A/N -- This is my first ever published FF. I have a fragile ego, but I beg you for constructive criticism. Hope you enjoy.
ATTENTION: This story has been revamped, re-edited, and reorganized. Anyone who began reading prior to 2/16/07 should got back and re-acquaint themselves. Some is slightly different, some exactly the same, and some completely new.
Given three years of getting used to it, darkness shouldn't bother Lincoln like it does. He doesn't want to think about why now more than ever. He doesn't want to remember the images that burn themselves nightly into his brain, his eyeballs, and what should be there instead.
He was in prison for three years, and more than a decade, on the whole, before that, and while he'd sat behind those bars, he watched his life crumble. He felt it there, though, one last scrap of a foundation he could, would, rebuild on – Veronica. Until a gunshot bounced back into his ear across the static of a fucking cell phone connection. And now she wasn't there to make the dark okay again; she was supposed to make the nights outside of Fox River different from the one's he'd known for all those years. She was supposed to make them good and peaceful and full of sex and sweetness and dreams. Now he needs something to help him lose the nightmares of being inside.
Sometimes the prison's cement walls are collapsing around him, piling dirt and gravel onto his chest, grime filling his mouth, his lungs. And sometimes Veronica is beneath him, her own walls pulsing and tightening around him. Either way, he wakes with a strangled holler for release, sweat cooling on his skin, and prayer rising into his throat for it to be real one of these times, because one way or another his misery would finally end. She's gone, and he needs to forget everything – for a little while, at least – so he betrays her memory for a small glimpse of serenity in the moment. He never had been one for planning ahead, but even he knew he would regret it when he walked into that first roadside bar. He knew the only afterglow he'd get was guilt, but the prompt and total resignation to instant gratification was the basic flaw in every addict.
Now it's a science of knowing his prey, and an art of seducing them as quickly and simply as possible. His predatory senses turn his stomach when he thinks too long about why he picks the not-quite-pretty or not-quite-chunky ones and flashes a winning smile, sidling up with a hint of shyness, and a tingle of gentility. His personal record was in and out in five minutes – the door, that is. He uses them all night…because they always end up looking like her.