Name: Chris

Title: Scratch

Genre: Angst

Rating: M

Summary: Tainting purity seems unforgivable until you realize that there was really nothing all that pure there to begin with. [GlenKyla

A/N: Not going on any spoilers or anything, just playing around. I'm trying to work some bugs out before I attempt a real fic for these two.

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Couldn't turn around for days
Talking about what you changed
Learn to live, you're not alone
Take your time, and it will come and die
Don't know when
Beautiful things don't die

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There was something undeniably innocent in Kyla's eyes. That was the first thing he noticed; the sparkle and the curiosity and how dark they were. So damn dark. Warm. Rich. Inviting. And deceptive as hell.

She was beautiful. It was indisputable. People flocked to beautiful girls like a flame. When you were blessed physically like Kyla was you were granted a leniency others didn't get. More than one eye was willing to look the other way. Because beauty commands respect. Beauty is put on a pedestal.

Beauty makes your weaknesses invisible.

And he was just as guilty as anyone of that particular crime. Glen looked at Kyla and all he saw were the big doe eyes and the full lips and the smooth skin. She spoke and she was bubbly and sweet and just a touch more naïve than a self declared party girl should ever be allowed to be. And that's why people loved her, why they wanted to be near her. That hard edge created by LA and the club scene hadn't built up around her yet. Softness permeated from inside her; in her eyes and her smile and her voice and it made him think about her long after he was done working for the night.

He thought about her a lot. Late at night when things about the night floated back to him, sharper without the club haze of the pounding music, Glen thought about her and how she smiled at him until he fell asleep and then he dreamed of her and the things that his subconscious screamed for. He woke daily in a fog, his body aching, and counting down until the time for work came and he had blessed proximity.

There had been a time when Glen had known exactly what road he was traveling. It led to college and basketball and coeds on Spring Break. But life never warned him that it may not come true so he was left up in the air, unprepared, and all too willing to fall.

And he fell hard.

Spencer and his mom had provided him with enough chick flicks during his life to know that it was all just a smidge cliché. In prefect Hollywood scripts the pretty party girl always fell for her adoring bodyguard because he saw the real person inside the mask and made her feel safe. There's a reason clichés are cliché-they're what everyone wants to see. People want the fairytale ending.

Kyla let him in every morning. Just after ten, she'd open the door, still in one of the oversize tee shirts she slept in, all rumpled from sleep, and they'd have coffee while scouring the papers for a new mention of the Davies girl's latest shenanigans. Glen liked the morning coffee more than the late night partying. That's when he knew-when he had looked up at her, sipping her espresso from the fancy machine she got for free, with the morning sun backlighting her, and saw how heart stoppingly stunning she was-and he knew. In that moment, he knew he wanted to protect her for more reasons than just her paying him.

He wanted to touch that beauty. That innocence. Perhaps if he could…some of the ugliness in his own life could be redeemed.

Glen figured it was sometime after he first saw her snorting coke that the perfect image in his mind began to crack. It explained so much, once he really began to mull it over. Her mood swings had taken such a turn; the highs had no peaks, then lows knew no bottoms.

She was drowning. And no one cared enough to see.

The powder lined up perfectly on the mirror, reflecting like tiny tracks of snow he remembered on the lakes back home in winter. Pure white. Only there was nothing pure about it or what it did to her.

He'd seen her drinking. She was LA's newest It Girl. Club owners were only too happy to cater to her every whim so long as she was sure to be photographed there. Seventeen was just a number to them which meant she had a little ore shelf life than the twenty something has-beens that had gone before her. Her drink was something called a Ruby Martini, and it was always ready for her when she walked in the door of her nightly hot spot.

He trailed along, the ever dutiful bodyguard. Off duty he was Glen the quasi friend that was just one part of the whole in their incestuous little group. But when he was working-that was another story. During those times he was the hired help and his opinion on how much she drank went unheeded. Even if he could have told someone it wouldn't have helped. No one that should have cared really did. Ash le and Aiden were too absorbed in their own issues to care, so he tried to handle it himself.

That was when he saw her with a finger pressed to one nostril, a short straw to the other. The sight stopped him in his tracks. It came as more of a shock than anything else. Snippets of conversations with Kyla talking about her spiritual journey filled his head. What would Buddha have to say about doing cocaine? Would the Dali Llama approve of recreational drugs?

Somehow he doubted it.

No doors in the loft seemed to be a silly thing to him the first time he was there. Why would someone want to live somewhere with no privacy?

The way she didn't even try to hide it worried Glen most of all. She was sitting on her bed, in full view, leaning over her night table. Her eyes lighted on him when she raised back up, tossing her hair like a shampoo commercial, and gave him a bright smile like he hadn't just seen her getting high. Jumping up, she ran to him and dragged him to the living room to show him the flowers an admirer had sent her earlier.

For the sake of his sanity he pretended that it wasn't a big deal. The party scene was littered with any number of things a person could toy with that bordered on dangerous. Drugs was just one of them. And Kyla seemed more excited about her growing fame than anything else. Perhaps she was just realizing she had this huge smorgasbord of decadence available to her and she was merely sampling out of idle curiosity?

Seeing her do it again, at Ego with that scumbag Jake in full view of anyone who cared to look, made him realize it wasn't. It was getting serious. Bad.

She was growing dependant on it. There were baggies in her purse, the loft bathroom, her bedside table drawer. Tissues littered any surface near her at any given time. She stopped eating because she was always nauseas. Her clothes began hanging on her. She lost track of time like it was actually capable of being lost.

The night she laid passed out on one of Ego's plush VIP couches and Glen had had to pull Jake off of her was the last straw. Ashley was nowhere to be found; most likely off in crisis counseling with Spencer or Aiden, and really, who else was there to take care of her if not him?

Once he deposited her safely in her bed, after taking off her deceptively intricate heels, the pillaging of her multiple stashes began. Five bags went down the toilet and he sat in front of her bedroom doorway until the dawn breaking over LA's business district woke her up.

"Glen? What's going on?"

Kyla was pale, drawn, hopelessly mussed from sleep, but still managed to retain her innocence and loveliness as she rubbed her eyes sleepily like a little girl. Her dress had ridden up in her sleep, providing a view he fought to avert his eyes from even as it tempted him with the sparkles catching glints of the sun's early and weak rays.

"I flushed your coke," he said simply. "All of it. You need help, Klya."

"You what? You had no right-you work for me!" she stormed, shaking on her bed.

His head bobbed of its own accord. By now he had no energy to nod consciously. "And I care about you."

"You didn't get rid of all of it?" She scrambled to the floor, stumbling, and grasped at his shirt. "Glen, tell me there's still some. A little? Please, I need it." Her hands felt like ice blocks on his chest and face. She pleaded, crying and shaking, until all the energy had left her body and she all but collapsed against him.

The tremors racking her tiny frame seeped through his hand on her back and tears pricked his own eyes. No one should have to suffer through this type of pain. "You don't need it. I know you feel like you do…I've been there, remember? It feels like hell now, but you'll get through this. We just have to get you help."

"Help. Right." Her head came up, watery brown eyes locking onto his. Fingers pulled at his cheeks in desperation. "Call Jake. He can get more."

"No."

"Glen, please."

"No." He wove his hand through the hair at the back of her head to hold her in place, to try and still her shaking, to keep her from calling Jake. To try and hold her together if he could. "Kyla…Jake's not a good guy. I mean it." He held tighter, hands on her arms when she attempted to get away. "He's not good for you."

"You're just saying that because you're jealous."

Every instinct Glen possessed was screaming at him to reel back from the dark look on her pretty face. He felt like she had slapped him. His hands tightened on her arms involuntarily. Subtlety had never been one of his attributes. Of course she had seen.

"I see how you look at me. I know what you're thinking." His eyes dwell on her lips again, so damn round and so damn pink, even in her haggard state. He aches for sensations, rather than a discussion. He aches for pleasure rather than words. Words hold no meaning for her right then. "I just…I need it, Glen. Please. Please help me."

Before that moment, Glen had dreamed of tasting her lips, of them being as sweet as they looked. But they were salty from tears, slightly bitter, and chapped as they moved over his. Her hands roved clumsily through his hair and down his neck.

He let his forehead lean against hers for a few seconds, not quite ready to let the moment, as tainted as it was, end after wanting it for so long. Her skin was still as soft as flower petals when he skated his hands down her arms, her hair still as silky between his fingers. She was broken, and yet still she was so beautiful to him.

"I can't-" His voice broke, emotion clutching at his throat. "I won't help you kill yourself. And if you don't stop, you will. I can't watch that happen to you."

"So you'll leave me if I don't stop?" Barely a whisper, and still strong enough to break his heart. He didn't want to leave her. He wanted to protect her, look after her. He wanted to love her.

"I'm just a bodyguard. Hired help." The bitterness in his words tasted horrible, felt like sandpaper on his tongue.

"No you're not," she breathed.

And it was his breaking point. Her arms had been twined about his neck, the blunt and perfectly manicured nails digging into his skin just enough to hurt. He pried them away and stood, backing away despite the tears that started to fall down her sunken cheeks once more.

"Call me if you need a ride to rehab or the name of a doctor. Otherwise…don't."

Glen left his key on the entryway table, next to Ashley's purse. He snorted. Of course she was home and too self absorbed to notice him sitting on her sister's floor like some sort of guard dog. But why would she? It wasn't as if he were Spencer or Aiden.

The door slamming echoed in his ears all the way downstairs. The sound wouldn't leave his head or his heart. The image he caught of Kyla, crying in her designer party dress, watching him leave, burned itself into his soul even as he turned away and made his way to onto the freeway.

What remained of his dignity tried in vain to pretend he wasn't listening for the sound of his cell phone, jingling 'Bright Eyes' like it only did for her. He meant it when he told her he would help her, whatever it took, and she knew that. And she knew how to reach him.

There was really nothing more he could do.

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Lyrics from 'Beautiful Things' by Haven.