F A N F I C T I O N > V . M A R S
Being Roberto by Amberina
He's written Veronica Mars dozens of letters over the course of the year. He never could get up the courage to send them. In them, he would confess everything. He'd tell her the reason why he broke up with her, and how much it killed him, how much it still kills him. He'd tell her what that night meant to him, and how sad he is to be disturbed that he loved it. He'd tell her everything, he'd spill out his soul.
The pen was always like a knife on his heart. Each stroke of it against the paper was more blood, more pain, more tears. He couldn't write the letters without breaking down. He couldn't write them without wishing things were different. Wishing he was different, she was different. Wishing their dads were different. But they aren't, and that's why the pen is like a knife and he's falling apart.
He hates his father. He hates his father for fucking Lianne Mars in sleazy hotels, and he hates him for taking Veronica away from him. He knows his father didn't kill Lilly, though. So he tries to hate Keith Mars, for persecuting his father, for accusing him while he was in pain. He can't, though, not really. Not when he knows his father took Veronica away from Keith, too. He wonders if Keith knows.
The letters always end up ripped to shreds at the bottom of his wastebasket. He tears them in half, and then into quarters, eighths, sixteenths, until they're nothing more than confetti made of notebook paper and ink and surreal despair.
He wrote Veronica one last letter before he left for Cuba. This one he sent, in a plain white envelope, her name and address scrawled in Duncan's tiny print. It looked so simple, so innocent, when it was inside the envelope, where the words and the hurt and the love and the longing and the truth couldn't be seen. The envelope was a lie, a beautiful, clean white lie. It said, "This is a letter." That was a lie. It wasn't a letter, it was Duncan's breakdown.
He hesitated before dropping it into the mailbox. A thousand thoughts were swimming through his head, but when weren't they? Fuzzy thoughts, burning bright and blurry. It's how his mind works, how he thinks, and he's used to it even if he doesn't understand anything that goes on in his own head. And then he held on to the edge of the mailbox, and it was solid, and it kept him grounded and he knew he had to do it. He shoved the letter through the slot and he prayed to a god he didn't believe in that Veronica would be all right.
Cuba's treating him nicely. The food is good, the people are nice, and he has chicken and rice and freedom from himself. Down here he isn't Duncan Kane, he's Roberto Nalbandian, and he's a poet and a philosopher and an artist, without a single verse or a single thought or a single brush stroke. He's a man he will never be, can never be, and it's nice to play a character. To be someone else.
He checks for suspect wires when he returns to his hotel room every night. He can't be too careful.
He met a girl named Maria in a dimly lit bar. She looks nothing like Veronica, but something in the way she smiles, the way she laughs reminds him of her. He fucked her against the wall of his hotel room, and he wondered faintly if she might get pregnant despite his use of a condom, if somehow their children would fall in love and then fall apart. It was never a full thought, never all the way there, but it was in the back if his mind.
His Spanish isn't perfect, but Roberto isn't expected to be perfect, not like Duncan. It's passing, though, and he's getting better with Maria's help. He's only known her a few days, but he sees her everyday. They go out dancing together, and when she asks about his past, he tells her that his mother is Irish and his father is half-Cuban and half-Armenian. He says that he grew up in America, in a little town in Oregon, and that he came to Cuba to find himself. He tells these lies so many times, he now believes them to be true. His name is Roberto Nalbandian and he wants to find himself.
She seems to accept these answers, and she gives some of her own. They're not important.
Roberto is waiting for Maria to come back from the restroom, trying to concentrate on the paper he's reading but failing miserably when Keith Mars approaches him. Suddenly he's Duncan again and he feels like a caged animal.
He gives up and goes back to Neptune with Keith. They leave before Maria returns from the restroom, Duncan's copy of The Globe And Mail left on the table. Maria waits for Roberto to return for three hours.
Somewhere in Neptune, a postal worker examines a letter to Veronica Mars from Duncan Kane. That's gotta be interesting, he thinks before marking it return to sender. Kane had forgotten to affix a stamp.
He hopes it wasn't important.