls at her from a chair.

"This is... scummy." She giggles, bubbling with it. "You're living in an executive suite, with housecleaning, and you still managed-" she prods the mug, "this."

"I'm an overachiever," he snaps. "Do me a favor and go home."

"I can't." It's somehow still funny.

"Oh, fuck you, Veronica," he sighs; but reaches for his keys, anyway.

They ride in the quiet of the early evening- there's no traffic on the boulevard, just kids on scooters and old people holding hands. He doesn't take the shortcut, but the road along the beach, which she loves best. He parks across the street from her complex and turns the engine off.

"He doesn't need me," she says suddenly, staring out at her neighbor's lawn, where crickets have already started to sing. "I know he loves me, but I don't even know if he likes me. I could vanish and he'd change the channel."

"Veronica," he says, and then his hands are on her face, and it's like a circle closing in on her life, a globe that spins and she's put her finger on the same spot, again and again, forever. She kisses him and he smiles at her. "I'm glad you finally know what that feels like."

"You're such a jerk."

"Devotedly, yes."

He follows her up the stairs.