Ficlet: Drifting (Duncan, Veronica)

Title: Drifting

Author: txtequilanights

Characters: Duncan, Veronica

Rating: R

Spoilers: Season 1

Summary: Duncan can't get Veronica out of his system.

Notes: Written for the first challenge at

            Thanks to redflora , the most awesome beta ever!

Drifting

Duncan doesn’t think he will ever get Veronica out of his system. It doesn’t matter where he is or who he’s with, she’s always there, bubbling steadily beneath the surface of his thoughts. He hears her voice in his head, joking, teasing, laughing. She asks him what he’s thinking when he takes home a girl that looks like her, and she tells him it’s ok when he cries himself to sleep.

Veronica fills his dreams with her touch and her kisses and sometimes he wakes up with her name on his lips and his hand on his dick. That’s when he knows it’s time to move on. He’s been to more cities than he can count in the years since he left Neptune and he’s fucked more girls than he could ever hope to remember. He lives in constant fear that one day he will run out of places to hide and or he will run out of girls to use and then all he will be left with is Veronica inside his head and that scares him even more.

Once in a while he picks up the phone and dials the number of the cell phone she had when they were dating. He remembers the days when he was happy and all he wanted in the world was a tiny girl with long blonde hair and shimmering eyes - not that anything but the first part has really changed. He hasn’t been happy since then, but she is still all he wants. He finds it slightly amusing that, of the three people he loved in high school, she is the one he pushed away and she is the one he would ask for if given a choice.

Lilly was lost to him, not on the day of her murder, but on the day he saw her fucking Aaron Echolls on tape. Logan was lost to him when he followed his mother’s ghost off of a bridge and was too selfish to ask if Duncan wanted to come along for the ride. But Veronica has never been lost, just misplaced. She’s like a word you can’t quite think of or the fuzzy memory you wake up with after a night of drinking expensive vodka and washing it down with even more expensive hookers.

Duncan doesn’t think he will ever get Veronica out if his system, until the day he walks by a magazine stand (on a rare visit to New York to see his parents) and a headline screams at him that Aaron Echolls was killed in prison. Under the headline are pictures of the lives Aaron took, directly or indirectly. Lilly. Lynn. Logan. Veronica. Duncan knows all of this; he was there when the ambulance took her body away from the scene, he was at her funeral, and he has taken flowers to her grave. But this time, when he sees her name, her picture, she quietly slides from his head and he loses her. Veronica is gone and Duncan is alone, a single flame burning dimly into the blackness long after all those around it have been snuffed out.

x-posted to vmfanficutopia