Author's Note: My life has been insane for months. It's finally sort of evening out again, so here's a couple chapters of TCD to apologize for making you wait so long.

The post-Coda fic set in California is still in the works, but I have no idea when I'll get around to it. This one, at least, I got some headway on. Thanks for being patient!

…

Lily watches Nina dance that afternoon with avid eyes. A little Xanax goes a long way; freed from the anxiety that typically imprisons her, Nina dances with more fluidity and grace, and her black swan is lovely. Lily doesn't bother to hide the hunger in her rapt gaze, though she can't quite lose herself in the performance.

She'll have to do something about Veronica eventually. That snide attitude just won't fly; it's irritating as hell, and it wrecks the entire cooperative/competitive dynamic essential to the company. She just has to catch Veronica in the act and confront her with evidence. Then she can properly humble her. Forced to beg for a second chance, Veronica might finally realize who's in charge here, and that she's never going to be able to manipulate Lily into doing what she wants.

Not to mention, it would be very interesting to see what Veronica would offer to keep her position if she felt her director was truly furious with her. It's been a while since anyone wore a collar for Lily… Besides, humiliation and domination would keep Veronica under better control than sex. If they fuck, Veronica can pretend it's her own idea, and Lily wants to thoroughly destroy her delusions of superiority. Sex is one of the things that Lily does only on her own terms, no compromises accepted.

She can't concentrate on all of that now, though. It's for the future. As for the present, she has to walk a very fine line with her young star. At the moment Nina is making David seriously reconsider his answer of a few weeks ago. She actually smiles, not the strained tightening of lips that usually passes for a smile, but a real grin of happiness. It's the Xanax, of course, and that gives Lily all kinds of ideas.

Lily keeps a small pharmacy split between her medicine cabinet at home and her desk drawer at work, all of which was prescribed to her: Ambien, Cymbalta, Percocet, Valium, Vicodin, Wellbutrin, and Xanax. Some are for stress, some for depression, some for pain, and one for insomnia. By seeing several different doctors and using two pharmacies, Lily manages to keep all of her prescriptions current without any of them realizing she's using the drugs for more than the specified purpose.

Speaking of recreational drugs, in several careful hiding places she also has a few things she acquired by trading her legitimate prescriptions: some Rohypnol, and a generous supply of ecstasy. That last is the one that Lily's mind keeps coming back to. Sedating Nina won't help her for long, and the antidepressants might not help. The pain meds, well, they'll chill her out, but Nina surely doesn't have Lily's tolerance, and even half of one of her Vicodin would probably leave Nina acting drunk. And she certainly doesn't want that.

Lily is aware, of course, that sharing prescription drugs is a felony. Any narc looking into her desk drawer would immediately assume she's either selling them or abusing them. She would argue the point, and possibly win; her ankle has never been the same, and New York's damp, chilly winters turn it into an agony some days. Plus the stresses of her job, of trying to hold this company together in a world that barely appreciates art and mostly associates ballet with grade-school girls in tutus, have certainly given her a right to be anxious, depressed, and sleep-deprived.

She doesn't think of herself as a junkie, nor does she consider the way she uses and mixes her prescriptions to be drug abuse. It is true that without her pills, Lily would be a very different person: on edge, in pain, subject to bouts of depression, and possibly violent as well. The meds keep her calm, keep the pain at bay, chase the darkness from her mind, and soften her quick temper to something more socially acceptable. She's careful how and when she uses them, knowing that all of them will enhance each other's effects, and that taking any two of them with alcohol would likely kill her. They are dangerous, and for that reason both the cabinet at home and the desk drawer are locked.

Lily's not afraid of death, though. She loves life, loves its challenges, loves making new conquests. If she dies, at least she'll do so knowing that she lived while she could. All the same, she's not eager to die, so she keeps the drugs carefully separated and knows her reaction and tolerance extremely well.

With Nina, she needs to reduce the girl's anxiety without dragging her down so far she can't perform. Tension is necessary to her performance, or Lily wouldn't torque up the attraction between them the way she does. Still, sexual manipulation can work both ways, to put someone on edge or to relax them. Yet with Nina, Lily doesn't think it's going to work as the only solution to her excessive stress. She'll need drugs—Nina's neurotic enough that it's a surprise she's not already on them. And ecstasy seems like the best candidate. It'll relax her without making her sleepy or impairing her mind. It will also make her more sociable, less awkward.

And perhaps best of all, it will make her more aware of her body. Not in the clinical, technical, muscle-tendon-and-bone in which she knows it now, but a more sensual understanding. Nina's beautiful, in a fragile way, yet she doesn't seem to know it, or to enjoy the youth and loveliness that she possesses. Lily would like to see her embody that more, to love herself and to fully inhabit her flesh, so that her black swan can be every ounce as magnificent as Lily needs it to be.

It's then, while Lily's daydreaming about how Nina would dance on ecstasy, how much freer she would be, that Susie knocks on the door before opening it. Everyone stops and turns to look. "Sorry to interrupt, I know you're working," the older woman begins.

Lily waves a hand dismissively. "No problem. What's up?" If it were anyone else, Lily would scold, but as Charles once told her, the first rule of any successful director is love thy office manager. Susie knows everything that's going on, sometimes before Lily does, and she would never risk the woman's displeasure by yelling at her.

"It's Beth," Susie says, and Lily's heart kicks once, hard, like a furious dancer trapped in her chest.

For a moment she can't even hear the next words, so sure of what they'll be. She's dead. "I'm sorry, what did you say?" she asks, in a polite calm tone nothing like the roaring in her ears.

"She's awake," Susie repeats, starting to smile. "Beth's awake, Lily, the doctors won't say anything over the phone, they're trying to reach you, but the nurse I spoke with said it looks good…"

Lily's instantly on her feet, and she hadn't known until this moment quite how much she was expecting Beth to die of her injuries. She takes two steps before she remembers what she's doing here, and turns to look at her dancers. Nina is the only one who catches her gaze, and her eyes are full of complicated things. "Go," she says softly, and Lily does.

Only once Lily's actually in the cab does she realize it looked to everyone watching as if she asked for and received Nina's permission to leave. She swears, thumping her head on the backrest of the seat a couple times in frustration. Still, it's Nina, and so far Nina's mostly been easy to keep in check. Other than a few brief flashes, she doesn't seem to have much dominance to her. Veronica, now, if it had been her Lily would probably have to physically overpower her to rein in her ego after an incident like that.

Even though she's seen Beth every day for two weeks (except the past three days, she hasn't been back since that horrible glimpse of Beth's shattered leg), Lily's still shocked at her appearance. While she slept, Beth had a kind of mournful serenity. Now awake, it's more obvious that she's weak and gaunt and in pain. Lily wants to shy from the vision; she's seen that look in a mirror before.

But Beth is expecting her, has already caught sight of her, and her smile is pathetically glad to see Lily here. Lily goes to her in a rush and hugs her carefully, murmuring, "Oh, princess, I thought we'd lost you," against Beth's lank hair.

Still, in the back of her mind, she's thinking Beth looks terrible. The comparison with Nina, in the flush of her youth and power and beauty, is especially cruel. If Nina looks like life and potential, Beth looks like death and wasted chances.

Lily can't help knowing which one she'll choose.