I've seen a few hundred stories like this done for Jade, but none for Beck. He really does not get much love around here, does he? Well, I'll give him some. A lot of people see him as boring. I want to change that.
This is my hundredth story (huzzah!), and it's probably one of the most personal things I've ever written. I took one of the things I relate to the most with Beck and drew it out to an extreme. And stayed tuned until the author's note at the end, because there's a story behind this story, if you're curious.
Severe warnings for self-harm, brief suicidal thoughts, and a dangerously unhealthy thought process throughout. Read with care.
I do not own Victorious or any of their characters. The story is mine. Enjoy.
— Nothing —
It's a question he asks himself sometimes. It's a lingering thought in the back of his head during the long days of nothing. It's a concern he raises when he fails to react properly to a situation. What is it like to feel?
Because he's so numb sometimes (all the time), and he wonders what it means. Is something wrong with him? If something is wrong with him, then something has always been wrong with him. He can't remember a time when he didn't feel this way; he can't remember a time when he felt anything. This is him, and if it's wrong, then his whole life is wrong, then he is wrong; does that make him a mistake? But he feels nothing about his numbness. He feels nothing at all. It doesn't bother him (except when it does, but he doesn't feel anything, so it's okay.)
He should be more interesting. He lives an interesting life, with interesting friends, and interesting teachers, in perhaps the most interesting town in the world. So why is he so boring? Why can't he pull himself together and be vibrant and dramatic and excited like everyone expects him to be? Why can't he feel the emotions he's supposed to?
Her kisses make him feel something. Maybe that's why he loves her so much (loves as an action, not the feeling). There's a brief spark, and he clings to that for all he's worth. Her oddly chilling embrace or soft fingers curled through his . . . he feels that and now he finds himself living for that. But deep inside he knows the truth. He knows that the spark he feels isn't his own. He feels something because she does. He loves her (an action) because she loves him (a feeling). Her spark, her passion, transfers to him with every touch. He still feels nothing of his own.
That's how he acts, you know. When he's on stage or in front of a camera, he can pull off all the stunning emotions he's never felt. Because he feels other people's (characters') emotions. Not his own, never his own, but at least he can channel someone else. He doesn't feel anything, but his character does, and somehow that's good enough for him. If anyone knew the blessed paradox he lives through every day, they would not understand how he wound up in this profession. He would question it himself, if he cared enough.
He doesn't feel anything. He can't. He thinks he does sometimes, but he doesn't. He can't.
What is it like to feel?
What is it like?
Will I ever feel anything?
And he kisses her deeper and holds her tighter and hopes and hopes and hopes that something could come out of it; something that's his and his alone, even if it's carnal and selfish and evil. He wants something. Anything. He loves her feelings (that love is an action again), but he wants his own. He wants a way to feel things on his own.
He finds a way.
It's not bad, he tells himself. What he's doing isn't even that serious, he tells himself. He'll never take it too far, he tells himself. He's not one of those angsty teens that populate the dark corners of art websites. He just needs something, something, something that makes him feel. It's not dangerous. In fact, it's so innocent that he can do it in public without being noticed. In fact, he does.
Because it's just a simple scrape across the skin with his nails. He never even breaks skin (well, sometimes, but rarely, rarely, he promises). He pushes just deep enough for it to hurt, because pain is a feeling, and he feels something. Finally! It's like splashing cold water on his face: that's what he tells himself. It's not dangerous, really. It's just a small jolt of feeling, and that's enough for him. That's all he wants.
He does it along his scalp, because no one can see the marks under his hair. He has a lot of physical tics, so no one questions it when he puts his hand to his forehead as if to run it through his gorgeous locks. No one can see him pushing his nails in, pulling them out, pushing them in again. It becomes something of a drug to him, this rush of pain, this rush of feeling.
He can't do it for long; that's why he so rarely breaks skin. A few seconds are all he gets before his body acclimates and he's left with nothing again. Digging in deeper doesn't do much. So even what he's found isn't perfect. It's a brief whiff of the thing he's been missing his whole life, but then it's gone again. It's gone until a few seconds later when he can attempt it again—perhaps in a different spot this time.
It's not bad. It's not bad. It's not bad.
He's not depressed. He's not screwed up. He needs feeling. That's all. That's all.
They go on a school trip to San Fransisco in their sophomore year. They walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. They stop halfway and stare at the view. He stands on the railing and looks out at the bay. Beautiful. Beautiful. He looks down.
He knows how many people have jumped from up here. He saw the signs on the bridge offering help and counseling and blah blah blah. But what he sees now is the water underneath, and he cocks in his head in wonderment. What would it be like? What would it feel like? He supposed it would be much like a roller coaster at first, going straight down, but then . . . it would hurt, wouldn't it? It would hurt more than anything else could ever hurt. The feeling of hitting the water would probably be the most feeling he would ever feel in his life—of course, it would also be the last feeling. What would death feel like, anyway?
He's not depressed. He's not suicidal. He's not. He's just curious, and, well, you're already familiar with the saying linking curiosity to death via an unfortunate feline.
A short gasp escapes his mouth as gravity latches onto his upper body and the water gets a few inches closer. His friends scream and grab him, pulling him back to the almost-solid ground of the bridge. They chatter, and one of the teachers chastises him and informs the whole group to stay back from the rail. When the excitement of the moment is over, they disperse again. But she's still there, her hand in his, and an innocent-angry-scared look in her eyes. She's trying to make anger the dominant emotion, because that's who she is, but he knows that fear is currently controlling her mind. He pulls her closer, and now he's sharing her feelings again. Maybe it's not as dramatic as a bone-shattering jump into the wild waves of the San Fransisco Bay, but he'll take it for now.
It wouldn't last.
Because she starts to notice. She starts to blame him. She doesn't understand, but he doesn't blame her for that. He doesn't understand, either, and he can't explain it. They get louder and angrier and angrier and angrier, and he starts to love the anger almost as much as he loves the pain (loves as an action, of course). But it's still not his anger. It's still hers. She's still his connection to the world of emotions, and he takes more from her than he gives. He feeds off of her anger, and then she feeds off his (which is really hers), and it cycles all around again, and he only realizes the danger of that sort of situation when it's too late. It's too late. The door is still shut, and she's gone.
He didn't open the door because he couldn't. Because he's nothing. Because he's a shell of a human being who's absolutely numb, and she was the one holding him down. But she's gone now. When he gets home that night, he breaks skin and swears at his reflection.
He floats aimlessly for a while. He can't do anything else. He still feeds off her anger, sometimes, but it's not the same. (Besides, he hates anger—hates as an action—because that was what took her away from him. Her anger kept her from him; his numbness kept him from her.) On the bright side, he's no different than before. No one worries about him. He's always been distant and emotionless. He can act the same without her as he did with her, and no one cares. It's wonderful.
He starts scratching his upper arm. It's more obvious and harder to reach if he's wearing long sleeves, but he rather likes the feeling. He can see the marks without a mirror. Those little red marks that remind him that he is human, that he can feel pain. But it's only physical, and he's starting to wonder if he even has a soul. If he can just break through . . . cut deep enough through the skin . . . will he find something? Is there a human under there?
He misses her, misses her so much that it almost hurts—almost. (Not as much as the scratching, of course.) He imagines that if he was a normal person with normal emotions, his heart would absolutely ache. But he's numb, because he's always numb, because what the heck are feelings anyway? That's not because of a lack of love for her. He still loves her—as an action, always an action, but he can't act on it anymore. The feelings were never there (he always wished they were, if only for her, because of all the people in the world, he thinks he could love-as-a-feeling her).
He has to find someone else to love-as-an-action (because he needs that connection to someone else's emotion nearly as much as he needs to damage his skin), and he lands on one of his closest friends . . . and her worst enemy. It feels like a betrayal, in some ways (if he could feel anything, which he does not). But there he is, on her couch, trying to kiss her. Twice. The first time is interrupted, the second is rejected. So he can't love-as-an-action her. They move on. He sees she's wrestling with it, and the leftover emotions she has come up again in the awkward situations when they're alone. But not for him. He knows he should be embarrassed or guilty (kissing your ex's worst enemy broke every societal rule), but he's numb. As always. And he's aware of it.
That's the good part, right? Being aware? That means he's not insane. If he believed things that weren't true, he would be insane. But he doesn't. He knows the truth. He's well aware of the lack of emotion (something Google insists is depression, but he doesn't buy it), and so there's this vague sense of acceptance. In fact, when he accepts is when he feels best. When he sits back and lets himself be numb without question, then he feels fine. His desire to elicit pain diminishes. He can drift through life without a care. But inevitably something happens. A question that he can't answer correctly, or a complete lack of fear that doesn't make sense to those around him, or a terrible detachment from the excitement of his friends. These always result in weird stares, sidelong glances, and a barrage of thoughts reminding him that he's not normal. So off he goes again, wondering what's wrong and how to fix it and tearing up his skin because it's the only answer he's found.
He stars in a play that semester. It's set in Ancient Rome. He's a soldier. With a dagger.
It's a prop. There's literally no way to hurt himself with it. But he tries something, out of curiosity (which seems to be one of the few emotions that manifests strong enough for him to recognize). He puts the point of the dagger in the center of his chest, angling the handle upward. It takes him a moment to place where he's seen this before, but he soon figures it out: The Princess Bride. A comedic movie. The scene where Buttercup wants to kill herself because she can't be with the one she loves.
Something overtakes his mind (emotion?), and he hurls the dagger across the room. He sits there for a moment and stares at it. Then he stands and picks it up, unaffected. He twirls it around in his fingers, grins, and tries a few slashing moves as if he's fighting an enemy. It's all just practice.
He puts the dagger to his chest a few more times when no one's looking. Nothing's wrong with him. He's simply wondering. To run it straight through his heart . . . now that would cause some feeling.
Another action manifests a week before the play: drawing the dagger across his palm. The way people would do when they made a blood pact. Only he doesn't make a pact with anyone. He just daydreams about what it would be like if the plastic were steel instead. It fascinates him. Nothing is wrong. It's only something that piques his interest.
Before dress rehearsal, another actor walks in on him pretending to cut his hand. It's some lowly freshman. They lock eyes for a moment before she turns to leave the room. If any gossip occurred, he did not hear it. Besides, what could the girl even say?
He misses the dagger immensely after the play. He's been handling it for so long, and losing that prop feels like losing a limb. It had become an odd sort of lifeline, something that could distract him from the emotionlessness of his life and even from his desire to cause pain—in an ironic, twisted way.
What would it have been like?
How much feeling could it cause?
You could still do it, you know.
They get back together.
He missed her. He missed the way she connects him to emotions, and he hopes for that again.
It doesn't work. He still doesn't feel anything.
During their first kiss, the one he initiated because he thought it would help, he feels the deepest nothing he's ever felt in his life.
It's the closest he's ever come to being terrified.
His dissatisfaction with nothing grows, but not enough to do something. Not enough to feel something. So they drift along together, and she sees no difference. No one does. He's still him. He's still the same he's always been. He's still numb and unfeeling and completely nothing.
Sometimes, in the quiet moments that only they know about, when she's genuinely loving to him, he draws his nails across his skin. Without her seeing. Because it doesn't seem right that he doesn't feel loving. He wants to feel something, so he makes himself feel something. He needs to be something for her, he says. He needs to feel things. But she can never know what he must do for that. She can never know the depths of the numbness in his soul. She would be heartbroken to know that he had never—could never—feel the same way as she does.
There come a few moments, as they're texting late into the night, where he almost tells her everything. But he always stops himself. What could he even say? It wouldn't be worth it to worry her (because as much as she would deny it, she worries about him). So he keeps it inside and tries to ignore it, and he waits for the small, ever-multiplying scars on his arms and face to fade. A few look like they never will.
He is not shocked when it all comes to a head. He is not shocked because nothing shocks him, because he feels nothing. But eventually something broke somewhere (his heart, maybe, but he still wasn't convinced he had one).
He sits in his RV, his room, the place he's lived for almost four years now. A place of joys and sorrows and triumphs and defeats that he has never felt. A place of memories, a place of her and his friends and him alone. A place of a hundred late nights wondering what was wrong with him and how to fix it (but falling asleep quickly because he didn't really care in the end).
He sits on his bed in nothing but a tank top and some old basketball shorts. His right hand finds its way to his left shoulder, and his nails do the thing they'd become so accustomed to over the last three years. It starts off softly, and his brain gives a slight jolt. It is so much less than it used to be. The nothing had grown so large that these pangs left barely a dent, and one that was quickly filled at that.
Something boils up inside him. He supposes he could've pinned it down as anger, if he was capable of such a thing. No, no, never mind. Desperation. That was a better word. If it is possible for him to feel, he feels desperate. He wants something. He wants focus and motivation and drive and something-something-anything, and his fingers get the memo.
He pulls his hand away and peers at the blood under his the nails on his index, middle, and ring fingers. It is such a vivid shade of red, something that none of his artist friends could hope to replicate in their work.
His hand goes back. It comes away again. It goes back. Tears form in his eyes, but only as a primitive reaction to the pain. He feels cold, and his stomach churns, and his heart aches.
Did you hear that? He feels.
And the tears (not emotional tears, but at least it's something-something-anything) fall for the first time in years, and a few splash onto his shoulder and only make it sting more.
The area of broken flesh grows larger. He looks at it sometimes, uncomprehendingly. All he knows is it's making him feel, in an absolutely horrendous way he never thought it could. Finally.
"Beck?'
Beck turns to see Jade standing by the door, her face full of imperceptible emotions. It takes him a moment to understand why she looks that way, but it doesn't take long for her eyes to travel to his remarkably bloodied shoulder.
"It's not what it looks like!" "How long have you been there?" "I cut myself working on my car earlier." "I swear, babe, I'm fine."
He could say any of those. He could say anything. Anything, anything to ease her mind. Anything at all. Any words. But he doesn't.
Instead, he locks his eyes on hers. His breathing and heart rate remain unnaturally steady. The coldness passes, the churning passes, the aching passes. And he's left with nothing again. Nothing and her.
Jade sniffs and moves around to the side of his bed with her arms crossed. "What are you doing, you moron?"
He has a choice, of course. He decides to tell the truth. "Nothing." Because he feels nothing and does nothing and is nothing.
Jade sits. She places her hand on his shoulder, and even though it's far gentler than he would've expected, he still finches at her touch. She bloodies her own fingers while he watches, waiting, wondering how she will react.
It's a sigh. "People always thought it would be me who would do something like this." She lifts her eyes to his. He doesn't know what he was expecting—anger, fear, or just plain shock, maybe. But no. He sees compassion in her eyes. He never thought she would be capable of such a thing. "Beck," she whispers. It comes out in a breath, soft, worried, full of love, and he's hating-as-and-action all the numbness again and the fingers of his right hand twitch in anticipation. Why can't he feel the things she does?
They sit in silence for a few moments before she whispers the most-needed word of the moment: "Why?"
He can't quite bring himself to look at her, but he manages to bring himself to the pivotal point. He tells her everything. The scratching, the dagger, the bridge, the curiosity, the numb, the nothing, the lack of love, the lack of anything. She listens, unflinching, sometimes unnervingly still.
When he catches up to the current night, she exhales. "You know I can't let you keep doing this, right?"
"I know." He does know. He might not feel it, but he knows it. He knows that from this moment, things will be different. She will act the way she's supposed to because she feels the things she's supposed to.
Something small starts in his heart. Hope? No, it couldn't be. He doesn't ever feel hope.
She leans forward as if to kiss him, but instead she pauses, and then she tilts her forehead onto his. "Beck," she whispers. "I still love you no matter what."
And something about that seems to set him free.
Change is starting, perhaps. He'd come to the point of not being able to face this on his own, and a dangerous point where he was risking himself and everything he cared about. He can't do this anymore.
Nothing is a part of his identity. It has been for as long as he can remember. It has been a struggle his whole life, but now he has someone to go through it with him. And he grabs the back of her head, more forcefully than he means to, and digs his forehead further into hers. She doesn't seem to mind. She keeps her hand on his shoulder, gently, soothingly, and the other hand she places on his right one. She pins it to the bed and squeezes it, keeping it away, keeping it safe.
He can hear her sniffing to hold back the tears. He doesn't try to hold back his.
He doesn't feel sadness. He doesn't feel anger. He doesn't feel aching or sorrow or pain or joy or release or anything, good or bad, but maybe . . . maybe he's starting too. Because there is a tugging on his heart, just as soft and gentle as her hands on him, and maybe this is feeling? He wouldn't know how to define it, would he? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe she could help him understand.
He doesn't love-as-a-feeling her. But she loves-as-a-feeling him. He is loved. And maybe, just maybe, one day, he could heal enough to give her the same.
Maybe, one day, with her help, he can finally love-as-feeling.
I began writing this story the first week of June and made it all the way to the line "They get back together." I had to stop writing for a few weeks because I went to a conference and then a camp without my laptop. Two days after I had closed my computer on this story—on that line—I met someone who I would eventually tell about my own nothing. And he is the one who, in much the same way as Jade does for Beck, is helping me break free of it and feel loved. I had to grapple with my own struggles for a few more months before I could come back to Beck's, but here we are.
Yes, a lot of this is drawn from my own experience and thought processes. Don't get me wrong, I very exaggerated it for the purposes of the story. But the scratching (though I swear to all of you that it was never nearly as bad or lasted as long as Beck's, even if I did justify it in much the same way), the dissociation/numbness/nothing, and, yes, the dagger (mine was one I made out of cardboard, tinfoil, and electrical tape for a Halloween costume) are all very inspired by my life. Oof, it's not easy to admit all that. But thankfully, I never went very far down the dark path, and I'm already starting to come out of the little bit I had traversed on. This story is me taking a character and sending him much, much further than I ever went (but possibly could've if I hadn't found someone who could help me stop before it got worse).
If you're struggling with the same things, please, find someone who can help you and love you. Reach out. There are people out there who care about you. Don't let everything that's wrong grow inside you, because trust me, that's what makes it so much worse. Confess. Get help. Find someone in your life who loves you. You can break the cycle. You can get better, I promise.
So there you go. My hundredth story, and probably one of the most personal things I've ever written. Hopefully this story can also change your view on Beck's boringness (something a lot of people seem to hate him for). I come across as boring too, but there's a lot more going on that you don't know about.
I don't know when I'll be back to fanfiction, honestly. I'm in college now. I'm in a long distance relationship (with the aforementioned someone who is helping me through my struggles even as I'm helping him through his). I have original fiction ideas that I want to work on. I don't have as much time to watch shows to gain inspiration. I just don't know. No promises. But until I come back, I genuinely hope you can enjoy the hundred stories I've given you. Thank you so much for all your support. I'll always cherish this site.
~ Rosie