— archived040415-deactivated20170: ✍

Lila West (aka Lila Tourney)         –––         from Dexter

She’s in a new town with yet another forged name –– these days it almost seems too easy to just pick up and leave a city, to become a different person in the next. She thrives on it. She is, after all, an artist. She crafts stories and lies with a silver tongue and a brilliant smile, beguiling her chosen prey. Her chosen soulmate –– if they’re lucky. Lila is not a woman to take things to chance, and she refuses to be seen as a messenger of fate.

She is a damn goddess. If anything, once she has secured her grasp on a person, she will be the puppeteer. She will change the circumstances, twist truths, fabricate lies –– because that person is hers. All hers. God bless her competition (if there is any) because Lila West doesn’t take easy to competition. She will win, no matter the cost, no matter the collateral damage.

She doesn’t give a shit. Just as the canvas that she has left drying in her home sports the precise brushwork from her experienced hand, Miami too is her canvas tonight. The people are her paints, and fire is her brush. She will paint the city with brilliant flashes and flames, and no one will be able to stop her. Lila has her claws dug deep into the Dark Passenger that haunts Dexter, and she doesn’t intend to let go just yet. Dexter. Oh, how they could have had it all. But no, he had to throw her to the wolves, to go back to his skinny bitch Rita, and those two darling children.

Lila bites her lip, and she steps closer to the man, sweaty and exhausted, behind the chainlink cage that encases him. James Doakes –– the wanted man who is allegedly the Bay Harbor Butcher. Her eyes are far away as she presses a hand to her mouth.

                   “ ––– You poor thing …”

And then she hears no more, letting her lips do the talking as she stares vacantly across the room. She processes the name Dexter on her tongue, and the horror in the eyes of Doakes as her gaze snags on the stove sitting so innocently there, and the gas pipe. And the sharpness snaps right back into her eyes, the purpose back into her steps.

The next moments are a blur to her memory, motions born of memory and pure instinct, and she runs to her car, fast steps that will bring her out of harm’s way. She is just barely in her vehicle, just out of reach of the explosion when it happens –– a brilliant plume of ash and fire and the smell of gas in her nose. And it is beautiful. Lila’s lips part from pure ecstasy, her eyes fixated on the almost too-bright spray of gravel and pure heat searing up into the sky. Her ears are still ringing from the force, but she doesn’t feel it. The feeling consumes her, exhilarates her, and an almost hysterical laugh is wrenched from her throat as she finally drives away, leaving the burning remains of the cabin to be found by the police the next morning. Her soul practically sang out of her soul. How liberating was it to burn … She was content for the night.

      “           It was a pleasure to burn.
                    It was a pleasure to see
                    things eaten, to see things
                    blackened and changed.       ”
                                        ––– Fahrenheit 451