Logan tried to swallow the sip of coffee, but it kept hovering there in his throat, as the muscles threatened to convulse. His hands were shaking. His normally steady, reliable hands, and they kept shaking so much that the surface of the coffee shuddered violently, forming little eddies in the drink. Dark as night, sweet as sin, his father would say about it: the way he drank it black, with sugar. There was still light, somewhere. There had to be. There just wasn't any here, not right now, not for him.

He waited by the twisted barbed wire, in the dark, in his vest, tail flicking back and forth. He waited for hours, without moving. He had started to pace, he had gone and gotten a coffee, and made his way back. He was still there, in the mud, staring at the twisted wires. His lip twitched away from his teeth in a silent snarl, and his eyebrows furrowed together, as he took another sip of his coffee. His hands shook so badly that he splashed a drop on his shoes.

Perhaps it was partly from cold. Mostly, it was from the fact that he was gone. Not Logan; Logan was still right there, within himself, of course. Jace. Jace was gone, and had been for a while. Logan had patrolled all the usual places, left his window open at night, but... it had been weeks, months even, and he hadn't seen or heard anything of Jace. It was as if the teen had just vanished off the face of the planet. Logan's father had been particularly sympathetic, even if Logan hadn't explained everything.

One night, Logan had come in, covered in mud, and his father had been waiting for him. He had been searching the streets for Jace, or even for Ryder, who was also missing-- even Bigsby, for Alice's sake-- and no one had appeared. Logan, feeling discarded and alone, had looked into the sympathetic face of his father and rushed forward, burying his face against his father's chest and crying. Shaking, crying, and letting it all out. Like he never had before, not even as an infant. They hadn't really needed to talk about it, it was sort of a wordless agreement: They both knew, now, what it was like to have someone immortal choose to leave them. Because when Death was not involved, it had to be a choice, didn't it?

And it must have been something he said, or something he did, or something he failed to do. Logan shut his eyes against the thought, and howled in something that was equal parts agony and misery; guilt, and shame; disappointment, and defeat.

No matter how hard he looked, if someone didn't want to be found, especially someone in Spades...

They never would be.

Logan made a vow, then, in real time, digging in his pocket with his spare hand for a pack of cigarettes-- he was about to light one, when he realized that it was a pack Jace had left in his room. Logan crushed them in one fist, and smashed his coffee mug on the ground.

In that moment, a burning anger razed the sadness from Logan, making him throw the crushed pack into the barbed wire from which Jace had once rescued him. That same wordless howl raged within him, and he held onto that anger.

Because as soon as it left, he would remember. He'd remember what it felt like, to know that Jace had been faced with staying or leaving, and leaving was what he had wanted.

If it was what he wanted, no one would or could keep him from that. And Logan vowed that day never again to set foot in Spades.