Swan & Echo
By Mice
Lilah liked to talk to herself in the mirror.
Make up, fashion created style. A soft facade of charm. Also practiced in the mirror.
Cigarettes were her favorite prop until she realized she had a disdain for them and didn't need to light one to know. Lilah had entertained the idea of a sterling cigarette holder, but the idea of another old lecherous attorney offering a light in hopes of an offer of her body held familiar truth.
It took Lilah a while to realize that instead of getting upset of her intelligence going unnoticed in favor of her looks, she should utilize an opponent's weakness to make it her strength. Good perfume didn't make her dumber and it didn't make them smell better.
A femme fatale Trojan horse whose only weakness was sometimes having a heart. The world will forgive a beautiful woman for a lot. Wolfram & Hart had explicit codicils in their contracts regarding weakness.
In the afterlife, it was much harder to talk to yourself in a mirror. A scarf and intelligence were the accessories she relied on blindly now.
She lost her virginity when she was seventeen - an age she predetermined when she was ten based on proximity to childhood and anticipatory reaction to the freedom of college. She chose a nice foreign boy who didn't trip over big words and had no illusions of wedding bells with her. From that night, Leda Murogov conceived of the idea of Lilah Morgan.
The first step was letting go of the girl she lived inside. Natural moments of joy were to be ignored. Lilah had practiced so hard that the idea of Christmas only meant expensive gifts to clients, Balenciega boots for her, and a reminder to feel guilty about not visiting with her mother and making it up to her with flowers she didn't choose.
It wasn't as if she was thrilled with the rumor of her heart being a piece of Antarctica suspected that the accounting department started, but it didn't hurt and that meant she was safe.
One day, she was handed a birthday card to sign and spent the rest of the morning wondering why she even considered doing it.
Antarctica had warmed up since she started fucking Wesley Wyndham-Pryce.
She always thought of him in full name for reasons that visibly mortified her. She had avoided grease traps that had employed her and that she had represented. When she dreamt up her up, Leda decided that Lilah wouldn't have sex for power. She decided that if she ever found herself in bed again, it would either be for adventure or, just in case it existed, love.
Adventures happened. Then Wesley Wyndham-Pryce.
He would have loved Leda. Maybe she should have found her old no-nonsense turtlenecks and penny loafers instead of the pigtails and plaid skirt.
She had to find the weakness and exploit it.
When he chopped her head off, Lilah felt it was out of something more. She began to refer to it as love until she saw him again. She could see it was guilt that led to him trying to burn her contract - a gesture out of childish impulse to make it right.
As a ghost, Lilah wanted to witness Wesley Wyndham-Pryce to try to grab her the way she had resisted with others, try to kiss her the way others had insisted, and be disappointed that she no longer existed. The way a romantic would.
"You made me into Gidget," was how Lilah ended most of her talks without a mirror. She still performed them in front of the mirror, but unable to see her movements and test for genuineness. She traced her finger underneath the scarf, unable to see the scar, but able to feel it and remember that one moment where she let herself believe she was done with having adventures.
It was Lilah's greatest hope that one day, Wesley Wyndham-Pryce would find out who introduced Knox to Fred Burkle and that he would seek her out for revenge. After all, their version of hand holding involved throats anyway.