Title: To Face The Day

Author: Ayakaishi Fei

E-mail: Ken_Dai_

Rating: PG-13-R

Category: Angst, Pain.

Warnings: Self-harm.

Summary: // I've bled myself empty of emotion, and it feels good to be empty// Sometimes it's easier not to feel anything. Short one-shot. Self- harm.

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Hands, too pink to be considered tan, too brown to be truly pale quiver with suppressed emotion, fingers, long and delicate caress the cheap plastic handle of the penknife. Long fingernails, decorated with chipped purple nail varnish, not quite clean, force the blade out of it's hiding place. The dull orange light of a lamp creates folds of shadows around the edges of the small messy room.

//"I love you."//

Brown eyes, threaded with gold and green; lock onto the blade, it doesn't gleam the way the razor does, but it has an odd beauty. Heady blood trapped in veins, capillaries and arteries pulsates with excitement, begging to be released. Long slender legs tremble with apprehension, thin scabs, that may become scars, adorning them, souvenirs of the past - of past imperfection.

//"I need you."//

I want to dirty the blade, until I stain the metal with my copper blood - until it rusts and blunts. Until I'm not beautiful, and not perfect. I want to be as unlovable on the outside as I am inside, when my glittering façade is thrust aside.

The cheap unvarnished, unpainted door to my bedroom is closed. Locked. My fingers trace the contours of my pale thighs, the scars that itch as the skin heals itself, and I hate them, because he loves them.

//"I want to be with you forever."//

My lips curve upwards - full, red, plump - perfect for kissing in his opinion. They are lips, which he has tasted, but never ravished, lips that have never known the pain of a sadistic lover, lips, which have only ever known gentleness. Funny that they should settle into a smirk so easily, as if they were made for the perversion of a smile, as my body was made for the perversion of love.

I put the pen-knife to my leg and drag it through the skin, wending it up my thigh, past my hip bone. It doesn't bleed, so I have to try again - I think I should have found a sharper blade. The second time it cuts and bleeds. It stings, more without the water to wash it away. I think perhaps I am growing more desperate, to use my shower-time ritual in the darkness of my room to ward off his words. And my loss of control.

//"You're the best thing about me - the only thing I care about."//

I gaze at the welling blood, it isn't coating my pale thighs pink the way it should, so I cut again, opening an old cut. The usual thrill goes through me - adrenalin, the heady rush of the forbidden. When I used to shoplift, as a young teen, this was the rush I felt. I cut again, my body alive, but my head dulled, the same buzz I get from the drugs I've taken once or twice.

Cutting is cheaper. Safer. I don't do the drugs anymore, as long as I can cut I get my heady pleasure - once or twice a week. It's all I need. All I want. To be inside myself, and outside myself, to feel and not feel - the pain and pleasure and apathy of cutting is the only drug I need these days.

//"I couldn't live without you."//

His words scare me sometimes, his gestures, his very love makes me die inside, and when I am reborn, it is to be tortured once more, as I lay trapped inside a box that the rest of the world calls reality. I see more than they dream of, in my mind's eye I create something they'll never understand. Why I cut, why I need the pain, why I can't seem to differentiate love from hate, from apathy, because somehow they all swirl together into a single pointless emotion.

And when I'm dying inside, and every gesture he makes, every word he says makes me sick to my stomach, and there's no one there to save me - I realise I want someone. I feel like I'm empty inside, and there's nothing left of me to give him - his gentle kisses, his touches - the touches that make my skin crawl with their implicit tenderness - have taken everything I am.

//"If you leave me I will kill myself."//

How can I be responsible? How can I be everything to one person? How can I lose myself in him. I don't love him. He is the thief who stole all that I was, and you put me back together. When I was ready to kill myself, to spare myself from him, you were there.

How could I not love you. I couldn't not love you anymore than I could have continued loving him. We took it slow, friends for so long, so long that I couldn't imagine you wanting to be more - but how could I not love you? You were everything to me that he couldn't be - you gave me everything I needed, everything I could get from a boy who was almost a man. You gave me what I'd been longing for without even realising it.

And he ceased to matter, because you became everything - more to me than he ever had been, and I wonder sometimes - is this what he felt for me?

But how could it be. How could this pure, perfect emotion have been tainted by him? He never loved me. Not like I love you. My blade touches my skin again, and I cut, because I love you, and love, hate and apathy are all the same emotion, when you strip away the surface.

Authors Notes: And that's it. Weird, weird scary ending, but hey. That's how it goes isn't it. Review if you like. Don't if you don't. And if you're freaking out right now, remember it's all fiction. *smiles*