Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They're pushing you. Pushing and tugging and clawing at your mind-- at your sanity and well being. They're breaking you. Destroying you. Just like what Jace has always said, 'To love is to destroy.' And your loved ones are certainly destroying you.
You don't know if they see it, don't know if they even care if they do, but you try to hide it. You try to grin and bear the strain and help them because they're struggling and you need to help. It's your job to help, to protect them. But it's been building you think. Your breaking that is. You used to be able to shed a few tears every time they insulted themselves or said something upsetting and you would be fine. Like how Magnus is always trying to drop a few pounds, never willing to pick up a slice of food despite the fact that he's practically skin and bones. Or how Izzy sneaks the razors from the bathroom at night before asking you a few days later to buy more band aids and Neosporin. Or how Jace is always disappearing to the bathroom only to come back with a suspiciously blank look in his eyes, the pills once hidden away in the cabinet doing who knows what to his body. But now, it's like there's a parasite under your skin, burrowing deeper and deeper into unreachable places that only make you want to dig all the deeper for it when you use your blades. Their words make you itch and burn, sends this furious restlessness thrumming through your veins that makes you writhe and claw at your skin. You're not sure what it is. Whether you're angry or restless or sorrowful or anything else. All you know is that it's scary and makes you stupid and one day it's going to cause you to kill yourself. You know it.
And yet you can't find it in yourself to speak up. To tell then to stop. To shake them and scream what you want.
Because what you want is to force Magnus to eat. What you want is to throw away all the razors and make sure Izzy never touches one again. What you want is to flush all of Jace's pills down the toilet. What you want is to hit and punch and tear and bleed and just talk to someone, among all the other things you cannot do. Things you would never do. At least not to them.
So you start punching walls. You start digging things into your skin again, over and over again until it is an inflamed red and hurts under the lightest touch. You scream into your pillow and kick at things. You cry and tear at yourself and break.
Because honestly?
You don't know what to do anymore.
This situation is so hopeless, so insane, so utterly fucked that you don't... You don't-
You don't know.
It's hard to find the strength to fight anymore. It's hard to argue against people who simply shake their heads and hurt you more deeply than any wound you could inflict on yourself with a mere choice of words. You want to stop this. You want to stop caring and stop existing. You want to tear at yourself until nothing is left. You want to be left alone, away from civilization and people and hurt. You want to end.
And at the same time you don't. Because they've gotten better before and you can't simply give up on the hope that that will happen again, or more adequately, you can't give up on them. They are what keeps you to this world and pushes you off it. They are what heal and wound you. They are what saves and kills you.
They are your destruction.
They are your salvation.
You just wish loving them didn't hurt so fucking much.