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Logan had a question.
It started as a simple thing, a small part of his brain suddenly piping up and questioning things. Mostly what his brain questioned was "who were the kind people who sometimes came to visit him?"
His parents had once explained that they had been kind to him when he was really sick one time, and then continued to be kind ever after.
He stopped questioning it after he grew up; after he found out he had the kidney of their dead child.
But the more worrying question started there.
When is a person really dead? What makes them dead?
Is it when their hearts stop beating? When their brains no longer send signals to their bodies? Or is it when they are forgotten?
He wanted to start experimenting the second he could, but he knew. He knew this was morally ambiguous, he knew he would be judged. So Logan waited, building a foolproof reputation for himself and slowly playing the game.
He had to be normal, to keep his immoral curiosity deep in the dark spaces of his mind. And so the years went by, and he was flawless in reputation. And he started his new chapter.
He escaped to forums, to people with deep depression he could slowly manipulate. When their ghosts started appearing around him he ignored them as he had done since he was born.
They were only prototypes of what he wanted to do, after all.
The first candidate he seriously considered was a tired man with purple eyes. He came to Logan on a forum, explaining how he had no personal ties but maybe he might be of help, at least for science.
His second candidate was an actor who had been rejected one too many times, his argument a simple "I want to go down in history"
His third candidate was a father of no child, who had lost it all in a delivery room where his child gave his first and last breath. The difference between them was that the last candidate wasn't aware of this.
He's not sure when he starts talking to his candidates. He can't remember when Virgil sat down in front of him while he worked on his findings.
But he can remember the slow-forming connection, a tingle of regret for what he still wanted to do. He can remember when Virgil grabbed his hands and pressed them to his neck, begging, because Logan had promised and to please make it end.
He can remember the warm laughter of the semi-transparent young adult -only a few years younger than Logan- and the curious but slightly pressing question of where exactly had his heart ended up in.
Roman is slightly harder to forget. He appears at the end of the opera, a hand dramatically lifted in the air and the grace of someone who might or might not dance.
The connection isn't as deep as it was with Virgil, mostly because Roman is so different from him, and it's complex to find common ground and the chance for affection. It ends differently too, with a strong sedative and a stronger poison. He does disappear to the pigs - like Virgil did-, but it feels different.
When he reappears at the end of his bed there's no urgency to his voice - not like Virgil, who tried for nonchalance and ended up talking fast, hurried, higher pitched than normal- but there is caution when he asks about his liver and his kidney. Logan tells him to ask him tomorrow evening and Roman vanishes with a nod.
His story with Patton is longer, is filled with a pain he refused to acknowledge. He loved him, twistedly, darker, with a destructive force that ripped apart whatever they could've had.
A week after making Patton accept -because he refuses to acknowledge that Patton did not want this - he finds him curled up in the bathroom -the father's last resting place - crying and holding his stomach. He remembers his screams, his urgent and hysterical questions of where his lungs ended up in. Logan answers with a cold stare and a simple
"What do you need to breathe for?"
He reaches his conclusions a few years after. When Roman's parents find their way to the soil of the earth, when people stop visiting Roman's grave and his apparition dilutes slowly, translucent and shining in the wind while Logan places dried up flowers on his grave.
He confirms it when the always vibrant flowers that were present in Virgil's empty grave dried up and died -the last of them being placed by an older version of Virgil, his older brother he explains-. As a small tribute to his first subject, he leaves colorful flowers full of life and a small offering of bitter chocolate. Virgil laughs at him and tells him that as long as Logan remembers him then there's no way he's disappearing.
Virgil laughs at the irony that now he is stuck in a longer and more boring existence than before.
At the end he accepts that his emotional involvement to the experiment might have tampered with the results, he concludes it when Patton's spirit follows him to his own death, but he figures -the not twisted part of him, the part that hated what he was doing, what he did- that one can't forget his first love.
He dies with a small smirk on his face, cancer eating his cells and his body, the agony of it seeming as a fitting punishment for what he did to three people he appreciated. He dies surrounded by people who didn't know his darker secret, and with three spirits who disappear when he breaths his last breath.