on my knees and crawling, back to you /chaos;south

Lyla had never really been sure why they'd chosen to build the dance studio all the way in the outskirts of District Three, but she wasn't complaining. The moonlit strolls home after she picked Julian up from class were actually kind of romantic, and Ripred knew romance was something the blonde hacker needed in her life to help her get past everything else. It had been almost a month since they'd made things official, and the unlikely couple still drew stares on the streets. It never made Lyla uncomfortable but she feared for Julian's stability, grinning sadly when he'd refused to stop holding her hand. It appeared that they were sticking this out no matter what people thought.

Things were easier on nights like this, when there were no stares and no people crowding the moonlit backstreets as the two blondes made their way leisurely along the aged pavement with fingers intertwined. Speaking of fingers, Lyla was proud to say that she was getting used to doing things left-handed. Applying makeup and writing had become exponentially easier with practice, although the caramel-eyed girl still shuddered involuntarily when she looked down to see the useless paw that had once been her right hand. The pain from the cruelly severed joints bothered her more often than she'd liked to admit, but she suffered in silence, knowing that her beautiful little dancer was traumatized enough by the event without her dredging it up unnecessarily.

"It's nice out tonight," she mused, giving the smaller hand wrapped up in hers a soft squeeze as molten eyes traveled upwards to look at where a rare spray of stars could be seen through the thick smog. It was usually easier to see the sky out towards the fence, where the concentration of factories wasn't quite so thick. Lyla smiled softly, leaning down and placing a gentle kiss into silky golden locks. "How was class?"

Things had always been complicated and this was no exception, but perhaps the most confusing problem in Lyla's life was figuring out who she was now. The word "bisexual" had never crossed her mind until a few days ago but she supposed that it was really the only description that fit, given Julian's... condition. She had always, always liked boys before this entire cacophony of indecision began, but nowadays she found herself more and more attracted to Julian's feminine subtleties as well as the boyish traits that the dancer exhibited, taking more time to notice the graceful arc of the swanlike neck or marveling with new realization at the softness of pale skin.

It was a fact that threw her off-balance that one small person could change what had previously seemed to be an unshakable preference, but Lyla found herself acknowledging that she didn't really mind. After all they'd been through, how could she? Letting out a small yawn, the eighteen year old turned her eyes up the dimly-lit backstreets that wound through the dark along the few miles to her house. "I think Mom's making pasta tonight, are you -"

Rustle.

Lyla's head snapped toward the noise, the displacement of the foliage near the fence too great to be the result of a rabbit or any other small animal. Although stabs of terror and memories of stark white rooms and revenge and missing fingers shot through her veins she retained her composure, disentangling her fingers from Julian's and bringing a single spindly digit to her pink-painted lips. Shhh. If we stay quiet, the monsters won't get us.

Rustle, snap, muffled cursing.

Well, if it was a hitman that Rockshaw had hired, he obviously wasn't too graceful. Stepping cautiously towards the undulating shrubbery, Lyla reached out a tentative arm, neon-nailed hand brushing over whispersoft leaves. Steeling herself, the hacker tightened her grip on the branches and yanked them sharply aside, revealing what lay hidden behind.

"What the fuck?!"

She normally didn't speak with such vulgarity but the shock had rendered her without her usual eloquence, caramel eyes fixed with half-terror-half-confusion on dark ones that were all too familiar. No no nonono he can't be here right now not after everything not when I'm almost done putting my life back together not now what is he even doing here... But despite her mind's all out panic a strange joy began to thrum in the center of her chest at the sight of six foot seven of heartwarming smiles and comforting caresses that she'd been certain she'd never see again. "Clayton?"

A disbelieving smile spread like a sunrise across the alabaster planes of her face, and before Lyla knew it she was laughing like a child at Christmas and nearly crushing him in the circle of her scarred, warped arms, talking a mile a minute. "What the hell are you doing here?! Why aren't you back in One?! Oh, I'm so glad you got out of there okay, they took me out a different way after interrogation and I couldn't - but here you are! I'm so happy to see you!"

She could almost sense the confusion emanating from the golden-haired form behind her, and that was enough to make the guilt settle red-hot in the pit of Lyla's stomach. Turning around, she waved Julian over, staring between the two of them awkwardly. "Um... This is Clayton Sinclair," the guy I had sex with in my cell before they chopped off my fingers. "He was... He was my cellmate at the Detention Center, but I'm extremely confused as to why he's not at home in District One right now."

Her sense of happiness had all but disappeared in a few seconds, replaced by a nasty feeling of foreboding. Something tells me this is going to get ugly.

Lyla sighed in relief as Clayton finally folded himself into the small amount of space allowed by the open widow and stepped fully into the room, much more gracefully than she had. Pink-painted lips curved into a scintillating grin as he spoke, a flush creeping along the defined lines of her cheekbones as his hand gingerly wrapped around what remained of her damaged one. Despite many efforts to do so she had never really forgotten the way his hands felt, strong and confident from years of Career training and now from surviving in the wild but still managing to be incredibly gentle as he inspected the curled stump of an appendage encased between his fingers. And even though she'd only really known him for a few days there was just something incredibly familiar and immensely comforting in those bottomless, dark eyes, something that made the audible hammering of her heart dissipate and escalate all at once.

"Interrogation," she said softly, placing her good hand over his and twining their fingers together. "At least that's what they called it. They already had all the information they needed, but they wanted me to tell them things about Jules and my friend Prewitt and when I wouldn't answer..."

She trailed off with a shudder, remembering the blinding pain and the blood and the sickening sound of her bones snapping and separating one by one by one. The pain from the improperly healed breaks still bothered her, the constant dull throb escalating to a burning agony when it was about to rain or when she bent her hand too much. Already the old injuries were starting to act up, agitated by her trip up the trellis. "It wasn't pretty. But I didn't break, so they sent me home minus a few digits and plus some physical and emotional scar tissue that I'm pretty sure I'll never get rid of. But hey, it's better than being dead."

Is it really, though?

She'd been asking herself that for some time, always wondering if maybe things would have been better if her life had been ended in that cold, dark interrogation room. With her dead, Lyla's family would be considerably safer than they were now, Prewitt would have never been arrested, Julian wouldn't be under any sort of scrutiny... not to mention the fact that if she were dead then she wouldn't be standing here weighted down with a secret that threatened to suffocate her with every second that passed. Secrets were something that Lyla was used to, and after years of pretending to be a complete airhead, lying came second-nature to her. But there was just something about lying to Jules that made her stomach squirm uncomfortably, the foreign sensation of shame bubbling to the surface no matter how hard she tried to squash it down.

"Clayton, I..." she trailed off, momentarily lost in really seeing what he looked like for the first time, her vision uninterrupted by the darkness of a dank cell or the inky night outside her window. He really was very nice-looking, she decided, all chiseled features that seemed to mix together with the somewhat juvenile aspects of wide eyes and a lopsided grin that threatened to melt her heart if she let it. Lyla was suddenly aware of her close proximity to the taller boy, only the few inches where his hand still clasped hers separating them. "Julian doesn't know. I mean, about what happened with you and me. He's so fragile already, and I just couldn't tell him for fear of hurting him. He's been hurt enough."

The mere thought of Julian ever finding out about her lapse in fidelity was enough to make Lyla sick to her stomach, sending her swaying on her feet a little when she realized that with Clayton here, the diminutive dancer was bound to put two and two together at some point. While Jules was pure-hearted and trusting, he was anything but stupid. Lyla had never been the best at dealing with internal turmoil even though Ripred knew she'd had plenty of it over the past year, so it came as no surprise that the blonde hacker found herself at an impasse that made her head throb with all of the complication it entailed.

There was Julian, of course. Julian, who she loved more than life itself, for whom she'd laid her life on the line time after time after time and would have gladly died for, the beautiful, broken-souled little thing who had grand jeté-d his way into her heart and clung there with a stubbornness that no one would ever guess he possessed. And then there was Clayton. And what was he, really? One night. One night driven by fear and despair and the need to feel wanted in what Lyla had believed would be the final hours of her life. At least, that should have been all he was. Lyla had never been one to fool herself, and she knew enough to at least acknowledge that there was a bond between herself and the District One boy that transcended just a one-night stand in a cold, metallic jail cell.

"I missed you. I missed you much more than I should have."

And then, damn it all to hell, she was kissing him. It was more awkward than she remembered, probably since they were standing up and he was so tall that she still had to yank him down to her level even though she was standing on her tiptoes. Lyla felt severely off-balance at the conflicting forces of guilt and something much more frightening (Desire? Need? Oh hell, it couldn't be love, could it?) coursing through her veins, driven by the very audible pounding of her heart as her remaining fingers threaded through dark strands and drew him closer, noting how much more pleasant all of this was now that the two of them weren't fumbling around against the cold steel wall of an over-glorified broom closet.

And then she heard the doorknob turn.

Lyla leaped back from Clayton with an agility that surprised even her, caramel eyes wide with terror as the door creaked open (thank Ripred for those rusty hinges), revealing a flash of golden locks and wide oceanic eyes. Lips still tingling, the neon-clad genius forced a none-too-convincing grin, scarred arms wrapping themselves around her as if to shield all the secrets that sat heavily behind her sternum (sometimes she was sure that Jules could see right through her, romanticized that he knew just how ugly she was inside and still loved her anyway). "Oh, um, hey. So, now that the gang's all here, I guess there are some things we need to talk about. Anyone want to start?"

Certainly not me. Never me. For once, I'll just stay quiet, because there's enough destructive power behind all these lies I carry with me to leave all of us as nothing but charred, empty hulls.