A/N: Good lord, I've been gone for forever. No excuses. Oh! Wait! I do! It's called NaNoWriMo. Yep… There it is. And, also: while this is a filler, it kind of paves the way for Christmas morning. Which is coming. Soon. Promise.
Disclaimer: I don't own LWD.
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Blast From the Past
Chapter 36 – The Imps Have Eyes
By VirgoMaiden
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The remainder of Christmas Eve passed rather uneventfully for the rest of the McDonald-Venturi clan. Lizzie ignored Edwin unless absolutely necessary, and when she did interact with him, it was all ice and a stiff body language. It was completely different, Derek knew, than it had been the day before, or the day before that… Casey didn't make it known if she had noticed, but Derek had been too busy avoiding her to really notice if she had.
Derek didn't usually take suffering in silence (he had found out that the martyr type didn't get many dates from an early age) but he didn't know how else to deal with the situation other than complete and utter denial. When Casey needed complete concentration on something, Derek needed constant distractions. When distractions failed, denial worked just as well, if not better (like, when he had thought about dropping out of school to follow Sally to Vancouver? Although that might have bordered more on 'delusion' than 'denial'…). Hence, the avoidance. He had freaked himself and Casey out with what he had said to her earlier, and despite that, he still had her present; Or, rather, presents. One was a CD she had really wanted. That one was for appearances. The other, more private one, had been bought on a whim, and was a pair of tickets to see RENT when the show was due to come to town in mid-February. He had seen the ad while watching TV, and without a moment's thought was on the phone, reserving the tickets. The perfect gift, he knew, and he couldn't even suck it up to give it to her.
It was a big, twisted cycle, and Derek wished he wasn't such a pansy that he wasn't able to be in the same room with her without feeling like he was going to scream in frustration.
So it was a pretty rude "awakening" to him when Marti confronted him briefly that night, telling him that while denial and delusion were some of his (many) talents, he was just acting like a priss.
Derek Venturi. A priss. He couldn't have been more disgusted with himself when he finally turned in that night, the last thing on his mind being visions of sugarplums.
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A/N: As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this chapter-filler…whatever it is. Was Derek in-character? I think I've been making him a bit too "feely" lately, and so I'm trying to…fix that. More formal edits will be done at a later time, but they will be done.
(Also – I've been catching up a bit on LWD thanks to YouTube, and I've come to the conclusion that I HATE TRUMAN. It seems like the writers are trying to give Casey a love/hate relationship that's too similar to the Derek/Casey one. Think so? Think not…?)