let's talk about all our friends who lost the war.

movies of your dreams
another in a series of connected ficlets, the first being: living is what kills you.


1.

You knock on her door.

It's three in the morning, and the hour is a new kind of desperation that's sinking into your chest and mouth and eyes. The unrelenting, unforgivable kind. She opens it and her eyes are soft and melting when she says, "I was hoping it would be you," as if she cares, as if she doesn't remember what she had done to you just hours before. You can barely talk. You've got blood in your mouth and you think about choking on it. You hold the pen out.

"You wanted to see this. It. It's the note. He gave it to me, it's where. She kept it there. I thought you'd want to know. You always want to know."

Looking at her, then, what you realize is that what she did to you is more important to you than it ever will be to her. It wasn't hard for her. If it was, you couldn't see it. Lilly was always first; she was first for her and first for you and she's dead. It feels like she's been murdered all over again, but this time you don't even have the memories, this time, you can't even pretend that things would have been better if she'd lived - this time, there's nothing left for you to hold onto. And you had loved her and you still see her before you wake up. Fucking Lilly. You loved her and she betrayed you; you would have thought that you'd get used to it by now. You're so angry that you can't even feel it, so heartbroken that you can hear the bones in your chest snapping, grinding. Breaking. It's the same feeling you had when you realized it was over between Lilly and you. It feels like you're stabbing yourself in the gut, over and over. It feels like a blow to the head. It feels like the inescapable, perfect truth, the cruelest act of kindness you've ever known.

You know it well. It's the kind of feeling that makes you grit your teeth and smile, the kind that makes you lift your head and stiffen your shoulders when what you really want to do is throw glass at the walls and trip over the edge of a bridge and put your face in your hands and give up, for good. It's that kind of feeling. She's not smiling anymore. You guess it shows. You want to laugh, almost.


2.

"I. They told me about the videos. I want to see them."

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"Do you think I give a fuck? I just, I need to see them, I don't care if it'll destroy me, it's going to get worse and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't fucking fix this. It's gonna get worse and I don't care, I just need to see them."

"They're at the police station."

"Then tell me what was on them. Tell me what you saw."

"Logan, I --"

"I want to know. Consider this one last favor, and then you can flush me out of your life, or whatever it is you want to do, fuck me if I know what that is. I'm asking for this one thing."

(You used to tell yourself, after Lilly, that you'd had your heart ripped out once and it'd never happen again, not because you'd be smarter next time, but because you'd tear it out yourself first and lock it away for safekeeping. You lie a lot. You're a fucking softie - you're out there for the world to see and ridicule and hurt. You thought it was worth it, you thought a lot of things, and now all you can think about is how black the water was fifty feet beneath your feet, of your empty house, of the look on Lilly's face at the car wash. That secretive, glowing kind of happiness that you'd never been able to put there. All the words that your father used to say, all the lies he told, all the times you'd believed him. You're a fucking poor judge of honesty, you trust the people that matter implicitly and painfully, and you still haven't learned. You had loved all of them, once. You loved them and they used you. You loved them and they lied to you. You used to think that it was worth it, and the worst thing is, you still might. Being who you are, you should've known that everybody acts, you should've kept believing that, you should've.)


3.

This is what you want to do: You want to slide down against the wall and maybe cry a little and feel her hand on your shoulder and not have to say a single goddamned word. You want her to stop looking at you with that expression on her face. The one that means that she's sorry for thinking you killed your own girlfriend, sorry for lying to your face and taking your trust and impaling you with it, twisting. Sorry for landing you in the sheriff's office and never once telling you the truth, sorry, sorry, can you forgive me? And you hate it, but you would. That's the problem. You know you would, even if you can't understand why she would do that, how she could do it. Not unless she was planning all along. It's always business. And, that, you can't think about that without wanting to -- no. You want to taste the blood in your mouth and you want to be fourteen again. You want to stop being so useless. You want, and you've never stopped wanting. What you want most of all is to go to sleep and never have to wake up, what you want is to live in your dreams again and never have to understand that --


4.

Looking at her, you think, I would have done anything for you. She's turned against you twice and it doesn't hurt any less now, only more. You need to learn how to not care, how to survive. You almost manage a smile and you almost manage to steady your hands when you hand the pen over and you almost manage not to trip on the steps. You almost manage a lot of things; you don't know why you're doing this, why you're handing over a little piece of yourself to someone who always put other people and places and things above you, why you can't stop. On the drive back, you see your fingers twitch against the steering wheel, and you think of how easy it would be to twist it and slam your car into a tree, a wall, an ocean. You almost do it, but you're a coward. You spend the night in your car and fall asleep with your cheek against the window, parked outside of your own house. Cell phone turned off and quote of the day deleted, hands freezing, salt and alcohol in your mouth. You don't think you've ever been this scared.

The last thing you remember before you fall asleep is that you don't have anyone, now.

Thing is, you've always bounced back, each time a little less, but you'd done it because you'd had to, because you needed it more than anything else. You can't even try, this time. You don't know any jokes for this. You don't know the routine. All you can see in your mind are the turned backs of people you used to know, faces in shadow, and your own useless hands. You've got no one but everybody's got you, and you tell yourself that you'd better start learning pretty fucking fast.


5.

In your dreams, she's alive and smiling.

There's blood on her collar and blood in her hair. You had loved her as much as you could love anything, and you don't even get a goodbye, not anymore. Your father killed her. You killed her. It's a train, and you're fucking petrified on the tracks. It won't stop for you alone, because you haven't earned it, because you're not worth the effort, because you're nothing without the people you need. You see Lilly running away, laughing as if she'll stay young forever. Her hair shortens and her waist thins and it's Veronica; she turns around and half smiles in that way of hers and asks you why you care so much. Her words bury themselves like knives in your throat, with a crushing sort of heaviness.

It goes like this: you breathe in and you breathe out and it doesn't get any easier. You feel like laughing until you start shaking, until there's nothing left to be sucked out of you. You feel like standing on top of a building and screaming until your throat bleeds. You feel like destroying something, anything, yourself.

You care and you can't stop. You don't stop. It's morning and the feeling is still the same. It's morning.






notes: I don't think it was Logan at the door, and I'm not so much interested in Logan/Veronica as I am in their interaction, inside or outside of a relationship. There's just so much to say about Logan that I couldn't fit into the fic, because, ow, brain. :| Still. He's all alone, man. I hardly think Trina is a loving figure in his life. :| This fic is jolting and raw and rough, because that's how it came out, because that's how it needed to be. I worry that it's too straightforward and uncluttered for Logan, but that's how I imagine it would be for him right now.

In your dreams, she's alive and smiling. is a take on the lyric from Neutral Milk Hotel's Two-Headed Boy Part 2.