DISCLAIMER: I don't own Dexter, and I'm not making any money off of this.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This was written for the Porn Battle. The prompt was Lila/Rita, fire.
WARNING: Disturbing images and references to self-harm. Look at the pairing; did you expect anything less?
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.
All the Damaged, Pretty Things
By bank_farter
Lila has always been attracted to imperfection.
When she was sixteen, she took a razor to her own thigh. It wasn't because she wanted to feel (god, she's not that bloody clichéd), although that's what the therapist told her parents. She did it because she was growing tired of looking at the long expanses of her own skin, all alabaster and smoothness. It was so…generic. The scar gave it character. The scar was hers, a gift to herself.
Now she chooses the tangled wind chimes and the posts with rust spots and gouges and paint flecks from a dozen different car doors. She rescues them and takes them home, shapes them with flame and heat, makes them more beautiful. Makes them her own. Makes them art.
She can do this because she loves them. She loves all the damaged, pretty things.
Like Dexter's little girlfriend. Lila watches her sometimes, parks across the street and stares as she hustles the children out of the car and into the house. She looks so naïve, so innocent. When the sun catches her hair right, she might even appear angelic.
But Lila knows better. She sees the way she flinches at the sound of children screaming (even if it's only in play), the way she takes quick glances down both sides of the street before she shuts the front door behind her. She notices these things, things that tell her that Rita—that name sounds so harsh coming off her tongue—is almost as dearly damaged and broken as the rest of them.
Almost, but not quite.
Lila should not want her. Dexter should not want her. The gouges aren't deep enough, and the rust stains are more of a neat patina than a gorgeous mess. Her passenger rides safely contained in the backseat. She is too salvageable for either of them. She can be pure again.
And Lila wants to make her that way. Some people—most people—think that fire makes terrible messes, but those people lack vision. There is nothing more beautiful than a fire. Flames are moments of intense clarity, and Lila thinks about them sometimes when she watches her. She wonders what the perfect, white skin of her belly would look like with all those eager little tongues lapping at it. The intensity of the image, the very thought is enough to set her teeth on edge.
Occasionally, in those moments, she wonders if perhaps she would prefer it be her own tongue running over the flesh, dipping down between Rita's legs to lap at her, to drink her in. Rita would taste of salt, she thinks, like Lot's wife and all people who are trapped by what used to be.
When she sees Rita smile in the sunlight, watches her bending to pick scattered toys up off the lawn, she imagines these things. She imagines possessing her.
But she stops herself. She always stops herself because she could never make Rita art. She knows this. The flames could do so much more. The flames would cleanse, would purify, would leave behind nothing but bones, fertile ash, and wide open spaces filled with possibility.
The End