Pain
Slowly, like tears from another person's eyes, the crimson trickle ran down her leg, the contrast against her skin even more striking through the harsh electric light of the bathroom. She smiled as she felt the sharp pain spread from the small cut, running through her veins like fire until it reached the very tips of her fingers.
It was still there, the pain. She could still feel it. Sometimes she wasn't sure anymore. Sometimes she thought that she had sent one too many to their death, that she had sacrificed too many people's hopes for the "greater good". Always afraid that she was no longer doing what was necessary, but simply not caring. Always afraid that her blood had finally turned to ice.
And every night the urge to prove the opposite increased. Every night the lure of the blade grew stronger. She knew it was sick, God, she knew. She could not help it. She tried to resist, but it was a loosing battle.
Holding her breath in anticipation, she drew the blade across her thigh a second time – never her arms, she could not risk it, she could not afford anyone seeing the scars – to create a second eye-sized cut, just to feel the pain. To prove herself that she still could. More blood ran down her leg, warm against her ice-cold skin, and joined the first trickle somewhere above her ankle. A second pair of eyes that cried for her. Because she could not afford tears. Not the real, salty ones, the kind Rod could have kissed away.
Regal had died today, along with five young soldiers and ten American hostages. She had sent them, and it had gone horribly wrong. She had sent them to their deaths. Yet she had felt nothing, had just stood up and gone home in a daze, completely numb, devoid of any emotion.
"Shock", a distant voice had whispered, "Repression". She had been sure that these deaths had been her undoing. Because when she had reached the residence and had seen Amy, her little girl, lost in tears, she had felt nothing. Had simply walked by, numb and unaware.
Until Amy's tearstained voice, soaked with hurt and disbelief, cut through the haze and made her flinch. "Mommy, don't you care? Don't you care Regal's dead?" And she had loathed herself, because she didn't. But Amy couldn't know that. So she'd knelt down beside her and pulled her youngest into an embrace. "Honey, of course I care, of course." Tried to quench the guilt that was coming up inside. And then Becca had lashed out with the very thing she had been dreading all along: "Come on, Mom. Don't bother staging the 'I care'-act. We all know you're an Ice Queen."
Ice Queen. She had not tried to resist tonight. The doubts had been unbearable. She rubbed over the cuts, causing the blood to flow on, red and alive and warm, and causing the pain to spring to life once more. Just to show herself that she could still feel it.
After a while, she whipped away the traces of her pitiful substitute tears, flashed a smile at the mirror, to show herself that she still could, and headed back to bed.
A/N: I'd like to give credit to allthatjazz8, aka Theo, who came up with the idea of Mac cutting herself in Shattered. She also used the image of crying blood instead of tears. Theo, I hope this is ok for you.