Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Logan Echolls wakes up in his childhood bedroom as a 16-year-old with a massive hangover.

This is somewhat disconcerting given that the last thing he remembers he was a 30 something Navy Intelligence Officer moving his (he can’t believe he can say this) wife’s car and looking forward to leaving on an impromptu honeymoon.

And the last time he saw this bedroom it was a charred-out shell.

There is something in between. He thinks. But when he tries to focus on it seems to slip away. 

He tries to catch it. To probe at the hole in his memory like a kid with a missing tooth. 

All it seems to illicit is a deep instinctual feeling to stop it. That he doesn’t want to know. That that part of his life is over.

Now, Logan may not have Veronica’s curiosity. He may be more inclined to let things be. But even he recognizes that when a voice you’re not entirely sure is your own tells you to forget you’re missing a rather important chunk of memory --- that contrary to popular belief, it’s probably not in your best interest to listen to it. Maybe.

So, he reviews his options.

He could curl back up under the covers, fall asleep and hope that when he wakes up, he'll be wherever he’s supposed to be.

Preferably next to Veronica.

But he has a feeling that is totally his own that that isn’t going to work.

So, instead, he moves over to the desk where his old laptop sits and checks the date.

Then lets out a semi-hysterical laugh.

Because of course.

Of course, even when the universe has seemingly pulled him back through space and time against his will it wouldn’t dump him back quite far enough to save Lilly.

And then he reminds himself that you can’t actually be pulled through space and time.

He thinks.

He goes into the bathroom and examines his face. Pokes at baby fat his cheeks should have long since lost. Examines freckles.

He looks around the room. He puts on clothes.

He looks at the house. Then the block. Then he chooses a direction at random and runs until his not really in very good shape 16-year old body feels like it’s either going to collapse or puke. Possible both.

He walks (slowly) back to Muir Street, back to his room, and back to his desk.

He does about a thousand google searches.

Everything seems to point to one thing. To the impossible. That the calendar on his computer is right.

So.

His options. 

It could be a prank.

But it’s just too complicated. Too expensive. Too cruel.

True, he’s pretty sure there are still more than a few people for whom the “cruel” part would be the point, the other two issues would be pretty prohibitive.

It could be someone trying to get information out of him.

But, again, even if it were possible to create well, this, there are a lot of easier ways. And if the aim is for him to mess up and say something classified, choosing to put him here seems… kind of a stupid choice. It’s not liked his teenage years were rife with opportunities to spill state secrets.  

So, what’s left?

He could be dreaming.

A few minutes and every method he’s ever learned or heard of to tell if your dream seems to check that off the list though.

He could be hallucinating.

Maybe finally being married to the woman he loves broke something in his brain in a way that years of trauma had failed and he is, even now, sitting in a padded room somewhere.

Maybe he's in a coma.

Something like Life on Mars before Ashes to Ashes screwed with the ambiguity of the mythology.

Maybe he's dead.

Sure, it’s a bit less fire and brimstone than he was expecting, but while he doesn’t agree with Veronica that Neptune is hell, reliving some of the worst years of his life? That might very well qualify --- if it turns out he can’t do anything to change things.

Which brings him up short.

Because.

Because if there is any chance that this is real. That he’s back in time or in another reality or whatever. If he can change things. If he can save some version of his mom or Carrie or Bilbo or any of the other people he’s seen chewed up and spit out by Neptune and the world over the years…

If he can protect Veronica, even if it’s just from his teenage self’s actions…

Then how can he not try?

The answer, of course, is the answer to so much else in his life.

Veronica.

His Veronica.

The woman he was in love with. The woman he had said vows to only a few hours before.

The Woman. Not the kid that would be here.

He told her he’d always come back to her. To them.

If there’s any chance he can find her again, he has to try.

Whether that means figuring out how to wake up or clawing his way up from the bowels of hell. 

Still. Getting back to his Veronica will take time. Research. Resources that teenage Logan definitely won’t have access too. That not even adult Logan did.

So, he’ll need a plan.

Possibly a very long-term plan.

And while he doubts this is a have his cake and eat it too situation…. there’s no reason why his plans couldn’t include trying to do some good too, right?

Chapter Text

Logan’s actual planning session doesn’t last very long. Youthful boasts aside a sixteen-year old with a hangover doesn’t actually have much endurance.

He wakes up several hours later to the sound of a knock on his door and his face smashed into the notebook he’d commandeered to write out a make-shift timeline.

When he doesn’t answer, there’s another knock and he expects the voice that follows to be Mrs. Navarro or one of the many maids that always filled their house, whose names he was too much of a jackass to learn as a teenager.

It’s his mother.

“Logan? Honey?”

He’s off the bed and nearly at the door before his head and his fears have time to catch up with his feet and he stops. He walks to the door and leans against is, his ear pressed up against the wood.

“Logan. The service starts in two hours. You need to get ready.” Even muffled by the door, her voice is just like he remembers. Soft and sad. The voice she only had on one mimosa mornings when she wasn’t quite numb enough to play at being anything else. “Logan. I know it may not feel like it right now, but if you don’t go. You’ll regret it.” She gives a long knowing sigh. “You’ll regret not saying goodbye.”

He reaches down and turns the handle, pulling the door open.

She’s standing there in one of those stupid negligees with her hair and make-up already done.

He pulls her into towards him. Pulls her into the sort of hug that on a TV show would lead the huggee to ask what’s the matter. The question doesn't come. Apparently when your son’s girl has been murdered only three days before, having him hold onto you like he’s afraid you’ll disappear is sort of expected.

“Mom.”

She wraps her arms around him and strokes the back of his neck the way she used to when he was a kid.

“Oh baby.”

This is what breaks him. He starts to cry. Big, ugly crying. He hasn’t cried like this since… well since he realized his mom was really dead. This time he’s not sure if it's happy or sad. It feels like a bit of both.

When he cries himself out and pulls back, he gives her a watery smile. She doesn’t tell him it will be okay. She doesn’t offer platitude; she just mirrors him with one of her own.

He nearly starts crying again.

“I need to take a shower.” He tells her. She brushes her hand along the side of his face.

“I’ll have your suit laid out on your bed.”  She tells him, and squeezes his arm before he’s able to force himself to retreat back into his room.

This can’t be hell. Not with his mom here. Even if he has to watch her die again. Even if it turns out to be an illusion or a trick. Getting even a few more moments like this will be worth it.

It would be more than worth that pain.

****

He sneaks out to his car after the shower. After the shower and the suit.

He leaves a note for his Mom, telling her he wanted to check in with Veronica before the service. He hopes Aaron will be too worried about appearances at an event with so many cameras to let out his anger on him until after the wake.

He’s worried he won’t remember Veronica’s address, but once he’s in the area, all those drives he took with Lilly come back to him and he finds himself parked across the street from her house.

He hesitates. He’d say it’s like with his mother but that’s not quite right.

With his mom, he froze because he was worried, she wouldn’t really be there. That when he tried to touch her it would turn out to be smoke and mirrors.

With Veronica, once he sees her, that’s it. The reality (if this is reality) that his Veronica is gone. That he may never see her again. It will be there. Personified.

He stays seated there until he knows they must be a few minutes away from leaving.

Then he manages to take a deep breath and force himself out of the driver’s seat.

Veronica opens the door.

Her eyes are red. Her hair is long.

She’s so young.

She already looks at him with a bit of suspicion. But there's still a bit of hope too.

He really wants to punch his teenage self in the face right now for destroying that.

“I wanted to talk.” He tells her. “I know I’ve been an ass, these past couple weeks.” He doesn’t actually remember where they were in the frosting over of their friendship. It’s all too clouded, after being filtered through later, angry, tinted glasses. But he figures “ass” is a safe bet.

Veronica accedes with a sad snort.

“Can I come in?” He asks.

“We need to leave soon.”

“I know. I thought we could go together.”  She stares at him a moment. The ghost of cynical looks to come, but she lets him in.

They sit on the couch awkwardly.

She looks at everything but him.

“I need your help Veronica.” He finally tells her.

That earns him a look that is scarily like his own Veronica.

This is actually the one part of the plan he had been able to think through. Mostly because it was, more or less instinctual. Talk to Veronica. Get Tapes. Get Aaron arrested.

Admittedly he could have gotten the tapes himself. It may even have been easier.

But, to use a phrase his Veronica would hate: this Veronica needs the closure.

It was more than that through.

It felt wrong.

The only reason he knew how Lilly died. The only reason he knew that the tapes were there was because of his own Veronica. Swooping in and “solving” it himself felt wrong. Was wrong.

Veronica deserved, needed to be part of getting her Lilly justice. He wasn’t going to take that entirely away from her even if, for his own somewhat selfish reasons he needed to expedite the process.

Logan let out a calculated sigh.

“Lilly had a secret hiding spot. In her room. Where she could keep things that she didn’t want Celeste or anyone else to find.”

“Her air vent.” Veronica said. He smiled slightly, seeing the way putting that one little puzzle piece into place lights her up slightly. Even on a day like today.

“Yeah. She learned that from me” He gives her another small smile. “And I guess she told you. But since the whole point was that adults couldn’t find it… I thought maybe your Dad and his deputies might not have thought to look there.” 

He pauses slightly. Worried, this will offend her. That she’ll get defensive. Instead it seems to animate her.

“We need to tell my Dad.”

“No.” He spits out quickly. Too quickly. He should let her tell Keith. He should let this go through the proper chain of evidence from the beginning this time.

But he can’t.

It’s selfish. He knows that. But he needs to see those tapes. To hold them in his hand. To have physical proof that he’s here. And that the future he thinks is real --- that feels realer than this place is -- actually is.

“Logan…”

He’s worked this out too. Because he knows his Veronica. Any Veronica. And he knew he’d have to come up with some reason not to tell her Dad.

“Lilly doesn’t have much privacy left.” It was, true. Much too true. “She might have liked embarrassing Celeste by airing dirty laundry when she could, but that didn’t mean she didn’t like to keep her secrets too.” He expects Veronica to roll her eyes. Instead she seems to still, her facing taking on a look that is painfully similar to what his Veronica wears right before a major epiphany in a case. “And the vent, it was the one place she used specifically to hide things she didn’t want found.”

“Lilly said she had a secret.” Veronica tell him, still pulling together the threads of an idea. “She told me she did. The day she died.” She looks up toward him then. All he can do is nod.

“And maybe we’ll find something about it. Maybe there is something there that might help find the person who killed her. And if there is, if there’s any chance what we find might do that --- we’ll tell your Dad. But if there isn’t… if it’s just something she didn’t want to be seen. Shouldn’t we try to honor that?”

He’s pretty sure that if he’s not already in hell he’s headed there now.

Veronica contemplates this a minute. He thinks his Veronica wouldn’t buy it. Or maybe his Veronica would. He’d liked to think she trusts him that much. The Veronica that came in between, though, she wouldn’t. And she’d be right.

This one, still retains some of the trust that comes with being friends since the sixth grade, however, even if its recently been shaken.

“So, what is it you need my help with?”

He struggles to give her a small, sad smile.

****

Logan doesn’t really remember Lilly’s funeral. The whole week after he found out about her death has pretty much congealed into one drunken blur in his mind.

The moment he walks into the church he almost wishes he could go back to not remembering.

There’s no Lilly here.  Just Celeste and Jake.

As he walks down the aisle with the Mars family, he can hear whispering from the area where most of the 09ers are sitting.

Even his plan works perfectly, he realizes, Veronica may very well still suffer some backlash because of it.

Aaron is in the room somewhere. Livid, Logan has no doubt, that he deprived him of a photo acting as the compassionate father comforting his grieving son. Logan deliberately avoids looking around so he won’t catch a glimpse of him.

Logan has worked on his anger over the last few years, but he still isn’t sure what he would do. If he sees Aaron here.  If he has to watch him pretending to mourn Lilly. And he’s more than a little terrified of finding out.

When they reach the end of the aisle, Logan hangs back, allowing Veronica a few minutes to say her goodbyes to Lilly.

Off to one side, Duncan is sitting with his parents. Completely out of it. The first time around he must have assumed that Duncan was just overcome by grief. Now he knows that finding Lilly’s body had caused Duncan to have a seizure, one that took him three days to fully recover from.

The Kanes, rather than get him the medical care he so obviously needed, stuffed him in a suit and propped him up like something out of Weekend at Bernie’s. Because Jake didn’t want to ruin Duncan’s chances of becoming President. Because Jake cared far more about the idea of his children's role in his legacy than the children themselves.

Logan sees Veronica slide something into Lilly’s casket, below the lid, presumably so Celeste won’t see it and have it removed, then move to sit with Keith and her mom.

That leaves Logan to approach the casket himself.

The Kanes have spent an extraordinary amount of money on everything about this day, including Lilly’s hair and make-up. But there’s only so much putty and paint can do for a giant gash to the head. Lilly’s hair has had to be parted at an odd angle, to hide the damage.

He’d say they’ve still managed to make her look like she was just peacefully sleeping, but even asleep Lilly had a restless vitality about her. This is a china doll. Posed and glazed to make her, finally, into the daughter Celeste wanted her to be. A debutant with a demur dress and subtle lipstick.

Logan had thought he had made his peace with Lilly’s death a long time ago. But, whether because he’s now back in his sixteen-year old body or because there’s still some well of emotion left that even therapy hadn’t been able to drudge up, he is surprised by a flood of emotion he gets as he stares down at her. Maybe it’s that this is the first time he’s really seen Lilly through the eyes of an adult.

He’s not actually sure what to say.

There’s a part of him that wants to tell Lilly he’s forgiven her. And, there’s another part that feels a bit like scum for suggesting he would need to. She was sixteen. Sixteen.

And she was naïve in her own way. She would have hated anyone thinking that. Especially him. But it’s still true. She was young, and rich, and thought she was invincible. The thought that someone, let alone someone she knew, someone who she thought of as being her sort of people, would actually hurt her was completely alien to her.

A part of him wants to tell her he’s sorry. But he was just a kid too. He’s had to learn to accept that. To forgive himself a long time ago in order to survive.

He wants to tell her that they’ll be okay. But he knows they won’t. Yes, his life has turned out better than he ever would have guessed, even before Lilly died. But he can’t look at the way he got there, and say they’ll be okay. He can’t remember all of Veronica’s sharp edges, and prickly points or at what’s happened to Duncan and say they’re okay.

“I’ll look out for them Lilly.” He finally whispers instead. “This time. I’ll look out for them.”

****

The service is like the room: cliché and very very Celeste.

The wake is at the Kane’s house. By the time they arrive, the place is already filled with people who barely knew or cared about Lilly, dressed in black and gossiping over catered food. Getting into Lilly’s room shouldn’t be as easy as it is. He’s actually angry at the Kanes for making it that easy.

He and Veronica both take a deep breath before entering.

Once in, they work in wordless tandem. They’ve brought their own screwdriver. He helps her pull over the desk chair then acts as lookout.

He hears her gasp when she finds the tapes.

She steps down and offers them up to him on her hand with a mixture of surprise, relief and fear.

“Logan.” Its sharp, quiet and surprised.

“Duncan has a video camera in his room.” He whispers.

Rather than risk being seen along the hallway he convinces Veronica to execute a reverse of a maneuver he’d performed a million times himself as teenager.

Duncan had started leaving a window open for him about a month after he moved to Neptune and the Kanes had more or less been worn down into accepting that Logan would randomly show up in Duncan’s room by the time they were thirteen. It was an unspoken agreement between himself and Duncan. That he could stay there if he needed a place to lay low from Aaron or after Aaron... Without having to explain anything to Jake or Celeste.

And yeah, he may have used his presumptive right to be in Duncan’s room to sneak into Lilly’s.

A lot.

The other direction is a bit more difficult. It’s made even more so this time, he suspects, because his brain isn’t used to operating in this body. But they make it.

Logan fumbles with the cords on the camcorder for just a few minutes, trying to remember the direction from fifteen years ago, until Veronica rolls her eyes, takes it out of his hand and sets it up herself.

The first tape is from the day Lilly died.

He finds himself smiling just a little bit as she lays back on the bed and looks up. Tracing the cord from the fan to the hidden cabinet.

This is Lilly. Not that thing Celeste had made of her at the funeral. Not the girl she’ll be made into by the media. The girl with a smirk on her face at the thought of humiliating her mother and Aaron. Too smart for her own good, too reckless in others and too full of mischief and trouble for all of them.

“Where is this?” Veronica asks

“My pool house.” Logan chokes out. He’s started to cry again. He hadn’t realized it. Hadn’t expected it.

“But... You were in Mexico.” Veronica gives him a look that's part confusion, part accusation.

“I think we should put in the tape from earlier this week.” He suggests. “Lilly wouldn’t have taken it without a reason.”

That’s a lie. Veronica seems to think so too because she gives him a dubious, cautious look, but she still switches out the tape.

When the two figures appear, rolling around on the bed, Veronica sends him an angry, embarrassed look and moves to turn it off. He puts his hand over the play button.

“That’s not me.” He bites out. She gives him another glare but turns to watch.

Lilly flips over.

Aaron appears on screen.

Veronica pushes his hand away and stops the tape.

Then she gives him a look like she’s not sure if he’s going to come out swinging or break down then and there.

“Logan.” She swallows. “Your dad.”

“Would absolutely have killed to keep this tape from coming out.” He grounds out.

She stares. Calculating maybe? Or maybe just shocked. She isn’t his Veronica yet. Her tells and ticks are off.

He considers what he will have to do to convince her.

Will explaining to her be enough?

Or will he have to shuck off his coat, roll up his sleeves, and show her the remnants of just what Aaron is willing to do when he doesn’t get his way?

The Veronica that had found the tapes before, that in between Veronica that was part his but not quite the one he married. She had seen Aaron’s violence first hand and the leap from child abuser to child killer had been fairly easy.

 Even so some part of him is still surprised she didn’t leap frog right over that conclusion and think Aaron’s abuse and betrayal simply provided teenage Logan with more of a motive.

This Veronica has even more reason to go in that direction. He was the one that lead her to the tapes.

Instead she swallows hard and, miraculously, gives him the benefit of the doubt.

“We need to get these to my Dad.”

This time he agrees.

 ****

He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.

For Aaron to see Veronica marching out of Duncan’s room with enough purpose to practically advertise what they found. For Celeste to jump out of the shadows to go off on a tirade. For someone to stop them before Veronica has a chance to pull Keith aside to speak with him in one of the guest rooms.

Nothing goes this smoothly. Not for them. Not in Neptune.

He’s the optimist in their relationship, and even he doesn’t trust this.

It’s almost a relief when they hear a gasp and turn to see that Jake has stumbled in just at the exact point that Veronica is explaining to her Dad what was on the tapes.

They all stare at each other a moment, then Jake turns on his heel and dashes back in the direction of where most of the guests are still clustered.

Keith turns to them both, but points towards Veronica.

“Stay here.” Keith tells them, before running off after Jake.

Logan and Veronica share a look.

Then they both move towards the door to follow.

Finding Jake and their respective father’s is easy.

When they reach the living room. Jake is bellowing about how he’s going to watch Aaron fry. How he’ll destroy everyone he ever loved.

Logan morbidly wonders who it is Jake thinks this “everyone” is. Aaron doesn’t love anyone but himself.

Chapter Text

October 7 to 17, 2003

Logan spends most of the night of Lilly’s wake answering questions at the sheriff’s station and most of the following few days alternating between hovering around his mom, and trying to better wrap his head around what exactly was happening, and what he should be doing next.

He still felt like this was all going just a bit too well. That retrieving the tapes and making sure Aaron was arrested played out in a way that was just too good to be true, in its own warped way. While that should have given more weight to the idea that this was all a dream or hallucination, if that was the case, he has yet to find the glitch in the program or the frayed edge of the illusion he can pull at to unravel it.

And it felt real. It tasted real. Smelled real. Sounded real. All those weird gaps and sudden shifts that happened in dreams weren’t there.

He had tried to do some research. Tried to search for ways to tell if something was a dream or hallucination, or to force himself to wake up since he’d already exhausted all the ways he knew.

Then it dawned on him that anything he found would be part of the dream.

So, he had switched directions. Focused on researching the least terrifying other option.

At the bottom of that google rabbit hole was pretty much exactly what you’d expect.

Some conspiracy theory websites. Plenty of science fiction. One or two scientific papers that were mostly theory and all confusing to his history major brain. Nothing, in other words that would help him in a practical sense. 

It didn’t seem like he was going to be finding his way home, on his own, any time soon. And Einstein quotes aside, preparation was very rarely a bad thing.

So, he starts preparing.

He starts to use Aaron’s in-house gym.

He starts to look for a therapist, although he’s more than a little terrified at the sheer amount of his collective trauma he won’t be able to talk about now.

And he starts reading through some of his class notes.  Everything points to the idea that he’s going to be trapped here, in this Groundhog Day version of his life for some time.  In fact, he suspects that he may very well need to get high level clearance before he can find a way home. That means he’s going to need to graduate from high school and college. Ideally as quickly as possible and preferably with better grades than he had the first time around.

He really isn’t looking forward to re-living his high school career.

As an adult Logan had actually enjoyed learning. Especially languages and history. And planes. Anything to do with planes or flying.

He had had to be pretty damn good at Math and Science too. He studied his butt off to get close to the top of his class in OCS and flight training so he could be put on the track to fly those planes he’d learned to love.

But he was pretty sure what he had done (and would do) at Neptune High didn’t really qualify as learning. It was just what he needed to get through, as quickly (and now as well) as possible so he could start working on the stuff that would help him get home or make things  in this world better than his own. 

****

When Logan was a kid, on the days when Aaron had stormed off after one of his temper tantrums and left Logan too “sick” to go to school and his mom too hungover for much else, she and Logan would camp out in her room. They would stock up on snacks she’d claim she shouldn’t be eating and a pile of classic movies and spend the day watching them.

This time the snacks were healthier and the movies were more Bill and Ted and Marty McFly than Bogart and Bacall. But while he’s sure his mom noticed the change, she didn’t say anything. He probably should have added in Berkeley Square or Somewhere in Time in for her. Something with a bit more romance and a bit less eighties slang, but it seemed like time travel romances usually involved at least one person dying of a broken heart because they are chronologically separated from their love, and he didn’t think he could stomach that right now.

None of the films gave him any real practical hints as to how to get home. They did, ironically, ease  his worries about how long it seemed likely to take for him to find a way to get back to his Veronica.

Because, if he was really dealing with time travel, then he was dealing with time travel. He should be able to return to his Veronica, from her perspective at least, immediately after he had left, no matter how long he stayed here.

In fact, if he was returning to his old body, he would have to. Otherwise he’d be returning to a corpse.

And if he ended up having to return in this body… well Veronica might have made more than a few jokes over the years  that she was a cougar and the benefits of loving a younger man given  their slight age difference, but he didn’t think she would find it so funny if she was married to a teenager.

Unfortunately, this line of thought gave him something new to worry over too.

What would happen here, to this timeline and to this Logan when he did find a way to leave?

The answer, if this was a hallucination or dream, was obvious. Nothing. Because neither existed. But if, like Logan increasingly believed, this was real on some level. If he was back in time or in another timeline or universe or whatever “borrowed from a movie” terminology you wanted to use. Then what?

Nothing might happen. He would just leave behind a sixteen-year old version of himself that had the memories of his thirty something self.

But that begged the question, who would that really be? Weren’t memories who you were? Would he simply be a thirty something year old, stuck here in a sixteen-year-old body knowing he was just a copy? Or worse, not knowing if he was a copy? And if that was the case --- what was to say that isn’t what had already happened? That the voice or feeling he had, telling him he didn’t want to think about how he got here, was the original Logan and he was the copy. What if the home he wanted to get back to already had a Logan?

Another option that required slightly less philosophical brooding would be that he would leave behind a sixteen-year-old version of himself which didn’t have all his memories. That either remembered what he had done while he was here, but not why or one which just had a giant hole in his memory.

If that was the case, then Logan needed to be careful. He needed to make sure that he hadn’t done anything that would further screw up the life of the Logan he had left behind.  Maybe more importantly, he needed to make sure he didn’t act in a way that would make this Veronica start to rely on or trust him.  Because he certainly didn’t rely on or trust any version of his sixteen-year-old self to do right by Veronica. Or to do right in general. At sixteen any Logan would still be too angry at the world. Too quick to lash out. Too self-destructive to be the kind of friend or partner Veronica really needed now. Even if he doesn’t want to hurt this Veronica, he will.  And if they somehow manage to be lucky enough to overcome that, the way he and his Veronica had --- he’ll still hate himself a little bit for it.

There was, of course, another possibility. That he would have to return home in this body or that what he left behind would be just an empty shell.

If that was the case.  If he wasn’t going to be leaving any Logan behind. Then it wasn’t that he could do some things to change what happened here. It was that he needed to change certain things before he could go home. Things that in his timeline he had directly affected.

Now, Logan was more than willing to admit that a lot, if not most, of his actions during the years between Lilly’s death and when he had hit rock bottom in college had a more negative than positive effect on those around him. There had been those few moments, though, that he had managed to do something good. Like on the rooftop of the Neptune Grande or in the parking garage of Hearst.

He didn’t think he could leave this Veronica, or any Veronica, to deal with those things alone.

*****

He had way too many orange clothes. Way too many.

He doesn’t even like orange.

Did he like orange? He must have, at some point, right?

After a few minutes of searching, he was able to find a green t-shirt and what appeared to be his only pair of jeans hiding among a glut of cargo pants.

He should go through the rest over the weekend. Donate some of it. Or most of it. Throw in the puka shells. Then again, maybe donating the clothes would be cruel. No one should be forced by their circumstance to wear those orange pants.

He was going back to Neptune High today.

He doesn’t remember how long after Lilly’s death he waited the first time around. He suspects it was only after the school started calling and Aaron started worrying there was going to be P.R. backlash. But he isn’t making any progress on either getting back home or in making this timeline better by milling around the house.

After checking in with his mom and grabbing his lunch he heads to the garage.  Where he is immediately reminded of the fact that it isn’t just his clothes that are obnoxiously colored.

Logan was willing to acknowledge that the Beemer he had bought as a combination “congratulations you survived your second deployment” and “screw you dead dad I did live past 27” gift to himself may not have exactly blended in. And that he probably should have talked about the dead dad part with Jane before making the purchase. But it still really can’t hold a candle to the conspicuousness of the X-Terra.

Unlike the orange t-shirt he had thrown on yesterday to work-out in, though, when he slips into the X-Terra he is immediately flooded with memories. Some bad, but a lot good. Most haven’t happened yet. Many likely never will in this timeline, as a consequence to what he wants, and needs to change.

When he gets to the end of the driveway, the press are waiting.

They haven’t seemed to be able to decide whether they should camp out in front of his house or the Kane’s and have instead ended up dividing up fairly evenly between the two. But even with the paparazzi only out in half force, they are still there, and annoying, and still making him long for the semi- anonymity he had enjoyed as an adult.

He manages to avoid hitting any of the photographers, and takes a somewhat circuitous route to his alma mater in order to avoid running the press gauntlet again when he arrives. In spite of this, it’s still early enough when he gets there that the parking lot is nearly empty.

Which was exactly how he had planned it. He had wanted to arrive early so he could speak with Ms. James.

He was pretty sure he would have been pulled out of his first period anyway for grief counseling, but that’s not his goal this morning.

He may be an advocate for therapy now, but he also knows that to be successful there needs to be a sense of trust, and  rapport between therapist and patient. He could never have that with Ms. James. His teenage impressions of her are still too strong.

It’s not really her fault.

She was overworked and underfunded. He had been an overly entitled, overly traumatized kid with some major trust issues when it came to both therapy and authority in general.

But that still didn’t change the fact that some part of him would always feel like he was more guinea pig than patient to her. That in getting grants and writing papers about the long-term effects of Lilly’s death on those around her, Ms. James had tried to make her name and career off his and his friends’ grief.

Even if his adult self knew that wasn’t really true. Even though he could understand her motives. That feeling would still be there, in the background, and it would make working with her as his therapist impossible.

No. Logan was going to see Ms. James for the other part of her job description.

He wants to change his classes.

He’s pretty sure it should be too late in the year but if Neptune High actually followed those sorts of rules for its 09 students then Dick would never have ended up in AP classes.

All the same, he had decided to concentrate on three changes.

He wants to join newspaper this year, rather than waiting until he was a junior. Partly so he’ll have an easy cover if he’s forced to do some investigating on his own. Partly so he’ll have banked some extra English credits if Aaron’s acquittal doesn’t prove fatal this time around and Logan has to get out of Neptune before he would otherwise graduate.

He wants to join cross-country. He needs to get this body into shape. In case he needs to fight, but also, honestly, so that he can feel just a little bit more like himself. He might as well get credits for that, too. Just in case.

Last but definitely not least, he wants to switch into Mr. Rooks’s history class.

Logan hadn’t known Susan when she was alive. But you couldn’t know Carrie without knowing Susan. Carrie may not have been able to talk about Susan’s death, but that didn’t mean she didn’t talk about her life. Or that the Susan shaped hole didn’t form her just as the Lilly shaped one had shaped Veronica or him.

Logan had loved Carrie. Once. Admittedly, he had never loved her in quite the same “claw his way back from hell” way he did Veronica, but he had. And while he had fallen out of love with her long before their relationship had ended and even longer before her death, that didn’t mean he didn’t care for her as a friend. He couldn’t help but still care, on some level. And just like knowing Carrie meant knowing Susan, caring for Carrie meant caring for Susan by proxy.

Plus, he might still have some issues with men who seduce teenagers then screw them over when faced with the consequences.

Just a few.

And while there was a disturbingly large number of such adults in Neptune, Mr. Rooks was the one Logan knew would be acting in the near future.

Principal Moorhead had either been scared off pursuing students by producing Trina or had become discrete enough that Logan had never heard of another affair, even after Trina’s parentage had come to light. It seemed fairly safe for Logan to wait to expose him until Trina was in town and could do the honors herself. He could be a good brother like that.

Little League try-outs didn’t start until January. He hoped to God that meant he had a few months to figure out how to stop Woody Goodman. Because he suspected he would need it.

Chuck Rooks was going to seduce his sixteen-year-old student by April and in the following months impregnate and abandon her. But he had started his pursuit of her months before.  Logan wanted to deal with him as soon as possible.

And if he could stop Rooks, he would save Susan from her downward spiral. From her OD. And Carrie (and the others) from years of blackmail and abuse from Cobb before Carrie’s murder.

Save the Extemporaneous Speaking Competition champion, save the world. Or at least one small corner of it.

How he was going to deal with Rooks was admittedly a bit less clear. Simply stopping his relationship with Susan from taking place wasn’t really going to solve the problem. It would save Susan, but Rooks had done this before and he would do it again.

In fact, he had already gotten caught once, and gotten away with it. In some ways that just made it worse. It made him cocky.

The records from his old school were sealed. Carrie had been so pissed off about that. Years later, she would still be livid when she talked about the fact that someone had known what Rooks was but had still allowed him to be hired at another school.

Logan, though, knew what it was like to be a kid and be keeping something a secret because you knew people would look at you differently if they knew. What it was like to know if you did speak out most people wouldn’t believe you. To have something done to you, but feel ashamed of it. That was why, even if he could find out who had been involved, he didn’t think he could in good conscience try to force those girls to relive their trauma. Not before they were ready.

Logan suspects if Veronica had been working this as a case, she would have put herself in Rooks’s path. Caught him in the act. But he can’t do that. He isn’t exactly his type, and he couldn’t really stomach putting someone who was in that position.

But all that left, or at least all he had thought so far, was to make sure to put himself in a place where he could watch Rooks, sabotage him when needed and hope that he would eventually be able to come up with a more permanent solution in time.

Hence trying to switch into his class.

Ms. James had clearly only just arrived when Logan walked in. She gave him a strained smile, attempting to communicate her sympathy, he thought, while still being approachable. It wasn’t working. He repressed his initial, instinctive, teenager reaction, and sat down.

“I’m glad you came to speak with me today, Logan.”

He gave her what he hoped was a sad but charming smile.

****

Logan hadn’t planned to change the rest of his classes. It didn’t seem worth the effort. Not when the ones he could take as a sophomore wouldn’t help him shorten his time either at Neptune High or at Hearst. But after pouring on the charm, and a bit of guilt Ms. James had been almost eager to juggle his schedule around to allow him to get the changes he wanted. It made him feel a bit disappointed in her and a bit disgusted in himself as well.

Veronica’s in his new Chemistry class.

That was one of the unintentional changes.

It hurts.

He had thought it had hurt when he worked with her at Lilly’s funeral, but now it’s so much worse. At the funeral he had something to focus on. A mission.

Logan has always been his best in the middle of a crisis. He’s at his second best in the immediate aftermath. The kind that involves carrying Veronica home and making sure she has something to eat, even when the world feels like ashes in her mouth. It’s after that, the long term dealing with things, the everyday coping, that he struggles with. That he’s had to try so hard to work on. 

Seeing this Veronica now, when he doesn’t have something to concentrate on. It feels like swallowing glass. And he’s at a loss as to how to work through it. Time travel wasn’t exactly a situation he and his therapist had prepared him for in their sessions.

****

He’s mourning, he realizes.  Not for Lilly, but for him. For his life. His Veronica. He had finally thought he was in a good place.  He had a job that was fulfilling, that he enjoyed. He made a difference. He had finally, finally, managed to convince the woman he loved to marry him.

And now he’s here. Alone. And a teenager.

****

Lunches are awkward.

And not just because he knows how a depressingly high number of his classmates will die.

Duncan hasn’t come back to school yet and the 09ers seem confused as to whether they should be rallying around Logan or shunning him.

He decides to make it easy for them and avoid them.

As much as possible at least.

It’s going to be hard enough to pretend to be a teenager. Harder still to deal with other teenagers. Having to do so with people he didn’t even like as adults is just too much to ask.

Dick’s the only one he might want to sit with, but even Dick isn’t really his Dick.

Logan can practically feel his Veronica smiling somewhere at that pun.

Some people might say that Dick is the same now as the one he knew as an adult. But Logan has seen Dick’s lows and highs far too often to believe that’s true. Dick might not have really matured by most definitions of the word, but he has changed. He’s a lot more self-aware, and at least a bit more aware of others. He’s never going to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, or the most empathetic, but as an adult he’s far more likely to use  a self-deprecating joke. And it's far more likely those jokes aimed at others genuinely qualify as a good-natured jibe.

Adult Dick also isn’t attached at the hip to Cassidy the way this Dick is.

Logan had forgotten that. How much time the two brothers had spent with each other when they were in high school.

In the years since Cassidy’s death, Dick has tended to alternate between long periods of trying to pretend his brother never existed and short intense periods of grief and blame.  Towards Woody. But even more towards himself and his father.

Dick may be Logan’s best friend, but even Logan will acknowledge Dick did some horrible things to his brother. But while it might not completely absolve him of blame, Dick had been a kid himself for a lot of those horrible things. A kid cheered on by their horrible father.

And Cassidy…

Cassidy blew up a bus full of innocent kids and raped the girl Logan loves.

There really wasn’t a way to cast yourself as the “evil” brother compared to that as far as Logan was concerned.

Logan had spent time himself over the years trying to sort out what parts of the kid he thought he knew were real and what weren’t. Where the charade of normal ended and the actual personality began. Whether that kid had even really existed at all. In the end, all Logan had been able to decide was that if he had existed, he had died long before the night on the Grande’s roof.

One of the things that Logan kept returning to, was how he hadn’t known. How he, of all people, couldn’t see the rot underneath. Had living with Aaron just distorted his perceptions of good and evil that much, or was Cassidy just that good at hiding that part of his nature?

Logan had never come up with a good answer. Which made seeing Cassidy now, knowing what he knew, all the more confusing.

Unlike Aaron, Woody or even Rooks, Cassidy hasn’t technically done anything yet. Nothing to humans at least.

How do you deal with someone who is still more or less innocent, but you know is (bad pun acknowledged if not intended) a ticking time bomb? One you really don’t think you’re qualified to disarm?

One you don’t think you can be in the same room with without wanting to punch.

For now, the best option seemed to keep an eye on him, stay out of his way, try to find a way to bring Woody’s crimes to light without alerting Cassidy beforehand and be ready to step in to make sure certain things didn’t run their course.

Maybe mention Sally to Ms. James. Hope that if the guidance counselor knows that the kid mutilated his family dog it might set off warning signals to someone.

Then again this is Neptune. And he doesn’t really want to do anything that would put Ms. James or anyone else in Cassidy’s path.

So. Lunch.

Logan ends up sitting --- hiding out really---at one of the tables to the side of the building where he doubts anyone would look for him.  He spends the time slowly chipping away at the pile of make-up work while he eats.

Veronica finds him on Thursday.

She slides herself and her tray in across from him, without a word. They sit there for a few minutes, in silence while she plays with what looks like meatloaf. Or at least a meatloaf like substance

“You brought your lunch.”

He should tell her to leave. He should say something that will make her want to leave. That would make her hate him. That way he wouldn’t have to worry about what his teenage self will do if he does take over once he’s gone. That way he wouldn’t have to sit across from this nascent version of the woman he loves and have her constantly reminding him of the loss.

But even though he’s hurting. He can’t hurt her like that. Not anymore.

“I don’t have any of my own Pirate Points.” He points out.

“Is that why you joined cross-country?”

He smiles slightly. Sadly. Because, yes, this isn’t his Veronica. But she’s still a Veronica and of course she would find that out in less than three days. 

“No.” He says. “I thought it would help. To have something physical to do.” She studies him for a minute, then nods and gets back to playing with her mystery meat.

“I tried to switch out of Dance Squad.” She stabs at the meat glob with extra vigor. “Ms. James said there was nothing else that I could take for P.E. Credit that would fit my schedule.”

Veronica stares at him. He shrugs.

“Or maybe she’s just too lazy to manipulate more than one student’s schedule a week?” He let out a sigh. “I’m sorry.” He told her, shaking his head. “I wish I could tell you what magic word I used to get her to change my schedule, but I still don’t know whether she did it because she felt sorry for me or because she’s just as corrupt as the rest of this school and hopes I’ll donate Aaron’s Oscar to buy the school a new scoreboard.”

Veronica nodded but continued to stare.

For one, somewhat insane, moment he almost thinks she’s figured it out. That she’s somehow put the pieces together and knows that he’s a time traveler and is going to call him out on it right here, in the crowded quad.

Then the moment passes.

“I didn’t realize you’d memorized the quotes you use in your messages. I thought you just looked them up.”

“Knowledge is like underwear. It is useful to have it, but not necessary to show it off. Nicky Gumbel ”

“He says to show off.” She paused a second, studying him. Then he sees a familiar glint in her eye. “Logan Echolls. I do believe you are a closet nerd.”

“I think my grades say otherwise.”

“How could I not know this?” She asked, ignoring the statement. She gives a mock gasp. “That’s a notebook. You’re doing homework at lunch!”

“Shhh, keep it down. We wouldn’t want to startle or confuse the ’09er groupies any more than they already are. They might stampede in panic.”

She rolls her eyes at that. But her lips turn up, just a little in a ghost of a smile as she pulls out a notebook of her own and begins working on chemistry problems in between bites of mystery meat.

Chapter Text

October 17th & 18th

Neptune High’s journalism teachers seemed to have about the same longevity as a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts.

Logan hadn’t been in journalism during his original sophomore year so he didn’t know why Ms. Coggle hadn’t come back for a second year, but if he had to guess, he’d put money on her simply burning out. She already seemed to be fed up with the students in her disproportionately 09er filled class. And it was only October.

“So,” Coggle said with a sigh, “Does anyone have any ideas for the next issue of the Navigator?”

Logan’s hand shot up, gaining him a surprised look from pretty much everyone.

“Logan?” Coggle seemed more than a little apprehensive. Which he didn’t think was fair. He had only been in her class for a week and he hadn't had a chance to reach his truly bad years in this timeline.

“Tommy Dohanic.” He announced. Logan watched as Coggle seemed to try and puzzle out whether this was someone she should have heard of, or if he was playing some sort of joke. Then he saw her give up.

“He graduated from Neptune two years ago?” Logan supplied. “He just finished training to be an Army Ranger.  I thought it might make a good story.”

It was something of a catch-22. Logan really didn’t want to stir up past trauma for any of Woody’s victims, even more than he would with Rooks’. But to keep Woody from traumatizing new victims he had to find someone who is willing to speak out against him.

Lucky was the only one of Woody’s Victims Logan knew by name, that was an adult at this point in time. That meant Logan felt slightly less guilty about approaching him to see if he would come forward about what Woody had done to him.

Very slightly.

Logan’s plan was to use the interview as a jumping off point to befriend Lucky. After that, he would ease into asking him about his time as a batboy.

Lucky was certainly going need a friend after his tour of duty.

Whether or not he would think of Logan as one when all this was said and done was another matter.

From what Logan remembered Lucky liked to talk, especially about himself. It seemed unlikely he would turn down the opportunity to be interviewed for the Navigator. Unfortunately, as loquacious as Lucky could be, he hadn’t been very precise when it came to dates and times, especially when it came to his time in the army. That meant that Logan was really just guessing about when exactly, Lucky had finished his training; but by Logan’s admittedly rough calculations, it should be just about now.

“The deadline for the next issue is next week.”  Coggle said blandly. “You’ll have to get an interview and write the story by then.”

Logan could not tell whether Coggle just didn’t think he’d be willing to put in the effort to get the work to her in time, or if she just didn’t care if he did.  Either way he wasn’t surprised at the lack of enthusiasm among the rest of the class when she next asked. “Anyone else?”

****

To quote his lady love: Cuss.

Cuss!

He’d messed up.

Logan had called Lucky’s --- Tommy’s--- parents to try to get his number and set up an interview. However, Mrs. Dohanic had promptly informed him that Tommy had already shipped out on what Logan knew would be his first, last and only tour of duty as a Ranger.

Last week.

If Logan had just thought up this plan a bit sooner, if he’d started putting it into place instead of sitting around pondering the mysteries of time, space and his own identity, he might have been able to catch Lucky. He wouldn’t have had much time to befriend him, but he could have at least talked to him.

Logan had gotten Lucky’s e-mail address. He still planned to write to Lucky. Logan did think Lucky’s story should be written up in the Navigator. But as talkative as Lucky could be, Logan doubted he would want to spend that much of his limited computer time writing to a high schooler he didn’t know.

Even if Logan was wrong, and Lucky proved to be chatty, Logan really didn’t think that fairly public computer terminal on an army e-mail account would be a place anyone would feel comfortable talking about what Woody had done to Lucky.

Especially not in 2003.

Lucky should be back sometime around February. That might be soon enough to keep Woody from getting alone time with his next victim.

But Logan knew what Lucky would be like when he got back.

As a teenager, Logan had thought of Lucky, at best, as the eccentric guy with cool stories who was willing to buy him and his friends’ beer. More often, he thought he was the crazy janitor who spent his day getting high and playing halo and was so desperate to relive his glory days that he still hung out with teenagers.

Then Lucky had waived a gun around, and pretended to threatened Logan’s classmates so he could commit suicide by security guard. And suddenly Lucky’s stories weren’t so cool and his affectations didn’t seem so funny.

As an adult Logan recognized that Lucky’s was a tragic and far too common story. Someone barely out of their teens that chose to join up not out of any patriotic feelings but because they didn’t feel like they had any other options. Who was left injured and traumatized. Who fell through the cracks of an overwhelmed system and wasn’t able to get the help they desperately needed.

On the (very slightly) upside, now that Logan no longer had to wrestle with the morality of befriending Lucky, he might at least be able to really act as his friend when he did get back.

On the downside, there was still Woody.

Logan hoped, he would have another few months before he needed to act. But missing the boat with Lucky, drove home the fact that Logan really didn't want to take the chance that something might happen to him (or he might forget something else) before he could implement some sort of scheme to expose Woody.

He did have a plan B. And a plan C. Logan just wished they were closer to Plan X and Z.

But for now, they might have to do.

****

Saturday Morning. In the original timeline Logan’s pretty sure he would still have been sleeping off a hangover.

In this timeline he has already gotten a work-out in, taken a shower, and then made the shower pretty much negligible by digging around in some of the boxes stored in his house’s crawl space.

He had hit a wall last night when it came to ideas to deal with either Rooks or Woody.

But “Taking a break can lead to breakthroughs.” ― Russell Eric Dobda

So that was what he had decided to do.

When the house had been burned down in the original timeline, it wasn’t just a house and some truly hideous furniture that had been destroyed. All of his and his mother’s photos, keepsakes, and mementos were lost too. And Trina’s actually. She just didn’t seem to care much once she was able to get the insurance money. 

Logan had slowly tried to rebuild his photo collection over the years. There were plenty of pictures of him, his mom and Trina floating around that had been either taken or given out for publicity. Most of them were pretty staged, stiff and artificial. The photos he ended up treasuring the most, had come from some of his mom’s fans. Snapshots they had taken with her at events or during chance meetings in which she looked genuinely happy.

Logan also might have confiscated some of the photos Duncan had left in the suite when he fled. The fact Duncan had left them at all, Logan had decided, was the closest thing he was ever going to get to an apology for him leaving without saying goodbye.

And, of course, after he and Veronica had finally, really, gotten together, her photos had become their photos and filled in most of his tween and teen years.

By the time he was in his thirties the real gaps were his own childhood (pre-Neptune), his mother’s and his grandparents.

Logan’s Aunt Naomi had tried to fill that in somewhat but Logan’s mom had gotten the bulk of the family photos after Logan’s grandfather had died and no one seemed to have thought to make copies before they had been incinerated.

Logan had waded through several boxes of his mom’s film memorabilia but finally, in the back, where the crawl space really did only have space to crawl, he had found several boxes filled with Leister family history.

“Logan, Honey, what are you doing?”

At the sound of this mother’s voice, Logan, being the stealthy, mission impossible-esque naval intelligence office he was, reflexively attempted to sit up and banged his head on the ceiling. 

“Just a minute.” He grabbed the edge of two of the boxes and pulled them along as he backed his way towards the trap door. Leaving one just on the lip of the opening, he grabbed the other and carefully balanced it as he made his way down the ladder.

His mom was waiting for him down at the bottom, looking like she had just woken up and giving him a questioning look.

“I found these boxes of Grandma and Grandpa Leister’s things while I was looking for some photos.” He explained. It was true. But it was also vague enough that she’ll most likely assume he was looking for pictures of Lilly, rather than the pictures that he found. He placed the box on the floor and offered her an apologetic smile.

She gave him a sad one in return.

He felt a bit guilty at the deception.

“I thought I could look through them? Maybe copy some?” Logan suggested. His mother hesitated a moment, then she plastered on a smile.

“That might be nice.” after a slight pause her smile faltered slightly. “Just be careful?”

He nods.

“And honey, maybe wait until a little later in the day before doing more exploring?”

“Right.”

She turned, probably to head back to bed.

Most of the time, since he’d been trapped here, in the past, it felt like just that --- being trapped. Being stuck. But there were also times, especially with his mother, that it feels more like he’s racing a ticking clock. Like someone, very soon, is going to realize he doesn’t deserve to have these moments.

Right now, suddenly feels like one of those times.

“The airshow this weekend.” Logan rushed out. “Maybe we could go? Look at some of the planes like the ones Grandpa Laurie flew?”

That hadn’t actually been part of Logan’s plans.

He had mixed feelings about airshows in general and seeing this one, he suspects, would be even more mixed. And bittersweet.

And not just because it’s currently run by jarheads.

Logan loved flying.

His choice, in his own timeline to eventually change his career and work in intelligence had been difficult, and complicated, and long thought out.

Logan stood by it. But that didn’t mean he didn’t miss being a pilot sometimes.

Practically, in this timeline, he should aim to go straight into intelligence work. Not just because of all the reasons that had eventually that had eventually led him there the first time around, but because it seemed far more likely to lead him towards a way home.

Knowing he would never actually fly here, however, somehow felt very different, and much more depressing than it had felt back home when he had chosen to become a former pilot.

Logan also suspects some of the guys he had flown and trained with may be there today. Seeing them, knowing they would not only not recognize him, but most likely would never know him in this timeline? That would be hard.

On the other hand, getting to show-off something he loves to his mother. Even if he’s not the one actually flying --- even if it’s just explaining the parts of a plane and the technique used. It might just make the experience more sweet than bitter.

So, of course, when his mother turns around again, to face him, though, she’s giving him a sad, hesitant smile. And he already knows what will come next.

“Honey,” She let out a sigh. “I just --- I don’t think I’m up for that right now.”

Logan had once told Veronica that he knew his mother. On that particular occasion, he had turned out to be wrong. But he still thinks he’s pretty clear eyed about who Lynn Leister Echolls was.

Is.

He might have added a little rose tinting to her memory in the years since her death.

It was certainly easier to think of her just as the woman who put a knife to Aaron’s throat to save Logan’s life rather than as the woman who had stayed with Aaron afterwards. And after the next time. And the next --- until she was so worn down, she was more likely to reach for a glass than a knife.

Or to remember her only at her best --- as warm and vibrant. The woman who had been kind enough to Veronica that when he offered to pay Veronica to find her, she had ripped up Logan’s check in his mother’s honor, even after everything Logan had done to her.

But that wasn’t his mother. That was only a part of her. And if he had forgotten that somewhat in the years since his mother’s death, he certainly had been reminded of it in the weeks since he’d been back here.

And  

But he’d also been reminded of just how much he loved her. Not as some ethereal, ideal but as his mom.

So, her flaws and her weaknesses, didn’t mean he loved her less.  Especially when he understood those weaknesses so well.

Even when it meant she was more concerned with avoiding the tabloids than what teenage hoped to do.

“That’s fine.” He told her gently, giving her a short hug. “Maybe we could look over some of the photos together, later? You could help me figure out who everyone is.”

She nodded and gave him a fragile smile.

He expects her to walk away again. Instead she reaches over and places her hand on his cheek.

“I’m sorry you couldn’t have gotten to know him better.” She tells him. It takes him a moment to realize she means Grandpa Laurie.

“Me too.”

“Sometimes, when I look at you.” She continues.  “Especially during these last few weeks.” Her smile became slightly chagrined. “When I see how you dealt with --- all of this.” She shakes her head, then looks him straight in the eyes.  “I can see so much of him in you.”

Logan swallows hard and just manages to choke out:

“Thank you.”

Chapter Text

Monday October 20, 2003

Mary Coggle wasn’t sure what sin she’d committed she had done in her past life to be sentenced to the hell that was teaching high school students but she hoped she enjoyed it. She was already counting down the days and hours until she would be out of here.

“Ms. Coggle? I have an idea for a new story.”

It was Logan Echolls. Given the warnings she’d been given by other teachers when he transferred into her class, she had been surprised by his apparent eagerness to contribute to the paper. Then again, he hadn’t actually contributed anything other than ideas yet. Once he was actually forced to sit down and write, she expected that eagerness would evaporate.

“You haven’t turned in your first story yet, Logan.” She said with a beleaguered sigh.

“I know.” He said apologetically. “Tommy’s already overseas. I’ve e-mailed him, but it might be a while until he’ll be able to have time to reply to my questions. This story, though, is more for the November issue anyway.”  In other words, far enough away in time that he will be able to procrastinate and fool around in class for another month without being expected to produce actual work.

Mary let out another sigh.

“So? What is it?”

“I thought I could shadow Woody Goodman, the founder of Woody’s Burger? Write a story on local businesses and how they can benefit the community.” Mary managed to keep herself from rolling her eyes. Barely.

“This is a school paper, Logan. The articles need to be about the school in some way. I’m just not seeing the connection.”

“Right.” He said with a grimace. “I guess I’ll just have to think of something else.”  Then retreated back to his computer station.

****

Veronica hadn’t had a lot of friends in elementary school.

When she was really young, she’d been --- not a problem child exactly. But she’d been an only child of a stay at home mom and a doting dad. So, she’d had some problems with sharing. And taking turns. And generally getting along with kids her age.

There may have been some incidents.

And while Veronica firmly maintained those weren’t really her fault. (She had had that unicorn sticker first. What happened next was on Jean’s head, not hers) she could understand why, such… occurrences coupled with the fact that her birthday was already close to the cut-off date her parents and teachers might have thought it would be better to let her “mature” for an extra year in pre-k.

She can’t say if things would have been easier if her parents had gone the other way; if she would have had an easier time if she had been one of the youngest kids in her class, rather than the oldest. But it definitely didn’t feel like it helped at the time.

It also hadn’t helped that she might have come off as a bit of a know it all. And was sort of a teacher’s pet. At least when she wasn’t correcting the teachers. 

The bottom line was --- she hadn’t been that popular.

Then, when Veronica was nine, Sheriff Hertz, had had a heart attack.

He’d recovered, but almost as soon as he’d become conscious again, he’d decided it was time to retire.

Her dad had won the emergency election to replace him.

After Veronica’s dad had become Sheriff her parents had decided to buy a new house. It wasn’t bigger than the one they had, but it was located on the very edge of the 90909 area code. That meant that when Veronica went into sixth grade, she would be able to go to the newer, and better funded middle school that served the area.

Once they had moved, her mom had started signing her up for one after-school activity after another in their new area code. Soccer. Girls scouts. Cotillion. It was supposed to help her make friends before she changed schools. But the only person she knew at any of those things was Lilly.

Jake Kane had backed her dad in his run for Sheriff, so she and Lilly, had ended up as the only girls anywhere near their age at a bunch events and functions around the election. They had ended up together out of necessity, trying to keep each other from the inevitable boredom that comes with being a kid at an adult party.

So, when she found herself surrounded by girls like Madison Sinclair, Pam Collins and Ashley Banks Veronica had sat--- hidden really--- next to Lilly.

But contrary to even Veronica’s expectations Lilly never asked her to move. She talked to her. Joked with her. And eventually, Lilly began choosing to sit next to Veronica.

By the time Veronica was in sixth grade, they were friends and within a year they were best friends.

And when Lilly was your friend, a lot of people were your friend.

Veronica wasn’t stupid. She knew that some of these supposed friends were just pretending to like her because they wanted to stay on Lilly’s good side. But she had still thought that some of them were, you know, actually her friends.

Apparently, she’d overestimated her own charms.

It wasn’t that anyone was making fun of her to her face or anything. The only really negative stuff she had heard had been overheard. In fact, more than anything, she had seemed to have become a non-entity to most of the people she had been sitting at lunch and going to parties with for years.

But thankfully, not all.

Before Veronica had started junior high, Lilly had been her friend, but Duncan had really just been Lilly’s (often annoying) little brother, even if he was the Kane sibling that was actually going to be in class with her.

It was only when Logan moved to Neptune that that had begun to change.

Veronica was already spending most of the afternoons she wasn’t with her dad at the station, at Lilly’s house. Pretty much immediately after the move, Logan began to all but live at the Kane’s. The Kane house was big but it wasn’t that big. There was one pool. One driver to pick them up from school and their various activities. One kitchen to steal snacks from. Gradually, somewhat accidentally, it stopped being Lilly-Veronica and Duncan-Logan hanging out on opposite sides of the house and started becoming the four of them.

It wasn’t until over a year later that Logan and Lilly started dating and they went from four kids hanging out to Duncan-Logan-Lilly-Veronica. And it was almost a year and a half after that she and Duncan got together. 

Seven months.

That’s how long they’d been Duncan-Veronica-Lilly-Logan. 

It felt so much longer. So much more important.

And she thought --- knew that it did to Logan too.

But she also knew that Logan was Duncan’s best friend long before he was one of hers.

And today was the first day that Duncan was back at school.

So, when she got to what she had already started to think of as “their” table, and saw that Logan wasn’t there --- her stomach dropped. But she also couldn’t really be mad. Or at least she told herself she shouldn’t be mad. After all, if the situation were reversed, she’d probably be sitting with Lilly.

Veronica set her lunch down, and got out some of her homework, hoping she would be able to concentrate on it, rather than on the whispers behind her back or the lonely lunch ahead of her.

She was, in fact, so intent on her work, that several minutes later, when the table shifted from the weight of someone sliding into the seat across from her, she nearly jumped.

“Logan!”

“Hey.” He said, completely nonchalantly. As if he hadn’t missed nearly half the lunch period.

“Where have you been?!” Veronica said. She then immediately realized she sounded way too much like a jealous girlfriend.

Logan looked over at her, completely nonplussed. 

“I was having problems with some computer stuff so I stopped by to talk to the kids that hang out in the computer science classroom.” He explained. He studied her a moment. “Do I want to know where you thought I was?”

She shrugged and looked down at her plate, attempting to seem as casual as he did.

“Duncan’s at school today. I thought you might be eating with him.” Logan looked confused for a moment. Almost as if the idea he would choose to eat lunch with Duncan over her was completely alien to him.

“No.” He said finally. “In fact, I’m pretty sure Duncan is still pretending I don’t exist.”

“Yeah.” Veronica said with more bitterness than she planned. “That does seem to be his M.O.”

Logan seemed to think on that for a moment. Veronica was about to turn back to her homework when he finally spoke.

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be sorry for getting help with your computer Logan.” She scoffed.

“No. I’m sorry that I chose Duncan. Before.” He nodded backwards. Then looked at her with an earnestness that surprised her “And I’m not just saying that because he’s ignoring me now. What he did, ghosting you like that…. It wasn’t right, and I shouldn’t have assumed he was the one in the right. So, I’m sorry.”

Veronica wasn’t sure what to say. She decided to stick with her strengths and cling to the least emotionally charged part of his apology.

“Ghosting?”

Logan looked confused again, then slightly embarrassed.

“When someone breaks-up with you without telling you? They just stop talking to you or answering your calls. Like they’ve suddenly become a ghost. Or maybe it’s like you’ve suddenly become a ghost.”

Veronica raised her eyebrow.

“You came up with a term for what Duncan did to me but you’re not sure why you called it that?” She asked.

“I didn’t come up with it.” He said, now looking amused. “It just hasn’t filtered down to the masses yet.”

“Us hoi polloi do take a while to catch on to the Hollywood lingo.” She bantered back.

“Well, I’m happy to do my part to educate. Next week, I’ll be giving a seminar on ‘groovy’. I hear it’s going to be the next big thing.” He said with a smirk. Veronica rolled her eyes.

Logan took this as a cue to take out his lunch, and begin to eat it. He seemed content to dig into what Veronica thought to be both an overly complicated and overly healthy combination of food from his bag. But she still felt awkward.

Was she supposed to apologize now? To say she was sorry for choosing Lilly over Logan, and telling Lilly about Yolanda? But the thing was --- Veronica wasn’t sorry. Lilly was her best friend. Veronica had seen Logan kiss another girl. Veronica still believed she had done the right thing in telling Lilly. But she also, suddenly, desperately wanted Logan to know that she hadn’t chosen Lilly over him in another way.

“Logan, If I had known about Lilly and your dad…”

“You would have told your dad and gotten Aaron arrested for statutory rape.” Logan finished matter-of-factly. Without a single ounce of doubt.

“Well, yes.” She was pretty sure at least, “But what I mean is...” She let out a long breath and gathered her thoughts. “I didn’t think Lilly would really cheat on you. With anyone.” She had known Lilly joked about seeing other men, but she had thought it was just that --- jokes. “Lilly loved you.”

Logan responded with a sad smile.

“Yeah. She did.” He told her, gently. “Even if it wasn’t quite like how I loved her. And, she didn’t cheat exactly.” He paused a moment, thinking, then continued. “There’s this musical --- Kiss me Kate?”

“That’s the one with the Taming of the Shrew, right?” His smile grew amused.

“Right. There’s a song in it: Always True To You In My Fashion.” He sat up slightly. “Lilly obviously didn’t want expensive gifts from men, like the girl in the song. But she did need something that I couldn’t give her.” He shook his head. “Maybe that no one person could give her. So, every so often, she would find a reason to break-up with me or do something that would make me break-up with her.  Then she would get with someone else. And when she got bored of them, or what she needed changed, she would break it off and get back together with me. It wasn’t healthy in any sense of the word, but it wasn’t cheating either. At least not in her mind.” He said, adding a shrug.

Veronica stared at him for a moment. Completely baffled by how calm his explanation was. 

“You aren’t angry?”

“Of course, I’m angry.” He said, but sounded more sad than anything. “But not at Lilly. I was angry at her, for pulling that crap again. And at myself, for falling for it. I was even angry at you for telling Lilly about the kiss. But---Lilly’s dead. And the only person to blame for that is Aaron.” He looked at Veronica intently. "Lilly was a sixteen-year-old that was taken advantage of by a grown man. And when she threatened to expose what he’d done --- he killed her. He’s the one I’m angry at

****

Tuesday October 21, 2003

Subject: Alumni Information for Neptune Navigator

Date: 10/21/2003 08:33AM

From: Logan Echolls <[email protected]>

To:[email protected]

Dear Ms. Bugsby,

I am currently writing a series of articles on recent Neptune High School Alumni for the Navigator. I was hoping that as Alumni Association secretary you would be able to send me the contact information for a number of the Alumni I wish to speak to as part of the series. I have attached a list of the Alumni and would greatly appreciate your help. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Logan Echolls

Logan looked over the letter.  After feeling satisfied that it sounded professional enough to be polite but not professional enough to seem like it was written by an adult he hit send.

Cassidy’s little league team hadn’t been the first one Woody had coached. At the flag ship store of Woody Burger’s in Neptune, Woody had hung up photographs of all his teams, helpfully labeled with the players’ names. Logan had spent yesterday afternoon taking down the names for the players that should now be high school or older.

Plan C, would mean finding a way both to contact them without tipping off either Woody or Cassidy to what he was doing, and do the contacting in such a way as to find at least one of those older players who were ready to come forward about what Woody had done to them, and give them a little nudge. All without re-traumatizing them.

Easy right?

****

Mac hadn’t really thought of Logan Echolls as the punctual type, let alone the so punctual he’s early type. But when she arrived at Java the Hut for their tutoring session there he was, already camped out in a booth in the back facing the door.

Then again, Logan Echolls kind of seemed to be full of surprises these days.

At Neptune High, the prettiest, richest and most popular people at the top of the social pyramid weren’t jocks or cheerleaders, but the kind of people whose parents regularly appeared on the front of grocery store tabloids, tech magazines and the wall street journal.

Duncan Kane, the school's golden boy.

Lilly Kane the beautiful, rebellious celebritant heiress.

Veronica Mars, who managed to be both the perfect princess and the girl from the wrong side of the track --- depending on where you viewed the “tracks” as lying in Neptune.

Dick Casablancas who… well to be quite honest, no one could really agree on what Dick’s niche was in the group. Surfer Dude? Constant fifth wheel? The human equivalent of a golden retriever that tries to hump all the furniture? Whatever he was to the others though, he was pretty much a constant.  

Finally, there was Logan Echolls. The angry, angsty bad boy. Even if no one had known what he had to be angry or brooding about.

These four (well, five) were pretty much all anyone at Neptune High ever gossiped about. And that had sort of made everyone feel like they knew them.

When Mac had woken up three weeks ago, and Lilly Kane was all over the news --- or more accurately Lilly Kane’s murder had been all over the news, even though Mac had never had a class with Lilly, and couldn’t even remember ever speaking a word to her, it had still been kind of  a shock.

Neptune wasn’t the idyllic small town where nothing bad ever happened that the news had been making it out to be. But it was the sort of town where nothing bad ever happens to girls like Lilly Kane. At least, that had been what everyone --- including Mac--- had thought.

When Mac had gone to school the next Monday, a lot of the kids in her classes were absent, attending Lilly Kane’s funeral but Lilly was still the only thing the people who were left were talking about.

It was around lunchtime that the news began to filter down through the student body that Aaron Echolls had been arrested at the funeral. And that he and Lilly had been having an affair.

At first Mac had assumed it was just one of those weird rumors that pop up when a celebrity is tangentially connected to something. It just seemed so unbelievable. But there it was that night, on the news.

After that, it wasn’t just everyone at Neptune High that was talking about Logan and Lilly but everyone. At the grocery store. Online. On TV.

Some people still didn’t believe it. They claimed Sheriff Mars was bumbling and incompetent and had misread the evidence. Or that Aaron had to be covering for someone --- usually Logan. And, then, of course there were those people who thought this was all part of some massive conspiracy cover-up.

On the other side of the coin, there were the people who suddenly had always known Aaron Echolls was bad news.

At Neptune High, though, speculation wasn’t just over what had happened but what would happen when the rest of Lilly’s friend came back to school.

Mac had heard there was a betting pool over how long it would take for Logan to get suspended after he returned, and whether it would be for fighting or intoxication.

But Mac was pretty sure everyone in the pool had already lost. When Logan started going to classes again, it was like someone had flipped a switch, and all those bad boy traits everyone had expected to get turned up to eleven by recent events, had instead been turned way, way down.

That had caused more than a few conspiracy theories too.

The way Mac thought about it, when you discover that your girlfriend cheated on you with your dad, and then your dad murdered her, it probably causes you to re-evaluate your life a bit.

That still hadn’t prepared her for Logan freaking Echolls to show up in the computer lab at lunch yesterday and ask her to help him with some basic hacking skills. But, strange or not, Logan had offered to pay her. A lot.

Mac walked past the counter towards the table. Logan looked up, gave her a slight wave then stuffed the notebook he had been writing in his backpack.

“You’re early.” He said, like that was the weird part.

“So are you.” She said, gesturing towards him.

He gave a shrug. Then added,

“I was actually just about to call you. I realized I hadn’t given you directions or anything.”

Mac raised her brow.

“You think I need directions to Neptune’s only independent coffee shop named after a Star Wars character.”

“Right. Silly me.” He said. He nodded towards the counter. “I assume you want to order something first before we get started.” She raised her eyebrow a bit further then turned and headed towards the counter.

Several minutes later, and with her drink in hand; Mac scooted into the booth, and pulled out her laptop along with a piece of paper.

“This is the information you need to access the first e-mail account you ask me to set up. The second one should be ready by the end of the week.”

“And these will be untraceable?” He asked.

“Nothing electronic is ever entirely untraceable.” She told him. “But someone will have to be incredibly patient and incredibly good to figure out where something sent from one of these actually came from.”

“Thank you.” He said, with a nod.

“Now, as for the tutoring.” She continued. “I’ve got to warn you, in order to teach you what you want to know, I’m going to have to teach you a whole bunch of other boring stuff that will seem pretty useless at first. I’m also not entirely sure I can teach you everything you want to know. It might sound like a cliché, but in some ways, hacking can be more an art than a science. Sometimes, you have to just feel how to do it.”

“Okay.” He said with another nod.

“Really? Because, you know I can always set up stuff like those e-mail accounts for you.”

“If you give a man a fish, he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn. Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie.” Logan gave her a knowing look.  “But I’m guessing you already know that, and that’s why you want me to take the fish.” Oddly, Logan didn’t seem angry about the theory as much as amused.

“Or I don’t want you to ruin my reputation, clumsily poking around somewhere and claiming me as your teacher.” She retorted. His smile ticked up slightly.

“Okay. I can understand that. And maybe you’re right. Maybe I won’t really be able to be any good at this. And maybe I’ll get frustrated and quit. But I am more than willing to pay you handsomely for every hour of the attempt, regardless of the outcome. And I’m pretty sure that that’s going to add up to a lot more money in the end than if I just asked you to do things à la carte.” He told her. “So, why don’t we try it for a while and see what happens? I will promise to never implicate you in my clumsiness and, as an added bonus, since most of my friends would rather have their fish not just caught but sautéed in truffle oil before they so much as touch it, if one of them has any computer needs, I’ll send them your way. Deal?”

“On one condition.” She told him, somewhat proud that she had thus far managed to keep from looking too amused herself.

“And what is that?”

“You stay clear of the meat and fish metaphors in the future.” She said, finally allowing herself to smile.

Logan’s smile ticked into a smirk.

“I think that can be arranged.”

****

Wednesday October 22, 2003

Seeing Carrie during cross country and around school felt completely different than seeing Veronica. With Veronica, there was a constant stab, reminding him that his Veronica wasn’t here, and that there was a chance he would never see her again. With Carrie, seeing her here, happy, alive and relatively well adjusted just made him hopeful that he could use his situation to do some good.

Of course, keeping that hope alive meant making sure that Susan stayed alive and relatively well adjusted too. Today, his small contribution to that was staying late in his history class, playing with his bag, fiddling with papers and generally finding any reason he could to dawdle in the room long enough that Susan would give up on speaking with Mr. Rooks alone about the upcoming test, and leave for lunch.

Logan wasn’t entirely sure if that would make any difference, but at least it meant that he wasn’t just sitting there, doing nothing. He was sitting there, doing nothing for a greater good.

Unfortunately, he was sitting there doing nothing for a greater good for long enough that he was several minutes late to lunch. When he did turn the corner and catch sight of the table he had begun to think of as his and Veronica’s, he froze. Logan just only stand there, staring like a deer in the headlights at the scene in front of him.

“Dude! We brought your food!” Dick shouted at him.

Dick was sitting on one of the benches around the table, gesturing towards the sizable spread of Chinese takeout containers in front of him.

Veronica was on the next bench over.  When she saw Logan, she gave him an indulgent smile and rolled her eyes as if to say “what can you do, it’s Dick.” Which was just so, so weird.

Cassidy was sitting across the table from her.

Logan felt a tinge of relief that Cassidy wasn’t sitting next to Veronica. If that was the case Logan wasn’t sure he would be able to fight his instinct to hit him.

If Logan hadn’t been late to Lunch, if he had been here when Dick had actually gotten there with the food, Logan probably could have steered Dick (and Cassidy) back towards the 09er table fairly easily.  But that wasn’t really an option now.

It wasn’t that Logan really thought asking the Casablancas brothers to leave would trigger Cassidy to give into his murderous tendency. Logan knew very specifically how to avoid that. But Logan also couldn’t think of a good excuse to get the brother to leave the table --- at least not one that wouldn’t cause trouble (and gossip) itself. And if Logan just asked it would lead to questions. And Logan didn’t want Cassidy to start wondering why Logan suddenly didn’t want to eat food from one of his favorite restaurants with one of his best friends.

For all of the time Logan had spent thinking and rethinking who Cassidy had really been after the boy’s death, one of the few things Logan could say with any certainty was that Cassidy was smart. And he used that intelligence to ferret out information about those around him, and manipulate them with it.  He was so good at it; he even was able to trick Veronica. So, Logan really really didn’t want him to become curious enough about Logan’s odd behavior to start looking into its cause. Because then he very well might figure out that Logan was looking into Woody. And that he very, very much wanted to avoid.

That meant the best option, or at least the best option he could think of during the 30 seconds before the very fact that he was just standing there thinking would become weird in and of itself, was to grit his teeth, plaster on a smile and try to pretend like he still thought of Cassidy as Dick’s quiet, inoffensive younger brother.

Luckily years of playing happy family with Aaron meant that Logan was something of an expert at pretending he didn’t think the person sitting across the table from him was a monster.

It was actually one of the reasons he was so good at intelligence work.

So, smile on, Logan slid into the seat right next to Veronica. He did ease his anxiety somewhat, however by placing himself between her and Cassidy.

“So, how exactly did either of you get enough pirate point for this feast?” Logan asked, as he looked through the various cartons.

“Wait, they actually keep track of those things? I thought it was like a velvet rope thing.” Dick asked. “Like, if you’re cool enough your in.”

Cassidy rolled his eyes. It was the type of exchange that Logan had witnessed a hundred times between the brothers, but now it felt slightly disquieting in its normality.

Logan grabbed the carton with his favorite dish in it then, along with a couple others, and began to serve himself.

Something about this felt wrong.

No, Logan realized mid scoop, it wasn’t that something felt wrong. It was that something smelled wrong.

When Logan was a kid, he had eaten a crab-puff at one of his mother’s parties and his throat had closed up.

Afterwards, he’d carried an EpiPen, been careful when ordering take-out and used his allergy to mock Aaron’s ineptitude as a father.  But since he had managed to avoid any other attacks and had enough money that people generally listened when he said he couldn’t eat something it hadn’t really seemed like that much of an issue.

Then he had decided to join the Navy. Or, more accurately, he had begun to cling to the idea of joining the navy as a lifeline.

A food allergy as severe as he had, however, would have killed that dream before it had even started.

Logan had been pretty much willing to do whatever was possible to get the waiver he needed to still join. Allergy shot, experimental treatments, whatever. But somehow, miraculously, when he went to the doctor to take the food challenge, he hadn’t had a reaction. He didn’t know if the first doctor had simply misdiagnosis him, or he was just one of the very lucky few that grew out of a shellfish allergy, but he didn’t care. He got his waiver. He could start the process of getting his wings.

Some small part of him, though, had always worried that the test had been the fluke. That someday he would take a bite of something and go into anaphylactic shock. In fact, he was probably more careful about shellfish once that it could end his career, than when it just would end his life. He had become almost hyper aware of it, especially its smell, since they didn’t exactly list the possible allergens in the food at the mess. Veronica ---his Veronica--- had jokingly called it his fishy sense.

And right now, his fishy sense was tingling.

Wow that sounds weird. Even in his own head.

But it was also true, and he began reflexively poking around in the containers, trying to figure out which one was setting it off.

Down at the bottom of his favorite, he found a chunk of shrimp.

He only just kept himself from literally throwing it away from him, managing instead to just slide it as far away as his arms would reach.

Now, as much as he and Veronica might quip about his secret shellfish superpower ---- a bit of shrimp was not enough to make the entire carton smell.

There had to have been more shrimp material in the carton at one point – or it had to have gotten in contact with enough that everything else in the container smelled of it.

Usually the restaurant the food had come from was pretty careful when it came to  allergies, that was why they had ordered take out from there so often in high school, but since the order had been for Dick, they might not have realized they needed to be careful this time.

“What’s wrong?” Veronica asks beside him.

“There must have been some mix-up at the restaurant. There’s shrimp in it.”

“Dude! That could have killed you! You should totally sue.” Dick exclaimed.

Logan smiled a bit at that. He had seen Dick date a girl for over a month without learning her name, but apparently, he did remember Logan’s allergies. It was kind of endearing.

Veronica, on the other hand, sent Dick a glare.

“Dick, did you order something with shrimp?”

“No!” Dick reached over and grabbed the bag the food had come in, then shoved it towards Veronica. “I told you I brought your food.”

The bag crinkled as Veronica searched until she found the receipt stapled to it and frowned.

“I should wash my hands.” Logan realized. Especially since he didn’t actually know exactly when he had grown out of his allergy; now that he really thought about it, he might very well still have a reaction. Unfortunately, washing his hands would mean leaving Veronica here with Dick and Cassidy. He looked around quickly, then turned to Veronica.

“I don’t really want to touch my backpack right now. Veronica, could you grab it and come with me to the bathroom so I can have my EpiPen nearby just in case?”

She looked up at him with concern.

“Yes. Of Course.”

Logan glanced over towards Cassidy. If he realized Logan’s ruse to get Veronica away from him, he didn’t show it. Beside him Dick had dumped the entire shrimp-contaminated carton onto his own plate and began stuffing its contents into his mouth.

“Don’t worry dude.” He said between bites. “This will all be gone by the time you’re back.”

Logan tried very hard not to smirk.

“Thanks, man.”

****

Once Logan had gone into the bathroom Veronica allowed herself to slide down and sit against the wall and take a few steadying breaths.

She waited a few moments, just sitting there, waiting and listening. Logan had promised he would be able to bang on the sinks or walls loud enough that she could hear if he suddenly needed help. She wasn’t entirely sure that was particularly sound plan, but he seemed pretty insistent, and she told herself he should know his body best. 

Eventually she grabbed the receipt from their lunch and began examining it. She was surprised to see that the ticket had Logan’s name on it, not Dick’s, but other than that there didn’t seem anything unusual. The food listed was their usual order from what she could tell.

There wasn’t anything listed as having shrimp or any other shellfish. There wasn’t anything to indicate that the food was for someone with an allergy either, but Veronica realized, she didn’t know if that was normal or not. She had never paid for any of the take-out the group had gotten in the past.

This receipt showed that it had been charged to one of Mrs. Echolls credit cards when the food had been ordered.

Once Veronica was reasonably sure she wouldn’t be able to find any more clues to what had happened on the receipt, Veronica folded it back up and stuffed into one of the pockets of her backpack.

She then took out one of her notebooks and turned to the list she had been working on earlier that day.

How to survive Sophomore year:

1. keep getting straight A’s, so that all teacher complaints about me will sound like utter paranoia.
2. figure out a way to make money for my get-the-hell-out-of-Neptune fund – preferably by way of Stanford.
3. keep telling myself – only 985 days until graduation.
4. brush up on video games – I need to look too busy to notice that no one will join me for lunch on days Logan is busy.

She fished out a pen and added a final step.

5. Keep Logan away from shellfish.

Chapter Text

Thursday October 23, 2003

Logan had adopted a habit, since he’d come back, of checking in on his mother before he headed to school, just to make sure she was okay. And maybe just to reassure himself that she was really there. Today, he was surprised to discover she was not only awake but, finishing up her make-up to go out.

“You look nice.”

She gave a half-smile, half grimace that he recognized as meaning something along the lines of “I don’t believe you but thanks anyway for saying it.”

“Gina invited me to have brunch with her and some of the girls at the club.” She tells him, focused on the mirror. “I thought it was about time I came out of hiding.”

A small childish part of him metaphorically stamps his feet at the explanation, selfishly upset that she hadn't been ready to go out a few days ago when he wanted to do something.

But, the more adult --- and thankfully more in control--- part, is just incredibly relieved she seems to be dealing with everything that has happened far better than he had feared.

“I thought the girls didn’t get up before noon.” He teased.

“And I thought school didn’t start until eight.”  She countered, looking up at him out of the corner of her eye.

“You are correct. Zero period however, starts in,” He glances over at the clock, “Just about ten minutes.” He leaned down, and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “So, you can tell me all about your brunch when I get home from school.”

****

Logan pulls Dick aside between classes. His plan to avoid a repeat of yesterday, is fairly simple: ask Dick if he could keep Duncan company for him. The two things that Dick will accept more or less without question as a motivation were loyalty to a friend and trying to get laid.

Without really meaning to, Logan also found himself promising Dick they would do something together over the weekend. Dick might not be his Dick --- and wow did he really need to figure out some new terminology --- but he was still Dick. Even though Logan wanted to avoid Cassidy as much as possible, Logan couldn’t quite get himself to ignore the only person who had actually stuck with him from childhood to adulthood in his own timeline. Logan would just have to come up with something to do with Dick that Cassidy wouldn’t want to tag along to.

When lunch does come around, his scheme seems to have worked because Veronica is the only one sitting at their table. She’s picking listlessly at her school lunch as he sits down, which while understandable --- he’s pretty sure they are serving hot dogs left over from earlier this week --- also seems decidedly un-Veronica like.

“Everything alright?” He asks. “You weren’t in chemistry.”

Veronica grimaces.

“I got called into Ms. James office. To,” she frowns more, “Check in.”

He's not exactly surprised at the lack of enthusiasm.

Logan knows that Lianne of all people had gotten Veronica to go to a counsellor several months after Lilly’s death. He also knows that Veronica had sat there in silence through each of the six sessions until the clock had run out.

But that had been after she had endured several months of jackassery at his own hands, along with the rest of the ‘09ers.

And it had been after Shelley Pomroy’s party.

He had hoped --- but admittedly not really expected --- that Veronica might be more open to counselling now. That obviously isn’t the case. What he’s more concerned with, is whether this is just a somewhat normal response of a teenager or early indications of the same resistance to therapy his own Veronica had developed.

“It might not be so bad.” Logan told her, attempting to sound light. “To have someone to talk to. Maybe not Ms. James, but someone.”

She gives him a disbelieving look.

“I actually have been talking to someone, myself.” He continued. “A private therapist.”

Jane isn’t working in this area yet, so Logan had been forced to go to someone new. He’s tried to convince himself that that’s a good thing. As comforting as it would be to have Jane to speak to, it would also be difficult to separate the two Janes --- his and the one here and now.

His previous experience has, at least, made the search slightly easier this time around. He already knows he has an easier time talking to a woman (not that that was really any surprise). He knows what questions to ask, and what sort of specialties to either look for or avoid. In fact, he had visited a couple of the therapists that are in the area before, in the future, and knows they aren’t a good fit.

His first session had gone about as well as such things can. Which is to say slightly awkward, but also slightly hopeful. Logan isn’t sure how the experience is for other people, but the closest comparison he can come up with is a first date. It’s just that the information being shared is very different and you’re hoping for a very different kind of connection.

Veronica is still staring at him, with a look that manages to seem even more disbelieving.

“Given the month we’ve been having, I just thought it would be good to be able to talk to someone who is actually trained in how to deal with this sort of stuff.”

At this, Veronica looks less disbelieving and more uncomfortable. She stares down at her lunch again for a second before speaking.

“I just don’t see how just talking to someone is supposed to make me any of this better.” She says carefully.

“It’s not really just talking.” He tells her, then pauses a second to try to find the words to describe what, exactly it was like. Not just talking with a friend, like he had described it to his Veronica. Not at this point. “It's more like, when you’re having a hard time with a problem. And you try to bounce ideas off of someone. Except the thing you’re having a hard time with is how you feel and the someone who you’re bouncing ideas off of actually can bounce some good ones back.”

He’s pretty sure this is an awful description, almost as soon as the thought is out of his mouth--- but for all the time he’s spent mentally building a case for therapy for his Veronica, he can’t quite come up with anything better at the moment for this Veronica.

Veronica looks like she really wants to roll her eyes, but is restraining herself. Which feels oddly like progress.

He also knows that if he does press too much, it will trigger Veronica’s automatic defensiveness, so he decided to take the small win, and just eat lunch. For now.

Logan has no illusion that one exchange would suddenly change this Veronica’s opinion on therapy and magically change her future.

But he can’t help but hope that, maybe, if he starts what might well be a very long, slightly frustrating, series of conversations now, he just might be able to show this Veronica the benefit of asking for help before she has put up too much armor to accept such suggestions.

After their nine years of radio silence, once he and his Veronica had finally, really, gotten together Logan had been pretty open about his own belief, reliance even, on regular therapy sessions. He’d also been pretty open about the fact that he thought Veronica might benefit from therapy as well. And Veronica had been more than open about her belief to the contrary.

He had tried not to push. Haranguing her wouldn’t have been useful or healthy for either of them. He might have crossed the line a bit into somewhat harangue-y during the last few weeks he had spent in his own timeline, especially after what happened in the kitchen.

He wanted Veronica to be happy. And selfish though it may be, he wanted to be the one who she was happy with.

He had had a hell of a time, though, trying to figure out how to make that possible, so the only thing he could think of was to bring in a professional… even though he knew Veronica would really not like it.

It might seem counterintuitive that someone with a degree in psychology would be so anti-therapy, but to Logan it made a twisted sort of sense. His Veronica hadn’t chosen her major because she thought therapy worked. She chose it because she was fascinated by the concept of profiling; she was intrigued by the puzzle of dissecting people’s motives and actions and the potential that they could be understood and anticipated.

She didn’t see psychology as something to heal or to build someone up but as a tool to break them down into all their component parts and figure out which ones you could push to get what you wanted from them.

From what Logan had been able to tell during their occasional back and forth over the relative merits of therapy, Veronica had made sure that the classes she took at Stanford only served to strengthen this bias.

Aside from the bare minimum requirements, she had avoided clinical psychology and focused instead on things like profiling (obviously), physical and cultural psychology, and the non-clinical aspects of abnormal psychology. In other words: all of the ways the brain could be broken, molded or tricked.

Veronica acted as if she thought therapy was somewhere between crystal healing and the real-world equivalent of a Jedi mind trick. A manipulation that only really worked on the stupid or weak-minded.

She didn’t say that in as many words, of course. Primarily because he wasn’t sure she knew what a Jedi mind trick was. But it was there, right under the surface of all her objections, arguments and jokes.

But Logan knew Veronica. And he knew that if she really believed that, then she would have already gone with him to a session, if only to shut him up.

No.

Veronica only put the level of effort into avoiding something, like she had with therapy, when it scared her.

What she was afraid of was more difficult to understand, even for him. Sometimes he thought it was simply that she was afraid of what she might find if she looked at herself too closely. Or that she might be uncomfortable with the idea of having someone read her the way she read other people.

Mostly through, Logan suspected she was afraid she might be wrong. That therapy might actually work.

Because if that was true then she might really have to put in the work and change.

Veronica gave lip service to knowing her own flaws and recognizing the harm they caused.

But Logan had long suspected that, deep down, she viewed a lot of what she herself called her “issues” and flaws as strengths.

As what made her different, smarter and stronger than the naïve idiots around her.

As what made her better and stronger than the naïve, stupid girl she had been before Lilly’s death.

Which was complete and utter bullshit.

There were many, many differences between his Veronica and the girl she had been before Lilly’s death, just like there were many differences between both of these versions of Veronica and the girl who was currently sitting across the table from him. Some of these differences really could be attributed to what had happened to Lilly and the aftermath or to the other traumatic events that had filled their late adolescence. Some were because of other things his Veronica had endured afterwards.

But some of it was because, his Veronica had spent time working with her father. Or because she had become friends with Wallace. Or Mac. Or because she had gone through the brainwashing cult called law school. Or because she had finally had the opportunity to go to all those student film festivals and art shows she had spent their freshman year talking about---- and realized she liked them even less than he did.

Simply living a life and growing up had changed her, as it did everyone, in a million different ways.

But Veronica had always been smart, and strong and resourceful.

Lilly’s death and its aftermath hadn’t created any of that. It had just stripped her down to the bone, he had stripped her down to the bone, so the strength that had always been there, had become the only thing left of her for a while.

Of course, Veronica had also always been pretty good at living in denial and ignoring those parts of herself and her world which didn’t match up with what she wanted them to be.

So, getting his Veronica to admit that had been nearly impossible.

And it was possible that getting any Veronica to reexamine herself might very well prove to be an uphill battle.

****

When Logan got home from school, he found his mother sitting in her room, watching the news.

That was never a good sign.

Thankfully, he didn’t find his father’s face plastered across the screen. Apparently, some college kid from the Midwest had inadvertently done Logan and his loved ones a favor and taken attention away from Neptune for a few hours by nearly destroying his lab in a viral video worthy way. Not so great for the kid, but since no one was seriously injured Logan didn’t feel too guilty about being thankful for the distraction.

After staring at the screen for a moment, Logan turned off the TV, and sat down next to his mom.

“So, what happened?” He asked.

“Apparently something with foam.” She told him gesturing sloppily toward the now dark screen.

Logan had recognized fairly early in his childhood that his mom tended to loosen over the course of the day. The sharp, warm and determined woman from the morning would gradual shift into acting increasingly airheaded, increasingly thoughtless and increasingly excitable as the day progressed and her level of self-medication increased. By late afternoon, it was usually clear where teenage Logan had come by his tendency towards dramatic gesticulations.

His mom was practiced enough, though, at hiding her increasing intoxication from those who didn’t spend their life literally looking up at her, that she rarely became so loose that she would be recognizably drunk to the casual observer.

Today must really have been a bad day.

“I’m pretty sure the foam was part of the fire suppression system.” Logan told her then gave her a pointed look.  She sent him a slightly sour expression, like a kid who knew they had been caught in a lie, but didn’t want to admit it. After a moment, though, she finally let out a sigh.

“I went to see Barry Randall today.”

Logan had anticipated that his mother would go to see her lawyer at some point.

The press and the public expected a woman in her position to choose one of two paths: to either stand by her husband and protest his innocence --- or to file for divorce. Sooner rather than later.

But Logan also knew that if she did begin to take that first step towards divorcing Aaron, she wasn’t going to like what she discovered. Aaron had made his mother sign a prenup before they were married. And, given that it was prepared by Aaron’s lawyers for Aaron benefit, Logan had no doubt it had been crafted to be both draconian and thorough.

Logan had learned the hard way how Aaron used money to control his family, even long after they had thought they had gotten him out of their lives.

After Aaron’s timely death, Logan had thought he had been saved from dealing with the fiscal threats Aaron’s had made following his acquittal.

Aaron’s will, however, had left the majority of his liquid assets to Trina. That’s not to say that Logan hadn’t gotten a significant amount too. In fact, Logan gotten enough that, had he been savvy and prudent with his finances he would have not only been able to pay for college and live fairly comfortably off his trust fund until he graduated, but he would have had enough left over for a nice nest egg or emergency fund.

But Logan had been a nineteen-year-old mess whose only prior financial experience was being handed a black AmEx at thirteen and who didn’t really think he would live to see twenty-five. Savvy and prudent weren’t really part of his economic vocabulary at the time. Just as Aaron had no doubt predicted Logan had burned through this first layer of money fairly quickly.

The majority of Logan’s inheritance had been in the form of residuals and merchandising and licensing rights. Things like that.

In other words, Aaron had made sure that on paper it looked like Logan had gotten as much, if not more than his sister from his estate. A deliberate attempt, Logan was sure, to make it hard for Logan to challenge the will.

-In reality, it meant that the more Logan talked about the sort of person his father actually was, or the more he tried to make sure his father’s career and legacy were buried along with him, the less money Logan would actually get.

Logan suspected that Aaron assumed that by the time Logan had gotten full control of his trust, he would be so desperate for cash he’d either attempt to rehabilitate Aaron’s image himself, or sell the rights to someone who would.

Or that Logan would be dead and the rights would revert to Trina.

Instead, Logan had been midway through his flight training and feeling pretty damn good about himself and his future.

So good, in fact, that he had signed away what was left of this potential future income --- but to charity rather than for a quick infusion of cash.

Like the purchase of his Beemer, it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

And like the Beemer, it had seemed like less of a good idea a few years later when he had settled down with Veronica, her student loan debt, and her father’s medical bills.

But, as much as he might have wished he could help Veronica and Keith out more, he had still been able to manage to live with what he had. They had managed (mostly) with what they had.

His mother, though … Logan remembers the last time he had seen his mother (in his timeline) with the kind of clarity only the last moments with someone you love can have.  Aaron had threatened that she would lose everything if she divorced him. That had been what had metaphorically (and somewhat literally) pushed her over the edge.

“What did he say?” Logan asked gently. She frowned.

Logan wrapped his arm around her and allowed her to lean into him.

“I don’t know if I can do it.” She finally choked out.

“Do what?”

“Divorce your father.”

Logan thinks he should be angry. He is angry, somewhat, but it’s buried deep. And it’s almost entirely muted by the enormous amount of relief that is piled on top of it.

Because if his mother is worried about her ability to go through with a divorce, that means that she had spoken with Barry about taking that next step, and she had discovered the consequences of her prenup.

But she hadn’t headed to the Coronado bridge.

She’d come home.

“We’ll be okay.” He tells her, slowly rubbing her back. “We’ll figure something out.”

****

Friday October 24, 2003.

Without Lilly, the whole world is muted.

Duncan feels like someone’s scooped out his insides and filled him up with gauze.

He doesn’t even feel sadness. Not really. He cries, but it just leaves him feeling hollowed out. 

The only thing he does feel is anger. Or something like anger. Even that is different.

It gets stuck. Bouncing around in his head until he can’t think about anything else. Until he just wants it gone so badly, he feels like he either has to scream or curl up and sleep so he doesn’t have to think about anything for a little while.

But he can’t sleep. It won’t let him.

He’s tired all the time now.

Not the good kind of tired; not like after a good run. Or a long night out.

Just tired of thinking. Of being awake.

So, he tries to avoid anything that reminds him of Lilly. Or reminds him that Lilly is dead. Hoping, maybe, that the thoughts --- the anger --- will give him some rest.

He’s already begged his parents to sell the house. It’s the most effort he’s put into anything in the last month

He avoids Logan because he can’t look at him without seeing Lilly. Because he can’t look at him without seeing Aaron.

He avoids Veronica too. because he can’t look at her without being reminded that his father is a liar. That his father let Duncan almost… that he let Duncan and Veronica… that they almost…

That they almost did something that should make him want to throw up.

It’s a lot harder to avoid both Logan and Veronica though, now that he’s back in school.

Of course, at home it was almost impossible to avoid looking at the spot where his sister had had her head bashed in and imagine her lying there, dead.

So maybe it’s a fair trade off.

His mom had thought he should take more time off. Maybe spend some time at one of their other houses.

He would have liked that. 

But his dad had insisted that he needed to go back to school and start getting back into the swing of things.

Couldn’t have a little thing like Lilly’s death ruin Duncan’s chances of fulfilling his father’s dreams or anything.

Duncan was too tired to argue.

Today, just like every day this week, he walks into the journalism classroom and turns immediately to the left. He doesn’t look towards where Logan is sitting.

He doesn’t try to puzzle out why Logan is suddenly in his class.

That would mean thinking about Logan. And what he’s feeling.  And the fact that maybe Logan’s been changed by Lilly’s death too.

Instead Duncan just sits down behind the semi-protective barrier of his little cubby. He keeps his eyes on the computer screen. He opens up his school e-mail.

There’s a lot of mail.

Some of it's from his teachers.

Some of it's from friends.

Most of it is from people he barely knows.

He knows he should respond.

He just stares at the screen.

He thinks about moving all the condolences in a folder so he wouldn’t have to see them every time he opens his e-mail. Or just putting them in the trash.

It feels like too much work.

As he sits there, there’s a ping and a new email appears, shifting the rest down one line.

It takes him a moment to recognize the address.

It’s one of the girls he and Lilly had met on their trip to Italy over the summer. 

 He tells himself not ignore it. That he can at least work up the energy to deal with one e-mail. Taking a breath, He clicks on the message and skims it. It’s pretty much just the obligatory “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

But there’s a link to a video.

And a thumbnail showing Lilly in a bikini smirking at the camera.

He clicks on it.

He knows as soon as the video pulls up that he’s made a mistake.

Like when you stub your toe and you have a split second before the pain hits.

He knows what’s coming, but it’s already too late to do anything about it.

He doesn’t have time to brace himself, or slide down and lay on the floor. Or call for help.

He just sees the first flashes on the screen. He realizes he’s screwed. Then before he feels himself fade into the seizure.

Then, finally, there’s nothing.

Chapter Text

Friday October 24, 2003.

Logan heard the screeching sound of one of the chairs scraping against the journalism room’s linoleum, then a pair of sickening thumps. When he turned around, to check what had happened, he saw Duncan on the ground. Convulsing.

Moving mostly on autopilot, Logan grabbed his backpack and knelt down next to Duncan, he pushed the furniture out of the way as much as he could, then took the sweatshirt out of his bag and bunched it up, placing it under Duncan’s head and neck and gently turned Duncan onto his side.

Logan pulled out his phone, so he could time the seizure. But as he did so, he noticed there was blood smeared across the sweatshirt. He decided he really didn’t need to time the seizure and just jumped straight to calling 911.

As he waited, Logan kept his eyes on Duncan, but he couldn’t help but wonder what he had done since he had gotten back to this time that might have caused this.

When most people --- his teenage self included --- think of epileptic seizures, they imagine what television and movies portray. Almost always that’s a full tonic-clonic seizure. The type that leaves someone convulsing on the floor. Like Duncan was now. But in real life there are a wide variety of different kinds of seizures that presented themselves in many different ways.

Logan had suspected that a large part of why the Kanes had been able to keep Duncan’s epilepsy a secret for so long, was that Duncan’s seizures were usually not the convulsive type people expected.

It was definitely one of the reasons that he hadn’t realized that the seizure he had seen the week Duncan and Veronica broke up, had only been one of many he had unknowingly witnessed throughout his childhood until after he had received some first aid training --- and done more than a few google searches --- long after Duncan had fled the country.

That didn’t mean Duncan hadn’t had seizures like this --- but he had never had one while Logan was around, and he definitely hadn’t had one in the middle of class. Not even the Kanes could have hushed that up.

This was something new.

And he had no idea why.

When the paramedics arrived, Logan stepped back to allow them to check Duncan over, and started rattling off what he knew about Duncan’s medical history.

It wasn’t much.

Logan had never really been able to talk to Duncan about his condition. They had had that first conversation where Logan had warned Duncan that Veronica had a file on him. But Logan hadn’t asked him any questions. They hadn’t even really acknowledged that Logan hadn’t known about Duncan’s epilepsy until then. If he was honest, Logan had really just been hoping at the time that Duncan would either deny it or give some sort of explanation. When Duncan hadn’t, Logan had retreated rather than taking the chance that Duncan would get mad or forcing him to acknowledge it.

After that, Duncan had run away.

Then he had stopped talking to Logan because of Veronica. Then he had stopped talking to Logan because of Aaron.

When, finally, they had become friends again they had both been walking on eggshells, not willing to rock the boat by talking about anything deeper than video games and the Big Lebowski. Or at least as close to walking on eggshells as teenage Logan was capable of.

Logan had asked once. After he had moved into the Grande. But it had basically just boiled down to asking what he should do if he found Duncan having a seizure. Duncan ‘s only answer was to tell Logan not to worry, his new mix of medication was keeping things under control.

Then Duncan had run away again.

Logan stayed with the paramedics as they loaded Duncan on to a gurney and began to wheel him out. It wasn’t until the man steering Duncan’s feet apologetically told Logan that they couldn’t bring Logan with them in the ambulance that he realized he had followed them all the way outside.

After the ambulance left, Logan stood for a moment outside the school and took a few deep breaths, forcing himself back into a more normal state of mind.

When Logan had stumbled onto Veronica’s file on Duncan as a teenager, his initial reaction was disbelief, followed by anger and frustration with Veronica. That had fizzled out pretty quickly. If watching Veronica stand there and proclaim that she had loved Lilly hadn’t been enough to deflate it, then the fact that she had torn up his check definitely was. 

But with those emotions gone, he was left to deal with the information he had found in the file.

At first, he wondered why Duncan hadn’t told him. Why Duncan hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him, even though Duncan knew Logan’s most guarded secret.

Then he began to wonder what else he didn’t know about Duncan and the Kanes.

Logan had thought he knew who the Kanes were as people in part because he thought he knew everything important there was to know about them.

He had been friends with Duncan since they were both in Kindergarten. After he had moved to Neptune, he had spent most of his time either at the Kane’s house, or with Lilly or Duncan.

Plus, He was kind of a snoop.

As an adult Logan recognized that part of the reason Keith’s accusations against Jake had felt so personal, was that Logan didn’t just believe that the Kanes weren’t capable of harming one of their own, he didn’t think they could do so without him knowing about it somehow.

It was admittedly a giant leap to get from hiding a chronic illness to hiding a murder, but the fact that the Kanes  were both capable and willing to hide something that important, and that it had happened right under his nose, started to shake his confidence both in the Kanes and in his own ability to understand the people around him.  .

When Logan had spoken with Veronica and she had helped him to recognize that he had actually seen Duncan have a seizure and not known it, that had led to an even more unsettling realization.

He hadn’t just been oblivious to Duncan’s illness when it was right in front of him, but, looking back, he could see that Jake had been deliberately distracting and misleading him.

It would be several years and more than a bit of therapy before Logan really began to understand what the Kanes had been doing, both to their own children and to those close to them.

Logan could never know exactly what had happened between Duncan and Lilly and their parents. But from what evidence he did have, Jake and Celeste seemed to have frightened their children into believing that no one outside a small circle of health care professionals and their own family could know about Duncan’s condition.

Given the joy Lilly usually took in doing exactly the opposite of what her parents wanted, the fact that they found a way to get her to follow this rule was actually slightly terrifying.

If an outsider, including Logan himself, witnessed one of Duncan seizures, or episodes or whatever euphemism Jake was using that week, all of the Kanes had learned to divert, distract and, if necessary, outright lie.

In practice it was precariously close to gaslighting, by at least some definitions. Although given his own experiences with Aaron, Logan wasn’t really comfortable extending the term quite that far. After all Jake and Celeste hadn’t been trying to control him by making him doubt his memories and sanity. They just hadn’t cared if that was what happened, as long as it meant Logan wouldn’t ask unwanted questions about Duncan's occasionally odd behaviors.

Logan looked at his watch.  The period would be ending soon.  Once that happened, word of Duncan’s seizure and subsequent trip to the emergency room would begin to spread through the school in a perverse game of telephone. So would the information Logan had told to the paramedics. Logan really didn’t want Veronica to find any of that out through a third hand account from Ashley Banks.

He had left his backpack on the floor when he had trailed after Duncan. He should go back and get it, then he could go find Veronica. 

Logan ignored the inevitable stares as he walked back in. While he was grabbing his own bag, though, he did notice that Duncan’s backpack was still slumped over by his desk. Logan vaguely remembered that Duncan had kept a journal that he probably wouldn’t want anyone to see, so he walked over to Duncan’s little cubbie to grab his bag too.

Once he was standing in front of Duncan desk, he noticed something else too. Duncan’s computer had some sort of pre-YouTube streaming site up on its screen. He must have been watching a video right before his seizure started.

After a second or two of indecision, Logan decided to sit down and restart the video.

He was immediately assaulted with flashing lights, colors and seemingly unconnected pictures.

He quickly clicked on the stop and sat for a second blinking at the screen.

That was weird.

Weird enough that once he had stopped seeing spots in front of his face, Logan copied the video’s address and went to email it to himself. When he went to open his school email account, though, he realized that Duncan was already signed in to his. Old habits apparently did die hard because Logan found himself automatically skimming the email Duncan had left open in the window.  It had a link in it to the website where the video was posted. And a picture of Lilly as the thumbnail. Looking over at the sender, he didn’t recognize the address. Then again, if it really was from some girl Duncan had met over the summer, like the email claimed, that would make sense.  

Logan forwarded the email to himself and signed Duncan out. He could puzzle out why Duncan was getting a weird video from some girl --- and what it might have to do with his seizure --- later, when he wasn’t racing the bell.  Grabbing both his bag and Duncan’s, he gave a passing wave to the still dazed teacher headed in the direction of Veronica’s class.

****

Logan rested his hand on the X-terra and for the second time today, found himself taking a few deep breaths in an attempt to force himself to calm down and think.

Celeste had thrown them out of the emergency room waiting room.

Logan wasn’t surprised, exactly, but he had hoped he would at least get enough time to sweet talk (or bribe) one of the nurses to give him some sort of update on Duncan before Celeste had gotten a chance to swoop in.

Instead, less than five minutes after he and Veronica had walked through the door, the Kane family matriarch had come charging out. She hadn’t yelled. That would create a scene. Instead she used the barely controlled growl she had once reserved for Lilly.

There were more than a few choice words, but they all pretty much added up to the same thing. They had some nerve coming to the hospital.  They weren’t wanted. Leave. Now.

Most of Celeste’s ire was focused on Logan, but she still made an effort to occasionally glance over towards Veronica as if to remind her that Celeste hated her too.

Logan had reached a tipping point after a particularly pointed comment about his mom. He suspects that Celeste had actually meant it as a sideways dig at Lianne and therefore Veronica. Two birds with one stone and all that.  But whatever intent --- he very nearly lost control and growl back.

Thankfully, he managed to swallow down his anger and stop himself.

Celeste was a truly horrible person. He had known that even before he had graduated from high school, but any doubts he might have had as to how terrible she was had been squashed when she had had Weevil arrested because she had shot him.

But as horrible as she was, she had also just found her daughter dead in her backyard less than a month ago. And her son was lying on a bed in the Neptune General emergency room.

Nothing Logan could say to her, would really hurt her. Not compared to that.

There were, however, things she could say that might hurt Veronica.

There was also the fact that the nurses and security guards that had been watching their confrontation most likely saw Celeste as a grieving mother having a very bad day. If he had started yelling, it would be him that would look like the bad guy --- and that would pretty much kill whatever small chance he still had of convincing them to give him information.

So, he gritted his teeth, dismiss himself with minimal sarcasm and got out of there before he did something he would regret.

Logan heard someone stop a few feet away and looked over to see Veronica standing with her arms crossed over her chest. She continued to stare at him a moment too long, like she was trying to figure something out.

“So.” She says finally, “I have an idea.”

****

Keith looked up at the sound of a knock and was surprised to see Veronica hovering around the door to his office. Glancing at the clock his stomach dropped slightly. Veronica was not the type to skip school for no reason.

“Veronica?” She gave him a cautious smile and came in.

Followed by Logan Echolls.

Suddenly he felt less anxious, and more annoyed. Logan Echolls was absolutely the type to skip school for no reason --- and was probably the only person (alive) Keith could believe would be able to convince his daughter to follow suit.

Now, Keith was incredibly glad that Veronica still had at least one close friend that continued to stick by her. He just really wished that that friend had been someone other than Logan Echolls.

Maybe that Meg Manning girl. She seemed sweet.

While Lynn had long been one of the few parents of Veronica’s circle Keith actually liked, he couldn’t really say the same for her son. Even back when he first met him, something about the kid had always set Keith on edge.

It hadn’t helped that his first impression of Logan had been that he was about a decade and a popped collar away from being an 80’s movie cliché. 

Or, that it was pretty obvious that Logan had been the one who did the actual planning for the homecoming fiasco. Or, that Logan seemed to be continually throwing parties whenever his parents were away; even if Logan had managed to keep the parties from being broken up by the department --- that didn’t mean that Keith didn’t still have a decent idea of what sorts of things went on there. 

But it was more than just that Logan was entitled or a little wild (although that didn’t really help either). Most of Veronica’s friend could be called one or both at times.

Logan had become a regular part of pretty much any conversation Veronica had, about school or about her friends, from the time they were both in middle school. Pretty much from the beginning, it seemed like there wasn’t a week that went by without Veronica mentioning Logan getting into some sort of trouble. Fights. Pranks. Probably other things that hadn’t made the parent approved cut. Then, once Logan and Lilly started dating, Keith had gotten the running saga of all the makeups and breakups in their tumultuous relationship. 

Even reading between the lines of Veronica’s somewhat Lilly biased accounts Logan had not exactly come off as the kind of person Keith wanted his daughter to depend on.

Logan was angry and impulsive, smart mouthed and overprotective, jealous, reckless and needy.

And that was before everything that had gone down with his father.

It was true that Keith had more than a few of those flaws himself. But that was why he knew just how dangerous and difficult they could be, both to have, and for those in their life.

Circumstances had eventually pushed Keith to learn to control these flaws, and to focus them in a more positive way. Or at the very least to find a way that minimized collateral damage. But with a trust fund so large he could indefinitely buy his way out of trouble, a constant supply of hangers on to enable his actions, and no apparent ambitions beyond these two things it seemed unlikely that Logan would ever be forced to do the same.

That isn’t to say the kid hadn’t earned some serious point in Keith’s eyes in recent weeks. Especially given his actions towards Veronica. In fact, if it wasn’t Veronica that was going to be affected, Keith might very well have given the kid the benefit of the doubt. But it was Veronica that was involved. And Keith just didn’t think he could truly trust the kid not to do something that would hurt her.

She had already been through so much.

“Now, maybe I’m just not hip to what’s going on in high school now a days, but aren’t you two supposed to still be in class?” Keith asked. Veronica and Logan seemed to share some sort of wordless conversation, one which apparently ended with Veronica being deputized to answer.

“Duncan had a seizure in class. We left to try and visit him at the hospital.” Veronica told him.

Keith let out a sigh, all humor gone.

“I’m sorry honey. Is there anything I can do?” Veronica looked at him with big blue hopeful eyes and he knew he was in trouble.

“We weren’t able to actually see Duncan. They wouldn’t even tell us how he was doing. I thought maybe you might be able to find out for us?” She asked, tilting her head ever so slightly.

“Do you want me to call Jake or Celeste?” He offered.

“Celeste was the one who threw us out of the emergency room.” She said with a bitterness in her voice that tore a little at Keith’s heart. Then she gave him a hesitantly hopeful shrug, “I know that you are friendly with some of the nurses at the hospital? I thought maybe you could ask one of them?”

This time Keith managed to keep his sigh internal.

“I can’t do that Veronica.” He told her shaking his head. “It’s illegal. You know that.” Veronica leaned back in her chair and seemed to deflate slightly. 

“Honey, I know you’re worried about your friend. But there’s nothing you can do right now. You just have to trust the doctors and hope that Duncan will be alright.” Keith told her, “Why don’t you go home. Try to distract yourself for a while. I’ll try to get ahold of one of the Kanes. They might be more comfortable speaking to an adult.”

Or just someone who wasn’t named Echolls or standing next to someone names Echolls, Keith suspected.

“K- Sheriff Mars” Logan chimed in, prompting Keith to turn towards the other teen. “I think there’s something you should see. But I’ll need access to a computer.”

Keith wondered if there was a limited to the number of times you could sigh in a day without it losing all meaning.

“And what, exactly, do you need a computer for?”

Now it was Logan that looked like he wanted to sigh. Next to him, Veronica seemed equally confused by Logan’s request. Some petty part of Keith was relieved by that.

“Duncan was watching a video on his computer when his seizure started.” Logan told them. “The person who emailed him the link said it was a video of Lilly, but it wasn’t. It was ... weird.”

“What sort of weird?” Keith asked.

“It would be easiest to just show you. I forwarded myself the link.” Keith studied the kid for a second, before telling him.

“Fine.”

Keith really hoped Logan Echolls was not about to show him porn.

****

“Okay. I’ll admit, that’s weird.” Keith said, after the video had finished. He now understood why Logan had trouble explaining the video. He had trouble explaining it himself and he had just watched it.

“It’s like strobe lights.” Veronica said.

Both Keith and Logan looked towards her.

“You know, how like they always have those warnings when a stage shows or something on T.V. use a lot of flashing lights or strobe.” She explained, becoming surer of herself. Keith watched as Logan seemed to pick up her train of thought.

“Right.” Logan said slowly. “Like that cartoon, a few years ago that sent a bunch of kids to the hospital with seizures?”  Veronica nodded.

Logan opened up another window on the computer and typed “strobe lights” and “epilepsy” into the search engine. The first thing that came up was something on photosensitive epilepsy.

“Wait.” Keith said, and pointed towards the link. “I’d like to see that.” Logan clicked on the link in question and all three of them spent the next minute or so reading through the page.

“You said someone sent this video to Duncan?” Keith asked finally. 

“Yeah.” Logan said, then added, “But I didn’t recognize the sender.”

“Could you bring up their address?” Keith asked. Logan brought back up window with the email and scrolled down to show original sender’s email address. “What about you honey?” Keith asked, turning towards Veronica, “Do you know who that is?”  Veronica shook her head.

“No.”

“Okay.” Keith told them. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

****

Lianne was already in bed by the time Keith got home after his shift.

He felt guilty by how relieved he was. Even more so when he found Veronica in the kitchen eating reheated take-out alone.

“Save any of that for me?” He asked.

“Only the nasty healthy part.” She told him fondly, then nodded toward the refrigerator. “It’s on the bottom shelf.”

Keith dug out the container and dumped its contents on a plate. While the microwave heated it up, he turned back towards Veronica.

“I spoke to Jake.” She looked back at him eagerly.

“And?” she prompted. Keith let out a deep breath.

“Duncan has a broken arm and a concussion. Jake said that the doctors want to keep him at the hospital for a couple nights for observation, just in case, but they all seem to think he’ll be fine.”

Veronica visibly relaxed slightly, taking in the good news for a moment.

The microwave beeped and Keith took out his dinner, and sat down next to Veronica to eat. She waited until he had had a few bites before speaking again.

“Did you tell him about the video?”

“I did.” Although the version of how he’d found the video that he had told Jake hadn’t included Logan and Veronica.

“He thought it was most likely an accident or a prank. Not many people know that Duncan is epileptic. Jake thought it was likely that it was sent as an unfortunate joke by someone who didn’t realize what it would do. He told me he didn’t think it was something worth pursuing. Especially now that it seems like Duncan is going to be okay.”

Veronica frowned.

“But, you don’t need his permission to investigate it, right?”

“No.” He told her, “But I would need a warrant to read Duncan’s email without permission --- and I don’t think a judge would sign off on it.” Especially not if Jake Kane was known to oppose it.

“What do you believe?” Veronica asked. Keith paused a moment before answering.

“I think that it’s strange that someone sent a video to Duncan that is almost tailor made to cause a seizure.” He told her truthfully, “But I also think that it’s a pretty poor choice of weapon if they were trying to hurt Duncan. Too many things would have to align to make it actually work. How would they know that Duncan would open the email? Or that he would be in a place where he could get hurt when he did? It just seems too convoluted.”

Keith shrugged, then reached out and gave Veronica’s hand a squeeze.

Veronica seemed unusually quiet for the next few minutes, Keith supposed she was trying to digest what he said while they ate. Once he was finished, Keith grabbed his empty plate and stood up.

“So. I was thinking of rounding out this well-balanced meal with something from the top of the food pyramid. How about some ice cream?”

Veronica seemed to watched him for a moment, then gave him a not quite convincing smile.

“Logan and I stopped by Amy’s on our way back to school to pick up my car.” She told him.

“So, what, my good old-fashioned store-bought ice cream isn’t quite good enough for you anymore?” He joked.

“Oh, the store-bought's fine. Of course, I did get a couple of hand-packed pints but if you think they would ruin your pallet…”

“Hey now, let’s not be hasty.” Keith told her. “What kind of flavors are we talking about here?”

Veronica began listing off which types of ice cream she apparently now had stock piled in their freezer. As he listened Keith was almost able to convince himself that it was all going to work out.

Chapter Text

Saturday October 25, 2003

Logan goes surfing with Dick Saturday morning.

Veronica had called late Friday night, and let him know that Duncan would be alright, so it’s not as though they’re skipping the light fantastic while their best friend is at death’s door. But Logan knows that it still would seem a bit callous to most people. Luckily, some of Dick’s best (and admittedly, occasionally worst) qualities are reflected in the fact that he doesn’t even blink at the suggestion.

Logan could rationalize that he had chosen not to cancel his plans with the fact that Dick had complained earlier that Cassidy would be hanging out with his middle school “film nerd” friends on Saturday morning. It would therefore be one of the few times Logan knew he could honor his promise to go on a “surf date” with Dick without Cassidy tagging along

But that’s really only a small part of the reason.

Logan is all too aware that his moral compass as a teen (and a child, and a young adult) was not always the best. Sometimes he still has to stop and think about things, not just to ask himself if he’s really doing what he thinks is right, but whether his instincts are right about what is the right thing to do. There had also been a time, and maybe still were times, where he overcorrected. Or became so focused on needing to do something to fix a situation, that he ended up diving in rashly and regretting his actions or making things worse. Especially when something happened to the people closest to him.

Among the many, many things Logan had had to learn as an adult, because of his job and through his sessions with Jane, was that he couldn’t help anyone if he let himself burn out or let himself get so frustrated, he ran into a bad situation head first.  Part of that was learning that sometimes, when he can’t help a situation, the best thing to do is to take a moment, take a breath, and do something to decompress. Preferably with someone he cares about.  His version of Dick had proven to be particularly good at helping with that. So much so that even Veronica had eventually, begrudgingly come to recognize it. This version of Dick proves equally up to the task.

Afterwards, Logan calls Mac. Keith and Jake may have decided that it was a coincidence or an accident that Duncan had been mailed a video tailor made to cause a seizure but Logan knows something they don’t: Duncan was never supposed to have that seizure. Something has changed the timeline, and Logan needs to figure out what it was. Not just because Duncan was hurt, but so that Logan has a chance to stay ahead of the ripples in the timeline his actions have caused and adjust his plans.

It takes a bit of negotiation --- especially once Mac finds out whose emails, she’ll be tracing -- but Mac eventually agrees to do the trace. Avi Kaufman, is still paying off Logan’s credit cards using Aaron’s accounts, so Logan spends the afternoon at Fry’s with Mac while she picks out various gadgets and doodads to put on his Black AmEx as her “hazard pay”.

This Mac doesn’t have the calm confidence of her adult counterpart yet. She does have the same deadpan humor. And once she gets started talking about something techy, she is just as opinionated, and even more talkative, than the Mac he had known. When Logan asks why she is buying ten of one particular whatchamacallit, he gets a lecture about some tech company he has never heard of, their recent and unexpected bankruptcy, and how it has thrown the potential availability of superior quality whatchamacallits into doubt.

He also gets a mini-lecture about learning the real name for whatchamacallits if he’s serious about her tutoring him.

After Mac decides Logan has bought her enough stuff to make risking running afoul of Jake Kane worth her while, they check out and Logan drops her off at her house before heading home himself.

Sometime after Logan had tucked her in Thursday night, his mom had apparently decided to deal with her talk with Barry Randall by aggressively ignoring it and attempting to immerse herself back into her normal routine. It wasn’t something he would ordinarily condone, but it was honestly a lot better than most of his mother’s coping mechanisms, so he had decided not to intervene. At least not yet. 

Friday night he’d seen her go swimming for the first time since he had arrived in this time. This morning she had announced she was planning to do some sort of detox spa thing. So, the fact that she isn’t at the house when he gets home is technically a good thing. But Logan still has a small, reflexive moment of panic when he finds the house empty. And it’s only after he checks her bedroom, and makes sure she hasn't left his grandfather’s lighter behind that he’s able to really relax.

Even then, the house feels too quiet and he turns the television on in the background while he reads his emails. It turns out that the last game of the world series is on.

Back from the future or not, Logan is not able to pull off a Biff Tannen move and make a fortune through betting on sports games. He doesn’t even remember who won the 2019 World Series (much to his Veronica’s frustration), let alone this one. He’s never been much of a fan of spectator sports; even with something like surfing, he’d much rather be out in the waves than watching from the beach. But Wallace liked watching pretty much any game if it was on and Veronica and Keith were both big baseball fans. In fact, after Keith had stopped paying for cable, his visits always seemed to coincidentally align with Padres and Sharks games during baseball season.

Somewhere along the line, the sound has become comforting. A reminder of a time where Logan actually has a family and a place where he feels like he belongs.

He leaves the game on. 

Lucky had gotten back to him. So had Evelyn Bugby and her Pan High counterpart. Between the list of Neptune High Alumni and Pan High Alumni whose emails he’d asked them for Logan has a fair chunk of the email addresses for most of Woody’s former little leaguers and bat-boys who are now over eighteen.

 Logan writes back to Lucky first since, it’s the easier for now at least, he is still just trying to get him to trust him as a friend.

Then he writes a thank you to Bugby and the Pan High Alumni Association person for sending him the addresses. He really hopes they won’t actually be reading he Neptune Navigator anytime soon because he really doesn’t want to have to figure out an article, he could right involve all these kids just to fulfill the cover story he’d told them for needing the addresses.

Of course, now that he has the email addresses for most of Woody’s other potential victims, he really needs to start working out what he is going to write to them.

It’s at that point, Logan also realizes the dark irony of having baseball on in the background and turns the TV off. Logan suspects it’s going to take several days, several drafts and several sessions of working out his frustration in his home gym before he’s anywhere near satisfied with the email.

But he feels fairly satisfied with his initial draft.

Then Sunday comes.

****

Sunday October 26, 2003

If someone were to have asked Logan, just before he had ended up back in 2003, if he remembered the fires from his sophomore year of high school, he would have said yes. Of course.

But what he really remembered was how the fires had affected him.

None of the fires were ever close enough to put Neptune itself in danger. They had, however, made the air quality so bad that the schools had been closed for almost a week and everyone was warned they should stay indoors.

And Aaron’s movie shoot had closed.

It was a tense claustrophobic few days that had caused frayed nerves even among the comparatively well-adjusted families in Neptune.

For the Echolls household, it was pretty much a time bomb.

It took Aaron less than two days to create a reason to let his frustration out on Logan. In the aftermath, Logan had decided that whatever danger there was to his lungs outside, it was far less hazardous than the danger to his whole body inside. Luckily, he’d had Duncan, and Duncan had been more than willing to let him spend the rest of the week splayed out on his floor, with nothing to do but heal and ignore Celeste’s increasingly icy glares.

The details about the fires themselves, though, like a lot of things that hadn’t directly affected him, had gotten somewhat hazy over the last fifteen plus years. He wouldn’t have been able to give a specific date they had started. At best he might have been able to guess they had taken place in October or November, since that was fire season in California. Late October or November since he did remember they had taken place after Lilly’s death. But he couldn't have said anything more specific and he definitely would not have been able to say how they each started without looking it up.

Logan knows there are some things he just won’t be able to change. Things that are too big or complicated or even just physically distant for him as one person --- even one armed with future knowledge and navy training--- to fix by himself.

He also knows that it is inevitable that he will have forgotten some things. Human memory isn’t perfect at the best of times and he hadn’t --- couldn’t ---exactly planned for anything like this.

But he still feels a gut punch of guilt when he turns on the television Sunday morning to discover the Cedar Fire had already begun its devastation overnight. Not the least because he has been so focused on the things that had directly affected him (and his loved ones) that he hadn’t even really remembered and calculated one of the largest wildfires in California history into his plans.

There’s an additional side-order of guilt, too, as he watches. Seeing the damage caused by the fires serves as a stark reminder of just how stupid and dangerous the fires he and Weevil had set during their war against each other really had been. They could have so easily ended up putting so many people into harm’s way. 

But Logan can’t erase the entitled jackassery he did in his original timeline, even if he makes sure it doesn’t happen in this one.  He also can't change the fact that he had effectively forgotten these fires, here.  All he can do, is do better -- be better-- from now on. And focus on things he can still change.

Starting by using his now extra-extra-long weekend to make as much progress on his plans as he can from inside his house.

****

The Week of October 27 2003

Her head hurts.

God does her head hurt.

It’s been hurting since she arrived in Neptune, but over the last few days it has gotten so bad she can hardly concentrate on anything.

She still has work she needs to do so she downs some Tylenol and a lot of coffee, grits her teeth and forces herself to type.

When she is finally able to send off the last part of her section of the project, she can hardly see the screen. She should feel relieved. There will be more work in the future, but for now she can relax. All she can think of, though, is curling up in bed and sleeping for a week.

When she stands up to do just that, though, the world swirls dizzily around her and the pain in her head reaches a crescendo.  So much so, that she barely feels the pain in the rest of her body as she crashes to the floor.

****

Logan can’t do anything about what happened to Duncan or begin to figure out what caused the changes in the timeline until Mac gets back to him.

He also can’t really do anything about Rooks and Susan with school out. Thankfully, Rooks shouldn’t be able to do much either

Logan can, and does (after a few false starts) finish and send an email to Woody’s other possible victims that he hopes will be an effective, supportive nudge for some of them to come forward while not pushing too far or asking too much. He knows there’s no magic words --- he just hopes he’s found helpful ones.

He also does some research into local places where he can learn --- or rather relearn how to fight.  Really fight. Right now, his brain knows what to do, but it's calibrated for a different body. He also doubts he has anything in terms of muscle memory and he wants to be prepared.

He should really do the same thing with gun ranges for similar reasons but the only adult he can imagine would take him is Big Dick.

And he really doesn’t want to go to a gun range with Big Dick.

He even is able to spend some less productive time with his Mom, looking over the two boxes of photos he had found in the crawl space. Most of the people in the more recent photos, are now fully or partially identified. Less so with the older photos of his grandparents generation.

There are also photos he had not anticipated finding. Photos of doughboys and women with Gibson girl hair, of little girls (and little boys) with ringlets and short dresses. He doubts they can ever be able to be identified now. They are only interesting in the same way a photo in a history book would be. He does put aside one of the oldest of these photos, showing a man in a Union Army uniform with features he can almost see in his own. If he has a bit of breathing room where he doesn’t have to worry about how deeply he breaths outside Logan might take it to be looked at by one of the history professors at Hearst he remembers that specializes in military history.

By that point it's Wednesday.

Which is also about the point when he realizes that if he’s feeling cabin fever in his giant compound of a house, Mac and Veronica must really be starting to feel stir crazy.

Veronica jokingly asks if she can bring Backup to do laps around his living. 

Logan earnestly tells her yes.

She tells him she’ll be over in half an hour.

Mac, however, tells him she's more than occupied working on his project, thank you very much and rushes him off the phone.  But before warning him that he should be prepared to take her shopping again because said project has ended up being far more involved than she had originally thought it would be.

Then he has twenty minutes to figure a place for a Pitbull to run around in his house.

****

Even though it had been almost a month since he had gotten to this time, it still throws him a bit each time he sees sixteen-year old Veronica. Especially when she is dressed in so much pink. His Veronica had still worn some pink through their teen years. But usually only in a piece or too. This Veronica tends to use it as her signature color. And today it seems almost as if she had purposely dressed in an outfit that was more pink -- and cutesy --- than even her usual.

“Are you sure about this?” Veronica asked him as she led Backup inside. “Because what I’m sure of is that I cannot possibly afford to replace …pretty much anything in this room if he destroys it. Like that throw pillow over there? Most likely completely of my budget.”

“I’m pretty sure he’d actually be doing us a favor by destroying it.” Logan told her with a bit of a laugh. “I was seriously considering putting peanut butter on the curtains with Aaron’s face on them before you got here to specifically encourage him to destroy them.” Logan said “But I decided that wouldn’t be fair to Backup. No one should have to suffer through Aaron’s taste.” Veronica rolled her eyes at the pun.  “But if you’re worried about it, I do have a place I think he can run around without causing too much damage.” Logan said, and nodded for her to follow him down into the bowels of his house.

When they reached the chosen door, Logan crouched down and gave backup a few good scratches then took out one of the outrageously expensive tennis balls Aaron’s tennis coach had insisted were required for their lessons. He let Backup smell the ball a bit, then they both looked up at Veronica as if to ask for permission. She gave a nod and Logan unhooked Backup’s leash, opened the door and threw the tennis ball inside. Backup took off like a happy little bullet train. Logan gestured for Veronica to follow him, then closed the door behind them both.

Logan took a moment to watch Veronica’s eyes grow wide as she took in the room.

“Logan, why is there a room with a spaceship in your house and how have I never been inside it before?”

Logan chuckled at that.

“It’s the home theater.” He explained. “It’s basically spent the entire time we’ve lived in Neptune in a constant state of being remodeled, just having been remodeled and so verboten for me to enter or starting to be re-remodeled.”

Backup trotted back and plopped the tennis ball in front of Logan – who promptly threw it, causing the dog to go zooming off again.

“Okay.” Veronica said slowly. “But, spaceship?”  Logan shrugged.

“Aaron was trying to lobby George Lucas to let him have a part in one of the Star Wars prequels. Of course, Aaron didn’t actually know anything about Star Wars other than it made a lot of money and when the contractor built a Star Trek themed room instead, he didn’t notice. Needless to say, he didn’t get the part and all the electronics had already been yanked out in preparation for yet another remodel when he was arrested.”

This time the pit bull dropped the now very soggy ball at Veronica’s feet. She picked it up and threw it, and flinched slightly when it ricocheted off the ship’s “wings”. Backup bound after it one way and then another.

“So, how are you holding up?” Logan asked. Veronica shrugged.

“My dad’s spent most of the week at the station. I’ve mostly been trying to get ahead on my homework and reading.”

Logan nodded and leaned down to take the next turn at throwing the ball.

What Lianne was doing wasn’t mentioned, but Logan could make an educated guess.

Logan could remember the day he had finally realized that his mother was an alcoholic. He had known for a while before that that his mother drank more than most Moms. And took more pills. And probably drank more than was really healthy. But being able to make that next cognitive leap and giving it a label --- especially one that had so much baggage attached to it --- had taken some time.

For his Veronica, Logan knew, that leap had happened more in a series of small hops.

The few times Veronica had talked about her mother or her mother’s drinking during the first rounds of their relationship in High School and College, it had been very clear that while she now accepted her mother was an alcoholic to some degree, she viewed this as yet another product of the events surrounding Lilly’s death.

Sometime during their nine years apart, however, she had been able to look back over her childhood with more perspective and had realized that her mother had had problems with alcohol, off and on, for years.

Everything that had happened in the months following Lilly’s death had simply knocked the “functional” off of “functional alcoholic” and made it impossible for Veronica or Keith to continue to live in denial.

There was a frustrated growl, and Logan looked and saw that the ball had fallen between two of the seats, just out of Backup’s reach. Veronica moved to retrieve the ball, only to discover --- much to her frustration --- it was out of her reach too. 

Logan walked over and reached down, freeing the ball. That earned him a mock glare from Veronica and a happy bark from Backup.  Logan offered the ball to Veronica, as a form of apology. She took it and threw it --- with a bit more strength than was probably strictly necessarily – toward the opposite side of the room. Backup scurried after it and Logan stood up, ready to walk back down to the front of the room.

As he turned, though, Veronica surprised him by slamming into his side and wrapping her arms around him in a hug. Logan stood there a second like an idiot, before adjusting his own arms and starting to stroke her hair the way he had had to do far too often with his own Veronica.

“Hey.” He said, finally. “It’s going to be okay. None of the fires are going to get up to Neptune. I promise.” Veronica let out a slightly hysterical chuckle and pulled away.

“That’s not….” She swallowed and Logan realized her eyes were wet. “It’s just, Lilly --- she…”

Veronica stopped and looked away. At first, she tried to blink away the tears that were starting to form. Then she finally gave up and wiped them away.  After she had collected herself some, she turned back towards him with a watery smile.

“I’m just really glad you’re here.”  

Logan struggled to keep the emotions the confession brought this face. Because he immediately thought of how he hadn’t been there for his Veronica. Not trusting himself to speak, Logan mirrored her smile and reached over, squeezing her hand.

Backup dropped the drool covered ball at their feet and barked, clearly not liking the fact that their attention was not on him.

The moment, whatever it was, now broken, Veronica pulled her hand away, she picked up the soggy projectile, and threw it hard against the back wall.

****

Thursday October 30, 2003

Neptune High re-opened on Thursday. The school district had apparently decided that the air quality was good enough to allow kids to go back to school, but not quite good enough to let them outside. At Pan High and other schools with an indoor cafeteria, this really only impacted P.E. classes and sports.

Neptune High, though was mostly made up of buildings that had been built in the sixties. When the seemingly contradictory trends of riot proofing and outdoor lunch areas were all the rage in school architecture.

The only windows in classrooms were at the top of the rooms by the ceiling and were filled with barely translucent wired glass. Which Logan supposed might actually be a benefit for air quality but not for a group of kids which were already feeling claustrophobic. The hallways were also deliberately constructed to discourage the movement and congregation of large groups, and the only inside area that could even hope to hold the entirety of the student body was the gym.

Where no one was allowed to eat. To protect the floors.

Moorehead’s solution to this lack of space was to assign the students classrooms to eat in for the day. Alphabetically.  Logan could hear the defeat in Clemmons voice even as he made the announcement. Most of the teachers pretty much immediately realize the futility of trying to tell teenagers who to eat lunch with, and didn’t seem to think it worth putting in any effort to enforce the assignments.

Logan did, at least, check-in with the “E’s” before slipping out to search for the classroom hosting the “M’s”. His mental map of Neptune High beyond the few classrooms he had visited regularly in the last month was fairly rusty, though and by the time he was able to find the classroom Veronica had been assigned, he all but expected to find her gone in search of him.

He was pleasantly surprised, however, to find her still sitting across the room with the Manning sisters and Kyle Marker. Even more so when he sees that she is sitting next to Mac. Somehow, he had actually managed to create a good change in the timeline and bring Veronica and Mac together a whole year early for about five seconds. He’s able to bask in that unintentional accomplishment for about five seconds. Then they both turned towards him.

He’s most definitely in trouble.

Mac stands up and walks over towards him, holding up a folded piece of paper.

“Here's the address you asked for.” It’s a stage whisper, which he’s fairly certain is meant to be exactly loud enough for only Veronica to hear. Then she lowers her voice further. “This took me most of our little unplanned break to track down. Whoever set this up knew what they were doing.”

“Is that your way of saying you’ve upped your fee, again?” He asked.

“No,” she said, “Well. Yes. But it’s also my way of warning you. Whoever sent that email? They’re crazy prepared and crazy paranoid. And you won’t be able to pay my fee if you’re dead. So, you know, be careful.” She handed him the paper, then took a glance towards Veronica and added. “Good luck.” Before hurrying to escape them with a hall pass.

Logan discretely unfolded the paper in his hand and glanced at what was written inside. He was surprised to see that the address was in Neptune. Fairly close, in fact, to the bungalow Dick had rented at one time.

Logan closed his hand around the paper then steeled himself before closing the distance to Veronica.

She looks up at him with an overly sweet smile.

If this was his Veronica, he would guess that look meant one of two things. Either she knew exactly what Mac had given him and was trying to give him a false sense of security before she pounced, or she didn’t know what Mac had given him and was hoping her smile would make him feel so unnerved and guilty he’d confess.

Actually, if this was his Veronica, there would be a third option. His Veronica knew him well enough --- and knew that he knew her well enough --- to realize he would naturally default to assuming she knew everything. Therefore, all she would have to do is play along, and he would eventually spill all the information she wanted.

But this Veronica though? He wasn’t sure.

“I see you’ve met Mac.” He said, sitting down.

“We had a conversation.” She said. “She said she's been tutoring you in coding?”

“Something like that.”

“Funny how you’ve never shown any interest in that before. Even though you’ve been best friends with the son of a computer visionary since kindergarten.”

“Funny indeed.” He told her and gave her his own overly innocent smile.

“She also may have mentioned something about tracking an email for you?”

“Did she?”

“Actually it was more along the lines of a hypothetical ---, something like , if some unnamed person of our mutual acquaintance had hired her to track down the address an email had come from, whether I thought that person would, hypothetically, be a dumbass and do something stupid with it. But it was pretty easy to put two and two together. “

“Mac called me a dumbass?”

“I’m paraphrasing.” Veronica told him. “What were you thinking, Logan!”

Since Logan couldn’t exactly tell Veronica the entire truth, he stuck with something mostly, true.

“Duncan is one of my best friends…”

“Stop.” She interrupted. “That I understand. What I want to know is what you were planning on doing with that address? Storm up to the house and punch whoever answers the door?”

Logan thought he should probably be mildly offended by this. As far as he can remember he’s never punched someone in front of this Veronica.

“There wasn’t going to be any punching.” He told her. And there wouldn’t have been. At least not if everything went according to plan.

“I just wanted to see who had sent that email.” Along with doing some surveillance on who came and went from the house and, if at all possible, root around a bit inside, to see if he could find anything to suggest how they were connected to him and to the changes in the timeline.

“So, you’re going to, what? Stake-out the house between cross-country meets and chemistry homework? In your bright yellow jeep?” She asked incredulously. “And if you were able to get a good look at who lived there? Then what?”

“I was planning to try to get some photos, and show them to the head of Kane Security.” That is, if Logan couldn’t find a way to identify who they were himself.

Logan’s job with Daniel Maloof hadn’t been the first time Logan had done security work or the first time he'd worked with Clarence Wiedman.

Logan hadn’t known who Clarence Wiedman was when he was a teenager the first time around. He would have assumed Jake had someone who headed his security, if he had thought about it at all. And the efforts the Kanes had made to interfere with the investigation into Lilly’s death made it pretty clear that Jake most likely had someone around who did his “wet works' ' for him.

Logan hadn’t had a name or a face to put to the actions, however, until Veronica had run into Wiedman again, while working on a case. By that time Wiedman had long ago left Kane Software and started his own security firm, Deep Ridge, and Logan himself had recently transitioned from Naval Aviator to Intelligence.

In fact, the only reason he had met Wiedman at all was that Veronica had thought Logan might be able to help out at Mars Investigations during his new and sometimes ridiculously long periods of leave. Much like Mac, however, Logan was already discovering there really wasn’t work for a third member of MI on any more than a case by case basis by the time they had run into Wiedman.

MI had stopped taking the type of cases that really required extra muscle after Keith's accident — and as long as Logan might be called away mid-case, they couldn’t really rely on him to be there if they started taking them on again.

Wiedman had recognized that Logan was having trouble adjusting to his new, often uneven schedule and suggested Logan could come and do contract work for him at Deep Ridge if he ever found himself at a loss during his extended leave.

Wiedman himself had been ex-Army Intelligence before and a large portion of Deep Ridge was ex-military. They understood his life in a way that those friends he’d kept or made in Neptune really couldn’t and Logan had been happy to have the work during his leaves. It was never a perfect fit though. Logan certainly couldn’t imagine leaving the Navy to do it full time anytime soon.

Wiedman had had Logan work with him directly several times. Logan was never sure if it was because Wiedman liked him, or because he didn’t trust him and was trying to keep an eye on him.

The guy was tremendously hard read.

Even someone like Wiedman has some tells, however, if you pay enough attention.

Most people assumed Wiedman’s loyalty to Kane software was loyalty to Jake Kane. Logan had worked out, however, that in reality it was the Carnathan side of the family he was loyal to. He served Jake because it meant protecting Celeste and her children. The exact reason why wasn’t something Logan had really wanted to look into too deeply. Even as an adult.

It did mean that, even if Jake had decided not to investigate the email Duncan had received, Wiedman very well might be more than willing to if he could be convinced it was in Duncan’s best interest. Or that Celeste would appreciate it.

Unfortunately, Wiedman would also most likely take over the investigation and cut Logan out completely. So, contacting him was going to be something Logan only did after he had exhausted his own resources.

Veronica rolled her eyes and reached over, plucking the piece of paper with the address from his hand.

Logan chastised himself for being distracted. Normally he had much quicker reflexes than that.

And apparently, the part of his brain that instinctively knew not to get between Veronica and a mystery hadn’t gotten the memo that this wasn’t his Veronica.

 “It’s in Neptune.” Veronica said, with a frown.” Most of the houses in that area are vacation homes and rentals.   A lot of Hollywood stars and celebrities.” She said thoughtfully, then turned towards him.” Do you think it could be a friend of your father?” Now Logan frowned.

“Maybe? But most of Aaron’s “friends” have been pretty quick to disavow him in order to protect their own reputations. Plus, this time of year it's more likely a house sitter is living there if there’s anyone at all.” Logan said, thinking. “It might be a house sitter. Or one of what I’m sure is an army of people that keep the house running while the owners’ away. Or it could even be a squatter or someone who took advantage of the free Wi-Fi. Hence the plan for surveillance.”

Veronica paused for a second. Logan could practically see the gears working in her head.

“You know, there’s this holiday I’ve heard that’s coming up. Kids our age are actually expected --- nay encouraged-- to dress-up in costumes that obscure their identities and knock on strangers’ doors.”

“You want to go trick-or-treating at the house where the email was sent from?” Logan asked in shock. Veronica only shrugged.

“Well, if all you really want to do is see who’s living there and take a few pictures it does seem like a golden opportunity. And if no one answers you can always try that stalking thing later on.”

Logan stared at Veronica. He wanted to say no. He should say no. She was sixteen for God sakes and he had no idea what to expect from whoever had sent that email. Hell, even Mac had apparently been worried enough that she’d broken her usual confidentially rule.

But he saw something in Veronica’s eyes. Something that he didn’t expect from this Veronica and he knew. If he said no, she would find a way to go up there herself. Alone. And that was so much worse.

“Okay.” He said slowly. “But if we’re going to do this, we have to do it right. We have to make a plan. And if anything --- and I mean anything seems off we get out of there and call your Dad.”

“I’m pretty sure that speech just got your bad boy card revoked.”.

“I’m serious Veronica.” She gave him an oddly sad smile.

“I know.” She told him. She sat up slightly, pushing away that slight edge of sadness. “So, what’s first?

Chapter Text

Friday October 31, 2003

Duncan still wasn’t at school on Friday. In the confusion of Thursday’s lunch period, his absence had gone mostly unnoticed. Today though news that the Kane heir hadn’t reappeared yet was buzzing through the student body by third period. Logan wasn’t surprised per se. It had only been a week. In the past, however, the Kanes had always tried to get Duncan back into school, as quickly as possible after either episodes or scandals. The fact that they weren’t doing that this time made Logan slightly concerned that Jake hadn’t been entirely truthful when he told Keith about Duncan’s condition.

As it was, the Kanes were still trying to control the spin on the whole situation. Logan suspected there would be articles about how Jake Kane was bravely opening up about his son’s illness in multiple publications as soon as those pesky fires and Lilly’s murder stopped hogging the headlines.

One immediate side effect of Duncan’s absence was that Dick --- and Cassidy --- showed up at Logan’s lunch table.

Logan had to muster all his training --- both from the military and from years as the son of a temperamental monster --- to sit there across from Cassidy and pretend everything was normal.

Every time Cassidy spoke, every time he looked over at Logan or Veronica, Logan found himself trying to read him. To see what he now knew lurked underneath his mild-mannered persona. To try, maybe, to understand. But all he’d really noticed so far was that Cassidy was spending a lot more time staring back at Logan than Logan was entirely comfortable with.

“Dude, why are you still driving the X-terra?” Dick asked. “If I were you; I’d be driving that sweet Aston Martin everywhere I could.” He leaned in, “It’s not like your dad’s going to be using it anytime soon, am I right?” Then he gave Logan a good-natured slap.  Logan rolled his eyes.

“For some reason I don’t think bringing a $150,000 dollar car to school is such a good idea,” Logan told him. Dick deflated slightly in disappointment.

“But it’s a panty dropper, man!” Dick protested.

Logan automatically glanced over to share a look with Veronica. She rolled her eyes, but showed far more amusement at Dick’s antics than his Veronica ever would.

“Fine.” Dick said. “How about this: what are you two up to tonight,” he said pointing towards both Logan and Veronica, “Because I’ve got three words for you: good booze, costumed hotties, my house. Boom!”

Logan looked over at Veronica again. They wordlessly and simultaneously both decided it wasn’t worth the effort to tell Dick that was six words.

“Aren’t your parents having their annual Halloween party tonight?” Veronica pointed out.

“A Halloween party that my Mom is going to?” Logan added.

Logan had been a bit surprised (and a bit worried) when Sadie Casablancas had reached out to his mom.

There was some fertile ground for a friendship there. Both Sadie and his mom knew what it was like to be the second wife of a serial cheater who thought of his wife as an accessory rather than a person. They had both had a step-child (or step-children) who they had more or less raised, but who still treated them as an intruder.

But they also both loved playing hostess and being the center of attention too.

And Logan was fairly sure Sadie was still bitter that his mother’s annual Christmas party had become the Christmas party for the social elite of Neptune leaving Sadie to make the most out of hosting a party for Halloween.

It seemed more likely that Sadie had reached out and invited his mom to her party personally so she could rub it in his mom's face that her Christmas party was pretty much DOA.

He still wondered if maybe he should have convinced his Mom not to go. But he also didn’t want to squash her recent willingness to go out and interact with the world again. 

“That’s what I’m saying.” Dick told them, “There’ll be so many people around my dad won’t notice if some of the good stuff goes missing. And there'll be plenty of cougars on the prowl!” Dick made what Logan thought was meant to be a growling noise. Logan thought he heard Veronica gag a little.

“Funnily enough, Dick, I actually have plans for tonight that don’t involve dodging my mother or sleeping with her friends.” Logan told him. “But you have fun.”

“What, uh, what kind of plans.” Cassidy asked, looking over with the kicked-puppy expression that Logan now realized had been specifically calculated to make people underestimate and pity him. Logan wondered how long he had practiced it in the mirror to perfect it. “Because, I wouldn’t mind getting out of the house, you know?”

Dick rolled his eyes and let out a huff from across the table.

Unfortunately, Logan could think of only one answer that would not only stop both Casablancas brothers from asking questions, but would also keep either one from wanting to tag along.

“The kind a gentleman doesn’t tell of.” Logan told him. Cassidy rolled his eyes. Dick threw his hand in an imitation of lassoing something. At least that was what Logan thought he was trying to do.

“Way to go man. Get back on that horse.” Dick said, making his eyebrows dance. “And ride.”

This time both Veronica, and Cassidy let out gagging noises. Logan gave Dick the same begrudgingly amused smile that had become a staple of his reactions to his own Dick over the years and shook his head.

Dick gave a shrug and turned back towards his pizza. Logan shot Veronica a short apologetic look. Which she answered with a “you did what you had to” smile before turning back to her own lunch.

****

The X-terra wouldn’t start.

It had started just fine when he went to school earlier that day. It had started just fine on the way home from school.

But sometime between putting it in the garage in the afternoon and coming down to go pick-up Veronica in the evening the battery had died.

Logan would never be a gearhead, but he had over the years learned the basics of keeping (or getting) a car running if necessary.

Along with how to hotwire one. And pick its locks (or most locks, actually.) All in the service of Uncle Sam of course.

He also prided himself on being rather meticulous when it came to making sure things were locked, off and not leaking anything.

So, the idea that he had left the lights on without noticing it was a bit weird. Not impossible, he admitted, but still weird.

The idea that the battery would run down in just a few hours was even weirder.

But what was way beyond weird (and weirder), was the fact that Logan couldn’t find a single jumper cable in the garage. They had four freaking cars --- but not a single jumper cable.

After bumping around, looking for a pair for almost fifteen minutes, Logan decided to reevaluate his options.  His mom had already left for the Casablancas’ party in her Beemer.

He could drive his father’s Mercedes. It would actually blend in better than his X-terra. But it also had the license plate “Echolls1.”

Given the area of Neptune they would be going to, even an incredibly expensive and ordinarily ostentatious car would probably blend in better than that.

****

Veronica was still upstairs when she heard the doorbell ring. Punctuality had never been one of Logan’s strong suits before. In fact, Veronica thought she knew Logan better than anybody and even she couldn’t understand why he had developed this particular quirk right now.

Anyway. The bottom line was it was new. And still unexpected. And Veronica unfortunately hadn’t remembered to take it into account while she was getting ready.

That meant she still had to make a few last-minute adjustments to her costume and check to make sure that the absurdly small, absurdly expensive camera Logan had insisted on buying for her to wear was in place, before she headed down stairs

Veronica had initially balked at the idea that she should be the one wearing the camera, especially given how much it cost. But Logan had argued that she had more experience with photography, and that the camera itself fit better with her costume so she had conceded.

This whole night was a concession really.

She shouldn’t be doing this. She shouldn’t be letting Logan go to the house the email was from, much less be encouraging him. She definitely shouldn’t be helping him do it.

Unfortunately, she was also pretty sure that there was no way she was going to be able to stop him. At least not without her dad’s handcuffs. And possibly a taser. Going with him was the best way to keep him out of trouble.

That’s at least how she attempted to rationalize their little adventure tonight.

The fact was, she needed to know who sent that email to Duncan too.

When Veronica finally made her way downstairs and opened the door, Logan was on her doorstep dressed in a Batman costume and holding a nondescript pillow case open towards her.

“Trick or treat.” He told her, with a slightly nervous smile. Veronica shook her head and stepped outside, closing the door behind her. She hoped to avoid a run in with her mom tonight if possible.

“I still think you should have gone as Spider-Man.” she told him. He rolled his eyes.

Veronica had thought it was the perfect costume. Not only would it cover his entire face, but since the movie had come out only last year, it would still be popular enough that it would be almost impossible to use it to identify him.

Logan had argued with an annoying amount of logic that people would be less likely to open the door to someone in a full face mask, and that wearing a full mask would make it more difficult to talk or breath.

She suspected he just thought of himself more as a billionaire playboy then a science nerd.

And possibly that he wanted to avoid wearing a full unitard.

“If I was Spider-Man,” Logan told her, “I wouldn’t have this.” He gestured down to what looked like a way too functional utility belt to have come with the costume. Now Veronica rolled her eyes. Boys and their toys.

“Whatever, batboy.” Veronica told him., then leaned forward slightly, looking into the pillow case. “Why is there already candy in your bag?”

“So, if we have to call your dad, he won’t question why we gave up on trick-or-treating after only one house.”

“Smart.” She told him with a smile.

“I have my moments.” Logan told her and gave her an amused smile and she felt her stomach clench slightly.

“Shall we?” Logan said, waving her towards where he had parked. When she saw what he had parked at the end of her driveway, however, she froze.

Aaron Echolls’ Aston Martin was sitting incredibly conspicuously in front of her house.

“You do realize that if Dick suggests something, it’s probably a sign you should do the exact opposite, right?”  Veronica pointed out, gesturing towards the car. Logan, to his credit looked both chagrined and a bit embarrassed.

“I figured that out even before he got us kicked out of cub scouts.” He said. “Unfortunately, the X-terra’s battery died.  It was either this or the Segway.”

“Ahhh, yes. A Segway. The only vehicle that can make this,” she pointed toward the Aston Martin, “The less douchey option.” Logan laughed slightly and Veronica looked up at him with a faintly wicked smile. “Maybe you should have dressed up as James Bond.”

“I’m always Bond.” He told her, as he opened the door for her. “Tonight, I’m just Bond going undercover as a teenager wearing a Batman costume.”

Then he gave her a familiar smirk.

For a moment it felt like someone had knocked the air out of her. She forced a smile, though, and slipped into the passenger seat.

“Yeah, well, just don’t expect me to respond to any punny names. Especially ones that are feline related.”

****

Logan took a breath and leaned forward, pressing the doorbell.

Nothing happened.

He stood there with Veronica for another couple minutes, waiting, then leaned forward and pressed the bell again. This time he stayed close to the door and listened.

The bell was working, but there were no other noises. No shuffling. No footsteps. No sound of someone trying to get the door. No sounds of someone getting angry at the doorbell and the people ringing it. Not even a curse word.

He still waited for another minute or two, and then pressed the bell a final time. This time he rang it twice in a row before throwing in a third, for good measure.

Nothing.

Logan stepped back and reflexively started sizing up the house. This block of houses, much like Dick’s old bungalow, backed onto a private beach. While he hadn’t able to check for sure --- google maps don’t exist yet --- Logan bet that , much like those houses, these also relied on the privacy fence that surrounded the beach to keep out the riff-raff and didn't have much in the way of fences between each individual house.

If he was alone, Logan would have started looking for a section of the privacy fence that would be easier to scale and ….

And Veronica had just taken off down the block with the sort of determination that usually meant his Veronica was about to do something stupid in service of a case.

Logan pivoted quickly and followed after her.

She stopped three houses down, where the security fence had been set back a bit. The house had fenced in some of its front yard, creating an area where the fences met at a right-angle. Trash cans and other things he was fairly certain the association wouldn’t approve of were piled up beside it.

Veronica was standing there, staring at the fence as if she was sizing it up. When he stopped behind her she glanced backwards.

“So, are you going to give me a boost or am I going to have to stack this stuff up and use it to crawl over the fence myself?”

Logan could only stare at Veronica a second, too surprised to say anything. She stared back expectantly and he felt a bit of anger creep up on him, but he managed to quickly shove it back down.

“I thought we were going to call your father if anything weird happened.” He said, thankfully keeping the anger part of the equation out of his voice.

“Nothing weird has happened.” She tried to argue.

Logan gave her a disbelieving look and she let out a huff.

“No one’s home. This is still our best chance to find out who has been living at the house recently, and whether they were the ones that sent Duncan that email.” She stepped towards him, calm and determined. “I’m not saying we break in or anything, just take a look through the windows.” Her look turned slightly pleading “Please?”

Then she tilted her head slightly and Logan’s ability to resist pretty much dropped to zero.

He studied her for a moment, then the pile and the fence. Then he let out another long breath and knelt down, lacing his fingers together to create a place for her to step into.

“Just looking in the windows,” He warned.

She nodded and stepped on to his hands.

Even with a boost from him it took her a couple of tries before she scrambled over the top and he heard a worrying “oof” when she let herself down on the other side.

“Step back a bit” He warned.

He heard a muted huff, then sneakers scraping against sand and took that as a sign that she’d done as he’d asked.

Logan stepped back a few feet to give himself a bit of a running start. He jumped up right before he reached the security fence, and planted his right foot on the front yard fence to give himself a boost. His left then pushed against the security fence itself, giving him enough of a lift to allow him to vault over the fence's top and land on the other side in a crouch.

When he stood up, Veronica gave him a look that seemed to be a mix of surprise along with a touch of admiration.

He was a bit surprised himself. He hadn’t been sure if he would be able to pull off that trick in this body. He was also pretty sure he'd be sore tomorrow. But that was tomorrow.

Once he was over the fence, he was relieved to see that his guess was right. Most of the houses either backed directly onto the sand, or had a patio that did. The only obstacles as they walked down the beach were trash and giant rafts of seaweed that had washed ashore.

None of the houses had lights on.

The house they were looking for was a bungalow with glass doors that exited onto a small patio. The only thing that separated it from the beach was a low wall.

The lights were off here too, but when he and Veronica shined their flashlights through the doors, they could see clear signs that someone had been there recently.

Logan almost stopped right then. While the house was mostly open plan, he could see at least one bedroom off to the side. It was possible that whoever had covered the counter with takeout and left their laptop open on the table was in that room, and would see their light.

But before he could voice his concern, however, Veronica’s face screwed up slightly like she was trying to see something better, and she took a step forward.

“There’s something on the floor. By the couch” She said, leaning in.

Now that she had pointed it out, Logan noticed the shadowy bump too. It was mostly blocked by the furniture in question, but something about the bundle set Logan’s teeth on edge. He stepped onto the patio and shined his flashlight towards it.

The light transformed the indistinct lump into a woman, lying on her side and facing away from them.

Logan couldn’t tell from his angle if she was breathing, but his gut told him that she was way too still.

Without really thinking about it, he dug out the make-shift lock-picks he put in one of the pouches of his belt, and crouched down to start working on the door lock. Veronica moved up to stand next to him.

“What are you doing?”

“She might still be alive.” He told her. Veronica knelt down and reached out towards the tools.

“Here.” She said, gently. He looked over at her in surprise and she let out a huff. “My dad’s the Sheriff. He’s taught me a thing or two.”

Logan had trouble imagining the Sheriff version of Keith teaching his daughter to pick locks, but apparently, he’d underestimated his father-in-law’s younger alter ego. Because when he handed the picks over, Veronica made quick (and more importantly clean) work of the lock.

As soon as the door swung open, the smell from inside hit him and Logan knew he was wrong. They were way too late to save the woman on the floor.

Logan still carefully stepped over to the body and used the flashlight to get a better look, just to be sure. There were no obvious wounds or injuries, but even to his untrained eye, it was still clear that whoever was lying there, she had been dead for several days already.

He didn't recognize her. It was both a bit of a relief and a bit anticlimactic at this point.

Veronica joined Logan by the body. He heard a sharp intake of breath as she caught sight of the woman’s face, illuminated by his flashlight.

“I think now might be a really good time to call your dad.” He suggested.

Veronica didn’t move.  They both didn't move. Not until they heard a shuffling sound coming from the bedroom.

Then they both turned towards the room. Logan automatically shifted to place himself between Veronica and the bedroom door. She gave him a bit of a glare, but to his relief, she still kept behind him.

“Veronica…” He whispered

“We’re sneaking around an abandoned house with a body in it on Halloween,” She interrupted, in the same low tone, “There’s no way in hell we’re splitting up.”

By that logic they shouldn’t move towards the sound either, but Logan found himself inching forward. When he reached the door, he stopped and listened. Once he was closer, the sound was slightly clearer. He could hear another sound along with the shuffling. Something mechanical maybe?

Something clicked in his brain and he thought he knew what they were hearing. He inched forwards slightly again, to make sure he was right.

Both he and Veronica were wearing gloves as part of their costumes, so he reached down and (carefully) grabbed the door handle. In one quick motion he threw open the door and flipped on the light.

The good news was, for the second time that night he was right. There was no one there. Not even a cat to make this a real horror movie cliché. Just a printer in the corner was spitting papers onto the floor and already had at least a dozen sheets fanned out in front of it.

But the room couldn’t really be said to be empty either.

The wall across from the printer was almost completely covered in print outs. News articles.  Programs from everything from science conventions to concerts. Tickets and photographs. All pinned up and connected with a spider-web of different colored threads.

“I think this is what’s referred to as a crazy ass murderer wall.” Veronica said hollowly.

Logan nodded. As he examined the wall, though, he noticed something other than just crazy.

Aside from a few things towards the bottom of the wall, all of the dates on the items were in the future.

But from what he could tell, they weren’t from his future.

Without meaning to Logan drifted towards one headline in particular.

It was about his mother’s suicide.

But not about his mother’s suicide.

There were details no one could possibly have known. From the red convertible left on the Coronado Bridge to the suicide note on her blackberry. But the article was dated June 2004 --- not January 2005. And Aaron’s acquittal was cited as the cause, rather than Aaron’s infidelities.

Veronica must have seen it too, because he felt her reach up and put her hand on his shoulder, to comfort him.

“Logan, don’t…” She trailed off, and paused a second, before starting again with more confidence. “These aren’t real.” She told him -. “They can’t be. Your mother would never do that.”

Logan felt a hysterical laugh bubbling out from his throat but managed to swallow it down.

“That’s exactly what she would do.” He confessed quietly, “And that’s exactly how she would do it.” 

“Maybe. But she wouldn’t abandon you.” She told him, giving his arm a squeeze.

The words made his heart ache a little. Both because someone still has that much confidence in his mother and because they reminded him that, however much she may have acted like her today, this wasn’t his Veronica.

And that, led to the guilt. Because this Veronica was a sixteen-year-old kid. And he had brought her here.

He needed to get her out. He needed to convince her to call Keith.

The universe seemed to agree because the sound of a phone vibrating started coming from Veronica’s bag. Veronica shot him an apologetic look, and fished her phone out.

“It’s my dad.” She whispered.

“He’ll track your phone if you don’t answer.” He reminded her.

She still didn’t make a move to answer.

Instead, she seemed to study him again.

Finally, she looked from him to the wall behind them.  Then turned back again.

Veronica let out a long breath, plucked off the small camera hidden on her costume and tossed it to him.

“Six minutes.” She told him.

“What?”

“The response time for a call from the Sheriff’s daughter is going to be quick, even on Halloween. I think I can get you about six minutes to take photos of the wall with the fancy camera you were so keen on buying. Then you’ll need to be out of the house.”

Logan could only look at her.

“Don’t touch anything.”  She warned. “Anything.”

Then she rushed out of the room.

Something felt wrong. Even beyond the body in the living room and the murder board in the bedroom. Logan might not have known this Veronica as well as he knew his own, but he did know that her actions tonight don’t add up to the girl he had come to expect her to be. He just wasn't sure what they did add up to either.

What he did know was that six minutes was not a lot of time. So, he shoved down all his questions and worries and got to work.

There is no way he would be able to photograph all the articles in six minutes. Instead, he had to pick and choose one or two areas and focus on them.

He started with taking a photo of the article on his mother. Not because it was about his mother. Mostly. But because it was something that he knew was close to what he remembered but was just slightly off. After that, he moved to the items immediately around it. Then to the articles near the bottom, that had the dates that were coming up the soonest.

He stepped back then, and started taking photos of larger sections of the wall. He hoped that he would be able to use them to get a sense of where the articles he had already photographed fell and what the general trends were. If he was lucky the money, he'd spent on the camera would prove worth it and he would be able to see the headlines too.

Once the six-minute deadline began to close in he carefully made his way out of the house, made sure to close both the bedroom and glass doors behind him, and joined Veronica on the sand.

Chapter Text

Logan’s first clue that something might be wrong outside of what had happened in the bungalow was the look on Veronica’s face when he met her on the beach.

She was even paler than she had been inside the house.

“Hey.” He said gently. “Are you okay? Did you talk to your dad?”

“Yeah.” Veronica nodded slowly. “But he seemed less interested in the fact we found a body than how we got here. “He asked us to stay on the beach. And stay away from your car.”

“Does he know we didn’t drive the X-terra?”

Veronica nodded, her forehead scrunching up slightly like she was she was trying to puzzle something out.

The second clue was the sound of sirens. Way too many sirens.

To be honest, Logan had sort of assumed that Keith would meet them alone and sans sirens. He had thought Keith would want to see what they were dealing with --- and exactly how much trouble Veronica might have gotten herself into--- before calling in back-up.

While Logan loved Keith and wholeheartedly believed Keith had been the best Sheriff Balboa County had had in recent memory, that wasn’t exactly a steep curb to grade on.

Keith believed in justice and equality. On helping the little guy. But his first priority was and always would be protecting Veronica. Even if that meant he had to fudge the facts a little of how a body was found.

But he wouldn’t be able to fudge anything tonight. In fact, it sounded like half of the BCSD had been pulled away from stopping teenagers from toilet papering houses and dealing with under supervised kids hopped up on sugar to drive up Manzanita Drive to meet them.

The cars stopped. Then the sirens stopped. Then Veronica’s phone rang again.

“Dad? We’re still on the beach behind the house.” There was a pause. “Why? Uh, huh.” There was another pause. “I think so.” Veronica turned towards him.

“Do you think you’re up for a quarter mile walk down the beach?” Logan pointed down to the sneaker clad feet. 

“Sure?” He shrugged. Veronica nodded and turned slightly to talk on the phone.

“Yeah. Why…” She stopped, clearly interrupted. Veronica’s face shifted slightly to resemble what his Veronica looked like when she was trying very hard not to look like she was emotional. “I love you too.” She clicked off and put away the phone.

“My dad says there’s some sort of club house for the association about a quarter mile down the beach. He wants us to meet him there.” Then after a second, she added, more quietly. “He wouldn’t say why. He just asked me to trust him.”

Logan nodded again, and gestured towards what he guessed was south.

“Shall we.”

Veronica gave her own nod and they started walking. The adrenaline from their discovery at the house had started to leave their systems and they were both quieter than normal. Logan even had to reach out and steady Veronica a couple of times when she stepped oddly on the uneven sand.

And she let him.

When they got to the building Logan assumed was the club house, Veronica took out her phone again. Before she had the chance dial, though, one of the doors opened and Keith walked out and pulled Veronica into a hug.

“Honey.” Keith just held her for a minute. It should have been heartwarming, but it just ratcheted up Logan’s misgivings. Finally, Veronica pulled back and Keith stepped out of the way so all of them could get into the building. Veronica waited until they were all inside before she asked the question that was clearly troubling both of them.

“Dad, what’s going on?”. Keith let out one of the half-sighs that Logan had come to realize meant he was gearing up to deliver bad news.

“There was an explosion at Logan’s house.”

“My mom…” Logan asked quickly, panic rising.

“She’s fine.” Keith reassured him. He even reached out and placed his hand on Logan’s shoulder. “She is still at the Casablancas’ party. I’ve sent a deputy to bring her to the station.” Logan knew Keith wouldn’t lie about something like that, and he appreciated that he was trying to calm him. Especially given the fact that Keith most likely thought Logan had dragged Veronica into trouble tonight already. But there was no way Logan would be able to relax until he actually saw his mom.

“What kind of explosion?” Veronica asked.

“I’ll explain more at the station.” Keith told her. “But right now, my first priority is to get you." He shifted his gaze to Logan. "Both of you. Someplace safe. Just in case.”

Veronica looked like she was about to say something else, then looked over towards him and stopped, looking slightly embarrassed.

“Right. Yeah.”

Keith hurried both of them out towards his cruiser.

“Wait.” Veronica said as they reached the car. “I’ll sit in the back.”

Both Logan and Keith looked at her in surprised.

“Logan has enough to deal with right now without having some paparazzi take a picture of him getting out of the back of a cop car.” She explained, and looked unexpectedly pointedly at Keith. Keith let out a long breath, then he slowly shrugged.

“Fine.” He said, and moved around to open the door so Veronica could slide in to the perp area. After Logan had sat down in the front, he turned around and caught her eye.

“Thank you.” He said lowly as Keith started up the car.

****

Dick hadn’t had the best night.

I mean sure, he’d grabbed some of his dad's stash from his personal liquor cabinet. And there were plenty of MILF’s strutting around. But anytime he’d gotten close to being able to grab one of them –Beav had shown up and ruined it.

If he hadn’t known better, Dick would think Beav had been trying to give him blue balls, man!

After a while he and Beav had both ended up upstairs, playing video games and taking shots. Maybe taking something a bit stronger too. Just enough to make Dick not care what color his balls were, you know? Wait. Who was Dick talking to? Whatever. The point was that Dick actually felt pretty good now. In fact, some part of Dick felt kind of tingly. Oh.

“Dude, your vibrator’s like on.” Dick told Beav.

“It’s your phone asshole.” Beav said. Dick laughed, and tried to grab the not-a-vibrator, but ended up flipping over, losing his balance, and falling on the floor. So, Dick laughed more.

Beav sighed and picked up the phone himself. At least Beav’s glare was turned towards the phone and not Dick now. Little dude could be scary sometimes. Not that Dick would ever admit that. Not even to Dick if Dick were sober.

“Where’s the remote?” Beav asked. Dick shrugged. Dick didn’t know. Beav glared harder and started throwing things around until he found the remote.

Dick laughed again. Beav looked sooooo serious.

Then Beav switched off the game (not cool) and switched on the news.

And on the news was something that totally killed even Dick’s buzz.

“Dude.” Dick said slowly, trying to get his brain to start working again. “Isn’t that Logan’s house? On fire?”

Dick felt something in his stomach. Not like a normal I’m high and drunk and going to throw up feeling either. More like an I’ve been kicked in the stomach kind of feeling.

Beav said something about Dick's precipitation. No. Perception. Dick didn’t really hear it. Then Beav said something else. Something about leaving, maybe? Dick wasn’t sure. He just knew that Beav was gone when he finally pulled his eyes away from the screen.

And that Dick kept getting Logan’s voicemail.

****

“Dad. It’s one o’clock in the morning. I’m exhausted. Unless you want me to sleep in one of the cells, I need to go home.”

Veronica looked at him expectantly. Keith knew realistically he couldn’t keep her in his sight for the rest of the night, regardless of how much he wanted to. But he really wanted to.

Maybe he could put her in some kind of bubble? And lock the bubble in a tower. With a moat.

Unfortunately, Keith suspected, their homeowner’s association wouldn’t be too keen on a giant stone tower in their backyard.

Not to mention that if the last week was anything to go by, Veronica would probably just scale down it anyway.

Or throw Logan Echolls a rope.

Keith let out a long sigh, and started to mentally go through which of his deputies were now at the station.

 “Meeks.” Keith called out, “Could you drive Veronica home?”.

“Of Course, Sheriff.” The man said, scurrying over. Keith then turned back towards his daughter.

“Thank you.” Veronica said.

“Well, all our cells are full of drunk college students.” Keith told her, then turned towards Meeks. “Make sure you actually see her go into the house?”

Meeks nodded and Veronica gasped in mock offense. But Keith wasn’t quite up for banter on the subject right now.

“Please, Veronica.” He told her, “I need to know you’re safe.” He saw her face soften.

“You too dad.”

Once he had seen them off, Keith turned back towards his office. Where Lynn and Logan were waiting. Keith let out another long sigh.

Logan had his arm around Lynn, and was gently whispering to her.

Keith cleared his throat so they would know he was there.

“Keith.” Lynn said, with tired relief. “Couldn’t we please finish this up tomorrow? I think we’d all really like to go home.”

Keith gave her an apologetic smile.

“I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible Lynn. At least not tonight. The whole house in a crime scene.”

“But you said only the main house was damaged.” Lynn said. As if that was a perfectly normal statement. Inside Keith, the part of him that was still a kid from Omaha, mentally rolled his eyes. Outside Keith gave her a comforting smile.

 Over the years Keith had needed to become the king of appearing compassionate no matter what was going on internally. At least as long as Veronica wasn’t involved.

“Only the main house was damaged,” he reassured her, “But the whole complex is still a crime scene. I can’t let you go back in until we’ve search it thoroughly and made sure that there are no more…surprises.” Lynn stared at him a second, looking slightly bewildered as to why Keith wasn’t rearranging the rules to accommodate her.

“Why don’t I call the Neptune Grande,” Logan said quietly, “And see if we can rent a suite for the night.” The kid then turned and towards Keith. “If you think that would work?”

Keith had actually been about to suggest that the department could arrange for a hotel room for the both of them. But if the Echolls were willing to arrange a room for themselves, Keith suspected it would probably be best for the department’s budget to let them.

“I think that could be arranged. I would like to send a deputy with you, though. For your own safety.” Provided Keith could find a deputy that was free. He suspected he was going to have to fill out a lot of overtime paperwork this week.

“I also would like to asks you just a few more questions before you go.”

Lynn slumped ever so slightly at his words, but put on an appeasing smile nonetheless.

“Of course, Keith. Whatever we can do to help.” Keith nodded and pretended to study the papers on his desk for a moment.

Before he had the chance to ask anything, however, the door to his office opened abruptly and Sacks stuck his head in.

“Sheriff. There’s been another explosion.”  Sacks announced.

To everyone in the room.

“Where?” Logan asked quickly.

“Woody Goodman’s place.” Sacks answered automatically.

Keith did not, as the kids say, face palm. But he came close. Clearly, he was going to need to have another talk with Sacks about timing. And privacy.

“Thank you. Sacks.” He told him, then turned towards Lynn. “I guess we will have to continue this tomorrow.”

Keith reached into his desked and pulled out a pad of paper and a pen, and handed them over to Lynn.

“Why don’t you write down what you need, either new or from the house, for the next few days. I’ll have Sacks retrieve them for you. Once you’ve made your reservations, he’ll let me know and I’ll arrange for a deputy to drive you over to the Grande.” Keith stood up and moved towards the door.

“Keith – Sheriff Mars.” It was Logan. Keith turned around to look at him expectantly. But there was no way he could have expected what came out of the kid’s mouth next.

“I think I know who the bomber is.”

****

The first thing Veronica did after she got home (or at least the first thing she did after she made sure that Meeks was no longer nervously hovering outside, waiting for her to shimmy down the drain pipe) was to strip off her sweat and sand logged costume and take a shower.

She hadn’t been lying when she told her dad how tired she was, so after she had scrubbed off the events of the evening she slipped into bed. Backup apparently decided Veronica no longer smelled enough like him and crawled up next to her. Veronica knew she shouldn’t let him stay there, but the weight of him next to her felt comforting and instead of shooing him away she reached over and absently scratched him.

Even though she was dressed in her most comfortable PJs, curled-up next to the best boy in the world and lying in a bed that smelled and felt more like home than anyplace she had lived since college, she knew she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. Her head still buzzed with far too many questions.

That last thing she remembered --- really remembered, from her real life --- was Lilly. Lilly had called her, excited about some breakthrough she had made on her latest project. Then in true Lilly fashion she had invited herself over to celebrate.  When she had arrived, though, she looked more tired than excited. Haggard even, which was not a word Veronica would ever have thought could apply to Lilly. Veronica had gone to get them some drinks and then….

And then it was less like memories than watching a movie. One that was shot in first person, poorly edited and showed an alternate cut of the month after Logan’s dad had died --- but featured an unexpected and far more painful twist.

She knew what happened, but she didn’t feel like she experienced it herself. She had the memories but they didn’t feel like her own.

Then she had woken up. She was no longer a spectator. The memories she made felt like hers again. But she was still stuck inside the movie.

She’d spent almost all of the first four days afterward just trying to find a way out or come up with some explanation for what had happened. It was the first time Veronica was actually glad her mother had had a relapse, since it meant no one was paying attention to how crazy Veronica was acting.

Then Logan had called.

She hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t hesitated. She had just bantered and gone over to see him.

And he was Logan. That was when she knew ---- whatever had happened to her she was going to play along. On some level she had felt a bit guilty. For choosing to stay with Logan when and where that meant Lilly was dead. But if Lilly was the last thing she remembered, didn’t that mean this was Lilly’s doing? That Lilly had given her her blessing?

 Maybe that was insane logic, but this whole situation was insane.  And if there was any chance this was real and she had a chance to save Logan this time around she also knew, she had to take it.

And that Lilly, whatever roll she had or hadn’t played in allowing Veronica that chance, she would want her to take it too.

But if Veronica was really going to do that, she needed to find some answers.

Like what the hell had actually happened that night after Lilly had come over? Why and who the hell had tried to kill Logan? And how the hell was the body of Lilly’s thirty-something star coder lying dead in a house in Neptune when as far as Veronica can recall she should be a high school student back east?

Chapter Text

Early November

As soon as Keith had said that the explosion had most likely been started by a bomb placed underneath his car, Logan’s gut had told him the bomber was Cassidy.

And that he had allowed himself to let his guard down too much.

When Logan heard that there had been another explosion at the Goodman’s house, he had known his gut was right.

Logan had told Keith that Cassidy had learned how to work with explosives in order to do the stunts on his friend’s amateur movies.

But to really explain why he was so certain that Cassidy was the bomber Logan had had to invent a drunken conversation with Cassidy, in which Cassidy had talked about Woody --- after which he had threatened to kill Logan and himself, if Logan told anyone.

Keith hadn’t been too pleased that Logan hadn’t come to him with that information sooner. And he’d been even less pleased when Logan revealed that he had been investigating Woody on his own, hoping to find a way to expose what Woody was doing, without exposing Cassidy as a victim.

Unlike either of the Sheriff Lambs --- or to be honest most of the adults Logan had known during his childhood, Keith had actually listened to him.

Unfortunately, because of that, it wasn’t until well into the wee hours of the morning that Logan had been able to join his mom at the Grande, or check his phone.

When he did, Logan had discovered that Dick had left him at least half a dozen messages. And that Dick had stopped leaving messages right about the time that he would have been informed of Cassidy’s death.

Logan had tried to call him back, but Dick hadn’t picked up. And he had yet to pick up or return Logan’s calls in the days since.

From what Logan had heard, Dick was a mess.

Logan knew he should have expected that, given what had happened the first time around. But it still hurt. Even if this wasn’t technically his Dick

He also still really needed to find a different way of phrasing that.

****

Keith let out a sigh and put down the latest forensics report on the bombings.

According to Logan Echolls, Cassidy Casablancas had made threats to him several weeks before Halloween, after Cassidy had accidentally revealed to Logan that he had been molested by Woody Goodman the previous year.

But what seemed to have pushed Cassidy over the edge from threats to actual violence was a pair of emails he had received the week before Halloween.

Both emails had been sent from the same email address. Both had so far proved impossible to track ---at least for the caliber of computer experts willing to work for what the Balboa County Sheriff’s Department was willing to pay.

The first email, sent on Saturday October twenty-fifth had warned Cassidy that Logan Echolls had learned that Woody Goodman had molested several boys --- including Cassidy --- from a Neptune High Alumni interview he had conducted for the school paper. The sender also claimed that Logan planned to bring that information to the (real) press, in time to make the November second Sunday Edition.

Logan had confirmed that he was, in fact, writing an article on Thomas Dohanic, a former Neptune High student who was currently serving in Iraq. Logan had told Keith, however, that he and Tommy had never mentioned Woody in any of their emails. Logan had also denied that he had any plans to bring what he did know to the press.

Keith had not been able to speak to Dohanic himself, but he had been able to confirm from other sources that Dohanic had been a batboy for the Sharks when he was a teenager.

The second email had been sent on October twenty-eighth. It had contained more details.  It was after this email that Cassidy had contacted David Moran.

Moran was a mechanic that worked regularly on the Casablancas’, the Goodman’s, and the Echolls’ cars. Back in the 80’s, though, Moran had been a stunt coordinator on several big-name films, including, ironically, Aaron’s first real hit.

Under other circumstances, Moran would have made a perfect suspect. Or at least the perfect patsy.

When Keith had questioned Moran, he had admitted that he had shown Cassidy how to use the type of explosives that were used in both bombings. Moran had also confirmed that Cassidy had called him on the Tuesday before Halloween, and asked him several questions about setting up a stunt for his friend's next movie that involved a car exploding after a crash.

Moran was adamant, though, that he had had no idea what Cassidy was planning.

Keith believed that Cassidy had most likely attached the cellphone-activated bomb to Logan’s car on either Thursday or Friday afternoon while the X-Terra was still parked in the school parking lot. It was the only time he would have had access to Logan’s car.

It wasn’t clear why Cassidy hadn’t triggered the bomb earlier, either while Logan was driving home from school or at any point before Friday night.  It was possible he had been waiting until he was able to make the explosion look like an accident. Keith was inclined to believe that he had tried to trigger the bomb but some sort of flaw in the mechanism had meant it hadn’t worked.

Whatever the case, the X-terra was still whole and parked in the Echolls garage on Friday night when Lynn left in her own BMW to go to the Casablancas’ party.

Roughly half an hour later, Logan had gone to the garage and discovered that his car battery had died.

He had then decided to drive his father’s Aston Martin to pick up Veronica to go (they both claimed) trick-or-treating.

Logan’s carelessness, in allowing his battery to die, as it turned out, had saved both his and Veronica’s lives. Because of it Veronica and Logan were far, far away from the bomb when it detonated that night.

The explosion started a chain reaction, igniting the X-Terra’s nearly full gas tank, and causing the rest of the car to catch on fire. The other flammable materials in the garage had then ignited after that.

One of the Echolls’ neighbors had seen the flames and called 911.

The fire department’s response time for a house in one of the most exclusive parts of the ’09 area code was, not surprisingly, fast. The fire had been contained before anything other than the main house was damaged.

The strange thing was, there was no record of Cassidy placing a call to the phone attached to the bomb, either from his own cell phone or any of the other phones at the Casablancas house that night.

That didn’t mean he hadn’t. He could have used a disposable phone and disposed of it on his way to the Goodman’s.

But Logan had told Keith that Cassidy had believed that Logan wouldn’t be at home that night.

And Dick Casablancas Jr. was sure that he and Cassidy had been together at the time of the explosion ---and that Cassidy had seemed surprised when he saw the news coverage. He had punctuated the statement with a few more “dudes” though.

Of course, Dick wasn’t exactly the most reliable of witnesses.

If Cassidy hadn’t detonated the bomb that night, then the timing of its accidental detonation was lucky.

Halloween night had been one of the few times when not only were Lynn, Logan and their small army of staff not on the property, but Logan wasn’t driving the X-terra either.

If Keith was to believe Dick, then Cassidy had left the Casablancas house not long after seeing news coverage of the first explosion. He couldn’t tell Keith when that was, however.

What was clear was that Cassidy had eventually made his way to the Goodman’s house.

From there, things got fuzzy again, but the evidence suggested that Cassidy was seen by someone inside the house, and Woody Goodman had gone outside to talk to him.

That was when the second bomb had gone off

Cassidy and Woody had died instantly.

Mrs. Goodman and the Goodman’s son had been upstairs at the time and managed to escape any (physical) injuries.

But Goodmans’ daughter, Gia, had been standing closer to the blast and had been hit by shrapnel and debris.

She had died from her injuries at the hospital later.

Keith was left to wonder, had the person who emailed Cassidy known what would happen? It was hard to imagine they could have. Outside of Logan, everyone Keith had spoken to had seemed incredibly surprised that he was capable of that kind of violence.

But Keith couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had purposely put Logan in Cassidy’s crosshairs -- or forgot how close Veronica had come to being collateral damage.

If Keith thought she would listen, he would tell Veronica to stay away from Logan for a while. At least until he had a better idea of who had sent that email. But at this point Keith was fairly sure that would only make her spend more time with him. If that was possible.

Keith’s brooding was interrupted by a knock on his door.

He half expected to find Veronica standing there when he looked up– carrying take out and hoping to ask him for a favor.

She had already convinced him to find the address of a girl she claimed was Lilly’s “Pen Pal” earlier in the week.

But it wasn’t Keith’s daughter hovering in his doorway. It was Lynn Echolls.

“I’m sorry. I know that you’re probably busy,” Lynn said, “But I thought, given the circumstances, I should come to you directly.”

Keith put on a smile and gestured toward one of the chairs in front of his desk.

“Come on in.”

Lynn hesitantly walked in and sat down.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“Someone stole my credit card. Their purchases --- they just seemed so strange --- I was worried there might be some connection to –” She gestured outward “All this.”.

“Why don’t I take a look?” Keith told her.

“Yes, Of course.” She gave him a strained smile and pulled a piece of paper out from her purse, handing it across the table to him.

Keith glanced over the charges. There were a few from big box shops. Several weeks’ worth of take-out. And pawn shops. Lots of pawn shops.

“Some of these first charges are for food, do you recognize any of the restaurants?” Keith asked. Lynn leaned over and glanced at the bill again, then pointed to a charge to a Chinese restaurant.

“Logan used to order from there sometimes, but he would have used his own credit card, not mine.”

Of course, he did. Why not give a sixteen-year old their own credit card?

“I doubt it has anything to do with what happened.” Keith told her. “But I’ll look into it.” He held up the bill. “Do you mind if I keep a copy.”

“Of course not.” She said, shaking her head and giving him a smile. “Thank you, Keith.”

“Well, it is my job.” He told her with half a shrug. She laughed, slightly uncomfortably, and got up from her seat. Right before she got to the door, she turned back to look at him.

“I just wanted to say thank you again. The last few weeks have been very difficult for Logan.” She told him, “I’m just so grateful he had you and Veronica to help him through it.”

Well, now Keith almost felt guilty.

“This has been hard on Veronica too. I know she appreciates Logan’s friendship too.” Keith told her.

She gave Keith another, strained smile, and a nod, then walked out the door.

****

To be honest, Logan wouldn’t have really cared if it had been his ripples in the timeline that had thrown Woody off this mortal coil.

But his feelings about Gia and Cassidy were a lot more complicated.

During his life Logan had seen that, with enough pressure, with enough anger or desperation or coercion or power or fear, people could break and do things that they would otherwise find morally reprehensible. At some point, however, Logan had tried to make the conscious decision, to not see that as showing that everyone was hopelessly flawed. To instead use it as a reminder that people could be more than just their worst actions.

Not always. But they could.

But that became damn hard when their worst actions hurt the people Logan cared about most.

The Gia in his timeline had been hurt, threatened, manipulated and terrified by Cobb for years before Carrie’s murder. For the most part Logan pitied her. He could even, to some degree, understand her. But a less compassionate part of him couldn’t help but be angry at her too --- as much for how she had treated and enabled Carrie when she was alive as her role in her murder.

But he had never wanted her to die.

And this Gia --- she was still an innocent girl. One that had every chance to grow up to be, maybe not exactly a good person but at least as good a person as any of the other over-entitled, over-indulged ’09ers Logan himself had been counted among as a teenager.

With Cassidy through ----

What Cassidy had done in this timeline had been desperate and rushed. Sloppy even. So much so that Logan had wondered if he had overestimated just how dangerous and manipulative Cassidy had really been.

The bus crash, though, had been cold. Calculated. Precise.

It hadn’t been something Cassidy had done in the heat of the moment; it was a choice to do something monstrous --- to kill other kids, other victims, to keep them from exposing the man who had abused all of them, and another choice to deliberately kill others to cover it up.

And while the bus crash would not have happened until two years after Lilly’s death, Shelly Pomroy’s party would have happened only two months afterwards.

That made it a lot harder for Logan to draw a line between this Cassidy and that Cassidy.

Logan had still hoped he could find a way to keep Cassidy from making that kind of choice in this timeline. Even if all he would be doing was putting off the inevitable.

He really hadn’t wanted Dick to lose his baby brother.

Hell --- he still felt guilty that he hadn’t been able to stop Cassidy in his own timeline from jumping off the Grande’s roof, even if he simultaneously wanted him to rot in prison for eternity.

So, when Keith first told Logan about the anonymous email Cassidy had gotten, Logan had initially been incredibly relieved.

If Cassidy had received an email  the Saturday before Halloween warning him about Logan’s investigation, then not only did it mean that Cassidy hadn’t been tipped by Logan’s own odd behavior, but he also couldn’t have been contacted because of the email Logan had sent to Woody’s other potential victims either --- Logan hadn’t sent that out until several days later.

It meant that the ripples in the timeline Logan had created, hadn’t been what set the events on Halloween into motion.

Then the full implications of Keith’s warning set in.

In his Comus John Milton had asked “Was I deceiv'd, or did a sable cloud/ Turn forth her silver lining on the night?” --- and inadvertently given birth to the idiom that “There’s a silver lining to every cloud” (with the help of a few centuries and Mrs. S.C. Hall).

Logan's relief at not having caused Cassidy and Gia’s deaths was the silver lining but learning about the email also brought with it a fairly dark “sable cloud”.

Whoever had sent the email to Cassidy knew that Logan had been writing an article on Lucky, knew what Woody had done to Cassidy and Lucky, and knew how Cassidy would respond if he thought that secret was going to be exposed.

And that person wanted Logan dead.

They also didn’t care if someone else got hurt in the process. On Halloween those someones had been Cassidy and Gia but it could just as easily have been Logan’s mom or Veronica.

It could just as easily be Logan’s mom or Veronica or any other innocent bystander next time.

Logan wouldn’t be surprised if there were people in this time and timeline that wanted him dead. Some of Aaron’s more militant fans blamed Logan for Lilly’s murder and Aaron’s arrest. There were probably others out there that held a grudge against Logan or his family.

But they wouldn’t know about Lucky, Cassidy and the story.

The only way Logan could imagine someone could know all of that, was if they were either, from a different timeline, or somehow had gotten information from a different timeline.

If they were another time traveler that could open up a disturbing number of possibilities.

Logan had been a phenomenal Jackass to a lot of people in his teen years and some of them definitely had held grudges.

He still hadn’t figured out what had made Cobb hate him so much, that he and Gia had taken the risk of making Carrie’s murder look like a murder, rather than an overdose just so they could frame Logan.

Logan had made more than a few enemies through his work too, but most of those would have come after him directly, rather than risk using as unreliable a weapon as an emotionally unstable teenager boy.

Still, the most logical solution, or at least the clearest cut solution, would be if the email to Cassidy had been sent by the same Jane Doe as Duncan’s; the woman he and Veronica had found dead on Halloween. She was, after all, the only time traveler (other than himself) that Logan knew had been in Neptune in the week leading up the explosion and she had already used email as a weapon once before.

According to the coroner (or rather according to what the coroner had told Keith and Keith had told Veronica) Jane Doe had died from an aneurism sometime late Tuesday. That would still have given her plenty of time to send both emails to Cassidy.

But even if Jane Doe was the one to send the email, that left several unanswered questions. The biggest one, of course, was why she wanted Logan dead --- and if there was anyone else from her version of the timeline that might want to finish the job. But there were also other questions that might be tied to that big one. Like if it was just a lucky coincidence that Logan’s car battery had died so quickly that night.  And what had happened to the things that were missing from Jane Doe’s wall.

On Halloween, when Logan had been standing in that back bedroom, the wall had seemed covered in stuff. But after he had been able to take some time and really stare at the photos he had taken that night, Logan had realized that there were areas of the wall where things weren’t crowded together quite as much as the rest, and items that weren’t connected to any part the network of strings that crisscrossed the wall.

Either Jane Doe had taken some of the things on the wall down herself for some reason, or someone else had been in that house before he and Veronica had gotten there. This second person could be another time traveler, or an accomplice. Maybe they were simply someone who saw the wall and realized the information on it could be potentially valuable.  But now they knew things about Jane Doe’s future that Logan did not. And given that someone in that future had already hurt Duncan and quite possibly was responsible for what had happened on Halloween, that made Logan nervous.

He preferred to know why someone wanted him dead. It helped with the planning.

Unfortunately, it seemed like there were now three timelines in play and Logan only really knew two of them.

There was Logan’s original timeline in which Lilly died in October of 2003,  his mom committed suicide in January of 2005, Veronica found the tapes and Aaron was arrested in May of 2005, Cassidy killed for the first time (or at least the first time Logan knew about anyway) in September of 2005, Aaron was acquitted in late May 2005 and in a single  day in June 2005 Aaron was killed, Veronica realized Cassidy was the bus crash bomber and Cassidy killed Woody,  then himself.

Then about fifteen years later Logan was somehow thrown back in time to the weekend between Lilly’s death and her wake, and in doing so created a new timeline.

That was where it got really confusing. Because the more he stared at the pictures of Jane Doe’s wall, the more Logan now believed that the timeline he created was the one on the wall and the timeline he was living in right now was a new, third timeline, created by Jane Doe and whatever accomplices she might have --- by coming back from the future of the  timeline he had created.

The timeline on the wall seemed to have branched off from Logan’s original timeline at the same place as the one he was currently living in: with the tapes of Lilly and Aaron having been found at Lilly’s Wake on October sixth.

Something had made the two timelines diverge after that because during the timeline on the wall, Woody (and presumably Cassidy and Gia) hadn’t died on Halloween. Woody had instead been killed in a plane crash in January of 2004, while fleeing child molestation charges.

In fact, everything he was able to read in the photographs of the wall all suggested Logan had tried --- and to some extent failed --- to fix things before. He also must have messed up something badly enough in the process that Jane Doe had found a way to come back in time and tried to kill him.

On the very small bright side; if his theory was correct then Jane Doe would have had to have arrived in this timeline after Logan himself did. And since Logan wasn’t dead yet, either the aneurism that had killed Jane Doe wasn’t due to her time travel, or she had traveled in some fundamentally different way than Logan had.

Probably.

****

Brian stared nervously at the screen in front of him.

He had been so excited (and more than a little smug) when he’d been told he had been picked to work on a special project for Jake Kane himself, he hadn’t really considered that it meant he’d be working directly for Jake Kane. As in, answering to him. Directly.

Not that it probably would have mattered, because this project? Wow. He might be more into software than hardware, but even Brian could tell that the hard drive they had been tasked to work with was years, if not decades ahead of anything on the market.

Their team hadn’t really been told much about the hard drive’s origins. But to be honest Brian didn’t really care where it came from as long as he was able to play with it.

Of course, He and Allen hadn’t been asked to deal with the hard drive itself, so much as what was on it. Mr. Kane had wanted them to find out what was stored on the drive and why it had needed such a high-tech housing before he had a second team start pulling apart the drive itself to reverse engineer it.

The encryption on the drive had turned out to be just as advanced as the drive itself. Thankfully, just at the point at which Brian had started to worry he was going to have to tell Jake Kane he’d failed him, he and Allen had stumbled on something that had saved both their butts.

The encryption on the drive was incredibly complicated and advanced, but the entire system was built on a foundation of coding that was very similar to Kane Software. In fact, it even used some of the workarounds and shortcuts that Brian knew could be found in some of the oldest Kane Software code, the stuff that was rumored to have been written by Jake Kane himself.

Brian had been able to use that fact to find a few creative workarounds of his own. Workarounds that he absolutely had not learned by trying to hack into things at work.

Brian heard a tone from the computer in front of him and Jake Kane’s face sprung up on the screen.

“Clarence told me you’d made progress.” He said without preamble.

“I – “ Brian stuttered, taken off guard.

“I’m supposed to be spending my time in Napa with my family, so I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t waste any more of it than strictly necessary.” Mr. Kane said.

“Yes Sir. Of course.” Brian stumbled out quickly. “We’ve been able to get through the first layer of encryption.”

“But,” Mr. Kane said, with just a slight glare.

“Most of the information on the drive is still behind at least one more layer of encryption.  But we have been able to access some information.”

“What is it?”

“It appears to be a database of some kind, a list of dates and times.”

“And coordinates.” Allen added smugly. Allen was disproportionately proud of the fact that he had realized that, in Brian’s opinion.

“Do they appear to have any significance?” Mr. Kane asked.

“There were thousands of them, sir.” Brian said. Mr. Kane’s glare intensified slightly. “But we can do some research. Try to find some sort of pattern?”

“No.” Mr. Kane said quickly. “Copy what you’ve been able to access onto another drive and give it to Mr. Wiedman. He’ll have another team go over it. I want you to concentrate on the second layer of encryption.” Mr. Kane said, then immediately signed off.

Brian waited there a minute just to make sure Mr. Kane wasn’t going to come back on, like some sort of jump scare in a horror film. Then, once he thought it was safe, he sunk slightly down into his chair in relief.

****

Veronica had never really been a fan of time travel stories. When she was a teenager (the first time around) she had been happy in the present and focused on the future.

Once she actually had something she wanted, to change, seeing fictional characters get a second chance at their lives, when it was impossible for her to do so real life had felt more like a sick joke than a fantasy.

Except, apparently that time travel was a real thing and no one had bothered to tell her.

Not even her best friend.

There was still a possibility that this was all just some hallucination. Or the final firings of her neurons before she died. But the longer she was here the less likely that seemed.

So. Time travel was (most likely) real, but also not quite as helpful as it seems like it should be.

For example: if there was one thing Veronica would have thought traveling back in time would allow her to do, it would be to have some idea of what was coming and what she could expect from people.

Nope.

In her own version of the world, Woody Goodman had died in a car crash when Veronica was in college. The only reason she remembered it at all was that her father had worried the new owner would move the Sharks to a different city. She hadn’t known there was any connection between Woody and anyone in her life and she definitely had not known he had molested one of her closest friend’s little brothers.

Beaver himself had been alive in her world. At least as of the time she had left. After a SEC investigation into Casablancas Industries had led to his father’s suicide he had picked up the baton of Neptune’s top real estate developer and run with it. He had also picked up the baton of being its sleaziest real estate developer, if the rumors she had heard about some of his business practices were true.

But Veronica would never have expected Beaver to try to kill anyone.

Now she wondered if maybe Woody’s and Big Dick’s deaths should have been investigated a bit more thoroughly.

Based on what Veronica was able to put together it seemed like this version of the world had been created because some idiot had gone back in time and tried to save Aaron Echolls.

Then Aaron had killed Lilly.

All the other changes followed on from that.

Veronica wasn’t sure where Amanda, Lilly’s favorite coder, (aka the body in the bungalow) and her wall of crazy came into it. What she did know is that Amanda must have used a different way of time traveling than had been forced on Veronica.  Not only had she looked even older than when Veronica had last seen her in her own world, but Veronica had asked her dad to track down the Amanda in this world.

She was still alive, still a teenager and still just where she should be.

The only way Veronica was going to be able to find out more, was to look at the photos Logan had taken of the wall.

When she had first seen Logan again, alive and well, she’d been overwhelmed.

One of the reasons Veronica had initially convinced herself that this was real was the fact that he was here and he seemed so, Logan -like.

But now that she had had a chance to take a step back and really watch him, she realized that while he did act like Logan, he also didn’t.

Some of the weirdness was small. Petty almost.

Like his new found punctuality.

Or his new found interest in school.

Or the health kick he seemed to be on. Even after Logan had started to get into weight lifting in college, he had still mostly lived on fries and burgers.

Some of it, Veronica felt almost guilty to have noticed.

Veronica had loved Logan. And she would tell anyone who would listen how sweet, and funny and smart he could be. But he could also be snobby and biting and careless. He got angry and sad and self-destructive. Sometimes, he got into fights and drank too much.

Or did stupid reckless crap to protect the people he loved without thinking about the consequences.

The fact that this Logan had paid someone to track down who had sent that email to Duncan and had followed her on Halloween certainly seemed to fulfill the “reckless crap” part of the equation. But a lot of Logan’s other flaws were somewhat lacking.

That’s not to say that this Logan 2.0 was perfect. He wasn’t. But the flaws that she had always worried about the most, the ones she would have thought would be amplified by Lilly's murder and everything else he had been hit with in the last months, were instead blunted. Or absent.

And Veronica couldn’t figure out a reason why.

Then there were the other things.

A lifetime of surfing had meant that Logan had always been relatively fit, and had given him a languid sort of grace.

But the maneuvers Logan had used on Halloween, to get up over the fence, were not just the product of grace or fitness. They were the product of training.

So was the way Logan had gone through and checked the bungalow after they had found the body.

If Logan had just been acting more mature or less self-destructive than she expected, Veronica might have believed that she had just miscalculated Logan’s response to Lilly’s death.

She might even have toyed with the idea that he was like her --- an older version of himself from a world unlike her own. A world where he’d been given the time to grow up. But aside from that seeming a bit too much like a fantasy, even in a world where there was time travel, Veronica couldn’t imagine any world where Logan would want or need to be trained to clear a building.

If this was some other time traveling version of Logan, he was a version so different from her own, that he might as well be a different person altogether.

She wasn’t ready to confront him either.

If she was wrong and Logan 2.0 was just a sixteen year old Logan reacting against everything he had been through in this world, then asking him if he was a time traveling, body jumping imposter would not only potentially alienate her best chance at an ally in this world, but also quite possibly ruin any chance she had to make sure he didn’t walk straight into the same disasters the Logan in her world had.

If she was right, and this was some strange version of Logan or, worse, not Logan at all then she didn’t want to tip her hand just yet.

She had to be careful about how she acted around him. He was close enough to the Logan she remembered enough of the time, that it would be incredibly easy to let herself forget and let down her guard.

She just had to try and act as much like her sixteen-year-old self as possible.

Or as much like her teenage self as was still possible given how she had already acted on Halloween.

While simultaneously trying to get as much information out of him as possible.

Easy peasy.

Veronica found Logan sitting at what had become their table at lunch, eating something that looked way too healthy to be either take-out or room service.

Whoever (or whatever) was inside Logan, lunch was one time they really weren’t doing the best job of blending in. Not only had Logan not known what most-of the things in his kitchen at home did but Veronica was pretty sure no one should be able to actually cook what Logan was eating using the kitchenettes in the suites at the Grande.

Veronica put her far less healthy school lunch down at the table and slid onto the bench across from Logan.

He smiled.

She felt a flutter in her chest.

If someone other than Logan had hijacked Logan’s body, she was going to rip out their liver and feed it to them while they watched.

Right after she figured out how to get them out of Logan’s body, that is.

For a moment Veronica just watched Logan --- or not-Logan. There was probably some topic she would have been able to casually transition into asking about the photos, but for all the unLogan-like behavior Logan 2.0 had demonstrated, one incredibly Logan-like thing he did do was read her incredibly well. Better than anyone she had known outside of her Logan and Lilly actually.  So instead she decided to just get straight to the point.

“So. When are you going to show me those photos you took of Miss Crazy’s wall?”

Logan’s mouth twitched upwards into a knowing half smile.

“I thought you said you didn’t think the stuff on that wall was real? Why would you want to see them?”

“Someone thought they were real enough to hurt Duncan because of them,” and maybe you too Veronica thought, “It seems like it would be good to know what exactly they say.”

Logan studied her a second, and nodded.

“Fair enough. I don’t know if school or the Sheriff’s house is the best venue to view illicit photos of a crime scene. Could you come by the Grande this afternoon?”

“Okay, first of all, it wasn’t technically a crime scene. At least not until we broke in. Second, I’m expecting snacks. Real snacks, not the leaves and twigs or whatever you’ve been bringing to school lately.”

Veronica studied Logan’s reaction, wondering how he would respond to being called out on one of his new, strange behaviors.

Logan laughed and gave her a fond smile.

She felt those flutters again.

“I promise, anything room service can provide is yours.”

Veronica reminded her flutters that this probably wasn’t really Logan. And if he was really Logan, he wasn't freaking sixteen.

****

The bell rang, and the room was filled with the sound of kids shuffling around, packing up and making their way out to lunch.

Wallace was making his own escape when he heard Mr. Morgan call to him from the front of the room.

“Mr. Fennel? I was hoping to speak to you after class.”

Wallace’s classmates gave him the usual teasing oohs and jokes. Maybe more than usual since Wallace wasn’t normally the type of guy to get asked to stay after class

He wasn’t a nerd or kiss-ass or anything. But he also wasn’t a trouble maker either.

Once everyone else had filtered out, Wallace made his way up to Mr. Morgan’s desk.

“Wallace. I was wondering if you’d given any more thought to my suggestion?” Mr. Morgan asked.

Wallace swallowed.

Mr. Morgan hadn’t been at the school for very long. He’d only taken over Wallace’s science class after Mr. Johnson had been forced to leave for “personal reasons”.

But ever since Mr. Morgan had arrived, he’d kind of been treating Wallace like he was a nerd or a kiss-ass. He’d given Wallace articles on a bunch of different subjects, written way more notes on his assignments than on anyone else’s and tried to get Wallace to join the school’s robotics team.

Wallace was a good student.  He’d never failed so much as a quiz in his life. But he’d realized a long time ago that he was never going to be the kind of student who got their project picked to go to the state science fair either. Those kids tended to have at least one parent with access to a lab. And a lot of free time.

Which made Mr. Morgan’s latest suggestion, that Wallace should enter the science fair this year, even though a project wasn’t required for sophomores, all the weirder.

Wallace wondered if maybe someone had told Mr. Morgan about Wallace’s dad, and he was acting out of pity or something.

When Wallace had been younger, he had loved those videos they made for kids that explain how cars and planes and all sorts of other machines worked.

When he got older, his parents had gotten him one of those kits they have for kids with all the parts to make your own remote-control car or robots for Christmas or his birthday a few times and his dad had helped him put them together. He’d taken Wallace to the Science Center a couple of times, too, when he was able to.

It had been their thing.

After his dad died….

The truth was it wasn’t just after his dad had died, that he had started pulling away from it. Even before that, too many times before that, Wallace had started having other things that felt like it was more important. Friends. Basketball. Girls.

And now, without his dad, he just couldn’t see the point. Not right now at least.

He still wanted to be an engineer when he grew up. But for a little while at least, he needed to take a step back.

“Thank you. Mr. Morgan. I appreciate you looking out for me. But I just don’t think now is a good time.” Wallace told him.

Mr. Morgan frowned, but nodded.

“I understand. You have a lot on your plate right now. I would still like you to look this over,” he said, passing Wallace over yet another article, “I think it would interest you.” Wallace tried to look interested and took the thing. It was something about radios and magnets or maybe radio waves and magnets.

“Thank you.”

Mr. Morgan nodded again. Then he grimaced as if he was in pain, and turned away from Wallace. Wallace looked down and saw that he was using the desk to hold himself up.

“Are you okay? Should I get the nurse?” Wallace asked, worried. Mr. Morgan quickly shook his head.

“No. It’s just a headache. I’ll be fine.” Mr. Morgan then plastered a smile on his face and turned back towards Wallace. “You should go. I’ve taken up more than enough of your lunch already.”

Wallace looked Mr. Morgan over a second. He did not look fine. But he did look stubborn.

Wallace nodded.

“Alright. Thanks again Mr. Morgan. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Wallace turned and walked out the door. Once he was in the hallway, he stopped a second and thought things over. Then he turned and walked towards the nurse’s station.

****

Once it became clear that Logan and his mom would need to spend more than a night or two at the Grande, he had arranged for them to stay in the Presidential Suite.

He hadn’t actually been planning to stay in that suite in particular, actually, but, it had rather ironically ended up being the only large suite available.

It was slightly surreal to be there with his mom.

It was even more strange, in a way, to bring a version of Veronica wearing a fuzzy pink sweater and princess braid up to the same room where he and his Veronica had spent so much of their time.

.

This Veronica looked slightly wide eyed as she walked in and took in the decor.

“This is weird.” She said finally.

“Yeah, I’m not sure what the Landros’ did to the person who designed this room, or why they thought it was a good idea to hire them anyway, but I’m fairly sure it's meant to be some form of revenge.”

“That would imply that they expected the Landros to stay here.” She countered, “It seems more likely the Landros arranged for the décor to be horribly bad themselves to avoid someone Howard Hughes-ing it up. There must be a limit to the amount of time someone can spend staring at those fish without running away screaming.”

Logan managed to keep from flinching at the joke.

“I’d suggest we look at the photos in my room, but it’s just as shiny and fishy as here, just squeezed into a smaller space.”

“Living room, it is, then.”

Veronica had settled onto the couch with her laptop and Logan gave her the camera and cord.  Then he had sat back and simply watched her work for a while.

Logan hadn’t told Veronica his theory that things were missing from the wall. Veronica would be pissed when she found out, but he needed to double check himself. The human brain is hardwired to find patterns. Logan wanted Veronica to confirm that he hadn’t just seen a pattern where there really wasn’t one before they moved forward.

Logan also wanted to see how she worked.

There had been times, right after Halloween, when Logan had thought, even if only for a moment, that this Veronica might be his Veronica.

That his wife--- brilliant, resourceful, stubborn woman that she was ---- had found a way to reach him even though he had yet to find a way to reach forward to her.

But this Veronica had been so emotional and sincere when she had reassured him that his mother would never abandon him, that Logan had eventually dismissed the idea. Veronica was a good liar. But she wouldn’t be able to lie about that. At least not so convincingly.

Since then, however, he had continued to notice other things that were off.

Logan had always prided himself on knowing Veronica. Even when he had used that knowledge to be an absolute jackass to her.

While he didn’t necessarily agree with his Veronica about when, why and how she had changed following Lilly’s death --- there was no denying she had changed. Lilly’s death, his own betrayal, Keith losing his job, Shelly Pomroy’s party and Lianne leaving had all chipped away at Veronica’s beliefs about the world and herself and changed the way she saw both.

This Veronica had only experienced some of those events. Along with some new, and somewhat different kinds of traumas. So, in a way it would make sense that Logan could see in her both pre-Lilly’s death Veronica and bits and pieces of several different versions of Veronica he had known in the years since.

The problem was, that which bits and pieces were present in this Veronica didn’t quite fit together right or make sense.

Watching Veronica work through the evidence from the wall added another piece to the puzzle.

In the months after Keith had lost his job, when he was trying to get Mars investigation up and running, and Veronica had become his assistant, Keith had given Veronica some training.  But not a lot. Far less than Logan thought he should have, given what Veronica ended up doing at Mars Investigation, if he was honest.

What that had meant, was that Veronica had essentially taught herself how to be a detective. She had listened to the advice Keith had given her, and she had watched what he actually did and then she had started to take on her own cases and slowly built her own unique way of thinking about them and working through them.  She created her own technique, one which she had carried with her all the way into adulthood.

This Veronica acted like Veronica. She acted like a weird kaleidoscope mixture of the various different versions of Veronica he had known over the years, but she still acted like Veronica.

She also quite clearly knew how to work through a case.

But she didn’t work through a case the way his Veronica would have.

This Veronica hadn’t taught herself how to be a detective.

Chapter Text

Veronica had a song stuck in her head. One of those annoying earworms that are so overplayed that, years later, all it takes is hearing a bit of the melody or a certain phrase for it to start playing again on a loop.

In this case, Logan (or possibly not-Logan) had said something to trigger it as she was leaving his suite the night he had shown her the photographs of Amanda’s crazy wall. Veronica can’t even remember what it was that he said now, but by the time she had reached the elevator BOOM there was the song, playing on repeat.

She’d tried every trick she could think of to get it out of her head. She even tried to look it up online in the desperate hope that listening to it all the way through might push it out of her head. Or at least mean she the whole song would be stuck in her head, instead of just one or two lines recycled over and over.

The search, or more accurately its complete lack of results, just led her to realize that the song probably wasn’t even written yet.

God, she hoped she wasn’t going to have a single verse of some stupid song stuck in her head for the next five plus years.

She had tried to drown it out with the radio while she waited for Logan/ Not-Logan, to get out of cross-country practice to no avail. He had been car-less since Halloween, so Veronica had taken to waiting after dance squad so she could drive them both to the Grande.

Veronica told herself that she was just observing him. Monitoring his movements. Trying to get a read on who he really was and what she was dealing with.

The truth was --- she enjoyed it. For all the ways that this “Logan” wasn’t Logan, he still acted enough like Logan that it was deceptively comfortable to be near him.

So comfortable, in fact, that after she had driven them both to the Grande and they had spread out on the swallowed, was ugly, overpriced, Neptune Grande couch to work on homework, she had started, unintentionally, hum under her breath.

And then Logan had started to hum along with her.

Admittedly, calling what he was doing humming might have been a bit generous. Of the many many things Logan was good at singing --- and humming ---- wasn’t among them.

But however bad his humming was, it was still absolutely, clearly, the same song.

The realization of what that meant shocked Veronica into silence

That was when Logan / Not-Logan turned to her with a knowing smile.

“You know, I think we have at least another five years that comes out, and anyone else ends up with it stuck in their heads.”

There were dozens of ways Veronica could have reacted to that statement that would have made perfect, logical sense.

Maybe it was because, even though she had the memories of a twenty-nine-year-old, they were being processed through a sixteen-year old’s brain. 

Maybe it was just because it was (possibly) Logan and he made her thought processes go wonky at any age.

Because she didn’t choose any of them.

Instead she jumped up off the coach, reached into her bag, and pulled out the taser she had convinced her dad to give her after the explosion --- then brandished it towards Probably-Not-Logan.

“Who are you?”

Not-Logan stared up at her in bewilderment.

“Wait.” He said, “Wait. You’re obviously a time traveler since you know that song. And you’re obviously Veronica because --- you’re just obviously Veronica. But when I tell you I’m a time traveler too --- you’re first thought is that I’m not Logan.”

“You don’t act like Logan.” She told him.

His whole body tensed up. But his tone was disappointed, rather than angry.

“Why? Because I’m not a giant ball of anger and jackassery.”

“No.” She answered quickly. Honestly. “You…” Veronica rifled through all the evidence she had gathered in her mind, looking for the smoking gun she had known was there only a few seconds ago.

“You like to eat skinless chicken breasts.” …. And clearly not finding it. Not-Logan's expression changed back to slightly bewildered again.

Rallying, Veronica stared down squarely at Not-Logan.

“You don’t doodle in your notes.” She told him more confidently. “Your mannerisms are different. You don’t talk with your hands.” Her Logan, the real Logan had talked with his whole body, “You’re a morning person. A punctual morning person. You care about homework, and say Sir to my Dad.” Even her father had thought that was weird. He liked it, but still. Weird. “You trusted someone you don’t even know to track down the email that nearly killed Duncan. You avoid all our old friends.” Well, other than Dick. At least until Dick started avoiding them. “And…” She concluded. “And you know how to clear a building.”

With each item on her list, the tension in Not-Logan’s body melted away slightly. By the time she added her last, and to her mind the most damning addition, he was entirely relaxed and looking at her with a strange mixture of understanding and sadness.

“How long has it been since you’ve talked to the Logan in your timeline?” He asked quietly.

Veronica’s jaw clenched.

“What?” She bit out.

“How long has it been since you’ve talked to your Logan?” He said again, still keeping his voice low and annoyingly gentle. “Because the person you seem to be expecting? He sounds a lot like me at nineteen.”

Veronica’s stomach dropped and she felt a flare of panic in her chest. She stepped slightly closer, keeping the taser out in front of her.

“Tell me something only Logan would know.” She asked quickly. “Something only, he could know.”

Logan watched her a second then before answering.

“The first time we met. You were wearing your soccer uniform.”

“Something that you couldn’t get just from looking through his memories.” She said, and gestured toward Not-Logan’s head.

“You want me to tell you something only I would know, but not something that I would know now. And you want me to do it without knowing anything about the timeline you’re from or even when you’re from.” He said evenly

“Yes.” Because that was what she needed. Because if she was going to let herself believe that this was really Logan. To let her believe that some variation managed to survive when hers didn’t. She needed to be sure.

Not-Logan shook his head in disbelief.

“I don’t know what kind of Veronica you were expecting,” She snapped, “but I’m not some gullible girl.”  Not anymore. “If I’m going to trust you, I need proof.”

Not-Logan studied her for a moment, again, then shrugged slightly. Like he was telling himself that he should have expected this. Then he let out a sigh.

“When you were seven you took a lobster out of the tank at Chart House.”

“My Dad tells that story, a lot.” She reminded – told him.

“Yeah, but he lets people think you did it because you felt sorry for the lobster. Really you were hoping you could use it to scare Brittany Campbell, who was sitting three tables down.”

Veronica gave him a glare in response to let him know that this was nowhere near enough to convince her.

Even if it was true.

“Okay.” He said slowly, “A few weeks before Lilly died, you both snuck into the back room of the police station and made fake I.D.’s. You got them a few days after her death but you were too upset to look at them, so it wasn’t until a few months later that you realized you had accidently switched the photos.”

Except of course Lilly --- her Lilly--- hadn’t been dead. Instead she had laughed when Veronica had shown her the mix-up and told Veronica that they looked so much alike no one would notice anyway.

“I said something only Logan would know.” Veronica ground out, “Not a run-down of my youthful antics.”

“Well. There is this spot, on your neck, behind your ear. You’ve said I was the only one who could ever find it. There’s this thing with my tongue…”

“Something only Logan would know.” She interrupted quickly. “Not anyone I’ve ever made out with.”

Logan shot her a disbelieving look. Maybe that look alone should have been enough to prove he really was Logan. He was certainly cocky enough.

Possibly-Logan paused for a moment, after that, thinking. Then he took another long breath and gave her his next attempt.

“You talk about wanting to go to student art shows and film festivals but at the end of the day you’d much rather stay home and watch the South Park movie, or The Big Lebowski. Your favorite ice cream flavors are mint chocolate and butter pecan but you eat more vanilla than either because you think it tastes better in sundaes and on waffles. Your dad loves old, detective movies but if you give him a choice, he’ll rent Slapshot every time. You went through a phase where you loved The Virgin Suicides but after Lilly died, you were never able to watch it until the end again because even through Kirsten Dunst looks nothing like Lilly, Lux still reminded you of her too much.…”

Veronica’s arm slowly relaxed as he continued, listing off everything from the way she took her coffee, to her preferred brand of tampons, to the song she was mostly likely to sing while drunk. There were other things too. Opinions. Secrets. Things that he could only have known if he had been told by her. Things her Logan hadn’t even known.

It still shouldn’t have been enough.

There was nothing that screamed “Logan”; just tiny tidbits of information about her. And while there were those few things that could only have come from her, most of it could have easily been gleaned --- or at least guessed --- from social media, amazon lists or just simply watching her.

Some of it wasn’t even true.

(All of it would have been in a world where Lilly was dead).

But the way he said it – the mixture of fondness and confidence. The familiarity. The hints of affectionate frustration.

And just the sheer number of little tidbits.

He was either an amazingly successful stalker and good guesser, or he was someone who knew her very well. Someone she had let into her life entirely. And who had been a part of her life for a long time. Someone who knew her even better than she did herself sometimes.

There were only two people she could imagine could know her that well.

And he wasn’t Lilly.

“Those are all things about me.” She told him quietly.

Logan shrugged.

“Since you didn’t tell me anything about your timeline, the only things I could think of that would be the same were likes and dislikes. And my likes and dislikes between sixteen and nineteen weren’t really all that different ---with the obvious and rather fundamental exception that I fell in love with yo-,” He grimaced slightly and corrected himself. “That I fell in love with my Veronica.”

Veronica let her arm drift all the way down to rest at her side.

That wasn’t true. Not in her world. Her Logan at nineteen had been fundamentally different from Logan at sixteen in so many ways that did not involve her at all. But if she actually had to quantify those differences in a concise list? She could admit she’d probably be at a loss too.

Veronica walked back over to the couch and carefully sat down next to Logan. She felt drained in a way that had nothing to do with the physical.

“Wait, that's it?” He asked. He might have been blindsided by the fact she had doubted his identity, but he also clearly did not expect her to give up on her theory so quickly.

Which was really just more proof of how well he knew her.

She didn’t quite believe it herself. She’d tried to imagine who Logan might have become when he grew up. If he’d had a chance to really grow up. She’d tried to imagine, so many times, how she could have given him that chance.

She wasn’t being given that second chance. Not here. Instead she was faced with someone who’d already saved themselves, and who had turned into someone she only partially recognized in the process.

All Veronica could offer him was a shrug.

“You pretty much had me with the tongue thing.” She lied. “But I didn’t want to have to include that little tidbit if we ever had to retell the story to anyone. I didn’t know you would then go and get all sappy on me.”

She allowed herself to sink slightly into the couch, and leaned over resting her forehead on her knees before asking quietly,

“What do we do now?”

Logan didn’t say anything for a minute or so. Then he put out his hand for her to shake.

“Hi. I’m Lieutenant Logan Echolls. Former Naval Aviator. Current Naval Intelligence officer. In April of 2021 I went out to move my wife’s car so it wouldn’t be ticketed while we were packing for our honeymoon, and the next thing, I remember I was waking up in October 2003.”

There was just so much Veronica wanted to unpack in those sentences.

“You’re married?” Veronica said.

Logan’s face took on a slightly goofy expression and Veronica felt a pang of jealousy.

“It took five years of living together and one rejected proposal but I finally got yo--- my Veronica to make an honest man of me.”  The goofy look lingered for another moment before it turned into a frown. “And then I ended up here.”

The pang was replaced by something that felt more like someone had punched through her chest, then squeezed. She swallowed and forced the feeling away.

“When, here, exactly?” She asked, softly.

“The weekend before Lilly’s funeral.” He said quietly. Then gave a small humorless chuckle. “So pretty much, right after it would have been useful.”

Veronica sat, taking this in.

“Lilly died in your timeline.” She said finally.

“Yes.” He said carefully. “Didn’t she…. Is she…?”

“The last thing I remember before I got here, it was 2016 and Lilly coming over to celebrate a breakthrough in a project she was working on.” She told him. She waited a second, letting him absorb that. Then she took a breath and added. “On October 3, in my world. It was your ---it was Aaron that died.”

There was another long pause. Then he asked,

“How?”

The question took her by surprise. Given what she now knew about Aaron in her own world --- and given what Aaron had apparently done in both this world and presumably Logan’s, she hadn’t really expected him to care.

There was something… something floating around in the back of her head. I thought that was just beginning to form that made her hesitate to answer.

Luckily for her, she was saved from having to by the sound of someone trying to open the door to the suite.

She and Logan jumped apart like… well like a couple of teenagers doing something they didn’t want to get caught doing. Just something a lot more fun than what they had actually been doing.

A moment later a bell-hop appeared dragging a cart heavily laden with shopping bags from Neptune’s most exclusive stores.

Behind him drifted in Lynn Echolls.

Veronica suddenly realized just how lucky she was that Lynn hadn’t arrived a few minutes earlier.

“Logan.” Lynn said warmly, “Veronica!”

Veronica felt a twinge of what some might say was well earned guilt, given that Veronica had been holding a taser on the son of the woman who had just enthusiastically greeted her a few minutes ago. Logan gave his mother an almost doting smile as he watched the bell-hop struggle to turn the cart and drag it into Lynn’s bedroom.

“Picked up a couple of things?” He said. Lynn rolled her eyes.

“Everything I own smells of smoke, Logan. If there was ever a time when buying a new wardrobe is justified, it's now.”

“Oh, I’m not judging.” He told her. “I’m just wondering if getting it all in one trip was such a good idea. I think your helper over there might have to file a workers comp claim after he hobbles out of the room.”

Lynn gave a dismissive gesture, then walked over to fuss slightly over her son.

“I picked up some things for you too.”  She told him, picking at his t-shirt.

Logan shrugged, looking slightly embarrassed.

“You didn’t need to do that.” He said, “All I really need is a few t-shirts and jeans.”

Lynn rolled her eyes again. Throwing her hands up in mock surrender. Then shot Veronica a look as if to say “Boys!”

By then, the bell-hop finally had managed to wheel the overladen cart into the room, and returned to the living room area. He gave a sharp cough to draw Lynn’s attention.

“Oh, yes, of course.” She said, then proceeded to give him a very generous tip., making sure to catch Logan’s eye as she did so. After receiving his tip, the bell-hop hurried out of the room, clearly hoping Lynn wouldn’t suddenly change her mind and either take back some of the cash. Or decide she needed to bring anything else to the room.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to your studies. Sorry for the intrusion.” Lynn told them before wafting away into her bedroom.

Once Lynn was safely ensconced in her room, Veronica turned to Logan.

“Maybe we should wait and continue this conversation someplace where we are less likely to be interrupted by parents or hotel staff?” She suggested.

Logan seemed to study her once again, then looked up towards the door to his mother’s room.

“Sure.” He said tightly.

****

“Mr. Fennel.” Principal Hinkley gave Wallace an overly pleasant smile. “Thank you for coming.”

It was the first time the Principal had ever spoken to him, as far as Wallace could remember. It was a big school. Most of the kids hadn’t seen the man outside of assemblies, let alone spoken with him personally.

At least not unless they had gotten themselves either in serious trouble, or the opposite of serious trouble.

“Well, you are the principal.” Wallace said, “I don’t think I’m allowed to refuse.”

Principal Hinkley gave a strained chuckle, and Wallace relaxed a bit. Apparently, he’d succeeded in hitting the goldilocks zone between funny and respectful.

“Well, yes. I suppose I am.” Hinkley said. But after a moment, his face shifted from mildly amused to something more sober. “First I wanted to let you know you aren’t in trouble.”

Wallace suspected that was meant to be reassuring. It really wasn’t.

“Second, I wanted to commend you for your quick-thinking last week.” Hinkley continued, “You saved Mr. Morgan’s life when you told the Nurse about his illness.”

The words should have made Wallace feel good, but Hinkley’s voice had taken on a tone that had become way too familiar to Wallace over the last few months.

It was the tone adults took on when they were about to deliver bad news.

Hinkley cleared his throat. 

“Unfortunately.” He said, “We were informed this morning that Mr. Morgan had had a second stroke. He passed away last night.”

The words hit Wallace harder than he expected. Harder than he would have thought they should. He hadn’t known Mr. Morgan very long. And it wasn’t like he wasn’t dealing with another, far deeper, far more painful loss already.

He hadn’t really thought he had any more grief to spare if he was honest.

Apparently, he was wrong.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Wallace forced out.

Principal Hinkley nodded and pushed the raw discomfort he had shown a moment ago firmly hidden again behind a standard, practiced, show of regret.

“Yes. We all are.” He said. “We are planning to make an announcement during homeroom. But I thought, given your connection with Mr. Morgan, I should tell you personally, beforehand.”

“Thank you.” Wallace told him. Principal Hinkley nodded again.

“The student counselor is, of course, here for you to speak to.” He told Wallace. “In fact, I would greatly encourage you to do so.”

“Thank you, but – I’m fine.” Wallace told him.

There was an awkward moment, where Wallace got the impression Principal Hinkley thought he was obligated to say something else now that his plan to shuffle Wallace off into the counsel’s office had been derailed.

“Well. If you change your mind, the counselor will always be available to you.” He told Wallace. There was another uncomfortable beat, before Hinkley said. “I suppose I should let you get to class.”

Wallace understood the dismissal for what it was, and after another awkward nod, headed out to do just that.

****

Of all the many ways he had imagined Veronica might react to the fact he was (also) from the future, accusing him of being an imposter and threatening him with a taser hadn’t been among them.

Although, in retrospect that was probably an oversight. The taser part at least. Veronica did like her taser.

He had thought she might run away, or deny she was a time traveler. Maybe act like he was crazy or just simply avoid him for a few days. Or weeks.

Veronica not believing that he was him though? That had come out of left field.

But after thinking over what little this Veronica had revealed about her own timeline, it made a weird sort of sense.

The reason Logan had known that this Veronica wasn’t the one who should be here wasn’t just that he knew his Veronica well. It was because he had known her during the different stages that had made her her.

He’d known Pre-Lilly’s death trying-to-fit-in Veronica, prickly-loner-with-a-marshmallow-center Veronica, normal-is-the-watchword Veronica, artsy- college-student Veronica, and finally pricklier adult why-did-choosing-what-I-want-not-magically-make-me-happy-and-solve-all-my-problems Veronica.  He had even met-of-course-I want-to-be-a-corporate-lawyer Veronica although, thankfully, only for a few days.

This Veronica, though, seems to have only really known one version of her Logan. And it was a version that he hadn’t been in a very long time.

If the situation had been reversed, if he had only known pre-Lilly’s death Veronica, would he have still recognized his Veronica as the same person? Would he have still seen parts of the girl he had known in the adult version? He’d like to think so. But could he really say for certain that he wouldn’t have been just as blindsided as this Veronica had been by finding someone so different wearing such a familiar face? He’s not sure he can.

“So. That’s a healthy lunch.” Veronica said haltingly, gesturing towards the leftovers he had brought to school for lunch. They were sitting at their table in the lunch area. Alone. With each other. “Is that a Navy thing? The healthy food?”

That was another thing that had come out of left field. They seemed to be even more tense and awkward with each other now than when they were both hiding their anachronistic origins.

“They did like us to keep in tip top shape.” He told her. “But I also came to realize that I like to keep in tip top shape.”

Which was true. It was just the simplified, sanitized version.

The version that skipped over why he liked to know what his body was capable of and needed to know that that included being able to protect himself and those he cared about.

The version that skipped over all the various, far less healthy ways he had sought out for a rush before he discovered a runner’s high or tried to find peace before he learned to work out his anger with a hard gym session (or a hard therapy session). 

The version you’d tell someone on a first date. Not that this was a first date. It was more like two childhood friends trying to reconnect after not seeing each other since they were teens. And when at least one had undergone multiple life changing and traumatic events in the interim.

Veronica nodded at his simplified answer and went back to playing with her own school lunch.

“I could make enough for two next time, if you want to skip having another hot dog or the school’s cardboard pizza someday.” He told her.

“Oh God. No.” She told him. “I like to keep the fat and sugar in my lunch, just as it was intended, thank you.”

He couldn’t hold back a bit of a chuckle.

“I know.” He said. Veronica frowned slightly.

“Right. Of course, you do.” Then she went back to moving things around on her plate.

That’s when Logan realized he had miscalculated. Because they weren’t really just old friends reunited after many years. He was someone who knew her (or at least a version of her) far better than she knew him. And Veronica --- his Veronica, and quite possible any Veronica, ---hated to be at a disadvantage when it came to information.

Of course, this Veronica did have plenty of information that he didn’t have, too. She just didn’t seem particularly eager to share some of it. Some of it also, probably wasn’t the kind of thing they should be discussing in the middle of the lunch area of Neptune High, Veronica had mentioned Lilly through.

“You said you were celebrating something with Lilly? Right before you got here? A new project?” He asked. “What did she --- Where did she end up. As an adult.” Remembering where they were, he added, “Where would she have ended up.”

Veronica paused in her chewing, and he wondered if he had miscalculated again.   Lilly’s death in this timeline was still incredibly fresh for this Veronica. Even if her Lilly was presumably still alive and well somewhere in a different timeline. After a moment, though, Veronica got this little smile on her face. It was the same one he had seen occasionally on his own Veronica.

Her Lilly smile.

“She --- she’s Lilly.” Veronica said. “She went to Vassar. She still hops from one relationship to another. She said, giving him a knowing look. “She still loves being the center of attention.” She shook her head. “And she would do anything for her friends or her brother.”

 Veronica stared off slightly.

“But she’s matured too. She found something to channel all that fabulousness into that’s productive.” Veronica seemed lost in thought for a second. “She started her own company. A tech company, actually. And she’s good at it. Like really good.” She glanced over at him, as if she was expecting some kind of objection or disbelief. “I’m not saying having Jake Kane as her dad didn’t help her get it off the ground in the beginning, but she’s the one with the ideas. And she made it thrive.”

Logan felt a mixture of affection and something suspiciously like pride bloom in his chest.  He wasn’t sure he had any right to be proud of this other Lilly. But he was.

“Good for Lilly.” He said finally. 

“Yeah.” Veronica said slowly.

They went back to focusing on their respective lunches then. But this time, the silence was just a little less awkward.

Finally, Logan decided to try and bridge that silence.

“I think I have an idea of where we could hash things out.” Logan told her.

“Really?” Veronica sounded surprised.

“Really.” He said gently. “But there are a few things that need to be taken care of first.  Would you mind making a stop on our way home?”

“Well, that depends.” She said, comfortably shifting into banter mode, “The LeBaron is a temperamental beast. He doesn’t like to stray too far from home.”

“It’s local, I promise. I just wanted to replace some of my school supplies.” He told her. “And I thought I could order a couple of white boards, too. For our purposes.” 

Veronica raised her eyebrow questioning.

“You do know how small my back seat is, right?”

Logan smiled.

“Don’t worry. I’m just going to pick them out and have them delivered.”

“Well then,” Veronica told him. “I guess we’re going shopping.”

****

Wallace found himself in his room a couple days later reading over the last article Mr. Morgan had given him. It seemed like as good a way as any to honor the man’s memory.

It was interesting. He didn’t think most of the rest his classmates would probably agree. But it was. It also had nothing to do with anything that they had been learning in class. It was just a bunch of stuff about radio interference and the earth’s magnetic field. Which left Wallace wondering why Mr. Morgan had given it to him.

He had just turned to page four of the article, when he noticed that something had been scribbled on the back side of the previous page. A letter and a few numbers. It reminded him of the numbers on the lockers at school, actually.

Flipping back, Wallace realized that all of the back-sides of the previous pages were blank. Which was a little weird. The school was usually pretty strict about keeping costs down and having everything be double sided.

He flipped forward. The back of the next page was blank except for some handwritten numbers too. This time, though, there were six numbers, and no letters or anything else to give him a clue what the numbers might be.

Wallace flipped through the rest of the article, then, looking at the reverse sides of each page. None of them had writing on them. There was, though, two words written on the front side of the last page, just after the end of the article: Wallace please.

Wallace wasn’t a handwriting expert or anything, but it looked like Mr. Morgan’s writing.

It was also a bit creepy if he was honest.

Wallace flipped back, again, to the page with the unknown string numbers, and stared at them for a while.

There were too few to be a telephone number. A date, maybe? It could work if you thought of it as three two-digit numbers instead of six one digits.

Wallace nearly rolled his eyes out of his head, when it hit him.

The first page had a locker number.

The next page had six numbers or three two-digit numbers.

In other words, exactly the right number to be a locker combination.

****

Veronica was less than thrilled when Logan had asked her to drop him off at his old house after they went shopping.

“You aren’t going to go risking your life to get some old notebooks and your collection of orange t-shirts, are you?”

“I promise. I will stay far away from the structurally unsound parts of the compound. Even if I see my nylon orange pants just hanging there, begging to be rescued.”

Veronica had given him a skeptical look, but she still dropped him and his bag of office supplies off without too many further questions.

He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. A Veronica, who didn’t ask questions, was unpredictable.

Cassidy’s attempt to kill him had included both an explosion, and a fire involving the somewhat scary amount of flammable materials that for unknown reasons had been stored in the garage.

Even so, it had still only managed to damage a chunk of the main house and the garage.

It had really put into perspective just much work Weevil and his fellow PCHers had had to put into burning down such a large swath of the Echolls’ compound in the original timeline.

Logan, of course, wouldn’t have wanted to live in the pool house. Given the choice, huddling under the shade structure near the tennis courts or camping out in the cabana thing with a roof made of palm leaves would have been preferable. In an El Nino year.

But the pool house was one building that he had some claim of ownership to and which no one was living in, no one was working in and no one was technically supposed to even be anywhere near. And that, practically speaking, made it kind of perfect for what he and Veronica needed.

It wasn’t as if they would be using the bedroom. Just the rec room next to it. And Logan could do that.

So, after Veronica had dropped him off, he slowly transformed the rec room into something like a war room. He also may have gone a bit overboard.

He had originally planned to just buy a couple of white boards to plan things out on. And he had bought two rolling white board when he was at the store with Veronica.  But he had also ended up buying a bunch of string, a rainbow cornucopia of post-its and a new printer among other things.

At first, he had just stretched out four lines of string along the walls ---one for each of the timelines that they knew of --- and marked out the next five years or so on each.

Susan’s death had seemed like a good stopping point. There had been a bit of a break in the usual death and destruction in Neptune afterward. At least among the people he was closest to.

He had already made a list of the things that he wanted to change or look out for in this timeline, so it seemed like a natural step to copy each of those events from his notebooks to their own individual blue post-it and put them up at the correct point along his timeline’s string.

As a bonus, once he had actually seen everything all laid out, he had been able to remember some other things that hadn’t been on his original list and put them up too.

There were a lot of post-its on his line. And a lot of them were clustered together at the beginning and ending of school years; he was pretty sure that wasn’t the way major life events were supposed to cluster like that outside of seasonal television shows.

From there, it had seemed like a logical next step to enlarge and print-out the photos he had taken from Jane Doe’s wall, and pin those to the appropriate places on her timeline.

On Veronica’s timeline he had only been able to put up one, bright pink post-it, marking Aaron’s death on October 3, 2003.

And then, finally, their own, current timeline had become dotted with post-its for things he knew he had directly changed (jack-ass orange), things he suspected the Jane Doe or her accomplices had changed (highlighter yellow) and things which were different from his own timeline but that he had no clue why they had changed (green).

He’d reserved purple for those things Veronica had changed. But he had also bought up pretty much every color of post-it available at the store, so if this Veronica turned out not to be a pink or purple fan, she had plenty of options.

Having everything all laid out in front of him hadn’t just helped him remember make a few connections and remember some events he had originally forgotten through. It had also made him realize how much he was going to have to tell this Veronica.

And just how much of that he was terrified of telling her.

Things that he still was amazed that his Veronica had ever forgiven him for.

Veronica’s instinct when she was afraid ---- or at least she was afraid of something involving emotions or relationships --- was to run.  Which was more than a little ironic given that her instinct when she was afraid of pretty much anything else was to run towards it.

Logan’s instinct, however, was to hide. Again, not physically. At least not since he was a little boy. But to hide whatever it was he thought would get him in trouble.

Years of loving Veronica had taught him just how counterproductive that instinct was. Years of therapy had doubled down on that lesson, and taught him ways of dealing with it.

But the instinct was still there.  And as he had stared at the wall he had created, at the post-its he had already put up, and at empty spaces between them where he didn’t need to put anything (but maybe he should), it was screaming in his ears.

****

Wallace came early to school the next morning.  Even though he had tried his best to make sure no one was around, he still felt jumpy as he stood in front of the locker from Mr. Morgan’s note.

After reassuring himself that this, for whatever reason, seemed to be what Mr. Morgan had wanted him to do, he put in the locker combination Mr. Morgan had left.

The lock popped open.

Inside was a bag of stuff that reminded Wallace of some sort of supersized version of radio kits he and his dad had worked on when he was a kid. Underneath it were several, slightly worn, spiral notebooks.

Wallace just stared at the weird collection of stuff. Was he really going to do this? Just take stuff from an unknown locker because of some numbers he thought had been written by a teacher.? A teacher that was now dead?

Wallace thought of how insistent Mr. Morgan had been when he had pushed that last article into his hand.

After a few breaths of indecision, he reached into the locker and grabbed the bag and notebooks and stuffed them all into his backpack.

Then he quickly closed the locker and lock, and made sure he was nowhere near them by the time anyone else started showing up.

****

“Duncan? I’m home.” Celeste had only been out for an hour or two. Just long enough for a Pilates class and a brief look at a couple of shops.

She hadn’t really wanted to leave Duncan by himself, but she had had the class on her calendar since they had arrived in Napa. And she had needed it badly.

Needed just a little self-care. A little time out of the house. A small chance to talk to someone other than Jake, Duncan or the staff.

Of course, when she had planned it, she hadn’t thought Duncan would be alone.

But Jake had just had to take the private jet back to Neptune for an emergency at work on the one day during the week she had plans

“Honey?”

Celeste wondered if she’d still be able to smell the scent of the "emergency’s" perfume on him when he came back. Or would he actually use his “big brain” this time and shower and change first. 

“Duncan?”

Duncan’s doctors at Neptune General had initially told Celeste that Duncan’s latest seizure hadn’t caused any long-term damage, and that he would be ready to come home after a day or so of observation.

Duncan’s doctors at Neptune General were idiots.

Almost immediately after Duncan turned on the television in his room for the first time, he began to have repeated absence seizures.

He would stare off into space for several seconds, often squinting repeatedly, before blinking several times. Sometimes he would mumble something. Then he would continue on as if nothing had happened. At least for a few minutes.

Duncan had previously had absence seizures, but they had never happened as frequently before. And he had never had them be triggered the way these seemed to be.

The doctors had put on a show of doing a new battery of tests but in the end, after everything they’d put Duncan through, they had been just as clueless as they were before.

Every time Duncan tried to watch television, or work on a computer the seizures would start up again, irregularly happening every few minutes.

Obviously, the doctors in Neptune didn’t know what they were doing, so Celeste had arranged for Duncan to be seen up in San Francisco.

They had done yet another round of tests.

And they hadn’t been able to come up with any better answers than s the incompetent idiots at Neptune General.

They manipulated his medications. They had monitored his sleep schedule and diet. And then they sent him home with instruction to avoid anything with a screen until they could find more tests to run.

In an attempt to accomplish this nearly impossible task, Celeste had decided to bring Duncan home to their Napa house. It was closer to UCSF and, if these doctors proved to be as inept as the ones in Neptune, it was less than a two-hour drive to Stanford. On a good day at least.

She had had the staff remove all of televisions, computers and other electronics before they arrived.

Or rather, she had had all the staff remove most of the computers. Jake had insisted that if he was to spend any time with them at the Napa House, he would need to keep his study intact so he could work remotely. 

He had, of course, then spent all his time in his study since they had arrived. Until today. When he left.

Without television, video games or his computer Duncan had been spending most of his time either in his room or by the pool. But today Celeste didn’t see him around either.

She slowly looked through the rest of rooms until all that was left was the one room that Duncan had been specifically told not to enter.

Honestly, she probably should have just started there.

Jake’s study had a lock on it, but like all of the interior locks it had an access hole on the handle, so the door could be opened from the outside.  It had been designed to make sure one of the children couldn’t lock themselves in by accident.

Lilly, of course, had learned how to use the hole to unlock the doors herself while she was still barely old enough to reach the handle.

Celeste tracked down one of the maids and ordered her to use a paperclip to open the lock.

Afterwards, when Celeste first looked inside, the room had seemed just as empty as the others. However, when she walked inside and made her way around the hideously oversized desk Jake had insisted on buying, she found Duncan laying on the floor behind it.

He wasn’t convulsing --- thank God --- but he was on his back and his eyes were wide open. Staring.

For a moment Celeste flashbacked to finding Lilly.

Even more than the blood, it was the stillness that was terrifying.

Lilly was never still.

Celeste shook the memory off.

Duncan was still breathing.

Celeste kneeled down next to him.

“Duncan?” There was no response.

Celeste looked up. The maid was hovering a few feet away from them.

“What are you doing you stupid girl! Call 911.” 

****

Veronica was surprised, to say the least, when Logan suggested that they use his pool house as their home base.

.

But if he could stomach being in that building, then she could too.

Given the amount of damage to the front of the house --- and the still clinging presence of paparazzi --- Logan had instructed her to park around the back of the compound. Unlike before, however, he helped her over the fence with him.

It felt strange, walking around Logan’s backyard. Being in a place she knew so well, when it was so oddly empty.

And slightly charred around the edges. At least towards the front.

Logan hesitated a moment at the door of the pool house. But only a moment.

“Ta da.” He said, throwing the door opening with a flourish that she would have expected from her Logan, not this one.

Veronica walked in, and let her eyes adjust a moment as she took in the room. And the giant color-coded wall of post-its inside.

“Awww, you made us our own crazy murderer board.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Veronica realized that this Logan may not have taken them the way she intended. When she glanced over at him, though, he was wearing a familiar smirk.

“I will admit that our Jane Doe inspired me a little.” He told her. “Although I was kind of going for something a little less crazy and a little less murder-y.”

Veronica bit her lip.

“Amanda Willard.”

He gave her a questioning look.

“The woman we found in the Bungalow” Veronica explained. “Her name was Amanda Willard. In my world she worked for Lilly as a coder.”

 Logan seemed lost in thought for a moment before quietly asking,

“Lilly didn’t ….” He stopped a minute, searching for the right words. “She didn’t do something to her, did she? I know Jake didn’t exactly do the right thing by some of his employees when he was starting out.”.”

Veronica crossed her arms over her chest and frowned.

“No.” She told him, curtly. “As far as I know Lilly hasn’t done anything to her employees that would lead them to seek vengeance by going to an alternate world and trying to kill her brother.”.

“I had to ask.” Logan said with a shrug. Veronica deflated somewhat. She would have asked the same question she realized.

“Anyway, Amanda was our age in my world.” She told him. “And when I had my dad look her up in this world there was still an Amanda Willard who was alive and in high school where she should be.” Veronica shook her head. “So, I have no idea how she could also be the body in that Bungalow.”

Logan nodded, then reached back and grabbed a large box.  He opened it up and offered it to her. Inside, was neatly stacked were post-its in what she was fairly sure was every color available for sale on the west coast.

“You should write down what you know about Amanda. Put it up on your line.”

Veronica raised her eyebrow and gave him an “you’ve got to be kidding” look.

“You don’t have to use neon pink.” He told her. Right. Because that was the weird thing. He offered up the box again

Veronica let out a huff, and grabbed the box. After digging through, she finally pulled out a stack of post-its that was closer to the color of a pink of an eraser rather than pink highlighter and wrote down what little she knew about Amanda on it.

“Where should I put it?” She asked, “I didn’t meet her until after college.” Logan got up and moved some games that were stacked up in front of the wall running perpendicular to where “her” world’s line of string was stretched out.

“Here?” He suggested. He thought for a moment and added. “And we should probably put information about the days we traveled back from here too.”

Veronica carefully stuck her post-up up on the suggested space.  She wrote out what little she remembered from right before she was sent back, on another post-it down, and put that one up too.

Afterwards, she took a step back and examined the wall(s) again.

“You know, I was wrong. This is very well organized.” She told him. “And color coded. Not crazy at all. I take it this is the result of your time in the military?” She would have expected something a little more… free flowing from her own Logan.

Logan actually looked slightly embarrassed.

“It may have played a part.” He said, “But it was more a panic response, honestly.” His voice got rawer, “You. My mom. You both nearly died because someone weaponized information that I should have remembered from my own timeline and been prepared for. I’m not going to let something like that happen again.”

Veronica turned over what Logan said in her head a moment.

“Beaver tried to kill you in your world too?” She said quietly.

Logan shook his head, then walked up to the wall and tapped his knuckles on a post-it placed just where the summer between Junior and Sophomore year would be.

“In my timeline, two of Woody’s other victims came to Cassidy and asked him to help expose Woody.” Logan swallowed, took a step further along the line, and tapped another post-it, this one at the beginning of senior year. “Cassidy put a bomb on a bus they were both driving back from a field trip on, sending it off a cliff.” He took a deep breath. “Eight people died. Then, a few months later, when my Veronica figured out that Cassidy was the one who caused the crash, he blew up a plane she thought Keith was on in front of her and tried to kill her too.” Logan swallowed again. “I was lucky. I got to the roof at the right moment and distracted Cassidy, so Veronica was able to grab his gun.” He turned towards her suddenly. “She didn’t shoot him. But he jumped off the building.”

Veronica took this in.

“Wait, a few months? You did this when you both were still in high school?”

Logan gave her a watery smile.

“Graduation night.”

Veronica shook her head automatically.

“That is not how our graduation night went.”

“Good.” He told her quietly. “It’s certainly not how I hoped ours would go.”

Logan held her gaze a second. Then she looked away.

“Are any of our other friends secretly psychotic mass murderers?” She meant to lighten the mood. But Logan flinched. Her shock must have been written on her face because he quickly said.

“No one that we’re friends with now.” And I don’t think they technically qualified as psychotic mass murderers.”

Veronica could only continue to stare. 

“My high school and college years were … complicated.” Logan said, “And I think, maybe, to understand what happened we really need to start at the beginning. With the event that seems to have splintered your world off from mine and from the one we’re in now.”

Her stomach sunk a little as she realized what he meant.

“Lilly’s death?” Logan shook his head again.

“Aaron’s.”

Chapter Text

Veronica was wearing her “I’d rather be spelunking” look. Or possibly her “I’d rather be making out with a broken bottle” look. Logan always had trouble telling the difference between those two. Possibly because he’d spent much more time and energy trying to avoid getting either one of them aimed at him. 

“Aaron’s death can’t be what “splintered” our worlds.” She said, “Your Lilly was --- she had been dead for hours when it happened.” 

Except…  this Veronica didn’t know what Lilly’s actual time of death was, did she?

With the murderer behind bars and several other catastrophes to deal with, this Keith hadn’t had an opportunity (or a reason) to second guess the coroner’s original conclusion. 

“That’s not necessarily true.” Logan said 

“I was with my dad when the call came over the radio. I remember the time.” 

“I’m not doubting your memory. I just happen to know that the coroner’s estimated time of death for Lilly is wrong.”

“And you happen to know this how?” Veronica asked.

“Time Travel.” said Logan. Veronica rolled her eyes. Which he supposed was a step up from longing to dive into a cave. 

“How do you know the coroner in your world wasn’t the one who was wrong?”

“Because the coroner in my timeline was wrong.” He told her. “They came up with the same time of death as the one here. But in my timeline my Veronica found evidence later on that proved that Lilly had to have died after six.” He saw Veronica squirm slightly. It was subtle. He wasn’t sure if he would have noticed it at nineteen. He definitely wouldn’t have at sixteen. But now it was really all that he needed to know that Aaron’s death in Veronica’s timeline had happened before his Lilly’s.

“What kind of evidence?” Veronica asked. 

Logan paused for a moment and studied Veronica. Then he looked over at the still mostly blank portion of the wall he had assigned to her timeline. And the many, many post-its on his. Many, many of which were connected in some way to the change in Lilly’s time of death, or the off Kane’s other attempts to “protect” Duncan.

“How about this: you answer my questions about how Aaron died, and afterwards I’ll answer all of yours about Lilly’s time of death and any other questions that those answers bring up.”

“Are you being serious right now? You’re withholding information about Lilly’s death. For Aaron.” She said, then added with far less sarcasm than he was comfortable. “Maybe I was too quick in accepting you were really a Logan.”

“I’m not withholding anything Veronica.” Logan told her, gesturing towards the post-it bestrewn wall. “And I’m definitely not doing anything for Aaron. I just want this to be more of a discussion. So far, we haven’t exactly had a quid pro quo when it comes to information.”

“I answered your questions.” She countered. 

“You answered my questions about Lilly.”  

“You asked about Lilly!” 

“I did.” Logan conceded, “I asked a lot of questions about Lilly. And I was happy to have the answers. But I also asked other questions. And each time, you found a way to distract me or diverted me or get me to start talking about my timeline instead. But this question is important. Even if it makes you uncomfortable.”

“Why?” She countered.  “Why do you care so much about Aaron’s death? it’s not like…” She trailed off, swallowing back the rest of her question. Something along the lines of “it’s not like it was a bad thing” or “It’s not like he was a decent person or father” he suspected. Possibly “it’s not like my Logan cared.” given how uncomfortable she looked.

“I don’t care.” He told her.

“Kind of seems like it.” 

“I don’t care about Aaron’s death.” He clarified.  “I care about why Aaron died in your world and Lilly died in mine. I care about why and when our timeline split. I still think it was Aaron’s death. Maybe I’m wrong, but in order to figure that out, then we need to actually talk about the differences in our timelines.” 

“And why does it matter when our worlds split?” Veronica asked “I thought the purpose of all this was to make this world better. The circumstances that led to Aaron’s death in my world, didn’t happen here, and they’re not going to happen here. It’s not something we need to avoid. It’s not something we can change. I don’t see the purpose of dredging it up.” 

“Because…”  Because if they ever find a way to go back home, they’ll need to know where and when they would need to go their separate ways. Because he had spent countless hours of his teens and twenties, thinking and rethinking what had happened the day Lilly died, wondering if there was something he could have or should have done to change the outcome. Because the very fact Veronica used the words “dredging” and “up” sets off alarm bells in his head that this is something they need to talk about. Because…

“Because making this timeline better isn’t just about finding out what we need to avoid.” Was what he finally said. “We also need to anticipate what our changes will do. How different people will react. How things will ripple out from those changes. And what won’t ripple out from those changes. We need to be able to recognize when a change isn’t something we could have caused. And to do any of that, we need to pool as much of our knowledge together as possible. I tried to stop Woody and keep the bus crash from happening using only the information I had from my timeline and it blew in my face. Almost literally. I can’t,” He had to take a steadying breath, “If the bomb had gone off when you were in the car. If it had gone off when my mom was home…” He shook his head, trying to shake out the image. “I can’t make a mistake like that again.”

Veronica’s posture, all hard edges, and protective stances since he refused to answer her question, softened slightly.

“That wasn’t because of something you did or didn’t do, Logan." Veronica said quietly, “Someone sent an email to Beaver and told him you were going to expose him as one of Woody’s victims.” 

“Exactly.” 

Veronica gave him a questioning look.

“It wasn’t something I did or didn’t do. It was because of something someone else did. Someone who knew I was the one sending out emails to Woody’s other victims, and who knew what lengths Cassidy would go to keep what Woody did a secret. Who from this timeline could have known all that Veronica?” Veronica frowned.

“One of Woody’s other victims.” Veronica stated. “Someone who was on the same little league team with Cassidy. Someone who had enough computer sense to trace back your email after they received it and enough time with Cassidy to realize he was batshit crazy.”

“Or someone who knew how Cassidy would react that way because they had seen it happen in their timeline.”

“Are you honestly trying to suggest that “time travel” is a more logical answer than someone simply being good at reading people.”

“No.” Logan said. “I’m suggesting that “time travel “is a more logical answer than someone being able to trace back an email sent from an account Mac helped me set up. Especially when we already know that a time traveler sent an email to Duncan that seems to have intentionally caused him to have a seizure.”

“You think Amanda sent the email to Cassidy.” Veronica said.

“Or someone working with her.” 

“How many time travelers do you think are here?” Veronica asked. 

“You saw plans--- her wall of crazy was more like an entire room of crazy. That was way more than one person could do on their own.” Veronica glanced meaningfully towards their own wall of crazy. When he didn’t respond she let out a sigh.

“Fine. Let’s assume you’re right and Amanda did send that email. What does that have to do with how Aaron died? We know what Amanda’s plans were. Aaron’s death wasn’t part of them.” 

“Maybe. But we don’t know what Tom, John and Harry’s plans are.” 

“Tom, John and Harry?” 

“I’m fairly sure I can always guess what Dick’s plans are in every timeline.” He explained, trying to bring some levity to what was becoming a very dour conversation. “My point is, the more information we have, the better. That way we can make a more educated guess as to what our changes will do to the timeline and be able to spot when something doesn’t quite fit. You say that it’s not worth dredging up Aaron’s death. Okay. What is? What would be something that we do need to avoid or change? What is something that someone else from your timeline might want to avoid or change?”

“Logan…” She paused, gathering her thoughts. “My world wasn't like this,” She gestured wildly towards the wall of crazy. “The only mystery I tried to solve my sophomore year was why Duncan dumped me. I spent my high school years worrying about where we would be going to college and how to pay for prom, not which of our friends was a mass murderer. Your World. Amanda’s world. They are clearly a lot closer to this world than mine is. If we’re trying to be prepared, we should focus on them.”

“So, you’re telling me your world was all unicorns and rainbows? That nothing bad happened to us or to anyone that’s connected to us?” 

“I didn’t say that.” She told him. 

“Okay, then what happened? How did Duncan turn out? Or Dick? I know my Veronica made some enemies through her work --- could you have? For that matter, what was your work? What about your Logan? Did he do anything that could have made him enemies.”

Veronica wasn’t wearing her “I’d rather be spelunking” face anymore.  No. Now she looked like she’d rather be throwing him down into a cave. Without a rope. 

“Three Questions.” 

Logan blinked at her moment in surprise.

“About your Logan?”

“About Aaron’s death.” She ground out. “That’s when you think our timeline split? Fine. I’ll answer your questions about it. But I want to make sure I get some questions today too. So. You get three questions. Then you answer mine.” 

“I think the customary number in these kinds of situations is twenty.” said Logan, still reeling slightly from the abrupt change in course of the conversation. 

“I’m not giving you twenty questions about Aaron’s death. Even if there were twenty things for you to ask, we’d be here all week.” She countered

“Ten?” 

“Five.”

“Seven?” 

“Five.” 

“Five it is.” He agreed. “But then you only get five questions too. And after that, we can trade off --- and the next round can be about any subject we want.” Veronica suddenly looked like she was about to bolt at the suggestion, so he added, “Except our counterparts.” 

Veronica relaxed slightly. Very slightly. She looked like she couldn’t quite decide whether to spit fire at him for reading her so easily --- or be grateful. But at least she didn’t look like she was going to run anymore. Or throw him down a crevasse.

“Fine.” She split out. “But we only do two rounds today. Anymore and we’ll be here all night.” Veronica glared towards him for a moment before adding, “Ask. Your first. Question.”

“How did Aaron die?” Logan asked. 

“A car accident.” 

“If you’re only going to give me five questions, you have to give me a bit more than that.” He said, then added more gently “Would you accept that as one of your answers?” She somehow managed to glare at him harder, but after a moment she answered. 

“Aaron ran a red light.” She told him. “Another car slammed into him on the driver’s side. Aaron wasn’t wearing his seatbelt. He died at the scene.” 

The description hit Logan with an unexpected emotional punch. Not because he really cared about Aaron. But because it was uncomfortably similar to the “accident” that had nearly killed Keith five years ago in his timeline. Or possibly twelve years in the future, depending on your point of view. 

“What happened to the other car? Was anyone else hurt?” Logan asked. Veronica’s face and stance softened slightly again.

“I don’t know. They fled the scene,” She gave him a slight, chagrined smile, “The Sheriff’s department was never able to track them down.” Then, she surprised him by voluntarily adding, “The theory was that after their initial panic the other driver realized what they had done, and dumped their car in an area where it would get stolen.” 

And where Weevil and the other PCHers would unknowingly dispose of the evidence while stripping it for parts. At least he hoped it was Weevil. Whatever conflicts they had had over the years, Logan still would rather have the PCHers making a few bucks off Aaron’s demise than the Fitzpatricks. 

“Where did the accident happen?” He asked. 

“Along second street.” Said Veronica.  “Near Main, I think?”

Which meant that Aaron had been driving along the same route Lilly had taken when she bolted from his pool house with the tapes.  

“And the time?” He asked. 

“I can’t give you a precise time of death.” She said, "But my dad had just picked me up from some pep squad thing after his shift ended and we were talking about where to get dinner when the call came in over the radio. That places it at a little after six. Maybe a bit earlier, but not much.

So, exactly when Aaron would be driving towards the Kane’s house to confront Lilly. Hence Veronica’s earlier squirm.

What to ask next? He knew there was something he should be asking. There was a voice in the back of his head (one that sounded suspiciously like his Veronica) that was shouting there was something wrong with what Veronica described. Not that she was lying exactly, but that there was something about Aaron’s death that felt wrong. He just couldn’t figure out what it was. 

He wanted to ask about his mom. 

What had happened to her aftermath of Aaron’s death. How had she reacted to it? Had she… But he wasn’t going to get the answers he really needed with a single question.

“I think I’ll hold onto my last question for now.” He said finally. Veronica shot him a look somewhere between calculating and annoyed. Like she wasn’t quite sure what his game was now but she knew she didn’t like it.  “Take your first question.”  He urged.

“You know my first question.” She told him. 

“What kind of evidence?” He asked. Veronica nodded. “Veronica discovered that Lilly had gotten a traffic ticket on October third. She was caught running a red light by one of those automatic intersection cameras just after six.” Logan could see the wheels begin to turn in Veronica’s mind, and braced himself for what he assumed would be the inevitable questions.  

“Then October third isn’t the day our worlds diverged.”

Instead, he was just very very confused. 

“I think I want to use my fifth question now.”  Veronica rolled her eyes again, but nodded.

“Why does Lilly getting a traffic ticket make you think that our timelines had to diverge before October third?”

“Because in my world, the traffic cam system in Neptune was down on October third.” 

Logan reflexively started to ask why the traffic cams were down --- and whether it could be connected to Aaron’s accident. He only got so far as opening his mouth before he saw the look on Veronica’s face and shut it again. Immediately. 

****

Veronica knew she should read what Logan had posted up on the wall. Start with the first post-its. Continue chronologically through at least November and December. Determine where there were gaps in the information or places that needed clarification. Target those points.  That was the best use of her remaining questions. The logical, smart thing to do. 

But sometimes, logical and smart had to take a back seat to instinct and curiosity. 

“Why was Veronica the one to find the traffic ticket?” Logan looked surprised by the question. Maybe his Veronica was better at letting her logical side win.

“I don’t know how Veronica found out the ticket existed. We weren’t really…” He grimaced slightly. “We weren’t really talking at the time.” They weren’t really talking at the time? “I know about the ticket because she kept records of her investigation on her computer. And a few months later, when we were talking, she left the computer on with the file open when I came over.” He gave her a slightly embarrassed, and very guilty smile. She barely registered it.  “And teenage Logan was particularly good about personal boundaries.”  

“Her investigation? What was she investigating at sixteen?” She asked. Logan frowned.

“Lilly’s death.” 

“She didn’t believe Aaron was the murderer?” Veronica hadn’t realized there was ever any doubt. How could there be after seeing the tapes?

She realized she must be missing something when she saw Logan’s reaction.  A realization seemed to hit him with her words and spread (along with a large dollop of guilt) across his face. He looked over towards the wall, then back at her before shaking his head.

“Veronica, in my timeline the tapes of Aaron and Lilly weren’t found until the end of our Junior year.” He said finally.

“Junior year? How is that possible.” Logan gave a hopeless shrug.

“Veronica, Duncan, and I just didn’t remember that Lilly used the vents to hide things. Or if we did, it didn’t occur to us that there could be something in there that would point to her murderer.”

“And what about, I don’t know, the entire Neptune Sheriff’s Department.”

“The whole reason we used the air conditioning vents as a hiding place was because it wasn’t a spot any grown-up would think to look.”

“But, without the tapes…”

“Without the tapes Aaron wasn’t on anyone’s radar as a suspect.” Logan finished. Veronica felt like someone had punched her in the gut.

“Not holding anything back, huh?” She ground out. 

“It’s on the board!” Logan protested weakly. Veronica glared back at him. After a moment she was able to organize her thoughts enough to ask. 

“If Aaron wasn’t a suspect until the end of our Junior year, then what did my dad do for a year and a half? Twiddle his thumbs?” 

“No.” Logan said quickly, “Keith….”  Logan seemed to struggle a moment.  Unconsciously he reached over and grabbed one of the pens on the table and started playing with it. It was a nervous tick she had seen in her Logan, but had thought had been drilled out of this one long ago. Her stomach dropped slightly. “It wasn’t an accident or a mistake that the coroner got Lilly’s time of death wrong. The Kane’s.” He grimaced again, this time clearly with disgust. “Tampered with it. To give Duncan an alibi.” 

“Why would Duncan need an alibi?” And how the hell had Lilly’s parents “tampered” her time of death? Logan let out a long, slightly shaky breath and shifted from simply playing with the pen to rolling it between his fingers. 

“Duncan was the one who found Lilly by the pool.” He said finally. “It triggered a seizure.” He let out a little huff. “He somehow got Lilly's blood on him afterwards. So, when his parents got home, they found him, next to Lilly, blood splattered, and in a daze of postictal confusion, and they assumed that his seizure had caused Lilly’s death instead of the other way around. Then they promptly called their head of security to cover it up”

Veronica shook her head. 

“That’s insane.” Veronica said finally. Logan snorted.

“That’s the Kanes.” He told her. “In my timeline, at least.” Veronica let out a huff, only for Logan to add. “And that’s not all.” Of course not. “Keith may not have found the ticket, but he did realize that there was something wrong with the Kane’s alibis and with Lilly’s time of death. So, he focused his investigation on them.  Specifically on Jake.” 

“I can’t see Jake Kane allowing himself to be tried for murder.” She said, “Even if it was to protect Duncan.” 

“No.” Logan shook his head. “When Jake realized what direction the investigation was going, he held a press conference. He teared up and talked about how much he loved Lilly. How he was being wrongly accused.  And we all ate it up.” His let out his own little huff. “Within a week there was a petition circulating for a recall election. Then, around mid-November, someone leaked the footage taken from Lilly’s crime scene onto the internet. Everyone was all too happy to let Keith get the blame.” Logan swallowed “By early December, Keith had been run out of the department and Lamb was acting Sheriff.”

“Donald Lamb became Sheriff?” 

“Unfortunately.” He spoke. Veronica let out a full-on snort this time. 

“Now he I can believe twiddled his thumbs for a year and a half.” 

“As much as it physically pains me to do anything resembling defending Lamb, that’s not exactly what happened either.” He told her. “Even with Lamb as Sheriff, the Kanes were worried that as long as Lilly’s death remained unsolved someone might start looking too closely at what happened that night. So, they bribed a former employee of Kane software to confess to killing Lilly.” 

“Who the hell would do that?”

“Someone dying from cancer who had a daughter they thought could use the money.”  Logan told her 

“That’s not really what I meant.” Veronica said, feeling slightly sick to her stomach.

She knew the Kanes weren’t good people. She did. But interfering with their own daughter’s murder investigation? Bribing a dying man to take the fall? And her dad… Oh God. Her dad. Whatever his flaws, serving his adopted home town as the Balboa County Sheriff was his dream job. The only thing he’d ever really wanted to do. The only thing she could imagine him doing.

“What happened to my dad?” She forced out.

The pen momentarily stilled in Logan’s hand. Then he started to pop the top on and off with a fresh wave of enthusiasm and anxiety.

“Keith got his private investigator’s license and opened his own office:  Mars Investigation.” He told her. “My Veronica ended up working there too. Technically she was the receptionist, but within a few months she started taking on the cases that Keith didn’t have time to do.  Eventually she started taking her own cases too, mostly from other kids at school.” 

Logan actually smiled a bit at the memory. Veronica once again shook her head in disbelief. 

“Whenever our worlds diverged it must have been a long time before October third because my dad would never have allowed me to do that. He barely let me stay out past midnight with my friends when I was sixteen.” said Veronica.

“I don’t think Keith had much choice.” Logan said quietly. “He didn’t really have anybody else, and they needed the extra income.” She didn’t know what to say to that. Neither, it seemed, did Logan. They both just stood there a moment until, finally, she asked the obvious question,

“What about my mom?” 

Logan looked down at his hands, and seemed to finally realize what he was doing with the pen. After a moment, he snapped the top of the pen one last time and placed it down on the table again with just a hair too much force. 

“Lianne left.” He said finally. “Sometime in February, I think?” His hand momentarily drifted back towards the table, only to form a fist and move quickly back towards his side. “Veronica tracked her down during our junior year. But ---” 

“But what?” Veronica prompted. He let out a sigh.

“I don’t know what the Lianne in your timeline was like but the Lianne in my timeline had Some issues.” He said, carefully. “With Alcohol.” Veronica let out a half-hysterical snort. That was one way of putting it.

“If you mean she was a closet alcoholic then that's apparently one thing our worlds share.”

“In my timeline the “closet” part of the title more or less fell off after Lilly died.” He told her, gently. “Veronica used up her college savings to pay for her to go to rehab.” Now this was all sounded a bit too familiar. Painfully so.

“She didn’t finish the program, did she.” Veronica said quietly.

“No.” Logan answered.

“And my dad threw her out.” She could still remember the look on her mother’s face when her father had offered his final ultimatum after her mother’s accident. 

“No.” He said, sounding somewhat surprised. “Veronica did.” Veronica felt herself grimace. She’s not sure she would have had the strength to do that. She knows she wouldn’t have at sixteen or seventeen.

“I think it’s your turn now.” She said, “I’ve asked at least five questions. More I suspect” 

“We don’t have to do that, Veronica.” Logan told her. She knew he was trying to do the right thing. To be considerate. But she didn’t want to talk about her mother or how another her dealt with her.

“No. We made a deal. We should stick to it.” She needs a break from his world and his Veronica. “You seemed eager enough to ask something a few minutes ago. About the traffic cams?” And that should be a safe enough topic.

****

Logan studied Veronica for a moment. Had he wanted to ask something about the traffic cams? That seemed like an age and a half ago. It took him a minute to mentally retrace their conversation, in order to remember exactly what it had been.

“Okay.” He finally said, “Why were the traffic cams down on October third?”  Veronica seemed to relax a bit again.

“One of my dad’s dimmer deputies downloaded an email attachment on October second. Turned out, it contained a virus that attacked the department’s computer systems. The traffic cameras were the worst hit. They were down for days.” She said “It was a major factor in why the sheriff’s department was never able to track down the car that hit Aaron.” 

“Did they track down who sent the virus?” He asked. 

“I don’t know.” Veronica said. “I was sixteen, Logan. I wasn’t exactly kept in the loop regarding the investigation.”

And unlike Aaron’s case, she hadn’t cared enough to put herself in the loop. 

“Was there anything that might connect the virus with Aaron’s car accident?” Veronica looked at him like he’d grown a second head.

“Why would you even suggest that?”

“Why wouldn’t you? Someone disabled the traffic cameras the day before Aaron was killed in a hit and run where the other driver is never found? That seems way too convenient to just be a coincidence to me. “ 

For a moment Veronica looked like she was going to get angry. Then she paused, and her anger seemed to deflate. Following her eyeline he realized she was staring at the wall of crazy. 

“Look,” Veronica said, finally, “I understand why you might think there was some secret conspiracy behind Aaron’s death given,” She gestured again towards the wall “but as I’ve already said, my world isn’t like yours. That’s just not how things work there.”

“Maybe that’s true, but this wasn’t just some random car accident. Or some random person. It was Aaron. And he was literally on his way to murder Lilly when he was killed.”

“No one could have known that.” Veronica countered “They couldn’t even know that Aaron would drive through that intersection that day.”

“They could if they had a copy of Lilly’s ticket.” Now Veronica was staring at him like he’d grown an entire second body.

“No. Just, No.” she spit out finally. “My timeline was normal.” 

“I’m pretty sure most people in this timeline think it's normal.” Veronica gave another disbelieving glance towards the wall of crazy. “At least as far as the time-space continuum is concerned.” He corrected. Veronica shook her head. “You said the virus was sent by email.” He added

“That is generally how viruses are sent. That and porn sites.” 

“It’s also how Amanda triggered Duncan’s seizure. And how Cassidy received his “warning” that I was investigating Woody.” 

“Then why just Lilly!” She yelled out suddenly. There was a moment’s pause at the outburst. Veronica seemed to pull herself together and added quietly, “I told you before my world may not have been like this one or like yours, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t bad things that happened in my world and in my life.”

“Not all rainbows and unicorns.” He echoed quietly.

“Exactly. So, what kind of person would defy the laws of physics to kill someone, but not to fix anything else. How could they save just one person --- even if it is someone as fabulous as Lilly --- but allow all the other horrible things in my world to still happen?” That was a desperate edge to the question.

“Maybe they couldn’t do anything more.” Logan said, just as quietly. “Maybe saving Lilly sent the timeline off in a direction they didn’t anticipate. Maybe they didn’t have time to change anything else. Amanda died long before she’d done everything she was planning. Maybe they didn’t realize how limited their time would be. Or,” maybe they were the Kanes. Maybe they were a younger more self-involved version of himself, “Maybe they only cared about Lilly.”

“No one who truly knew and cared about Lilly would have just saved her.” 

The statement hung between them for a moment, along with the increasingly clear outline of whatever it was Veronica was really avoiding telling him. He wasn’t sure if it was a moment or bravery or stupidity, but he couldn’t help but ask. 

“What about the Kanes?” 

“Do you really think the Kanes would be capable of that?” Veronica asked, “For Lilly.” 

“One of them, Kanes, had Aaron killed, in my timeline.” He told her. Veronica frowned. 

“That’s not quite the same thing, though, is it?” Veronica said. She was right of course. it wasn’t. It was mopping a mess, not voluntarily creating one.

“I think maybe we should take a break.” Veronica said suddenly. “I know we agreed to do a second round of questions but I think I may have just reached my limit of surprising emotional reveals for one afternoon. And I didn’t even realize I had a limit until now.”  

Logan really looked at Veronica for a moment. At the tension rolling off her. Then he looked up at the wall. Absolutely covered in surprising emotional reveals. His eye unintentionally drifted toward the post-its placed in the marking the first week of December.

“Yeah.” He said, “A break would be good.”