Monday, September 10, 2012 -- late evening

The clock-tick of hard heels on wood for a girl for whom time doesn't move. White fawn-legs slashed by shredded fishnets teeter on high, silk-clad stilettos, her coathanger body hung artfully with a dark green satin gown that looks like moss. Lyla has been awake exactly one hour, her lashes and lids crowned in silver mothwing powder, her pale corona teased into a braid-wrapped crown of curls. Lips dark, rapacious and blood-starved violet. Tick. Tick. Tick. Time to wake up, little deer.

Ben's been behind the bar with a bottle of water, just leaning against the backbar, quiet observation tonight -- but his face goes blank for a second when he hears the clip-clop of those heels, a sound he dreads.

She catches sight of Ben at the bar and purses her lips, a slow, smoke-licked slur of an expression. Does he even remember it, all her lipstick stains, her ash burns, what those leaf-green eyes look like way up close, in the dark, with their tiny blood-black pupils swimming in post-2AM madness? This pretty manic-pixie had been his lover? You wouldn't think it, would you, by the way her bony shoulder is cold as a stranger's, hung tautly from the razor of her collarbone as she sidles up to the bar. The girl is vicious on her comedown, grit-jawed and bluelipped under her Sephora-coiffure, the flecked soot of stray mascara dancing at the corners of her eyes. Yet she has almost childlike fairy-movements, starving wrists and pink-glitter nailpolish chipped as she tips a whiskey bottle that looks too big for her into a big square tumbler. "Is Harry even your name," she hisses quietly to the man she used to do things to, under her breath, in the cigarette-spun-sugar voice he ought to remember, because how could you forget it unless you were mental?

How could you forget it? Only if you were mental. Ben's eyes never leave Lyla, little tottering deer, but his lips purse just slightly when she asks him the question -- a good one, a completely fair one, but it takes him a few seconds to answer. "No," he's telling her, watching her pour, though mostly, his gaze remains on her face, her eyes; there's something hard in his own. "It's not."

"I saw the television," she says, and her fingers are like the thin pincers of undersea animals, electric and light-hungry tendrils that pluck, with precision, into her purse to pull out a thin cigartte-cylinder that she hangs from the corner of her dirtymouth. "Those Southerners you like." To a city-doll, every enemy is a Southerner. "Those people you work for. I heard about it. Chico said he saw you at the disaster site." Unsettlingly, there is no clue as to whom Chico might actually be. It is ruthless, unflinching, a strange contrast with her snowglass cheek, the bambi fringe of her curling lashes, that innocent look, the way she does not emote, just raises the thick, cold liquor glass to her mouth like the barrel of a gun. "So are you going to tell me who you really are, or did you figure I'm the kind of two-cent whore who gets so much prick she can't keep it all straight?" Cold, little fairy snow-queen.

If Ben's intimidated by the mention of Chico, whoever he is -- if Ben's worried, unsettled, it doesn't show up in his expression -- he's still stone-faced, the only change in it a slight shift of his jaw to one side. "Not surprised he saw me there. I'm sure a lot of people did." He pauses, like maybe he isn't even going to answer her question, but then he sighs, and the mask finally pulls away, he looks a little sorry, faint defeat. "No, I didn't think that. But do you really care?" He's sure that Lyla doesn't want anything to do with Ben -- never would have in the past, never will, and that's the way Ben prefers it. Hard to believe he'd say that, after the kinds of nights they've spent together -- but they're ones only Lyla remembers. But, "It's Ben," he relents, probably unwisely.

"No, of course I don't care," she says flatly, brutal sarcasm as cutting as a thinning violin string, stretched catgut laced in cigarettes and benzodiazepine. "You think I do this all the time, don't you. I'll be fine now that you want to throw me away, because that's what I'm for." Valium-calm, cocaine-crashing, her eyes are frighteningly hollow, her lips pursed like a love-bruise. "That's what you thought, isn't it... Ben?" Sounds like sin in that lilt, something head-achingly familiar about having your name called in that voice. "I'm the slutty drug mule you can't tell your corn-huskin' girlfriend about, was that it?" Shakes her head, glitter-dust from last night's party littering the bar. She leaves her stains everywhere. Even her perfume is a little dizzying, like there's some reason he ought either to love it or hate it. "Why did you do it to me, Ben?"

It's sickening, the way the perfume brings back memories -- or feels like it should, like it's making him nostalgic for something he's never experienced but still knows intimately. A little maddening, and when he shakes his head, it's both to deny the accusations and try to clear his head of -- what? Nothing. That was the unsettling part of this conversation. Most men might have an answer ready for that final question, something biting, or demeaning, or just glossing over the hurt feelings, there, there -- especially men like ... Harry? Ben? The man that had spent those wild, sleepless nights with little Lyla-deer. Ones that seem to do this all the time. But his brow furrows a little, he looks like he has to think it over, and when he finally comes up with an answer, it's only, "I don't know," and it's the truth, "But I'm sorry I did."

There's a long, tomblike silence. Maybe there's something about her that makes the senses twist, time elongate. The din of the inn seems very quiet, and the lewd, moist sound of her lipsticked mouth on the glass very loud. Her scent is suddenly everything, the coldness of her silence like an empty void. Crystal and cold, white, taut and high vibration -- it had been like that with her, glass thighs with all the heat in her fingertips and inside her mouth and everywhere else. Snow that falls into snow makes no noise; when the branches shed their crowns and blankets, the tears that fall become one with the forest floor. Numb silence; the winter of boyhood, when you could lie in the snow and feel, hear nothing but absolute peace. She is listening. The snow queen is listening. "I see," she says, soft, hoarse and high as a child companion peering from among the trees. No -- no it's just a party girl on a bar stool, a girl like any other girl. But prettier, or younger, or something. Her gaze is as empty as twin lunar craters. Her light's unplugged, in a fugue state. Not the radiant party girl he might remember, just as he isn't the same, either. They come and go, both of them. "Did you tell me you liked me because we're the same?" Strangely pitying, that, her pale head tilting in his direction like she's offering compassion instead of looking to lean on him. Thin little sigh. It's all been so sad.

Just a girl -- one that Ben doesn't even know, not really (but he does, and the way that silence, frozen, envelopes him, is chillingly familiar for reasons he cannot explain or understand), but prettier, younger. He feels bad for her, really -- Ben certainly never wants this to happen, even though it does, again and again. "Did I?" He's asking her, and it doesn't seem like a mockery, but more like he really doesn't know. "What do you think I meant by that?"

Frozen lake. Green-glaze gaze stares unflinchingly at him, and the bruise-blue crescent of her downturned mouth suggests she's the one that feels bad for him. It warns against pity, even though she has the ageless face of an elf, a child (and the smudges of eternal sleeplessness beneath those too-bright eyes). "You said you liked me, but it was me who knew you weren't all the way here." She takes a deep pull of her cigarette, cords of her white throat standing out, her dispassionate gaze slipping numbly among the bottles at the bar, amid nothing in particular. Her lustful mouth yawns open, unhinged as a snake, letting thick, suggestive snow-white pour from the corners of her lips. "I never asked you, because I thought you were like me." Goldilocks corona brushes the edge of his shoulder as her temple rests there with strange detachment. Indifferently: "Something's wrong with you, isn't it." This wasn't how it's supposed to be. She's supposed to break glass, to shriek, as she must have been doing for months every night he acted like someone she hadn't met.

It's almost better this way. Almost. If not for how surprisingly perceptive Lyla is (though maybe Ben's kidding himself, maybe it's utterly obvious to everyone that something's wrong with him; he knows this is a possibility), how unsettling that is, too, the way it contrasts with the sugarspun pixie, the wild nights, the doll-eyed fawn. "What do you mean, like you?" There's a quick glance aside to her when her head rests against his shoulder, and while he doesn't do anything to encourage it, he doesn't shrug her off, either. It feels utterly foreign, any kind of touch from her, but it feels like he should be familiar with it. A flash somewhere at the back of his mind, white light, blindness, split second heartbeat, mingled voices, but so brief it's impossible to tell whose. After it's there and gone, he takes a deep breath, lets it out, "Yeah, something's wrong with me. It's probably best if you just ... forgot." The way he seems to, so easily, like anything they've done has never even happened at all.

What do you mean, like you? Lyla's unplugged, flourescent gaze flickers in a slow roll to his, and she just offers an oddly private, muted expression that is complicated. Impossible to read. "It'd be best," she echoes him in faint disbelief, and her frosty brows lift as to say really? It's clear: This little slip of nothing, this addled madchild, finds him implausible, finds him illogical. "Best for whom?" She asks, with a smoky little sigh, crunching her cigarette in the ashtray. The ash breaks like a beetle-shell, like starving life. "Do you really want me to forget the you that no one else knows but me? How will you find your way back home, then?"

It's so careless, the way she stubs out her cigarette -- the way she asks him those final questions. The first may as well be rhetorical, because the last throw him off enough that he forgets; he's taking a couple steps back from her, and while he's been composed until now, that hits him, and it's clear from the look on his face, wide-eyed and maybe a little ... fearful? Of Lyla, little Lyla? "What? What are you talking about?" But it's rushed; he knows. Just doesn't know how she could know too.

"You really don't remember, do you?" She looks, huge black-fringed eyes flicking soot-flecks against her high, bronzed cheekbones. Not long ago, Ben had seen those black dots connected by the silvereen thread of her tears, and it had been the last thing he remembered for a while. Oh, don't cry, Lyla. The idea of her weeping is suddenly deeply anathema for reasons it might be hard to understand. "I told you, you couldn't handle doing drugs with me." But it's a fey smile, amused -- obviously it isn't the drugs and she knows it. Who knows what she does know, though? She is playing with her lower lip in the manner of an addict, pinching the fat, glossy, obscene thing with an incongrous childlike look. "The man named Harry who was always shagging me... you... he always said he had to get home, before we passed out. He told me all kinds of things." She gives him a skeptical look.

There's something frantic in his eyes -- a look that's never, ever seen in Harry's, ever. The most frantic he ever gets is when the booze and the drugs start to run out. "What kinds of thing-- No, you know, I don't need to talk to you about this." Of course he didn't, because he already knows, right? He is the one that told her, isn't he? "It's late," and without apology, he's moving past her, presumably for the door, "I've got work in the morning."

Her gaze is suddenly disinvested, listless. "Now you don't need to," she says with a callous sort of boredom, watching the flame-shelled heart of her cigarette dying in the tray. "But you will. Best not to forget me, lover." Purses her lips hard, so it's again impossible to tell what it is that glazes her eyes. In the winter, black water is always moving under ice. It lets you know it's unsafe to tread there.

Forgetting, the very idea of it, how it's much different for Ben than it is for most people -- it almost makes him laugh, when Lyla advises him against it. Instead he only feels ill. "No," he's trying to be firm, but he's shaken, "I won't. Forget this," the gesture he aims between them is quick, dismissive. "And forget about that, about everything he -- I told you. There's no home for me to go to," now he's lying, and she's got to know it, how often he's talked about it in the past. But then again, considering everything else he's said with her (done to her) that seems to be a lie now ... who can really tell what his truth is. "I'm going. Forget it -- all of it," and he's turning and heading for the door.

Her frown just broadens. What's it like, to see genuine pique, pity, in that frosty little face? "Ah," she says softly, and it's weirdly gentle, especially since she has no reason to be gentle. Slashed tights, bony nape, smoky fingers and lips, mad eyes, skinny brows, skinny everything. "All the boys I like are crazy," she says softly, and yet crazy, from her wet little mouth, sounds strangely tender, like the ravings of a sleeping-beauty. "You know where to find me when you need me again." Soft, certain, sad for herself. Sad for him, pointy elbows on the bar, her spun-sugar crown resting in her own arms, watching him go with those haunting saucer-eyes. "Poor you," she coos, to no one in particular.

((Taken from live play with the always amazing Lyla Hart))