Chapter Text
When Logan first met Louise—really met her, the time he stupidly stole her bunny ears—he could never have imagined how violently his life would shift on its axis. One minute he was an irritated sixteen-year-old trying to prove to his friends he wasn’t as boring as they thought, and the next he was standing in a ring of bikers, a circle of exhaust fumes and leather closing in on him like a noose. Critter—he knows his name now, knows it too well—pressed that filthy pocketknife toward his head with the kind of casual cruelty that suggested he’d done this before. Logan remembered thinking, absurdly, This is it, this is how I die. Because I took some kid’s stupid costume accessory.
And yet, somehow, what branded itself into his brain wasn’t the fear. It wasn’t the bikers revving their engines or the knife glinting in the sun or even the humiliating way he begged. No—it was Louise Belcher. It was something stranger, deeper, harder to scrub out. Something like awe. Because as those bikers were circling him, ready to treat him like some cautionary tale, Louise had stood there vibrating with fury, looking half feral—eyes wild, grin sharp, delighting openly in the chaos she had caused.
And Logan, who had spent his whole life being told to smile politely, sit up straight, speak gently, behave, behave, behave—felt something in him jolt awake.
He wanted that. That freedom. That audacity. That willingness to be chaotic and cruel and utterly unbothered by the consequences. He wanted to be the kind of person who could steal something just because it amused him, not because it made him look good for a scholarship panel.
When he was home, he was expected to be their “good little boy.” At school, he was the well-bred honor student teachers praised in the hallways. In his extracurriculars—debate, mock trial, community service—he was the quiet, reliable one. Everyone had their version of Logan Barry Bush, polished and pleasant.
But none of those masks fit anymore.
He wanted to be a jerk who could swipe bunny ears off a little girl’s head and enjoy the chase that followed. And God, when Louise had come after him—face twisted with rage, pigtails flying, screaming threats no nine-year-old should plausibly know—he had felt alive for the first time in his entire life.
He’s going to start acting out more, he decided that night. The thought came to him with the certainty of a vow.
And he does.
Skipping obligations. Picking fights at school. Talking back. Breaking rules that once made him anxious to even consider bending. And he likes it. Each slip feels like loosening a knot in his chest.
His mother, of course, is horrified.
“Logan, sweetheart, what is going on with you?” Cynthia would demand, voice trembling like she was auditioning for a tragedy. “This isn’t you. My kind little boy would never speak this way.”
“Your kind little boy doesn’t exist,” Logan muttered once—not loud, but loud enough.
She hovered after that, tightening her grip, monitoring him with desperate, suffocating intensity. Checking his homework, asking about his friends, insisting on family dinners. The final straw was when he called her the B-word under his breath during one of her tirades.
“Oh, that is IT!” she snapped, dragging him by the wrist toward the front door. “We are going to the Dakota Applebaum Mother-Daughter Seminar and you are going to learn some respect, young man!”
“It’s a mother-daughter seminar,” he deadpanned, trying to wrench free. “I’m not your daughter.”
“You’re coming anyway! Maybe you’ll learn something about gratitude!”
He expected that day to be a circle of Hell. It was—until he saw her.
Louise.
His stomach flipped so violently he almost tripped. Of all places—here? Now? Her expression, when their eyes met, shifted instantly into that sour little snarl he remembered. And something in him sparked.
He enjoyed messing with her more than he should have. She would snap at him, and he’d grin. When she got frustrated, her whole face would scrunch, cheeks blotchy red. And that voice—God, her voice. When she was upset, it pitched higher, sharp as a cracked bell. But when she was plotting? It dropped low, dark, almost… controlled.
And the first time he heard that low voice again—scheming about how to sabotage the seminar—it happened.
A twitch. Heat. His bits tightening in a way that made him freeze mid-step.
No. No, no, no. He wasn’t one of those people. He wasn’t. There had to be another explanation. His body was confused. He was stressed. Overstimulated. Something.
But the fluttering didn’t stop.
During their laser-tag game against their moms, he realized he couldn’t take his eyes off her. The way she darted between obstacles, the way she laughed when she managed to score a hit on him, the way she glared like she wanted to bite him every time he smiled back.
He shouldn’t feel this way. But the beats were the same—the racing heart, the tight chest, the electric awareness—identical to what he felt when an older girl flirted with him.
Except with Louise, it didn’t fade.
It clung.
It festered.
It disturbed him so deeply that he grew even more explosive at home. Snapping at Cynthia. At Tom. Slamming doors. Picking fights he knew he’d lose just to feel something sharp and real.
Cynthia, wringing her hands nightly, finally confessed her fears to her husband.
“Something is wrong with him, Tom! He’s mean. Angry. Distracted. He stares off at nothing and won’t talk to me. What if—what if he’s doing drugs? Or being bullied? Or depressed? I don’t know what to do!”
Tom, reading the newspaper, barely glanced up. “He’s a teenager, Cynthia. They get moody.”
But even he began noticing. The way Logan’s eyes lingered on the burger restaurant whenever they drove past. The way he made excuses to go toward Wonder Wharf. The way he seemed… expectant. Like he was looking for someone.
They assumed, naturally, it meant a girl. “Maybe he’s finally interested in someone his own age,” Tom suggested one evening. “That’d be healthy.”
Cynthia lit up with relief. “Oh! Yes! Maybe he is! Should we encourage him?” Encourage him, they did. Logan, cornered by parental enthusiasm, agreed to go out with a girl from his grade. She was pretty enough. Nice enough. She flirted a little.
But she didn’t interest him. Not really. Not even close.
She was a placeholder—something to keep his parents happy. A distraction to make them stop watching him so closely.
Because the only time his pulse truly stirred, the only time his mind sharpened, the only time he felt anything that wasn’t dull or angry or both—
Was when he thought of Louise Belcher.
After Bob and Mr. Fischoeder were nearly killed by Felix and Fanny during the Wonder Wharf debacle, Logan found himself standing on the pier with what felt like half of Seymour’s Bay. Sirens flashed red and blue against the water, casting strange, broken reflections across everyone’s faces. People muttered to each other—gossip already forming like steam in the cold air—but Logan wasn’t hearing any of it. Not really.
He was supposed to be on a date. The girl from his grade—his “girlfriend,” as she kept insisting. He’d never called her that; the title slid off his tongue like oil. She tugged on his sleeve, eyes wide with a thrill that had nothing to do with empathy and everything to do with spectacle.
“Oh my God, Logan, do you think they’re hurt? This is so scary,” she whispered dramatically, leaning closer to him like she thought danger would make him romantic.
He barely registered her voice. His hands were in his pockets, but he could feel the tremor of adrenaline humming through his veins as he stared past the rubbernecking crowd.
There they were: the Belchers.
All soaked to the bone, wrapped in thin hospital blankets that clung to them like wet paper. Louise was perched on the edge of an EMT’s bumper, kicking her boots against the metal. Her pink ears drooped with water. Her face was pale, but her glare was sharp, alive. Defiant.
Logan’s pulse jumped hard enough that he swallowed against it.
He caught sight of Bob and Mr. Fischoeder standing nearby, speaking in low voices. Bob looked exhausted. Calvin looked annoyed to be breathing air that wasn’t filtered through his own money. Even from a distance, Logan could tell the conversation was more than surface-level. He felt the prickle of instinct—secrets were being exchanged.
And he loved secrets.
“Logan?” his date asked, tapping his arm. “What are you staring at?”
He didn’t look at her. “I’ll be back.”
“What? Back from—where are you going?” Her voice pitched up, confused.
“I said I’ll be back.” He stepped away before she could grab at him again.
He slid through the edges of the crowd, careful, silent. He ducked behind a police cruiser when an officer turned his head. The cold wind lifted the loose edges of his jacket as he maneuvered through the chaos, eyes never leaving the Fischoeder brothers.
He wanted to follow Louise. Every cell in his body tugged in that direction—the hospital, the ambulance, the wild little girl wrapped in a blanket and looking like she might bite the EMT if he spoke to her wrong. But hospitals had security. Parents. Lights. Too many obstacles. And Calvin and Felix… well, they were walking straight into shadow.
He followed them.
Calvin was talking to Felix in that breezy, condescending way he used with everyone except, apparently, whoever frightened him. For most of the people on the pier, their exchange sounded like two rich brothers bickering.
But Logan heard the things underneath.
The way Calvin’s voice dipped, just slightly, when he murmured, “Felix, I swear to God, if you ever pull something like that again, I’ll tell them what you did in Budapest.”
Felix went rigid. “You wouldn’t.”
“Oh,” Calvin said lightly, “I absolutely would.”
To anyone else, it might have sounded like normal sibling threats. To Logan, who had been studying the Fischoeders in the same instinctive, hungry way he’d been studying Louise, it was a door cracking open.
A brother threatening his brother with legitimate secrets. Real leverage. Real darkness. Real power.
And suddenly Logan knew—he could use this. Somehow, some way, he could use the cracks in their perfect façade.
Back home, things only got worse.
Cynthia was convinced the Belchers—Louise, specifically—were corrupting her son.
“She’s trouble, Logan!” she cried during one of their arguments, pacing the kitchen like she wanted to throttle the entire Belcher family with her bare hands. “Every time I see you near those burger people, your attitude gets worse! You used to be so polite. So sweet. So normal.”
Logan gritted his teeth, not bothering to hide the smirk curling at the edge of his mouth. “Maybe I wasn’t normal. Maybe you just didn’t notice.”
She ignored that. She always ignored anything that didn’t fit her narrative. Instead, she began orchestrating ways to “separate him from bad influences,” hovering over him like a wasp, dragging him away from Wonder Wharf, steering him away from Ocean Avenue entirely if she could help it.
But college applications changed everything.
Cynthia, wracked with anxiety about her son’s future, decided he needed volunteer hours and “character-building experiences” to beef up his resume. She knew his recent behaviour and unreliability had put a dent in his once-perfect resume. And she knew—oh, she knew—that Bob Belcher could be manipulated. A little guilt, a little flattery, a little parental solidarity, and one garden plot.
“Logan would love to help,” she insisted. “And I’ll stay during his shifts to write his application essays.”
She didn’t stay to write essays.
She stayed to spy.
She stayed to monitor.
She stayed to pry her son away from the gravitational pull of that infuriating, magnetic little girl.
It didn’t work.
By his last shift, when Louise was sitting on the other side of the booth, in the middle of firing him with a different kind of fire in her eyes, Logan wasn’t annoyed. He wasn’t angry.
He was laughing.
A real laugh. The kind that shook his shoulders and startled even him. Cynthia grabbed him by the arm, horrified as they stormed out, marching along the sidewalk. “Logan Barry Bush, how DARE you encourage that behaviour?! She’s a child, Logan! Why are you enjoying this? Why are you letting her be so—so mean to you?”
Because it felt good. Because being hated by her felt better than being ignored by anyone else. Because when she glared at him, he felt alive.
He bit back the smile but couldn’t hide the spark in his eyes. Cynthia dragged him outside like she was trying to save him from a burning building.
She didn’t realize that he’d already walked willingly into the fire.
And while his mother tried to smother the flames, Logan fanned them.
He followed the Fischoeder brothers.
For days. Weeks. Months.
He skipped school sometimes, slipping through back alleys and shadowed corners of Wonder Wharf. He learned their patterns, their habits. He saw the way Calvin controlled the family empire and how Felix crumbled under pressure. He saw secret meetings, overheard careless remarks, pieced together skeletons they thought were long buried.
And once he had enough—once he’d collected enough fractured, incriminating pieces to assemble into a weapon—he knew it was time to approach Calvin.
By then, Logan was seventeen. Almost eighteen. He had been watching Louise for two years—she ten, almost eleven. Not obsessively close, but enough. Enough to know her patterns. Enough to know her schemes. Enough to know when she’d broken a rule or swindled a tourist or manipulated her siblings into doing her bidding.
And every time she succeeded, every time she smirked at some chaos she’d created, his blood surged hot and electric.
Over these two years, he messed with her when he could—small things, petty sabotage, just enough to make her chase him or snarl at him or threaten him with cartoonish violence. Every time her eyes snapped toward him in recognition, every time she spit some insult like it was a promise…
His heart thrashed. His pulse hammered. And he told himself it wasn’t obsession.
Not yet.
But it was growing.
And he wasn’t going to let it go.