Title: To the Moon and Back

Summary: A kidnapping that no one cared about. The streets of Los Angeles. A rich actor who keeps some twisted company. And a skittish, broken girl with nothing left to give--or to lose.

Notes: Lots, lots darker than "White Sateen Suit", which isn't really 100% fluff, either. Is it based off the Savage Garden song of the same title? In part. I just like the title, really, although parts of it can certainly apply. The song that really inspired most of it is "The Fragile" by Nine Inch Nails. This is just going to be weird and very different from my other story in terms of the way I write and also the content. "Baby" (whose real name is Elyse) is nothing like Serafina--she is not a confident, assertive woman with experience in the world and also she is very innocent in her way. Also: I dyed parts of my hair purple today. Bright purple. I have dark hair normally. It is rad.

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The cars didn't stop, their drivers focused straight-ahead with utmost common sense. A sleek silver Eclipse. A dusty red Wrangler. Two taxis. Between takes, a girl.

Next to her trying not to relapse is an emaciated man in his forties dressed as Spiderman, a local eccentric who's freshly sprung from prison for sex crimes. Against teenage girls, though usually he likes the laughing sprinting athletic type and the girl next to him has body language that screams fragile, not trusting at all. His drowning eyes flick to her bare arms and then her full-lipped unhappy mouth and its cut lip, then determinedly back at the cars. He grips the American flag in his hands a little more tightly.

She's warm skinned, your ordinary mixed race young thing, a little black a little cuban, mostly of a very dark Middle Eastern flavor though, with peculiar Egyptianlike eyes, doe eyes delicately lined with kohl naturally. "Fuck me" eyes some boys at school have said although probably they know that Baby as she's called requires the most persuasion of the pretty girls at school--hold her wrists, whisper soothing things and a social threat in her ear, promise you'll use protection&remind her that she 'asked for it'--her hair is long, layered in the front, and dark and wavy, with blunt cut bangs, a big chunk near the middle of them dyed a strange shade of turquoise blue. Small and skinny, her tight little cap-sleeved t-shirt striped red and white, her jeans tight on her hips and ass but loose around the ankles, billowing over flower printed thong sandals--red and white again, her nails painted red too on her toes and fingers. A silver(-plated) choker, some kind of cheap "Claire's" or "Afterthoughts" trinket, thin and ringing around her slender throat. Those spiked pleather bracelets coating her wrists like paint, on the very last silver snap--they'd probably fit on her upper arm just as easy.

The Spiderman is noticing this, noticing the way her jeans fit and how her B-cup makes that perfect swell in her trendy little top, how her waist is so small and how she's probably no more than five foot one, but manages to have legs that'd reach towards Jupiter were she flat on her back--he has to look away. How she has cigarette burns on the tops of her hands and wears too many of those inexpensive silver rings purchased in import stores that sell incense and paraphenalia for smoking weed. And Baby knows he's noticing but she doesn't protect herself, she just stares at the cars and wonders if the people in her little suburb-city are ever going to fix that stupid streetlight. It's about three fifteen so she's likely fresh out of school for the day, but doesn't have any books or pencils or anything at all, just a cigarette tucked behind her ear and a translucent purple lighter stuck in her pocket.

Spiderman reaches to tap her on the shoulder but he's interrupted by someone clearing their voice--a man. Young, yeah, decked in shades and some pricy three piece suit like who does he think he is in this town? Probably beautiful but he's got one of those trendy 70's style haircuts that, paired with the Gucci glasses, prevent anybody from getting a real clue.

Sunglasses smiles at her. She stares at him a long moment and smiles back very slightly and then looks at the pavement, unable to maintain eye contact. Baby wonders if she's in the presence of a God, she feels so stupid, thinking about every out-of-place hair and how she should've reapplied her lipstick and eyeshadow in the bathroom before leaving school, how her tiny body must seem so childlike, so unformed. She sneaks a look at Spiderman who looks unimpressed.

"I was wondering something," Sunglasses speaks and she's trying so hard to listen she can barely understand what he's saying, caught in each perfect vowel and consonant.

"Yeah?" Much to her surprise, her voice comes out fairly normal and does not squeak as she had feared it would. Baby possessed one of those lovely cheeky little girl voices that is actually quite low in tone, but had the tendency to shift into a cutesy higher toned roughness when raised. The phone sex voice for those with a fetish for schoolgirls.

"Well," he hesitates, looking uncertain, "I notice you here every day. Don't you have a ride?"

Obviously not, her expression says and he just laughs at himself.

"Well, what I mean is.. you want a ride?"

Now everybody knows not to get into cars with strangers, not even rich beautiful strangers who could probably have any number of glamazon starlets should they choose, and therefore had no reason to select a just-turned-sixteen mixed race social recluse who, despite hardly ever speaking in class, somehow managed to garner the reputation as "slut" at school--without ever actually sleeping with anyone. Oh she'd come close and done everything else but she'd always held off on that one act, something in her bittersweet psyche holding it special. And Baby knew of all the possibilities: but it seemed to her there was no way he could want her, and her only other option was Spiderman who looked at her in a way that made her stomach turn, it wasn't sex because she knew sex as well as any hormonesick adolescent, it was something more depraved. And well, she couldn't see anything in Sunglasses eyes because of his expensive eyewear. He was the lesser of two evils, as she saw it.

So she said okay. And maybe she was a little dazzled by the sun reflecting off those lenses, because when she got in the car and he locked the door, child-proofing her side, she noted two other men in the front passenger seat and next to her. And they smiled toothy Crest vampire-shark-piranha-lustful smiles at her.

Baby wondered if it would even matter if she screamed.