Chapter Text
Post 4x01. Logan proposes, but he gets called back to the Navy for another mission before they can talk about it. Then another, and another…and pretty soon it’s gone from Spring Break to December. Logan finally gets 3 days leave for Christmas. Problem is, he’s in Paris. Parisian Christmas reconciliation fic, anyone?
March
[Handwritten note, left on refrigerator]
Veronica,
I got called back for a mission. Not really an emergency or anything to worry about. They probably just need me to do something small, like save the president or a raft full of puppies lost in a storm. Such is the life of an international playboy and naval intelligence officer. This has nothing to do with the proposal, so don’t get like that. I asked, you said no, we’re moving on. This is bad timing and orders, that’s all. Should be back in a few weeks. Don’t forget, Pony’s not getting along so well with that new food, think we need to switch back to the old stuff.
Love,
L
May
[Text message]
Logan: Mission got extended, looking like end of May, maybe June before I’ll make it home. Sorry again about that call from the navy. Protocol is to notify family members for any hospital admission, but it was really just a sprained wrist and a couple of bruises. They shouldn’t have worried you just for that. Put a note in my file for the future that you’re not to be called unless the injury is too big to be patched with Snoopy Band aids.
June:
[Text message]
Logan: So, the mission finally wrapped up, but they’ve got another one they really would like to use me for. Something about an impossible bank heist, maybe a laser maze of alarm systems or two. Logan, you’re our only hope blahbetty blah, you’re the only one that’s ever cracked this impossible safe before, you know how these charmers get when they need you for one last mission. Anyway, I need to give them a yes or a no today and on the phone, you sounded really busy with that bomber case. Not really sure if you’re ready for me to come back and ruin your professional groove with all my hot reunion sex. Text me a thumbs up or a thumbs down in between interrogations, would you?
Logan: Got your message. Guess that bomber case is really a handful, huh? Good thing I’m a highly sought after intelligence operative in my own right or I might need to take up knitting to fill all my spare time waiting for you to come home from the office. Anyway, so this mission should be just a summer fling, back by August. Until then watch your six for me, would you? It’s a really attractive six, hate for a bomber to get the best of it before I get to see it again.
September:
[Text message]
Logan: Hey, sorry to hear you’re going to be out of town during my week of leave. They had another mission, and I subbed in for a buddy so he could go home to his wife. I know I’ve been gone a long time, but on the phone, it sounded like you were swamped with work and the stuff with your dad and so one more mission wouldn’t matter much one way or another. They’re sending me out until Thanksgiving, maybe a little later. Send a picture of Pony when you get a chance. I can barely remember what the big mutt looks like at this point.
November:
[Text message]
Logan: Sorry about that phone call, hope it didn’t make you worry. I put the note in my file about the Snoopy Band aids, but you know how the Navy bureaucracy is. They’ll process the change in 6-9 years, give or take a decade. Anyway, it was just a bump on the head, nothing to worry about. My head is still a hell of a lot harder than a tire iron, especially with what passes for “iron” in Turkey these days. Also, wanted to let you know the mission got extended again. Looks like this one is going to go through January, not Thanksgiving. I still have email, though, so you can write. If you know, you want to.
December:
[Text message]
Logan: Good news is, I got leave for Christmas after all. Bad news is, it’s only three days, and it’ll be in Paris. Not really enough time to come home, which sucks. Know you’re busy and probably are working through Christmas but I miss you. As to your international playboy texts, haha very funny, but there’s nobody but you. Never has been. Anyway, I’ll at least have cell service while I’m on leave so you can call if you get a minute free and you want to. I don’t want to call and have your phone ring when you’re hidden in somebody’s cupboard or something. Happy Christmas, you better have bought Pony lots of toys from me so the big mutt doesn’t think I died or something.
#
Logan strode down the sidewalk, his hands stuffed deep in his pockets as he ignored the picturesque light posts glowing softly against the night, the tiny cars zooming by along the curb. Probably he should have taken a taxi. Usually, he loved to hear the Parisian cab drivers cursing in vicious, intimate detail in a language he only half understood. He liked their enthusiasm, and how equally they hated everyone.
But tonight, he wasn’t in the mood to be cheered up by acerbic cab drivers, and he was too twitchy to sit still. The five mile walk back to his hotel might take the edge off of a Christmas spent in a city that didn’t even have snow, half a world away from the woman who was barely returning his text messages these days.
Technically, he wasn’t alone. Kirby and Gus were in a hotel down the street, and they all had plans for Christmas dinner tomorrow. His CO had put him in for another medal, though the ceremony wouldn’t be for months. He had people who cared about him, he had respect that he’d earned through blood, sweat, and a lot of quick thinking. He had the memory of those six diplomat’s kids’ faces that he’d rescued last week. Not a mark on any of them, and he still remembered how he’d made the youngest laugh with an impromptu puppet show.
All that, and he was alone on Christmas. He could act the naval hero all he wanted but it didn’t cover up that he was apparently still the type no one really wanted as family, just as he had been even back when he still had living blood relatives. They’d always had more important parties to go to on Christmas, too.
Nearly a year later and Veronica’s no still rang in his ears. Her rejection of him, and a life together. Proof that she still didn’t trust him not to be like all those lying, cheating dirtbags she photographed every week.
He passed a bar, and his feet slowed. What did it matter if he got blinding drunk on Christmas Eve, if his fist found a face that hadn’t first been sanctioned by the US Navy? He was the kind of guy whose diamond solitaire got refused, even when the girl in question was still warm and pliant from all the sex they’d just had. Even when he’d deliberately planned the timing so she’d be primed by a long deployment apart to miss him, if she was ever going to. Even when he carried a ring around for months, waiting for her to be the first to drop a hint, only to misread her intentions when she finally brought it up.
Logan was the one no one wanted, and all these years of trying to be better hadn’t gotten him shit except a bunch of scars and medals that he gave equally few fucks about. He turned toward the bar, but as soon as his fist cinched tight around the handle, he remembered his therapist’s voice. Telling him that guilt was just another tool his demons used to drag him back into acting like the old psychotic jackass he used to be. Believing in his own worthlessness only kept him behaving in ways that proved it all over again.
He let go of the bar’s door. Brushed his hands down the front of his coat to press the crisp uniform beneath against his skin. He wasn’t Logan Echolls, legendary fuckup and rejected would-be fiancé. He was a representative of the US Navy and anything he did in this uniform would reflect on the organization he respected like he respected few things on earth.
It would be back to the hotel then, and a quiet night. Maybe catch up on all the sleep he hadn’t been getting since oh, about spring break time.
He’d thought, maybe at Christmas he could go home and see her, and it would have been long enough for it all to have blown over. But she hadn’t even responded to his text, saying he’d be in Paris instead. He knew how glued to her phone Veronica was. Placing calls to suspects, googling clues, checking in on her dad, whose memory he knew was failing even from her sparse calls and emails over the last nine months. There was no fucking way she hadn’t seen that text, and how long did it take to respond and say, “Okay, see ya next year?”
He’d thought if he stayed away long enough, gave her time to “do whatever” like she used to need to in high school, then she would cool down and they could both forget he’d dumbly pushed for more instead of being satisfied that he was already dating the love of his life.
The façade of his hotel appeared, and he scowled. Five miles hadn’t been nearly long enough to shake the twitchiness out of his legs. Maybe this place had a weight room? Didn’t seem likely, in a Paris hotel. Still, the only way he was going to be able to live inside his skin for three empty days was to make his muscles burn enough that they matched the churning fire inside his stomach.
He shoved open the door to the stairwell and jogged up fourteen flights to get to his room. It was barely a start on what he needed, but it would have to do. He shrugged off his coat and draped it over his arm, sweating under the collar of his uniform from the climb. What he needed to do for these three days wasn’t get dead drunk and go on some kind of destructive rampage across Paris. Instead, he needed to find some way to come to terms with the idea that it hadn’t worked. Him and Veronica.
If she didn’t even care to see him on Christmas, he had to face that she wasn’t cooling off…she was just waiting for him to come home so she could break up with him in person.
A lifetime later and he felt like an entirely different person than he’d been as a teenager, and she still didn’t love him the way he loved her.
He swiped his keycard and as soon as he opened the door, a bolt of something wrong had his back to the wall. He tossed down his coat, drew his weapon and scanned the room.
Someone had been here all right: that was obvious by the Christmas tree. Which had not been there when he left to get dinner. Neither had the three red-foil wrapped boxes—each big enough to hold a hotel-eviscerating amount of C4—or the ice bucket and magnum of champagne next to the tree.
If I die now, I never see her again.
Fourteen floors, maybe a hundred rooms per floor, 1-4 people per room, plus staff. If those packages are bombs, how many people are about to die for my worthless ass?
Logan didn’t even have to make an effort to press his first two thoughts to the back of his mind. Long years of training in war zones—his childhood, Kandahar, then the seas of the Middle East—had made it easier than breathing to act first, think later.
Living room, clear.
Bedroom, clear.
Bathroom, clear.
Balcony, clear.
He clicked the safety back on his pistol before he came back to the living room of his suite to examine the evidence at hand. If he were Veronica, no doubt he’d have figured out the answer already, but all he had was a full magazine of bullets and nowhere to put them. He was alone, so he didn’t bother to pretend he wouldn’t have welcomed the fight.
Instead, he ran an analytical eye over the staged tableau in his living room, weighing the possibilities. Most of them led right back to murder. It had been nine months of action-packed missions staged against crooked diplomats and terrorists and traitors and billionaire expats intent on stirring the domestic pot. The question, as per usual for an Echolls, wasn’t who would want him dead but rather, who wouldn’t?
The only thing that was keeping him from calling the bomb squad was the ice bucket. First, because it had no ice, which was an overlooked detail that had Kirby written all over it.
Kirby was one of his only navy buddies who knew his whole story. The navy didn’t allow aliases, or going easy on busting each other’s balls, so everyone knew he was an Echolls and everything that meant. He could tell dead girlfriend jokes with the best of them, nowdays.
But Kirby knew his personal life was even more barren than you’d expect from a run of the mill orphan, at least until the last few years with Veronica. Kirby was the one who had been shooting Logan sad looks every time Logan checked his phone since they got into port, the silence of no text messages received even more conspicuous than the glances themselves.
Kirby was the one person in France who would go to the trouble to get him a tree, and presents, and then forget to get ice for the goddamn ice bucket. It had his earnest Indiana farm boy flavor all over it. As did the mid-priced brand of the champagne. Like somebody wanted to make a Grand Holiday Gesture, but cringed at how high the upper range of prices soared. Nobody hauled in a tree up fourteen floors of stairs—fucking tiny Parisian elevators—then copped out on the gesture with the vinyl-siding subdivision level of champagne. Well, nobody other than a farmer’s kid who’d had a childhood that put the dirt in “dirt poor.”
Logan holstered his gun and pulled out his phone to call Kirby.
“No ice, bitch?” he asked without a greeting. “It’s like you don’t even love me at all. Now get your homely ass up here and help me drink this. Everybody knows drinking champagne alone dooms you to seven years single.”
A subtle beep sounded and the hotel door clicked open. Logan dropped his phone with his navy buddy’s voice coming through the speaker, and whipped out his gun, dropping to one knee for a steadier stance.
Ice rattled against plastic and the intruder froze, then drawled, “It’s a good thing I know you’re not quick on the trigger, or I’d be pretty nervous right now.”
He couldn’t move. All he could do was stare, but when he remembered to take his finger off the trigger before a stray tremor ruined his life forever, he found it had already jumped out of the trigger guard all on its own.
“Have to admit,” Veronica said. “This isn’t the way I’d hoped to get you back on one knee, but I suppose it’s no more than I deserve.” She offered a shaky smile, the ice rattling in her bucket as she shifted her weight. “Too soon for proposal jokes?”
Logan thumbed the safety back on and chucked the gun without a second glance, exploding up off the floor and across the room to her. The ice bucket erupted when he caught her up in his arms, the cubes going flying and the plastic bucket getting caught between them, its sides bending in from the pressure of Logan’s arms crushing Veronica’s body toward his. He swung her around, the ice bucket popping out somewhere around their knees when the pressure got to be too much.
She laughed, hugging him so tightly around his neck that he was pretty sure the arm of her sweater had left some rug burn. Also, he did not care. He buried his face in her neck, taking huge, heaving breaths and fuck, there was a small possibility he was about to cry while wearing the uniform of the US Navy. Not ideal.
Especially on Christmas.
As for his neck, it was being kissed. Repeatedly. By a breathless Veronica.
He stopped their spinning and held dead still with ice cubes melting at their feet, every one of his cells focused on the sensation of her lips. But as if the stillness had brought them out of the twirling-oh-my-god-you’re-here phase and back into normal reality, she stiffened.
Time out apparently over.
He bent his knees to set her back on her feet.
“You’re here!” He ran a hand back over his closely-cropped hair, wondering where his uniform cap had gone. “I mean, are you the victim of a Rudolph drive-by kidnapping or some other sleigh-related mishap, or is this a voluntary teleportation to Paris?”
A flurry of sounds from across the room made him remember his telephone and he crossed the room to pick it up to Kirby yelling at him.
“No emergency, don’t come up, man. Veronica’s um, here.” A smile almost flickered across his face at his buddy’s response. “Shut up. Anyway, call you tomorrow.” He hung up and came back to the foyer. “Sorry, forgot I was on a call when you came in.”
“Was it that pesky president you rescued?”
The smile made it onto his face this time, at the reference to the note he’d left on the fridge when he very first left. “Ah, I left that fucker to swing. Went for the puppies instead.”
“Good choice.”
She dropped to one knee and his already-overtaxed heart took an express elevator straight to his throat. At least until she picked up his white dress-uniform hat and rose back to her feet, placing it gently on his head.
“The effect isn’t the same without the hat,” she explained with another very-not-Veronica-like wobbly smile.
You should only wear this.
He could still remember what she’d said the first time she’d seen him in his dress whites, and he cleared his throat, that memory so precious in his mind he was afraid to even think it right now, when everything between them seemed so precarious. “So you, uh, came.”
“Of course I did. It’s Christmas.” She was looking up at him like her heart was breaking. “You weren’t home. So, a bunch of red eye flights and a maxed-out credit card later…” She did a little tap dance that ended with a twirl, outspread arms, and a smile from Logan so big he literally could not help it.
“Didn’t know tap dancing was in your repertoire.”
“Dance team. Far as I can remember, you watched our practices pretty closely. The old memory going just from that little bump on the head?”
His smile disappeared at the reference to his November text. “Didn’t know you’d gotten that one. You didn’t answer.”
She glared. “What was I supposed to say, when I’m not allowed to kill anyone for giving my boyfriend a concussion? When you’re out at work again before I can even track down which hospital you’re being held at, because they didn’t even give me a goddamn continent name to work with?”
He blinked. “You tried to track the hospital? I told you it was just a little bump on the head.”
“Oh? I suppose that’s why they had to shave part of your head for the stitches?” She pointed to the spot above his right ear. “The buzz cut hasn’t quite grown in yet, Lieutenant.”
He shook his head and took a step back. “Look, I’m not sure what role I’m supposed to be playing in this bit. Am I reassuring my concerned girlfriend, or hearing your opening arguments for why we’re breaking up, or defending my dangerous career choice?”
She let out a breath. “Sorry. I’m not, um…I meant to be better. By the time I got here. At this.” She bent and swiftly began gathering fallen ice cubes into the ice bucket.
Logan knelt and caught her hand. “Better at what?”
Her fingers tightened and the melting ice cubes dripped chilly water over both their hands. “Everything,” she whispered.
Logan sat down on the floor, ignoring the lump of a melting ice cube under his ass, and hauled her into his lap. “You’re here,” he growled. “And assuming you didn’t bribe someone to carry a Christmas tree fourteen floors up a tiny Parisian stairwell just to dump my ass, I’m pretty sure there’s not a goddamn thing on earth that could make you any more perfect than you already are.”
Veronica was shaking. Even with him holding her as tight as he could, even with her tears leaving tiny damp pinpricks against his neck. Even now, with both of them not just on the same continent but finally, finally in the same room.
“Is that what you think? That I came here to break up with you? Dammit, Logan.” Her voice cracked and the pinpricks of her tears became full droplets.
He rubbed her back, not sure what to do when he was being simultaneously cursed out and cried upon.
She pulled back with a little sniff, and wiped her eyes with a quick swipe that left eyeliner streaked across her cheek.
“First of all, I didn’t bribe anyone. Kirby did it for free, that adorable little nerd. It’s so wrong for anyone with that many freckles to have that biceps that big, seriously. Second, I’m here because you’ve been gone so long you’re one assignment away from qualifying from legal desertion in the state of California. Logan…” She touched his cheek and he wondered if it was possible to die of cheek touching. With as long as he’d gone without sex, cardiac arrest via cheek touch seemed like an all-too-plausible cause of death.
“I…” She stuttered. “I wanted to wait until we could talk in person, and then when you kept getting assignments, I thought it was a sign that it wasn’t time yet and maybe I was a coward, and okay, maybe definitely I was a coward to keep stalling, but I was never going to dump you. I was just waiting for you to come home. And you didn’t.”
“You never asked me to come home. When it was optional, not my orders, I gave you the choice and you said no.”
He wanted to pull back but she was tumbled into his lap in a muss of red skirts and one lost heel and he didn’t want to pace badly enough to push her onto the floor to do it. Plus, she smelled a little like nutmeg, which was complex and intriguing, and the kind of earnestly festive that had never existed in his household at Christmastime. Even before the mansion that had held his household had been burned to the ground by a biker gang.
She looked at him like he was an idiot. “I didn’t think I could tell you not to work when you’ve always, always supported what I needed to do for my career. Even on the days when you just wanted me to come home and fucking fuck you already.”
He smirked. “Unquote.”
Her eyes warmed a little. “I did think it was one of your more quotable moments. A Logan Echolls original.”
“You could have told me not to work.” He would have fucking loved for her to tell him not to work.
“I wanted to. I just…” She glanced toward the tree, then climbed to her feet. “Come here. I’ve been putting off this talk for months and when you said you weren’t going to be home for Christmas, I kind of just lost it. I knew I couldn’t wait any more, that if I did, I was going to get a third call from the hospital, and that call would be The Call.”
She looked down at him, eyes searching and uncertain, and he registered for the first time that she was wearing a red, cocktail length dress with a flaring skirt and an adorable white-ribbon waistband to set off her softly curled blonde hair. He hadn’t seen her wear anything but boots and leather in months, even before he left. The cynical armor of a PI setting out for the day to see the worst society had to offer.
And instead, she’d flown halfway across the world and conspired with one of his best friends to get him a tree.
“What are you smiling about?” she asked, her fidgeting fingers starting to tug the white ribbon waistband loose from its stitching.
“Just starting to catch that old holiday spirit.”
He came to his feet in a quick roll, ignoring the wet spot on his ass where the ice cube had fully melted. His girlfriend blinked up at him as he draped his arms around her shoulders.
“You hate talking about your feelings.”
“Um, yeah?” she said it like she was extending the word into an open bear trap, waiting for the jaws to snap closed on her.
“And you flew halfway around the world to do just that.”
“Yes.” She whispered it this time, her eyes darting to the floor, then the walls.
He kissed her forehead. “So let me take you out to dinner first. I bet you’re starving, and I’ve always wanted to see the depths of depravity you might sink to when confronted with a Parisian cheese plate.”
“WAIT.” Her eyes flew to meet his. “Did you say cheese plate?”
He grinned. “Don’t go changing, ‘Ronica.”
And he dipped his head to steal the first kiss he’d had in three long, long seasons.