It had been years since Sylvie had been the cause of the sticky squeal and sheet-metal rumbling of a playground slide. She enjoyed herself, and fortunately, since she had hyper-focused herself on the one activity. She relished the prickly hot on the backs of her black-black, shiny-black legs, however many times she'd experienced it, over and over in the few hours of the wait. And finally, somehow, she got tired of it.
Forty dollars, that's all she asked. Not much in the grand scale of things, and not much to most, but it was plenty to her. She squinted and glared at the sun. The sun would have cowered, if it could. Sylvie stood up and, self-consciously checking for spectators-- there were none-- brushed her wrinkled skirt down and smoothed it over the short, gaudy breeches she wore underneath.
Clothing to her was like baking a cake with all the ingredients you liked best. It didn't matter if that metaphorical cake didn't metaphorically rise, or exploded, or tasted horrible because you'd combined cinnamon, almonds, chocolate, and oysters all in one. It was the idea of getting as much on as possible that counted. She was vain, but so long as you didn't know, Sylvie was content enough to keep sticking her chin out. And that was exactly why, to look at the skirt, variously green and red, floral and possibly the remnants of fabric from somebody's aunt's attic, would send any onlooker to the ER and several subsequent trips to the optic surgeon.
She clambered up a rocket-ship. Her eyebrows tried to meet. Wait. What? Oh. It was a jungle gym-esque play-tower. Right, then. She put off pondering the faculties of playground design and waited.

Adrian always thought Sylvie was gorgeous. He loved the color of her skin. It reminded him of liquid, like if he touched her arm his finger would just slide through the membranes, to her bones. On the jungle gym, with the sun just starting to set behind her, she looked like something out of a picture, one of those high art photoshoots. He stood at the bottom with his hands in his pockets and his head tilted up, just momentarily admiring the view.

Today he was clad in his customary black and white striped shirt and red scarf. It was too hot for this outfit, but poor circulation made him feel just right.

"Hey," he called after a bit, smiling hazily up at her. He was already on something, always on something. The jungle gym seemed too tall; she looked like she was at the top of the building, right up there with the clouds.

Sylvie had a habit for squinting one eye at a time. She did it now, slowly lowering her face from the infinite distance (which was only infinite if you ignored the buildings in the way) to Adrian on the ground below.
"Finally."
She fumbled her way down the tower's step ladder side.
"So...?" she drawled expectantly. She pulled her tattered waistcoat tighter around herself, confidently ignoring the potent smell coming from the side pocket. Not that it mattered. It was only Adrian, after all, and she was a generous sort anyways.

Adrian's smile stretched into a grin. His eyes darted to her pocket. As messed up as he was, he could always go for a little more. "Hey," he drawled sleepily. "I wasn't that late." Though he probably was. He had taken ten minute a nap on a car earlier and had forgotten to wake, which was remedied by the owner of the car yelping at him in a panic. It took him a moment to realize the lady thought he was dead, and took an even longer moment to try and calm her down from a miniature panic attack. He had given up half-way through, popped a half a pill of Valium, and made it to the park. Which he realized was wrong after waiting for ten minutes, since their meeting place was at the playground.

"You look good, as usual," said he, offering out one arm for a hug.

She grasped his arm and, rather than embrace, patted his shoulder. "Ah. You flatter me."
She smiled with her mouth only, her eyes formulating the authoritative glare she terrified children with.
"So, you came to do business is what I understand? I'm not an....unkind person. But, you know, one only waits so long."
"Honestly, it wasn't so bad. The weather's been nice," Sylvie added, sticking out her chin, shrugging theatrically, and looking away.

She appreciated twilight time. As much as she liked the day, the character of dusk and dawn were alluring to her in much the same way they draw errant deer onto 6-lane interstate highways. Sylvie found more pockets on her being, stitched into her many folds of skirt fabric, and crammed her hands into them placidly.

"Impatient as always," said Adrian. His smile was still there, and there was a hint of laughter in his voice, mellowed only by the Valium. Adrian liked people. He especially liked Sylvie. She was gorgeous and sharp, but he admitted to himself that she was the kind of girl that always looked like she did high up that jungle gym—out of reach, on a pedestal, not the kind of person you touch, but just admire. He could easily love her, he decided, at least for a weekend. Any longer they would probably commit double-homicide.

He pulled out two twenties from his pocket. It would be stupid to show her any more, else she hike up the price.

"Got a flask in all those pockets?"

"You're a...you're a sinking ship, doll," Sylvie cackled, catching his bills with her index and middle fingers and stuffing them down, below her low collar, into the recesses of her undershirts. An expression of flamboyancy to a stranger, but a walking, many-pocketed military satchel to anyone who knew her.
She pulled a ziploc bag from her waistcoat pocket and pushed it into Adrian's hands. It was his staple, she knew, and he'd get it one way or another. He may as well get it from her.
Dealing to Adrian was easy, and in that it was difficult. Adrian was a guaranteed sell to anybody, and he got around so much there was no trusting him to be a regular patron. Who knew where he got what from? Sylvie always imagined that he didn't, either.
"Enjoy that. I saved it just for you, sort of. But hell"--she pulled a fattie from her pocket--"a sample?"



(OOC: lollercoaster. This sounds so ridiculous to me, probably because it is. BRAIN TIRED ARRRGH)

"Don't I know it." Adrian's lazy smile took a definite twist to it, something more genuine, something a little clearer. He didn't check to weed to make sure it was good; he trusted Sylvie.

Adrian could walk down a familiar street and get drugs handed to him by faces he did not recognize. He usually paid in some way, of course, he wasn't quite as fucking cool as Jim Morrison. But it wasn't an unusual occurance when he got drugs for free, so he wasn't surprised when Sylvie pulled a joint from one of her many pockets. Pleased, though.

"You're a goddess." He fished a zippo from his back pocket and waved to the main part of the playground. It was all wood, untouched by the plastic craze that modernized most playgrounds and took away good memories. He liked the wood. It felt more natural, less like he would be suffocated by the slick material and staticy feel. Normally Adrian liked bright colors. Here, he liked the chipped rust colored paint and the splinters.

Sylvie turned, half walking, half skipping sideways, alongside Adrian. She made a faux scowl.
"Hey! You leave those goddesses out of this. I don't trust that kind of business. Crazy deities...! Gods and goddesses and all that."
Her speech was quick, and didn't flow so much as did each word's clipped annunciation rush into the beginning of the next. It represented grinning affability swathed in the harmonics of aggression, but did not require her body language (and she was indeed grinning) to prove that it was lighthearted.
Sylvie maternally approved of Adrian's ability to make any location comfortable, namely if there were drugs involved. A playground never lost its joy, no matter how old you got. If nothing else at all, it was a shelter.
Tucking the joint back into her pocket, she took a running start and charged up the metal slide, skidding onto the crooked wooden platform that supported it. She removed the joint again, and held it aloft. She watched Adrian below and a little ways away, bemused. The situation reminded her faintly of one of those little animal obstacle courses, with the treat at the end.
"Come on, champ!" she called. Perfectly sportsmanlike, right?

Adrian waved his hand dismissively at the idea of anything besides the natural (he wasn't the kind to be superstitious) and took bait, chasing her up the slide. It reminded him of being a kid again, which made him smile with fond nostalgia. He didn't even see this as ruining an innocent memory, rather, this was remembering his childhood.

"Fuck, this brings back memories," Adrian said, settling himself against one of the wooden walls. He patted the area beside him and held out his lighter, flicking it open. The flame sparked to life. He wouldn't take the first hit, of course not. That wouldn't be polite. "You first."

Sylvie likewise made herself comfortable, an arm hugging her knees as she sat against the opposite wall. She pushed her hair out of the way, produced the fattie, held it to her lips and nipped off the end, leaning near enough Adrian's lighter to allow the tip to smoulder as she puffed gently several times. Well lit. She took a good, long hit and held it, chokingly passing the joint to Adrian.
Sylvie nodded and coughed inwardly, finally exhaling the serpent's neck of smoke.
"Yeah," she cleared her throat. "Old memories."
"In Haiti," she began again after a pause, giving the 'i' its own syllable, "we had a swing set. It wobbled a little and somebody broke all but one swing but it was good."
Good childhood memories have a way of prickling everyone with nostalgia, even if all the rest was bad. She kept a lot of secrets. She had a fortress full of things people didn't know about her, but once in a while, something slipped out. It wasn't that she was deliberately secretive, but nobody exactly asked and she was rather casually private.
Sylvie raised her eyebrows, making a quick turn from her quiet thoughts. "How is it? You like?"

There was something aesthetically pleasing about how women smoked pot. He liked how their hair framed their faces, if it was long, and how their eyelashes dipped against their cheeks when they were lighting up. It was pretty. Adrian took the joint from her and hit it, holding it in. The first smoke was always the easiest. It didn't burn as much as the last one. He waited until his lungs begged for fresh air before releasing the smoke. He still coughed a bit when he exhaled. "Fuck," he said after a moment. "It's good. It's perfect." He flashed a grin at her and held fattie out for her.

He imagined Haiti, he imagined the swingset. He could almost feel the hot metal beneath him and the way the swing wobbled and jangled when someone was on it. He imagined little kids running and laughing and shrieking in the sun. It made him miss a life he never had.

"I used to play hide and seek with my best friend." He used to do everything with Gaven. Still did, in some senses. "I got lost this one time. Chased by a big dog." He remembered tripping and falling and scraping his leg. He had hid behind a bush with his knees drawn to his chest and didn't cry, but sniffled a lot, until someone found him. He smiled at the memory and wondered if Gaven remembered that day.

He paused for a moment, liking the silence, liking how the wind cooled and how the wood was still warm under them. "Haiti," he said slowly, as if choosing his words. In reality, he liked the pause, "sounds interesting." He wondered if she missed it. He wondered if it was his place to ask.

She took her hit. "Interesting if you like bananas and rice. And only once in a while," Sylvie managed, through her held breath. It always reminded her of trying to talk with a cup suctioned to your mouth, but less impossible and arguably less ridiculous.
Dusk and dawn make a joke of the day and night. For as long as it is either light or dark, it's only ever shortly in between. Like spring and fall. You can have one or the other, but never both. Transitions. They were just that, and were never kind enough to linger.
Sylvie tipped her head up, looking out over the top of the platform wall and above the rim of urbanization. A faint red glow smudged the horizon, but was made insignificant by the street lamps now taking its place.
The best part about night, the absolute most exciting bit: looking in people's windows. People on upper floors didn't draw their curtains. They thought nobody would see them, way up there, protected by all that height. But with the lights on and the world outside dark, those unsuspectingly careless flat dwellers created a shadow theatre for the city to watch. Sylvie loved this. She maintained it like a hobby.
But after several more passes of the joint, she was slowing down. Easing up. It was night, and there were fantastic things to do out there.
And when you're high, stating the obvious isn't so bad. "It's getting pretty dark."

Adrian loved being high. It was one of those drugs he could never get enough of. Fuck 'gateway drug', weed was genius all on its own. It made everything interesting, opened up millions of different opportunities. Sure, it slowed him down. Sure, sometimes he forgot how to think.

It was fucking funny.

Adrian rolled his head to look at her. He felt a little like he was underwater. That was good weed, and they had smoked a lot of it.

"Let's go for a walk," he said after a moment that stretched out for too long. He tried to measure it by holding both his fingers together and then pulling one away, then got distracted by the movement. When he moved his finger like that, there was a peach trail that followed it. He tried it again. It struck him to paint his nails. Maybe red. That would match his scarf. He moved his hands a couple more times. "What?" Oh. No one had said anything. He blinked heavily and remembered what they were doing. Pushed himself up. "Come on." He might have swayed a bit. Or was the playground moving? "Fuck, this thing needs to stay still. Come on."

"Let's go for a walk."
It registered. It sounded like a great idea. Something about it, though. It wasn't enough charge, and it caught itself in a net somewhere in Sylvie's mental processes, stuck.
"What?"
It was like somebody snapped their fingers in Sylvie's brain. Pay attention! it commanded her. Her mind told her that. Pay attention to what? Was somebody talking? Did she need to do something? Her thoughts echoed the one word, like the key phrase at the end of a particularly noxious riddle. She squinted, potentially treating completely innocent dust particles to her glare.
"Come on..."
"Oh! Right, then."
She regarded the environment like a person in desperate need of sleep, her eyes fixated on whichever sorry bit of nothing happened to be in front of them. She very decidedly climbed down the back rungs of the slide, not currently bold enough to actually attempt sliding down.
"Adrian...how long have I been staring?" she asked, a little nervously. She tried to act casually, as though it were a passing curiosity, but her self-consciousness peaked through and tainted the tones of her speech.

For some reason, Sylvie's nervousness charmed Adrian. He gallantly held out a hand to help her up. "It's okay. It's okay." For all he knew, she could have been staring at the wall for days. Moving felt interesting. His limbs weighed hundreds of pounds. There were little pricklies in his eyes, and he was tempted to close them. He braced himself against one of the poles. He could feel all of the grooves under his oversensitive palm.

"Hey. Let's find, um. A really tall place." He wanted to look at the stars, and he figured she would be able to understand what he meant without further explanation.

She took his hand, a practical, un-ladylike grasp that liked to ignore delicacy and thought euphemisms were for dandies.
"A really tall place? Like..." Sylvie thought hard. She was trying to think of a suitably tall place to get to, nevermind the apparently unsuitably tall places that surrounded them on most sides. She gave up trying, after a while. "Or a wide open-- yes! A wide open space. Then, see, if you're in a wide open space, you're the tallest thing there, so you're in a tall place automatically."
She beamed at the genius of her own statement.
The dirt and patchy grass of the playground felt so soft under the soles of her ankle boots. What she took for granted other times, she thought hard on and appreciated now. Yet in as much as she noticed the earth below her more, it felt so distant. As they walked, she considered the possibility of this odd, fidgety distance being her reality and the rest of life being a facade. She sympathized with Adrian here-- it was her reality now but it was Adrian's reality always.

The city crowded like a big tunnel, with the dome of the sky as its roof. His vision was narrowed, as if the buildings were leaning towards them. Finding a big open space would be next to impossible in a world like this.

He didn't let go of her hand because she was an anchor to the ground. He felt like he would stumble, like he would collapse without her support. His grip might have been slightly tight, but he knew Sylvie could take it.

He hated parts of the city sometimes. But he didn't say so, because he didn't want to kill her high. This city would suck him dry. The putrid smell of decay, of a body eating itself alive from the inside out—these were scents familiar to him. They hit a little too close to home.

Some guy started yelling at Adrian for accidentally setting off a car alarm. It was late. People didn't like to be disturbed. Adrian's self-destructive thoughts were replaced by hilarity, and he braced himself against the wall to keep himself from laughing himself to the ground.

Sometimes the funniest part of nothing is the simple fact that some one else is laughing. A person can embarrass themselves at the end of a stupid joke because of this, when all they were laughing at was the other guy who actually found it funny. Sylvie watched Adrian crumple. She raised her eyebrows and chuckled, shuffling her feet absently. And finding that he wouldn't stop, found herself laughing with him.
It was transfixing. Like the opposite of suffocation, like hyper-ventilating and the splotchy coldness behind her eyes.
"Come on! Come on!" she stammered, at last, pulling him up and nigh dragging him after her. "I want to run!"
Sylvie couldn't believe herself. Adrian would probably hate her for this, and a little note of polite sobriety in the back of her head reminded her that this was a terrible idea. She would either feel like crap after running like this or forget she was doing it and run herself into the ground. But it was good time to bust. And how else were they going to get there, to high ground or to clear ground, in this swamp of a city? One street went on limitlessly. No, it obviously progressed as she ran, Adrian in tow, but her vision kept turning, the wayward image snapping itself back and repeating the process again.

Adrian stumbled after her, surprised out of his hysterics into little choked chuckles. "O-okay!" He raced with her, easily keeping pace, sometimes running a little ahead of her but always letting her lead, never letting go of her hand. Adrian had played hockey all of his life. Running was nothing. Running was easy, even with the abuse he had done on his lungs and the rest of his body.

He had no idea where they were going. In retrospect, this probably wasn't a good thing. In Adrian's current state of mind, however, it was the best fucking plan in the world.

He halted for a stop after awhile. If just because they were in front of a NUDIES sign. That was flashing pink. He was enthralled. It didn't occur to him that they had entered the seedy part of town that probably wasn't safe.

This place, after all, was a common hang out.

Sylvie felt the sharp tug on her arm as Adrian-- taller, stronger, and invariably heavier-- abruptly stopped, and nearly toppled. Nudies. Huge and bright in its resplendent pink glory. She cackled, for all the wrong reasons.
"We're in my neck of the woods now. Well. Not the nudies bit. You know that, right? Not the nudies? Right," Sylvie meant to continue with some point or some direction, but meandered on the way. She remembered her track of conversation after some time and a host of odd facial expressions. "I'm gonna laugh so hard if I see a customer out here, son."
With her cadence slowed to a hazy slur, Sylvie's accent protruded over her fairly well-tuned, innocuous speech. Her mouth was too busy grinning stupidly to produce words properly, and she was in no mind to do anything about it.
Nonetheless, she observed Adrian, staring at the flashing light. It showed a little something in a person's character, she thought, to watch what they watched when their guard was down. A flashing pink light, came the giddy conclusion in her mind, was a pretty decent metaphor for what Adrian was like, in fact.
She smiled widely, big white corn-kernel teeth, white-flashing-pink, and grasped Adrian's shoulder, pulling him away. She pointed, squinting one eye, to the looming shadow of an abandoned antique building. It was somewhere near five stories high, an ex commercial emporium left vacant because of the location.
"No. There's a ladder up the side of the old shop. ....Ssso long you don't mind climbing the bare stones a length or two to get to it."

"I don't mind," Adrian said, then promptly realized he didn't know what he didn't mind. "I mean. I don't mind. I don't think." He puzzled over the sign for a few seconds. What did it say? His eyes had the tendency to fuzz and unfocus when he was stoned. And he couldn't concentrate for shit.

And then he was yanked away!

"Oh," he said, looking up and up and up and up at the building, swaying slightly. It stretched forever. He wondered if he could touch the sky from up there. Then again, wasn't he touching the sky down there? He remembered getting high in the mountains once, a long, long time ago, forever ago, and passing out because the oxygen was too thin and his body couldn't handle it. That was then, this was now. Now Adrian could do anything. He could fucking fly if he wanted to. "Okay. Okay! You first."

Gallant was not Adrian.

It was worth the walk. What loomed in the distance was a bit farther than had been expected, and wasn't quite the bee-line Sylvie had thought it would be. They had to detour around a bum. A bum muttering complete nonsense about gods, things of that nature.
What the hell was it about this town? Sylvie thought. Is there something about the way the planet is? Something geographic that makes little pinpoint areas of this kind of madness?
"From Haïti to Bayfield," she mumbled. "With love."
Her eyes had been dazedly roving the ground as she thought-- or tried to-- and couldn't have told her to beware the obstacles ahead of her path. Or, as the case may be, the designation ahead of her path, the top front of her skull genially making friends with the rough old building stone.
Her thought processes were fickle. It was their fault this happened.
Sylvie looked up. The ladder rungs were not really all too far above her head, as it happened. ...Ladder rungs? Why was she interested? In a sudden forgetful panic, she snapped her head left and right, looking for Adrian. He was gone, and she was all alone, and how long had it been?
Oh. He was behind her. That was a relief.
"Ha! Adrian...I thought you were..." Sylvie began. No, too hard to explain. Too much work, she thought. Nevermind. But after a few minutes deliberation she had rediscovered their plan to scale the building. She palmed the stone and bit her lip.
"Um. Lift me, maybe?" She hated asking favours.

He looked at the ladder rungs thoughtfully. They didn't look very safe.

"Okay," he said, then picked her up easily. Adrian was shockingly strong. He sort of tried to aim her towards the rungs, but was having trouble since his sense of direction was severely muddled.

"Can you reach?" Why were they doing this again? He couldn't remember for the life of him. But climbing this building seemed like a must do. They would climb it, find the holy-fucking-grail, and life would be good.

"Yeah, I can just grab ahold..."
Sylvie felt herself sway as Adrian wobbled. She felt somewhat like the tack in a drunken pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game and had a brief spell of regret.
She wrapped her fingers around the first bar of metal and pulled herself up, off of Adrian's shoulders, and rooted her feet against a jutting ledge. With her legs on that ledge, she could reach higher-- all the way to the fifth rung-- and did so, pulling up all of her weight...when she felt the vibration within the ladder and heard an unnerving 'clunk' from above her. She dropped her legs back to the ledge, fearfully. And rightly so.
"Adrian? Uh-- Adrian?!" she called.
There was a long wail of tortured metal as the entire ladder swung downwards in a massive arc. Sylvie braced her feet against the ledge but couldn't keep her balance without desperately grasping the end of the ladder, which remained attached to the building wall.
What the fuck?! What the hell is happening?! -- Stupid, unhelpful thoughts raced through Sylvie's head. Additionally, Why am I here? and Am I going up or down? were added to that roster.
With a horrible, mind-jarring clatter, the upper end of the ladder hit the pavement some 8 meters away. Sylvie was left, feet against the ledge, hands gripping what remained of the ladder, contorted in a backwards semicircle with her head upside-down. Her back was over Adrian's head. She panicked internally. She hadn't bargained for this kind of shit.