IMPORTANT, PLEASE READ.

This story will deal with very sensitive topics, sexual abuse, underage sexual abuse, the mention of spousal abuse, eating disorders and psychological disorders. I can't seem to get away from substance abuse so expect that as well. I never warn lightly, so please use your discretion.

This will be a w/w/bisexual leaning venture. I tried to do pure lesbian but I'm bisexual and enjoy myself most when there's a healthy mix of both.

If I haven't scared you away, hold on because things are going to get real and weird.

Fairy Tail belongs to Hiro Mashima.

Black Heart

Heat croaked in through the smallest of spaces. Suffocating, damp heat that made her skin feel far too small for her body and her eyes burn. Lucy turned herself over on the couch so she was looking at the TV from an inverted position. Her dress flopped up, as limp as flower petals, plucked and left too long in the sun.

The reporter droned onscreen. The heat wave. The heat wave. She got it. It was omnipresent. And terrible. The air conditioner was broken and the repair man was busier than ever. He couldn't get out there for two days and no amount of bribery or intimidation would change his mind.

The reporter talked about a high school band winning first prize in some kind of competition with a huge fake smile on her lips. When she moved onto her next story, she was entirely sombre. The way people could turn the emotion on and off was chilling. Lucy tried it herself, smiling wide and then shutting down. She wanted to be just like them. Sunny, sunny, sunny, not a cloud in the sky, then, whenever she wanted, she'd be a storm front. That was power, not money, not words. Total control over what her face and body were doing.

"Another girl was found this morning in East Mill Park in the Greater Clover Area," the reporter said. "The police haven't released any details but a person close to the victim has stepped forward and revealed that that the victim's name is Amanda Ashley, a local just twenty years of age."

Lucy strained to look around the reporter's shoulder. She was standing in the park where Amanda was found, as close to the police barricade as she could possibly get. There were people everywhere, and the police were pushing them all back to preserve the integrity of the scene. The wind blew, throwing the reporter's hair over her shoulder and a black heart waggle from a tree branch way, way back there, where a pair of detectives were gathered, one blonde with a cigarette in his ear, the other with a maroon dash down his face, a scar, maybe. They overlooked the evidence spewed on the ground. Yellow markers were placed in the dry, yellow grass. Lucy's imagination tried to take a turn toward the morbid as she imagined what those detailed.

The front door opened and closed. Lucy turned right-side up on the couch and fixed her dress and tried to make herself small. It never worked. He found her, he always did. In he came, his blue herringbone wool peaked suit looking immaculate despite the heat. He sat down on the coffee table in front of her and looked at her with eyes the exact same shade of brown as her own.

"They found another body."

"I know. The news just reported on it."

"That's three."

"Okay."

"He's targeting girls just like you, Lucy."

"He's in the next town over."

"His first victim was taken from Magnolia, she ended up in Clover."

He was trying to scare her. "I thought you weren't allowed to give away any details?"

"I'm not, but when my daughter's at risk, I'll tell her what she needs to know to keep safe." He took her hand and squeezed. Lucy squeezed back because that's what daughters were supposed to do. "Don't go into the park by yourself or after dark, don't talk to strangers, don't wander around the city on your own."

"Sounds like you don't want me to live my life."

"Not until the killer's caught, no." He palmed her face, taking her by the chin and looking into her eyes. He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek; his moustache prickled her skin. "I worry about you, Lucy."

He stood and left her side. Lucy watched the TV for another few minutes, though she didn't actually take anything in. She shut it off and went upstairs to her bedroom. It was stifling hot up there. She opened a window; it didn't help, there wasn't a breeze in sight.

Her laptop came alive with a whirl of its expensive fan, her printer, too, chugging and buzzing. Lucy pulled up the article on Amanda Ashley and the newest screen caps of the reporter's initial account. Someone had already captured the black heart waving like a limp, ominous flag.

She printed it out and cut it from the paper, then stuck it in her photo album full of macabre things. Some of it was poetry, some was short stories she never finished, most of it, though, was pictures of murdered girls and their murder sites. She started after her mother was shot when she was ten and continued because once you begin something like that, you can't just stop.

She cleared her browser history and hid the album back beneath her mattress, she recycled the pages, and then she listened. She could hear her father on another conference call. The director for the Community and Public Affairs section of the Magnolia Police Department got no rest.

She thought it was safe to shower. She turned on only the cold knob and stepped beneath the spray. It made her gulp to catch her breath and her skin exploded in goosebumps. She bit her lip, waiting for her hot, hot skin to get used to the change. It never really came, anytime she moved, a new part of her was exposed to the icy water and she'd have to start all over again.

Her teeth were chattering when she finally turned off the water and dried. She clutched her towel around her body and poked her head out of the door. Runners of cold water slipped over her collarbone and left droplets on the flooring. The coast was clear. She clutched her sweaty dress to her chest and took small, quick steps on her tiptoes to her room.

She jumped when she entered and her father was laying back on her bed with his hands cupped behind his head. He lifted up when she entered and looked at her. "The air conditioner's getting fixed tomorrow."

"Good." She turned from him, determined to get her dress from the closet and get the fuck out of there.

Her bed squeaked and the heat of his body settled against her back. His hands closed on her bare shoulders. Lucy tensed. "Where are you going?"

"I need to go to the library and get some research done for the paper I have due on Friday and—"

"You didn't tell me that. I'll drive you."

"Thanks," she said stiffly.

"You smell good. Did you get new shampoo?"

"No." It was the same as ever.

"Must it's just be you, then."

Most memories came and went, as ephemeral as springtime runoff. Others clung like dust to a spider's web. 'You've never felt that before,' the dust and Lucy's mind was the web. The memories fluttered back and forth, trying to cripple her. Lucy tried to pull out of his grasp and turn to face him; sometimes, if he could look at her, he would see her, his daughter, and he'd stop. He kept her where she was and slid his fingers through the water on her chest and Lucy bit her cheek hard.

"I need to get ready."

He didn't say anything. His fingers dipped lower to the top of her towel and smoothed the skin over her breasts. Lucy would normally close her eyes but today she watched his familiar fingers close over the towel and pull it to the right. The material just let go, betraying her. His body pressing into her back prevented it from falling all the way to the floor. He always did stuff like that, like if she wasn't completely nude it wasn't completely wrong.

She'd let him do it for the same reason she'd started collecting macabre tales, once you started something like that, it was hard to stop, but today, something felt fragile. It was the heat rubbing her raw or it was his pen-calloused fingers pinching and her nipples getting hard and sensitive despite everything, but Lucy thought, this is the last time.

She didn't fight. She let everything happen the way it always did, except when he'd finished touching her and went to the washroom to finish himself off, she put on her old dress, took the money she'd saved for emergencies and her photo album, and she walked down the stairs and out the front door without looking back.

By the time her father spilled sperm into the toilet, she'd already flagged down a vintage cherry red car with the decal Thunderbird down the side and climbed in. The man in the driver's seat had an infectious smile that she immediately liked. He was going to Clover, so that's where Lucy decided she was going, too.

Cheap, artificial lilac burned Lisanna's nose. She breathed shallowly and pinned a lock of wig hair back from her temple. She looked strange with black hair. Stark. Someone completely new. If she ignored her freckles and her blue eyes. She couldn't do anything about either of those.

She leaned forward and swiped deep plum lipstick over her lips—also cheap, though the matte colour claimed a twelve-hour wear. She put a clear-coat of mascara over her lashes, leaving them so blonde they were almost white, and called it done.

As soon as she'd decided that, she wondered if she shouldn't have tried a little more. She looked like a porcelain doll fresh out of the kiln.

Her partner walked through the room and she ran out of time. He looked her over head to toe and looked both sick with himself and glad to be there, if it could be both.

"Sorry, had to take that," he said in a gruff voice that Lisanna first thought was put-on but now assumed was accumulated from years of smoking, if the cigarette behind his ear was any indication. He didn't look old and he didn't look young, caught somewhere in-between in his open policeman's uniform, sweaty from a day stuck beneath his bullet-proof vest. He was so fresh off his shift he'd driven past her in his cruiser not five minutes before he drove past her in his personal Impala.

She almost declined his offer, sure that it was a ploy, but she was desperate, and desperate people went to desperate measures.

"That's okay."

He stuffed his phone into his breast pocket, beneath the nametag that read L. Dreyar. Lisanna smoothed her hands over her dress.

"Do you want anything?" L. Dreyar asked. "There's room service. I'll get it."

Wine, Lisanna thought. Oodles of wine. "I'm fine." She heard from one of the girls that shared her corner that guys didn't like it when they were sloppy drunk. They wouldn't pay, too scared of sexual harassment charges coming up on them on top of purchasing a sex worker.

"Okay." He looked just as awkward as she felt. "Well." He cleared his throat.

This was the part where she took control. Flare had showed her in great detail. It was a very intoxicating performance.

She didn't know if she could be as good as Flare, but she could try.

Go.

Lisanna dampened her dry lips and strutted the way Flare showed her. Every other step, her heel tried to wobble out from beneath her. He didn't seem to mind, he looked relieved, glad that this was now something he recognized.

He let her get close. Lisanna put her hand to his chest and felt his heart beating along, felt his lungs fill, this stranger, she was touching this stranger.

Don't think about it.

She fingered the collar of his uniform and smiled, and then she raised up on her tiptoes and kissed him. He tasted like his cigarettes and touched her in the firm way one did when they had plenty of experience touching. It made her quiver with nerves. He felt it and stopped kissing her to ask,

"Are you okay?"

"Yes." Lisanna kissed him again and found the bottom of his shirt, feeling the damp skin beneath and his muscles flexing. She crooned. "That's so nice." That's what Flare said they liked. They liked to feel powerful and wanted and worshipped. They liked almost not having control.

He took the back of her dress and started undoing the zipper. It was bought online with Flare's credit card from an outlet mall that sold it to her for twelve dollars. It was cheap and thin and when L. Dreyar got the zipper stuck, it broke.

Lisanna was humiliated.

"Fuck. Sorry—"

She didn't want to hear the next words out of his mouth. She took the straps of her dress and pulled them down over her arms. He shut up and watched her breasts come out. For a moment, Lisanna felt like she had the same kind of black magic her sister seemed to. Then he touched her and she almost fell right apart, shaking again and breathing unevenly. Her partner tried to ignore it all at first, but Lisanna saw it eating away at him.

She tried to get everything back under control but the more she tried, the wilder everything seemed, until she could not get breath and she was just a quivering mess.

L. Dreyar had pulled away and now only looked at her. "You've never done this before."

"I—"

He steepled his hands and pressed them against his mouth, huffing air into them. "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."

"Please," Lisanna chattered. "I'm better now. I was just—nerves. I'm good."

He dropped his hands and skewered her. "No."

"No? I need the money—I—please—" Her eyes were wet without her permission. "I need to make money to pay rent or I'll never be able to get a place." His stare made her squirm. Don't fall apart. That was the most important part, Flare said. The first time's the hardest. Just don't fall apart. "Let's start over," Lisanna tried. She took her dress off the rest of the way. He looked at the fading bruise on her ribs but didn't do anything. Lisanna felt it safe to take his arm. He came alive and touched her, but not like a lover would. He pushed her back and really took a look at the ham-sized bruise.

"Did someone do that to you?"

"I just fell." Half on wet grass, half on a parking lot where a concrete stopper caught her body.

"An old boyfriend?"

"No."

"Your dad?"

"No. I fell."

"I guess girls are really fucking clumsy, huh?"

She was so aghast; she didn't know what to say. "I guess so."

"You don't have to be scared. You can—you can come and make a statement and the police will take care of it."

"No one touched me," Lisanna insisted and scuttled out of his hold.

"Fuck, Dreyar," he cursed. "Fuck."

Lisanna grabbed up her dress. Her cheeks were flaming. "You know I think I'm just going to go."

He shook his head. "Get your stuff together. I'll take you."

Lisanna blinked. "Take me where?"

"There's a place in town for girls like you."

"You're arresting me?"

"No, I'm not fucking arresting you," he said exasperatedly.

"You can't force me to make a statement, either."

"Just get your shit together and come on. Now."

He had an authoritative way about him; Lisanna jumped to do his bidding.

A/N: I've been sitting on this project for a long time, but here it is, the beginning of a murder/borderline supernatural/bisexual thing. If you have critiques, the only thing I ask is that you be gentle with them. I suspect this is near and dear to me.