[TW: for the rest of this story, there will be suicidal thoughts, self harm, etc.]
LOGAN
Logan stretched his cramped legs when he heard his phone pinging on the other side of the room. He always had everyone but his siblings (and since the roofie incident, Andy) on Do Not Disturb. Out of those four people, Elijah was out of commission, Olivia had already gone to bed and had no reason to text him from her room, and he was pretty sure Andy would never send so many messages in a row.
He hoped Blake was only sending him his stupid cat videos. Logan was still trying to study for his math test and there was no way he could drive the two hours to Blake's dorm and help him if he had set the house on fire or fallen down drunk and needed a ride.
He stood up and yawned, stretching his back like a cat and shaking out the sleep from his limbs. He took his phone from the charger and saw that it was, in fact, Blake.
Logan waited with bated breath, a train wreck of thoughts crowding his mind, one horrible thing after another.
Did he have a run in with the Sons of Solomon?
Was he in the police station?
Did he take something and was drugged up and couldn't talk?
Blake's goofy face flashed on the screen and Logan pressed his finger down to accept the call on the first ring.
"Logan-" Blake's tight, barely controlled voice came through the phone. The room was dark behind him, casting shadows on Blake's face so Logan couldn't see him properly.
"Are you okay? Why are you whispering? What's wrong?"
Blake lowered his voice even more. Logan had to turn his volume all the way up.
"Um - Andy just told me - I don't get it - what if he - it was like - and I almost -"
Logan was so terrified he couldn't think straight, and Blake's half-assed answer was only making his anxiety skyrocket. "Blake, what the fuck are you saying?" he demanded.
"Andy told me to kiss him!" Blake whisper-yelled.
It took Logan a few seconds to process those words.
Kiss him? Kiss him? That was what Blake had scared him half to death about?
"Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Logan, what do I do!" Blake wailed, returning to his normal volume. "I don't know what's going on! What does he mean?"
Logan was still trying to take deep breaths to calm his heart back down. He could hardly understand what was going on through the roar in his ears.
He set his phone on the floor and massaged his eyebrows with his fingers as Blake ranted about what had happened. Logan tried to follow along as best he could, but he still didn't get why Blake hadn't just kissed him given the offer.
"So you're telling me he explicitly told you to kiss him and you didn't do it?"
"It wasn't like that! What if he was just teasing me?"
"Blake." Logan was feeling calm enough that his anger at being scared had faded away a bit. He picked up the phone and looked Blake in the face. "Do you like him?"
"I don't know! What if he doesn't like me?"
"Whether he likes you is not the question! Do you like him?"
Blake chewed his lip. He looked away. "I don't know," he mumbled. "Maybe...no. I don't know."
"So you do?"
"What is the point of this?"
"If you like him, that means he's a good guy right?"
"Sure..."
"So why are you so worried? You think he'd lead you on like that?"
"Logan, there was another joke we had and he teased me about being a romantic and so maybe this is just that-"
Logan rolled his eyes. "Okay, you know what? Just do what you want."
"I don't know what I want!"
"If you want to kiss him then fucking kiss him. I don't know what else to tell you."
"You are so terrible. Give me some Elijah advice."
Logan's patience snapped.
"Well, I'm sorry that you only have me."
There was a long silence.
Logan bitterly wished Blake would just hang up the phone. He tried not to compare himself to Elijah, but he couldn't help it, not when Elijah had worked his ass off to raise all three of them, not when Blake and Olivia loved Elijah so much, all but worshipped the ground he walked on.
But Logan couldn't be Elijah. He wasn't that strong. He wasn't that brave.
He couldn't be who his siblings wanted or needed.
"I didn't mean that," Blake said softly.
"Sure."
Logan was exhausted. All these months trying to fill Elijah's shoes and hold himself together had been steadily wearing him down, and now the pressure came down so hard he ached.
He hadn't even realized how defeated he'd felt until right now.
Blake's words reminded him that he wasn't the powerful older brother that his siblings could count on in any situation - he was only a sorry excuse for a temporary fill in.
"Logan-"
"Just - quit it, Blake. I don't care."
"Okay. Um, well, I will..." Blake swallowed. Logan felt nauseous. There was an awkward silence. Logan knew he was being petty but he didn't know how to fix this, and Blake was too much a ball of nerves from the Andy incident to do so.
"I will, erm, keep you updated," Blake said without much enthusiasm, not even looking directly at Logan.
Logan hurt. He felt even worse. Blake had called him in a panic wanting someone to hear him and Logan had made this a fight about himself instead. He wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear.
He didn't want to be here anymore.
By some miracle, Blake was still on the call, waiting for an answer. Logan mumbled, "Okay."
"Okay. Bye. Good night."
Logan hung up without saying goodbye.
*****
Logan stayed awake as long as he could studying before he finally allowed himself to sleep. He'd been working extra hours at his research job so that he wasn't running Elijah's savings account empty, and he hardly got time to study during the weekend now.
It felt like only a few minutes had passed before the door to his room was slammed open, jerking him awake.
His eyes were glued shut and his fuzzy brain heard someone call out for him, but he was dead tired and he could hardly string two thoughts together, much less an entire reply. He screwed his eyes shut and then tried to open them and see what the hell was going on in the middle of the night.
"Logan?" the voice called again.
Just as he opened one eye, light flooded his night vision and he was so startled by who the fuck was standing there and flipping his lights on that he simultaneously clutched his hands to his eyes, white spots dancing behind his eyelids, and wildly tried to untangle himself from his bedsheets. He couldn't see a single thing, much less the fact that there was no more bed where he was trying to roll over.
He fell straight off the bed and onto the floor. He peeled open his eyes, his heart galloping wildly, squinting in the harsh light just long enough to see who it was.
"What the fuck, Olivia?" he wheezed. "The fuck are you doing, god."
He rolled over and pressed his face into his carpet, trying to calm his heart beat. Because twice with his two siblings in the span of less than five hours?
That was way too much for his fragile heart.
As he tried to regulate it, he realized it was quiet in his room. Olivia was weirdly silent.
When he was more sure he wasn't about to have a heart attack, he mumbled, "What time is it?"
"I'm not sure..."
Logan tried to open his eyes again, but there was no way he could adjust to the fluorescent lights beaming down into his face like a million suns. It was definitely an ungodly time of night. "I'm going to be fucking blind," he groaned.
"S-sorry."
Logan wished she'd just say what she came for. What the hell was she drawing this out for? "What is your problem?"
"I'm sorry, it's n-nothing, I'll go." She turned off the light.
Logan's senses returned to him in a quick rush. He remembered her fear that afternoon when he picked her up.
Although she didn't want to talk, she hadn't let him leave her sight, staying by his side even though he was going to wash the dishes himself and hanging out in his room when he went to study.
"Stop," he grumbled. "Wait. Come here."
"I said it's fine-"
"I said it's not. You didn't just blind me for no reason." He painstakingly sat up on the edge of his bed and pushed his fingers into his hair. "Sit next to me. Here."
He motioned for her to sit on the bed and she stiffly did as he said.
"Okay," he said in a more even voice, now that he wasn't on the floor and he wasn't blind and they were sitting side by side like normal people. "What is it?"
"What is what?"
Logan sighed tiredly. Why the hell was he doing this? He should've just told her to go back to fucking sleep and ignored this whole mess.
Yet here he was, pulling an Elijah, except it was like Elijah 0.1 because he didn't know what the hell he was supposed to do, and Olivia knew that.
This was going to be the Andy incident with Blake all over again.
He wanted to claw his eyes out at the huge screw up he was about to become.
"Why'd you come here? Did you have a bad dream?"
"It's fine," she said stubbornly, and Logan was so frustrated he wanted to rip his hair out, but he forced himself to stay calm.
"Was the dream about me?" he asked. "Did I do something?"
In a shaky voice, Olivia breathed quietly, "I was scared for you."
Logan's voice softened. He felt less angry. This was not about him versus Elijah. She was just terrified for him.
"I'm here, okay? It didn't happen. I'm here."
"I just thought you were gone," she rasped.
"I'm not. It's okay now."
"I know."
She was quiet. Logan knew she didn't like it when he pushed her to talk about the details of her nightmares, so he kept silent too until her shaky breathing eased and she wasn't sitting so tensely like she expected someone to come barging into the house.
Then he steeled his nerves and said, "Olivia, you're really having a lot of nightmares. Do you want to see someone? A therapist? Or a psychiatrist? They can prescribe things for nightmares."
"No, I'm fine," she repeated for the upteenth time.
"Like hell this is fine," Logan grumbled, rubbing his tired eyes. "You have nightmares at least three times a week."
"You're counting?"
"Of course I'm counting. This is serious."
"It'll go away. It's fine. I'm just stressed."
"Olivia, I know this has been happening since the trial. It's been months."
She didn't say anything. She clenched her hands into his bedsheets and didn't make any move to go back to her room. Logan's heart was tearing in two. He wanted to help her, but she wouldn't come out and say she would accept his help, or tell him what she needed him to help her with.
Was this what Blake and Elijah felt like, talking to him?
"You know," he said slowly, trying out the words on his tongue. He had never told anyone this before. The only people who knew were Blake and Elijah, and they already knew so he had never confessed it to anyone.
And he didn't want to ever tell his little sister this, didn't want her to know this part of him. But seeing her like this, he didn't know what else to try.
"I used to see a psychologist," he said. "A few years ago."
The words hung between them, a thick cloud of dark and black and a past Logan would rather leave buried. But it was out now, and he was going to deal with it.
"Was it for nightmares?" Olivia asked.
"It was for a lot of things," he said elusively. There was only so much he could say out loud. "But it helped, you know?"
"Did it really?"
"I'm not going to lie," he said. "You have to work really hard to help yourself because just seeing someone once or twice a week can't just make it all go away. You seriously have to work for it. You have to do the things they show you how to do or it won't work. But yes. For me, it helped."
And it had helped, in conjunction with the medications. Logan had gone from wanting to die every hour of every day to having intrusive thoughts a few times a week. He stopped cutting over the course of a few months and he just managed to pass his classes so he wouldn't have to repeat junior year of high school.
And he began to want to do things with Blake and Elijah again, the one thing that he was most terrified of losing forever.
Elijah forced him to attend therapy even when Logan screamed ugly things at him, even when Elijah had to physically drag him there. Elijah did not let him do what he wanted, and he would forever be grateful for that.
"It helps," Logan repeated.
Olivia put her feet up on the bed and drew herself into a small ball. "I did something today that you'll be mad about."
His jerk reaction was to demand why she would do that because really, he was so sick and tired of things always going wrong, but if she was coming to him with her problems, if she was saying this of her own accord and talking to him about what was troubling her, the least he could do was not make her feel like she couldn't do that. The last thing he wanted to do was make her feel like it was a mistake to trust him with her problems.
Logan kept his voice as steady as he could as he said, "Okay. You want to tell me?"
"I'm sorry," she said tearily. "Please don't be mad."
"I can't say I won't be mad, but I promise we'll be fine. Is that okay?"
"Okay," she said reluctantly.
Haltingly, slowly, she told him what had happened at school that day, from leaving the building to escaping the men at the gas station store. Logan forced himself to be silent throughout her story, only nodding along as she spoke, but inside, his blood was boiling.
She was only a little kid. She knew nothing and she didn't want anything and she didn't deserve this. She deserved to be able to ditch school now and then and not be afraid of being kidnapped.
He thought they were past this. He thought he could live in goddamn peace, but this was still happening. The itching under his skin grew and grew until he felt so hopeless he wanted to tear his skin off.
What was the point?
What was the point of all this if they were still being hunted? What was the point of him living with Olivia if he couldn't even keep her safe?
What was the point of keeping on going this way if nothing would ever get better?
And nothing was getting better. He'd been feeling this way for so many weeks on end that he couldn't remember why or how he'd ever been okay in the first place.
Olivia finished recounting the story. She put her hands beneath her legs and sat very stiffly, unable to meet his eyes, three inches too far from him.
Logan was so tired and drained he found he didn't have the energy to cross the distance between them.
"I'll call witness protection tomorrow, okay?" he said finally.
After a small hesitation, she said, "Okay."
Logan knew this was where he was supposed to comfort her from but he was at the end of his rope. He didn't have the emotional energy to do anything.
Nothing mattered anyway. He would fuck it up again regardless of what he tried.
He just wanted it all to end.
"I'm sorry, Logan," she said almost desperately when he didn't say anything else.
"It's fine," he said, if only so that she was mollified and he wouldn't have to do this anymore.
But as he sat there in the dark, the weight of the world threatening to cave in his lungs, the blackness of his life tunneling his vision until he couldn't see that anything at all could come next, he was starting to realize that it never would be.
I'm not sure if I'll just have to start updating every other week because of school and all. We'll see how it goes after this week.
Thank you all for the votes and comments :) I know I haven't been replying but I see each and every one of your names.
For next time: sorry guys but it's just going to go a lot downhill from here before the end.