Title: Duncan's Personal Hell

Author: filmFreak1

Disclaimer: Veronica Mars is the property of Rob Thomas, CW, etc. I own nothing.

Rated: T (thematic elements, a sexual reference or two, etc.)

Spoilers: up through episode 2x22.

Summary: One-shot. Duncan is killed in a car accident and meets a rather familiar face in the afterlife.

Feedback: would be very highly appreciated. I don't mind criticism, but try to be constructive.

The last thing Duncan Kane remembered before everything went black was seeing the truck about to slam into the side of his car where he was sitting. The last thought that had gone through his mind had been Oh, God, please let little Lilly be alright. His daughter had been sitting in the back.

The next thing he knew, his vision was fading in to reveal a white room.

"Where am I?" he asked himself.

"If you look behind you, I think you'll answer your own question," said a voice behind him. Duncan recognized the voice immediately, and slowly turned. He saw that on the other side of the large room was a man dressed in a tuxedo and sitting in a rolling chair next to a couch and a large number (more than he could count) of filing cabinets that lined the walls.

"Aaron." The word was not spoken as a question.

Aaron Echolls stood, smiled, and bowed in a mocking fashion. "At your service."

Duncan angrily ran up to his sister's murderer, and tried to wrap his hands around the older man's neck, only to find that his hands passed right through him.

Aaron smiled and sat back down. "You can't do anything to me here, Duncan. We're incorporeal. We're dead."

Duncan suddenly remembered how he had died, and he started to look around frantically. "Oh, no, my daughter—"

"—is fine," finished Aaron. "The truck driver tended to her before calling an ambulance. I was instructed to tell you that when you got here." Duncan breathed a sigh of relief, and then turned back to Aaron.

"Unless heaven has low standards, I must be in hell, huh?"

"Bingo."

Duncan nodded slowly. "So what was my great sin? Does heaven have a specific religious requirement or something?"

"Unrepentant murderers don't go to heaven, Duncan. Why do you think I'm here?"

Duncan started to get angry again. "What you did to Lilly was murder. What I did to you was justice."

Aaron laughed. "I don't think the Big Man Upstairs sees it that way, Duncan. I mean, come on, you really think you killed me out of justice and not vengeance?"

Duncan opened his mouth to respond, but instead closed it again. A pause that seemed to be a century long floated by.

Finally, Duncan spoke. "So what happens now?"

"Glad you asked. As it turns out, the first stage of hell for people like us is that they are forced to listen to their victims read their sins to them. After I finish with you, me and several others get to stick around to do the same for that black fellow you paid to kill me."

Duncan gestured toward the filing cabinets. "Is that what's in those filing cabinets? My sins?"

Aaron nodded. "Your sister got to read my sins to me."

Duncan's eyes widened. "Lilly's in hell?!"

Aaron shrugged. "Maybe. I can't say for sure. I think some of the heaven-bound folks come here just long enough to read to the ones who wronged them."

"So what happens to us once we finish having our sins read to them, as well as reading our wrongdoers their sins?" asked Duncan.

"I'm not certain," replied Aaron. "All I know is we move on from this place. My guess is that we go to another stage of hell, eventually winding up burning in the Lake of Fire for all eternity. On the other hand, others think that we may get reincarnated."

Duncan nodded. "So which filing cabinets contain my files?"

Aaron smiled. "All of them. This room always contains only the files of the one to whom the files are being read."

Duncan's eyes opened to point that they looked as though they would pop out. "All of them? But that's…that's…"

"Going to take forever? I know. Time doesn't have much meaning here relative to the world of the living. Lilly read them out to me in chronological order, and if I weren't already dead, I'd bet my life that it took her at least a millennium in Earth-years just to get through all the sins I had committed before I discovered masturbation."

Aaron stood and walked over to one of the cabinets. Opening a drawer, he reached in with both hands and pulled out a stack of papers over an inch thick. Walking up behind Aaron, Duncan looked at the stack, and realized that the papers were covered front and back with words typed in small font; among the words, he recognized names of people he had known.

"Personally, I find chronological order boring," remarked Aaron. "So I thought we'd start off with a list of every female you've ever had less-than-innocent thoughts about and the exact thoughts you had. Hmm, I wonder if your sister might have a couple of your thoughts next to her name?"

Aaron sat back down in his rolling chair and gestured toward the couch. "I suggest you have a seat, 'cause we're going to be here for a while."