logan/veronica. season 1 teeny tiny ficlet set around 1.20, “M.A.D.” title taken from prosthetic love by typhoon for secret obvious reasons 

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ONE DAY UNTIL BIRTHDAY. (ok more like 5 hours but...

happy birthday!!

LOGAN/VERONICA AU WEEK. Day 3: Beloved Tropes 

featuring the tropes: found family, friends to lovers, mutual pining, the start of SECRET DATING, and whichever trope it is where their bedrooms are right next to each other and they share a bathroom and begin to fall in love. 

(These three excerpts are from a fic i’ve been slowly, slowly writing for my babe @jessicajoned since 2016, in which Keith becomes Logan’s legal guardian & Logan and Veronica, are, you know, epic. eventually.) 

Even in the backseat of Logan’s Xterra with the air conditioning on full blast Veronica can feel beads of sweat forming at the base of her temples. Her curfew was twenty minutes ago, but they still haven’t managed to untangle themselves from one another, even though Veronica put an end to the marathon french-kissing some time ago.

(This is happening more often lately, curling up against him for no reason at all and feeling content, feeling like she’s at home). 

Logan’s threading his fingers through her hair, totally silent and still  -- for him. She can’t remember the last time she’s seen him so relaxed, maybe she’s never seen him like this. Maybe this ease is something only she has the power to conjure out of him. He conjures the same unique ease out of her, which makes her feel scared and warm all at once. 

Veronica runs the pads of her fingers along his cheekbone and Logan turns his head, presses a quick chaste, tender kiss against the tips of her fingers, before securing her by the waist and maneuvering them into an upright position. 

He bangs his head against the sissy bar on the way up and Veronica’s open-mouthed giggling with her head thrown back before she can remind herself to be cynical. 

She’s expecting Logan to make some quip, but when she finally quiets down he’s gazing at her, a wide grin on his face, and maybe, if she squints, actual hearts blooming in his eyes. 

She clambers off of his lap and crawls into the safety of the passenger seat, her hands fiddling with the edges of her t-shirt, her body feeling empty without Logan’s form molded around hers. 

“My Dad’s going to kill you if you don’t get me home soon,” She says, turning the air conditioning off with a decisive click. “And -- don’t take this personally -- but I’d help him get rid of the forensic evidence by melting your body with sulfuric acid.” 

“No ice bags to alter the time of death for me,” Logan chirps as he glides into the front seat, purposely brushing his body up against hers as much as possible. 

“Nope,” Veronica pops the ‘P’ and smiles easy.

“That’s what every boy longs to hear after a successful date, “Honey, I love you, but I’m going to drop you in a vat of acid now.”” 

There’s a beat of silence before he stammers out: “Or, uh, um-you know.” and quickly busies himself with reversing out of the parking space, a dull flush creeping up his neck and coloring his cheeks. 

Veronica....deeply cares for every aspect of Logan, but she’s especially fond of him when he’s like this -- unguarded and abashed, not hiding behind jokes or long sleeves or overly elaborate hand movements or anger. 

“What?” she asks, sugary innocent. “You’re telling me you’ve never ended a date like that?” 

Veronica stares at the soft cream invitation and is proud of the way her hands don’t tremble. 

Her dad leans over and glides the invitation across the length of their kitchen counter and it travels as if it is weightless, inconsequential. 

“It was nice of them to invite us,” her father says after a moment, his voice rehearsed in its diplomacy. 

The invitation is cold and clinical, no warmth in the simple “Mars Family” scrawled across the front in perfect rich, black-inked calligraphy. It’s handwriting Veronica recognizes from the handful of school forms Logan didn’t forge: elegant and precise in a faint, gentle manner. 

Logan and Lynn make their F’s the same way, and Veronica wants to rip the invitation into pieces. 

// 

Veronica decides to go to the party two days beforehand and her mom insists on going shopping with her -- spending money they definitely don’t have -- to buy Veronica a deep blue dress and sparkly kitten heels. 

“It’s New Years Eve, baby, you have to dress up,” her mother states, and for once her breath doesn’t smell cloying, that unfriendly mix of sharp disinfectant and melted cotton candy. 

Her dad has to work, so Veronica and her mom show up together, their arms linked as though nothing is wrong, as if Lianne’s activities haven’t been reduced to passing out on the couch, jumping at the slightest noise, and insisting that they need to move to a new city. 

Veronica does an automatic sweep of the room, looking for Lilly, seeking out her best friend’s bright laugh and carefree grin as she steals champagne glasses from the waiters. 

Veronica remembers that Lilly will never do any of those things ever again and disengages from her mother’s grasp, too heavy to pretend. 

// 

An hour after she has lost visual on her mom and her face aches from pretending to smile at rich people she has never heard of, family members or friends of Logan’s he’d never bothered to mention he had, she slips away and makes use of the far left staircase, the one for the servants, and Lilly when she was sneaking into Logan’s and too drunk to climb up to his window. 

Veronica had only been in Logan’s house a handful of times during their friendship, but she’s reverently grateful now for all of the stories the others have told, wild antics where they had to sneak Logan out of his house and then later sneak him back in, naturally while he was tripping on acid. 

She knows which floorboards creak, which window’s have the motion triggered alarms on them -- activated every night from 9pm to 7am --, and which rooms she’s likely to stumble across Logan’s parents in at the most inopportune of moments (the first floor study, the half-glass sunporch, their bedroom located on the second floor and spanning the entire right side of the house, complete with a private staircase entrance). 

Logan’s room is chilled when Veronica enters, lacking the holiday warmth orchestrated downstairs, but still smelling of the sugar cookie candles Lynn had dispersed across the tables. As usual, Logan’s room doesn’t reflect anything on Logan -- it’s too neat, everything stacked in organized little piles, the walls and single, lone bookcase adorned with expensive paintings and figurines she knows Logan hates. Even the books on the shelf aren’t titles that Logan would read, rather ones he would pick first to use as kindling at a bonfire. 

The only reflection of Logan in the room is on the magnet board hanging behind his desk, featuring a scrap of paper, and a picture of Lilly herself, smiling wide, her arm draped around Logan, who, for once, has let himself be immortalized on film, gazing at Lilly with adoration. 

She’s transfixed, which is why she startles when Logan leans over and yanks the photo off of the board, holding it close to his chest and staring at Veronica with hard, wild eyes. 

(She hadn’t seen him downstairs, not that her secretly-a-sentimental-sap self had been looking. She’d seen Duncan, briefly, out by the pool, flanked by his parents on either side, looking down at the water’s edge like he wasn’t there at all). 

“Is this something you do now?” Logan’s voice is brittle, but sober, and Veronica can’t tell if that will make this worse. “Invade people’s homes and try to seduce them dressed as some low-rate Vegas whore?” 

Veronica sucks in a deep breath and lays her hand flat against the cool surface of his desk top, stopping herself from fiddling with her dress, cut lower than Veronica would have preferred and higher than Lilly would have wanted, both at the chest and at the hem. 

While she’s distracted, off kilter, Logan reaches his hand out and yanks Veronica’s camcorder off of her wrist, the tie she used to wear it like a wristlet leaving behind red, raised marks and faint droplets of blood from the motion. 

(She forgot she was wearing it, had slipped it around her wrist along with her clutch instinctively: hanging out with Lilly and the boys, must bring video camera). 

Veronica is vocal about the pain, but Logan is talking loud and hysterical over her outcry. 

“Were you planning on filming it? Getting me all drunk and sad and then releasing the tape for the whole world to see like your Dad did with the videos of Lilly’s body?”

“Give it back,” she says through low, clenched teeth. 

Lilly gave her that camcorder for Veronica’s sixteenth birthday. Logan knows this because he was sitting next to Lilly when Veronica opened the gift, got a mouthful of her hair when she leapt across the coffee table to throw her arms around Lilly in thanks. 

She makes a move towards Logan and he stretches his arm high above his head, a game they used to play where she’d have to jump to get the remote control out of his hands if she didn’t want to watch another Charmed re-run. 

Logan isn’t playing now, and he makes it clear by walking backwards towards the staircase bannister and dangling the camcorder out over the edge, his eyes dead locked on Veronica’s the whole time. 

“Don’t you dare,” Veronica half pleads, half threatens. “Lilly gave that to me, you know Lilly gave that to me.” 

In response, he opens his hand and one of her last, tangible links to Lilly begins to plummet towards the floor. He catches it before it falls out of reach, but not before Veronica has begun crying, her eyes closed and her hands clenched into fists at her side. 

The fast approaching click of heels has Veronica opening her eyes again, and Logan wordlessly passes the camcorder back to her. 

Lynn says nothing as she observes them: Logan’s head bowed studiously towards the floor, his fingers twisting nervously into the sleeve of his dress shirt, while Veronica hitches her breath and tries to pull herself together, unwilling to cry in front of Logan’s mom, unwilling to cry in front of him. 

“I didn’t drop it,” Logan half whines as Lynn remains quiet. “It was a joke, Ronnie just over-reacted.” 

He calls her Ronnie to downplay his actions (and the things he said to her in his room), to brush it under the rug and act like it was a lighthearted thing among friends, and that -- hearing Logan’s old nickname for her whenever he was trying to convince her to let him copy her homework, or sneak out of her house and come to the Kane’s to go middle of the night swimming -- is what finally sets her off. 

“You’re an asshole, Logan,” she hisses with all the venom she can muster and Logan’s face twists into something mournful. 

He opens his mouth to volley something insulting back but Lynn reaches out and wraps her hand around his wrist, tugging on it gently to get him to look at her. 

“I don’t want to see you doing something like that to Veronica again, do you understand me, Logan?” 

Logan does a one-shouldered shrug and then squirms a lot, tentatively trying to free his wrist from her grip. Lynn patiently waits him out and finally Logan scowls and spits out, “Yeah. I understand.” 

Lynn doesn’t make Logan apologize, instead embracing Veronica with her free arm and hugging her close.

“I’m glad you could make it, sweetheart,” Lynn says. “You’re welcome here anytime, you know that.” 

Veronica sniffles in response and Lynn releases her, absentmindedly brushing a lingering tear off of Veronica’s face as she does. Out of the corner of her eye, Veronica can see Logan’s face fall, the energy slipping out of his limbs, the cruelty out of his eyes. 

Lynn kisses Logan on the cheek as she goes to leave. “Come back downstairs before the ball drops, okay, angel?” 

She leaves without waiting for a response, and Logan stares at the spot where she disappeared from view for a beat, that same raw look on his face. 

Logan turns to go back into his room; Veronica follows. 

// 

It’s five minutes till midnight and Logan is rummaging through his closet, The Same Boy You’ve Always Known playing low in the background. 

When he emerges it’s with a small bottle of absinthe that he wiggles in front of her face for consideration. 

“No,” Veronica responds flatly, and he scrunches up his face before disappearing again.

This time he exits with a standard bottle of champagne, pouring her a cup full of the room-temperature stuff, the liquid sloshing over the sides when he hands it to her. 

He sits down next to Veronica on the bed, close enough that their legs and arms are brushing against one another, and takes a long pull from the bottle, sputtering it out onto his shirt when Veronica pinches him hard in his inner thigh. 

“You can’t drink until it’s midnight,” she scolds, plucking the bottle out of his hands. “You’ll earn this back after the ball drops.” 

To be difficult, she sips on her champagne after her proclamation, Logan pouting at the unfairness while he rubs the sting away. 

There’s no tv in Logan’s room anymore (she knows there used to be because the summer before Lilly started high school the four of them holed up with Logan and watched endless random movies, while Logan was mostly delirious with fever, curled up on his side with his head and upper chest in Duncan’s lap, his legs sprawled across Lilly and Veronica), but they can hear the tipsy voices downstairs counting down from ten, nine, eight...and then it’s midnight and all of the faint, distant voices cheer and whoop. 

Veronica and Logan sit in stillness, watching the clock roll from midnight to a minute past. 

“I want you to leave now,” Logan says. 

A/N: whatever i felt like being a lil angsty about my kids, so, hello, it’s me. 

A/N 2: ANYWAY this is like an AU where Veronica doesn’t leave Hearst after freshman year and she still works at the library and Logan wanders in during one of her late night shifts after they haven’t talked in like over a year. also in my mind hearst has a fancy 24hr library w/ a 24hr clerk there at all time and veronica got stuck with like the sucky 10-6 overnight shift. 

Veronica’s on the verge of looking up from her forensic science homework and fully acknowledging his presence – maybe throwing a quip for old times sake – when she sees a fresh hickey at the base of his throat, clumps of red lipstick clinging to the edges of his collar. 

“You’re bleeding all over my carpet,” she grits through her teeth instead because it’s Logan and she knows him like the back of her hand and doesn’t doubt for a second that he’ll be bleeding for no reason at 10:36pm on a Tuesday. 

“It’s not that bad,” Logan shrugs, flashing her a quick glimpse of his palm, sliced open from thumb to pinky and stained a dark, wet red. “Besides,” he steps closer and his voice gets lower, going for flirtatious, cutesy, don’t-be-mad-at-me. “This carpets got more than my blood in it.” 

She snaps her book shut and stares at him, really stares at him, drinking him in for the first time since I just want to get to a place with you where we can be really intimate. They haven’t spoken since his fight with Gory in the cafeteria, almost had a class together sophomore year– four hours trapped in a room with just seventeen other kids every Wednesday – but Logan transferred into a different class last minute. She gets all her news about him now from the incessantly frustrating rumor mill, which surprisingly has next to nothing to say. 

He’s got a new scar near his cheekbone, about the size of a fingernail, and a handful of freckles beneath his ear. He looks like he hasn’t slept since they broke up the first time.  

“Why are you here, Logan?” She keeps her voice tight, tries to keep her eyes off of the purpling hickey, tries not to think about who’s kissing him these days, who’s going to drive him to the emergency room to get stitches in his hand. 

He steps away from the desk and his eyes lose their warmth. “It’s the Hearst library, Veronica. I wouldn’t have come if-” 

He cuts himself off, visibly frustrated, running his good hand through his hair before turning and walking away, disappearing into the rows of books. 

// 

At half past one when Veronica almost falls asleep at her desk and Wallace has yet to respond to her texts begging him to drop off coffee, she decides to do a walk-through of the building and make sure none of the freshman have set the books or themselves on fire. 

She’s not looking to check up on Logan. She’s stepped away from her desk plenty of times since he arrived, which has given him numerous opportunities to leave. She doesn’t expect him to make it a point to say goodbye beforehand, especially not since they are no longer capable of speaking to each other in full, non-hostile sentences. 

She berates herself for being immediately relieved to see him sitting at one of the tables not too far from where they once had sex –  the fucker –, his left hand covered in wads of blood-red toilet paper. 

“It looks worse than it is,” Logan says as she walks towards him, her arms folded over her chest. “Hand wounds just bleed a lot because of the nerve endings.” 

Veronica sits across from his, keeps her eyes trained on the table, in the small neutral space that isn’t covered by his textbooks or bite-mark ridden pencils. He glances at her quickly but doesn’t pause in his writing, rapidly filling the page of his spiral notebook. 

She sits there longer than she should, considering that she’s working, considering that he won’t even look her in the eye. 

She sits there longer than she should, thinking about how lonely and small he seems under the fluorescent lights, thinking about reaching out and touching his hand, asking how he cut it. 

“What are you doing?” Logan finally whispers and this time it’s Veronica who gets to walk away, her footsteps sounding loud and abrupt on the staircase. 

// 

As shitty luck would have it, Logan comes downstairs to leave right when Wallace and Piz have finally arrived to bring her belated, sorry-you’re-stuck-here-for-two-more-hours coffee and donuts. 

“It’s a public library,” Veronica rushes to explain to them, even though they know that her and Logan don’t talk anymore and neither of them asked. 

There’s a beat where Logan’s thrown off by the sight of all three of them at once and his eyes flicker between her and Piz (unhappily, he can’t hide that) and she wants to start screaming we broke up and I miss you and stay, i’ll share my coffee and who gave you that embarrassing hickey, asshole? and remember when we fucked upstairs by the books on vanished civilizations and we couldn’t stop laughing and it was good– we were good.

His hand wound isn’t bleeding anymore, but there’s a size able gap between the two sections of his skin that definitely looks like it could benefit from a trip to the hospital. She’s on the verge of doing something stupid and pointless – like offering to take him – when Logan exhales and gives her a small smile, not quite sad just: this is how things are. this is how things ended. 

A/N: Set during 1x06, after Logan finds out the bum fights are online, but before he goes home and has the first confrontation scene with Aaron. (In canon at roughly the same time the scene with Logan & Aaron happens, Veronica is shown to be hanging out with Wanda and making posters with her at the Mars Residence, but for my purposes I moved that event to immediately after school got out – like mid afternoon – and to Wanda’s house, so Veronica is returning home from that) 

Veronica should be surprised when she opens her bedroom door and Logan’s there. Surprised, and then furious at this deliberate violation of privacy and at the fact that he had audacity to break into her apartment and enter her room, a space she has very deliberately tried to make separate from him, to remind herself that Logan Echolls doesn’t have a space here with her anymore. (The boxes filled with four and a half years of memories stuffed under her bed and stacked haphazardly in the far corner of her closet don’t count). 

She should be even angrier when he doesn’t even look up when she opens the door or offer any sort of reasoning for his presence. 

She shouldn’t be watching him cradle her framed photo of Lilly in his hands, noticing his defeated, hollowed posture, the slight tremor in his bottom lip as he traces the image of Lilly’s hair with his fingers. She shouldn’t still miss him and worry and care, but fuck it– Wallace says she’s a marshmallow. 

“I think it kinda goes without saying, but if you’re going to be here you have to be quiet, and my dad can’t find out.” 

Logan sets the photo down with reverence and shrugs a little, almost acting like going head-to-head with her dad wouldn’t have any lasting impressions on the shitty-ness of his day. 

They sit side by side on her bed for hours in the near dark of her bedroom, neither one of them bothering to turn a light on even as the sun sets outside. This is the closest they’ve come to civilly hanging out since last November, if you could call Veronica unsuccessfully trying to get Logan to converse and Logan remaining disengaged and distant civilly hanging out. She attempts to goad him about how Wanda is going to kick Duncan’s ass at the recount tomorrow, about how he hasn’t gone to history in over a week and is definitely going to fail the test they have next Wednesday, she even tries to get him to celebrate when her dad texts and says he’ll be working unusually late that night, meaning they can finally raise their voices above a whisper. 

Logan fidgets a lot, exhales these shaky little breaths that she thinks are his valiant attempts at laughter, but he isn’t himself. 

By ten she’s given up trying to engage him and has moved on to mentally berating herself because Veronica, next time you come home to find the Biggest Asshole In Your Life standing in your bedroom– taser him and send him on his way, past friendship be damned.  

“I need a place to stay,” Logan says finally. His body slightly shifted so that he can stare at her fully. With only the glare from her laptop reflecting on his face, she can’t really make out his expression. “Just, um, just for tonight. If that’s…you know, okay, or whatever.” 

Veronica should say no. She should say: No, you fucker, this is what you get for being a complete dick to me and turning everyone in this town against me even though I was your best friend. At the very least, if she agrees, she should demand that she gets something in return. Sure, Logan, I’ll do this for you, but what are you going to do for me. 

Instead, she says, “Yeah. Of course.” 

Veronica should also make him sleep on the floor, but she dismisses the thought quickly. She’s been sleeping in beds with Logan since she was twelve, changing it now would just feel unnatural– like the way she sometimes has to remind herself to bare her teeth when he calls her Ronnie. 

They’re enemies now, or something closer to enemies then friends, so it shouldn’t feel like home and safety and belonging when he wraps his arm around her waist and she makes sure her back his fully flush with his chest and they loosely intertwine their fingers together. It feels like that anyway. 

“Have I mentioned, I fucking hate Halloween,” Logan hisses into Lilly’s ear as they’re crouching behind a dumpster in the alley next to the Sac’n’Pac. 

She swats half-heartedly at his arm in an effort to get him to be quiet and fucking chill, but she knows they’re beyond screwed. Fact is, Keith Mars is waiting for them just outside of the alley because there’s no way in hell he didn’t see them walk out of the Sac’n’Pac each holding a bag full of liquor. Not to mention the fact that they’d been at his house eating dinner with him not two hours prior, so their blinding white-sequined angel costumes are not doing them any favors right now. (Aside from the fact that they both look amazing). Also, yeah, the frantic probably-not-a-whisper screaming and elaborate hand waving as they processed who they were staring at before they ran into the alley definitely didn’t help. 

“Ugh, honestly, Logan, this is silly. If we just go out there he’ll yell a little and then it’ll be over.” 

“I am not leaving! We live here now.” 

“We’re both wearing white and practically sitting on top of cigarette butts and vomit!” Lilly exclaims. “This is not practical! Let’s just get it over with and then we’ll can go home and watch lots of Alyssa Milano.” 

“Don’t bring her into this. That’s not fair.” 

Fair, no. But it works because Logan chews on his sleeve and attempts to peek around the corner of the alley to gauge Keith. When he sighs dramatically she knows she’s won. 

“Okay, fine, but here’s the plan: we go out there, just hand over all the alcohol and then run to your car and drive off.” 

As plans go it’s one of their best ones. It’s even better when they turn the corner and neither Keith nor his car is anywhere in sight. Rather than being pleased, Logan seems affronted that Keith isn’t there waiting to read them the riot act.

“All of those thinly veiled comments about the dangers of underage drinking whenever he sees us and what? He’s not even going to bother sticking around?” 

“Are you fucking kidding me, Logan, let’s just go!” 

Logan grumbles the whole way home, mumbling under his breath about the corrupt police force and never being able to trust law enforcement. (Really, he’s subconsciously trying to justify why he doesn’t tell them about his abuse like Lilly keeps begging, but she is soooo not touching that one when they’re both sober). 

Their brief “luck” runs out when they finally get home and walk into the family room to find Keith and both of her parents sitting on the couch waiting for them.