Title: Angels

Rating: T

Warning(s): self-mutilation

Summary: After spending her life under pressure and expectations, she's given up. Breathing and walking without living, there's no one who can save her from herself.

A/N: My first chaptered fic. :D I expect it will be very short, but I have a feeling it'll be my baby for a while(: It's nice to have a break from my long!fic that I've lost inspiration for~

Chapter One: She's Not Perfect

All her life there have been expectations.

The standard expectations to walk at a certain age, to call her mother, and those were simple enough, back when she was a child, when it didn't feel so much like a burden, going at her own pace and not knowing everyone was evaluating her. She wishes it were like back then.

She has parents that love her, and maybe a little too much. It feels oppressive, the pride in their eyes that weigh her down like chains. They want her to be successful like her sister and bring home accomplishments for them to brag about to their friends, but it gets harder every day. They want her to be a lawyer, but she doesn't want to. She was raised thinking she was going to, though, and she can't think of any other career she would fit. She remembers grinning when her dad told her how proud he was of her, childish satisfaction in a parent's approval. Being perfect so that mommy and daddy would be happy.

It's not that easy anymore.

She wants more, she wants a reason. Yes, good grades and a good university, but what else? Is her life measured by the numbers marked in red at the top of her essays? If she were someone else, someone who couldn't go to university, was she not worth it?

She spent her whole life being perfect. It makes her sick. Screaming and fighting with her parents brings temporary relief, being able to yell until her throat racked from the dry sobs it couldn't give voice to. But it's not enough.

She can't bring herself to feel angry or indignant anymore. Every breath feels like a chore, but she can't bring herself to just die, even though sometimes she feels like she should.

She's had enough. She wears a mask, a painted doll's face, smiling with red-dyed lips for her so that she doesn't have to. At some point, the line between the mask and herself has blurred, disappeared, and she can't find where the mask ends and she begins.

It's like being a ghost, walking in the shell of someone else's life as a mere onlooker, detached and uncaring. Silence is the easiest solution. Sitting at lunch with her friends, smiling and hearing the latest gossip without listening. In the back of the classroom, taking notes and staring at the chalkboard without seeing.

She wears long-sleeved shirts to cover her wrists bearing the scars that silence has carved, scarlet blossoming across pale skin. An eruption of physical pain to make up for everything else she can't feel, careful cuts perfectly spaced across like train tracks, an aspect of her life all her own, something she can actually control.

The monotonous routine in her life doesn't end. She walks the same path every day without thinking, her feet retracing the steps she's walked, and she finds herself at home, at school, without remembering how she got there.

She's not angry or sad or hurt. She's just tired. She wants to scream, Enough already! but it's too much effort. She can't bring herself to feel anything at all.