A/N: Okay so, I have officially realized that apparently, it's really hard for me to just write one happy Eli story. It's like every time I try to write a piece about him it always ends up being depressing. -_-

*le sigh* I think it's just Eli's dark side that I love so much. I really enjoy exploring it and what might possibly happen because of it.

Anyway, this was just sort of a random little thing that crossed my mind. I was trying to see if I could imagine Eli with another girl on the show besides Clare, and when I thought about him with Bianca, the only way I could really see it happening was something like this.

In the end, it became a lot less about Eli/Bianca (Elianca? Beli?), and more about what I think might happen to Eli if he just completely gives up on himself after Clare breaks up with him, which by the way, is really sad to think about. :'(

Emotional Suicide

Eli Goldsworthy doesn't know how he turned out to be such a goddamn mess.

Well, at least, he can't seem to recall right now. Not when he's drunk off his ass and some nameless, faceless girl is busy sucking on his neck like he's some kind of dessert.

Eli groans reflexively, pretending to be turned on so she'll continue, and then groans for real when she finds that special spot just under his jaw.

The special spot that she used to kiss…Ah. That's why he's such a screw up now. Clare. Well, he's always been a screw up, but now he is even more than he was before.

God, he misses her.

This girl must have a name and a face, just not any that are coming to mind at the moment (although Eli will admit that he's not trying too terribly hard to remember).

And he certainly can't see her face to recognize her, because it's obscured under his chin, and besides, his eyes are so fucked up and blurry from whatever he'd been drinking earlier that there's no way he'd be able to make out her features anyway.

He really should stop mixing alcohol with those anti-anxiety meds.

Eli sighs slightly out of boredom. This girl and her ministrations are doing nothing for him, but he's desperate and screwed up and lonely. Maybe if he closes his eyes and takes himself back to another time he can get into it more.

A time when he was lying on his bed perhaps, with a familiar head on his chest, or even on top of someone else's very comforting, very warm, soft body.

He threads his fingers through this girl's hair - whoever the hell this one is - and imagines it's a lot shorter and a lot lighter in color.

Maybe if he opens his eyes, his wish will come true, and the girl now unbuttoning his shirt will be the one he always prays he'll wake up next to, and never is.

Eli holds his breath - even though he knows it's hopeless - and opens his eyes and…nope. No such miracle.

He snorts. Good thing he's a cynic. Didn't believe it would happen anyway. Miracles don't occur. They don't exist.

Well, one did. Correction: miracles never last. It was a miracle that she would have ever wanted to be with a guy like him, but it had happened.

The hair is black and long. It's curly though, so if Eli keeps his eyes closed then it'll still sort of feel like Clare's hair at least.

Eli's sitting in a chair. He remembers this suddenly when the girl on top of him gets off of his lap and drops to her knees in front of him.

He only knows this has happened when she has disappeared out of his view and he hears the clink of his belt buckle as she undoes it, feels his pants being unbuttoned and unzipped…

Eli remembers the first time he did this a year ago. Hooked up with some random girl at some random function held at some stranger's house where he didn't even want to be.

He remembers how nervous he was when the girl pulled him into someone's bedroom. So cliché, and it definitely wasn't his style...

:~_~:

He hadn't been used to just getting with strange girls. He had never done this before. He felt weird using someone like this, but it wasn't as if she wasn't just using him too. She was the one who had proposed they go upstairs. But she was offering an escape and he needed it. Anything to forget Clare. Anything to forget the anxiety and depression and self-hatred that he felt day-in and day-out.

Eli had offered her an eyebrow raise and a small smirk - a mask of confidence, a mere ghost of the smugness he had once possessed - and that was all the answer she needed before she was tugging him along by his hand through the crowd of drunk, grinding teenagers (all of whom were people Eli only vaguely recognized as faces he'd seen passing by him in the hallways at school), and upstairs.

She wasn't his type, and Eli knew for sure that he definitely wasn't even close to being hers. She had called him a freak and a loser on numerous occasions when they passed each other in the halls, or when he accidentally bumped into her at school that one time. But she was obviously horny, and Eli was drunk and lonely as shit. He could care less what happened to him at the moment, and he figured maybe kissing someone would sufficiently distract him from that heavy, ever-present weight in his chest that nothing else seemed to cure.

At first, he was uninterested and unresponsive as she kissed him on someone's bed, an indifferent participant in what he assumed would simply be a soon-forgotten make-out session. Maybe some heavy petting over their clothes. But then she had started to unbuckle his jeans…

"What are you doing?" Eli had sat up quickly, his usual air of confidence fading, his passiveness evaporating as he grabbed the girl's wrists in one of his hands and pulled them away from his pants. He flushed, hating himself for his blatant nervousness. He needed his dignity, he was barely hanging onto it as it was, and he had practically just thrown it out the window with that pathetic gasp of surprise. It wasn't like he was a virgin. He'd done it plenty of times, but the last and only girl he'd done it with was -

Julia.

And he and Clare had never gotten around to it. Not before she'd dumped him.

He felt that loathsome ache twist his gut at the thought. It hurt to think of her.

"What's the matter, Dr. Doom?" Bianca asked, pursing her lips with a nasty little smirk that rivaled his own and cocking her head to the side with her usual attitude, "Never had a blowjob?"

Eli glared at her. "Yes, I have, not that that's any of your business."

He snorted, his smugness returning when he saw her eyebrows raise in surprise.

"I can't imagine from whom. Little Miss Saint Clare obviously never gave it to you. So who gave you the head, freak?"

"None of your business. If we're done here, I'm going to get another drink." Eli stated this as smoothly as he could and made to stand up off the bed, but Bianca pushed him back down again.

Eli narrowed his eyes at her. He wondered how difficult she was going to make this. He started planning escape routes in his mind. She was the same height as him. Probably weighed about the same. He eyed her warily in a calculating fashion. She had muscles, but they weren't that impressive and he could probably overpower her easily if he just took her by surprise.

As Eli continued to study her through suspicious eyes, he came to a sad realization. Bianca was seventeen years old. So young. She was a pretty girl, no doubt. She had the figure of a woman and the face of one too. But if you looked at her in the right light, under the vampy red lipstick, the sultry eyes glazed over, under the hardness in her expression, was a girl, a little girl really - no older than him. Regardless of how many dudes she'd slept or fooled around with, it didn't change the facts. Regardless of whatever trampy clothes were clinging to her figure, it didn't change what was hiding underneath them.

He saw something in her eyes then that she was trying to hide, recognized it only because he'd been feeling it too for the last year. The raw hurt in those eyes, eyes like open wounds. And Eli suddenly remembered her breakup with Adam's brother, how she'd strutted around the school, like him, all tough and unaffected, like Drew had never mattered to her, the way Eli had done after Clare had dumped him on his ass. He wondered briefly if that was how his eyes looked, wondered if when people got close enough to him, they could see that same lonely, aching hurt, and he wondered if, even after all the shit he'd been through, he was really just as much of a lost, lonely, desperate little boy, as Bianca was a lost, lonely, desperate little girl. And he decided from then on that he wanted no one to ever get close enough to see it, to look into his eyes and see that pain, to get close enough to touch it and try to heal it or exacerbate it. He decided he wanted no one to ever look in his eyes again. It would be easier to hook up with people who meant nothing to him - and keep it that way - if things were impersonal.

He decided then and there that he wanted to be like Bianca. He would strut all around like she did, keep doing it all over the hallways at school, and now he would do it all over girls' pride, all over their hearts. He would keep his distance, keep his cool, make it frigid.

Of course, the whole thing would be false. He could act like a zombie in appearance, dead and unfeeling, but he was practically a living fire on the inside, and the only way to put it out, to end those intense, hateful, incredibly excruciating feelings was to commit emotional suicide. Eli was passionate by nature. He felt things strongly, and even though he usually managed to keep up a cool facade (besides the occasional anxiety attack, whose sharp bursts of panic had more to do with his disorder than his actual personality), Eli was always filled on the inside with feeling. And he was so tired of feeling, especially the way he did it. To feel is so exhausting.

He would dampen his inner fire slowly, torturously, punishing himself, making himself suffer through the use of isolation, until finally he would be just as lifeless internally as he was on the outside. Bianca was harsh and cool and fierce, too much so to ever lose her inner fire, or want to really. But Eli wanted to extinguish his. He knew he was weaker than her, knew he needed to put himself out of his misery. He could never live like Blanca forever - pretending he didn't care when really he did. The only option was to stop caring at all.

He could pretend that that would make him strong, make him brave, make him tough, when in reality, emotional suicide was just as cowardly as any other kind. He just had to convince himself otherwise.

Bianca interrupted his shrewd musings.

"Listen," Bianca tried a different approach. She began to trail her hand down his chest and over his belt and onto the inside of his thigh.

Eli's nerves increased, but he remembered to keep his cool. The last girl who had touched him like this…

Julia.

"Don't be a little bitch, Goldsworthy. Just relax."

:~_~:

The girl in front of him now repeats those same words.

"Shh. Just relax." The same pressure on the inside of his thigh. The hot breath he can feel through his pants. The way her hand glides up and down his inner leg in what he assumes is supposed to be a reassuring gesture.

Her hand comes up and pushes his head back against the seat, running her fingers through his hair roughly, and Eli shudders with disgust when he feels the way the cool pads of her fingers press against his scalp.

Eli stares blankly at the ceiling and wonders where the hell he put that bottle of whiskey…

As his eyes roll around, taking in the rest of his surroundings, Eli now realizes that he has absolutely no idea where the fuck he is. Too drunk to care, he turns his eyes to the left to stare impassively at what appears to be a Dead Hand poster. Some other stranger's bedroom? He can hear the thumping base of some horrid pop song pounding against the souls of his feet from the room below. God, same scene every time.

When he feels the girl rearranging his boxers for easy access, Eli shifts himself upwards as best as he can in his inebriated state so that he can watch what she's about to do to him.

He sees her shiny, blood-colored nails glint a little from the light over-head as they skitter over his crotch like little red beetles and then -

The wet heat of her mouth surrounds him.

At first Eli is able to continue to sit still, his eyes staring off unfocused and blank, and then the pleasure starts to build, so he tilts his head back.

It feels so good. He can forget about her. About Clare. For now.

Who's he kidding? He can't escape her. He pretends the girl sucking him off on her knees is her. He imagines that the person doing this to him is doing it because she loves him. That when she's done, Eli will make it worth her while and return the favor.

Eli loathes himself for being so pathetic.

No one would ever love him now anyway. He can find people desperate enough to screw a punk-ass freak like him, but care about him? Forget it. Not when he's this fucked up little shit with no hope for any kind of future and his mind is so sick. No one ever deserves to have to want him of all things. He's so unfixable, and even if he was fixable, he wouldn't even be worth the effort really.

He's just a broken mind with a broken heart.

His hips jerk up and he stifles a slurred cry with his knuckles in his mouth.

When it's over, she climbs back into his lap again. And Eli wants to sob when, instead of a little gold cross dangling from a thin, gold chain, a big black stone on a silver string hangs in front of his face.

She goes back to kissing his neck as she squeezes his thigh. His thigh is probably about the size of her upper arm. And even though he's always been skinny, it's most likely due to the fact that he's lost his appetite for food and because of the recently acquired smoking habit.

He's lost his appetite for most things. He doesn't even have an appetite for sex, even though he has it far more often than he ever had it in the past. It's just a habit. It keeps his mind off the shitty things in his life.

She bites him on the neck and suddenly, inexplicably, Eli feels something aggressive and vicious fill him. Something dark comes to life inside of him, and with a sudden burst of energy, Eli comes out of his catatonia to grip her hips and casually push the girl off of his lap and onto the floor. She lets out a loud curse as she hits the wood hard, and Eli bends at the waist in his chair and reaches across the floor to grasp the whiskey bottle that he suddenly recalls leaving there.

"What the fuck, Goldsworthy?" So it's Bianca that was going down on him - again. When she sounds so bitchy, he can recognize her voice instantly. It's such a change from the sweet, seductive tone she'd been using before.

Eli feels a much more twisted version of his familiar smirk crawl its way back onto his face unsettlingly.

He tips the bottle back against his lips and takes a swig. Half of the sip ends up on his shirt.

"Get lost." Eli dismisses her coldly, his voice whispery quiet and paper thin.

"Who the hell do you think you are? Think you can just tell me to get lost after you're done with me?"

Eli doesn't respond.

She snarls. "You are just asking for a smack down."

Eli doesn't answer. He gives her an intense stare. It's the only response she'll be getting from him.

"Fuck you," Bianca hisses, and she storms out, leaving something dead and cold and heartless left behind.

I've gotten pretty good at finding people who will, Eli thinks absently.

There will be other girls. Most definitely. But none of them will ever feel about him the way that he wishes someone could (not that he'll ever give them the chance). None of them will ever make him feel about them the way he used to about Clare. Not even Julia came close.

And most of all, none of them will ever be Clare.