AN:
Summary: He's broken. Little jagged pieces that don't quite fit together they way they're supposed to anymore. And his pieces, none of them fit with hers anymore. Maybe they were never supposed to.
Warnings: Mentions of: depression and other mental disorders, suicidal thoughts and tendencies, the briefest implication of sex between minors, character death
Disclaimer: I don't own "Degrassi"
Eli used to fit. Slot in place next to her like he belonged there. He doesn't anymore. The rough edge of him scrapes against the smooth lines of her, and they hurt. She was supposed to save him. He was supposed to shelter her from the storm.
But their pieces don't fit together anymore.
There's someone else now. Connected to her the way he used to be. Someone tall, with a simple dimpled grin. The All-American boy-next-door. Eli guesses that he provides her shelter now.
There's no one left to save him though.
He punches walls when the pills wear off and he can feel again. His room, cleaned out when he was numb and empty, is littered with crumpled dry-wall. There's a fine white dusting over everything he owns, and it makes him laugh. It makes him laugh and laugh and laugh with a force just the wrong side of hysterical.
It's all white now.
His knucles are sickly yellow and bruised purple, bleeding crimson. And he laughs.
And his pieces, they're all still black.
She sits across from him in English. He wants to hurt her. He wants to soothe her. He wants to reach out and touch her. Feather light, the way she had always liked best. He wants to jam his hand down a garbage disposal so he won't.
She isn't his to touch anymore.
She smiles at him. Soft and full of friendly concern. That's all it is though. Friendly. He doesn't get the world stopping brightness of Clare's love anymore. She gives those smiles to Mr. Boy-Next-Door.
Eli simply doesn't smile at all.
It hurts to much to try.
He doesn't speak in therapy. He doesn't like his therapist. Doesn't trust him. He watches with these narrowed eyes as if to say "Oh great, another depressed emo kid. Fantastic." He scribbles down prescriptions for more anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills and more pharmacutical sleep-aids.
And Eli takes them all.
They make him numb. Take away all that he is and ever will be. Files it deep beneath the surface until the pills wear off.
He dreams of bleeding black over everything he touches. it slithers out of him like smoke and crawls into the things he loves most.
He sees Clare, beautiful blue eyes empty and dead inside, and she flinches at the sight of him. Because it's his fault. It's always his fault. He tried to force black and white together, so they could both be grey.
And destroyed what it was he had loved to begin with.
He wakes up, and it was just a dream. But the panic is back, full-fledged and demanding action.
They don't make a pill for this kind of pain, he realizes slowly.
All-American has a truck, and he's sitting on the tailgate with Clare as Eli walks by. They wave and say their cheery hellos. Eli looks up at his angel that isn't his anymore, and wonders how he ever thought he could have her.
He forces a smile, but it doesn't feel right.
She doesn't call him on it. Doesn't chide him for faking it. She used to. He wishes she would.
But she doesn't, and he just walks away from her.
He can't write anymore. Writing means feeling. Feeling something. Anything.
And he doesn't anymore.
He wonders, if he could write, could be all the parts ofhimself that she had loved without any of the ones that had frightened her, would she love him again?
Mix her white and his black, and paint the world gray?
But it's a hopeless thought.
All of him is broken, the good grafted painfully to the bad. Inseperable. He could never be what she wanted, needed.
He could never be what she deserves.
He thinks about ending it.
Sometimes.
He holds the orange bottles in his hands and knows that the wrong combination, the right combination, could end him.
He thinks about ending it.
Sometimes.
He never goes through with it though. He's not sure if that makes him cowardly, or brave.
He knows what she would think. She's call him brave. Then, she'd preach at him for days about how suidide is the worst kind of sin, taking take which God has made and throwing it away. And he'd smirk and remind her that he didn't believe in God, that he did it so she wouldn't be disappointed in him. And she'd smile that beautiful, innocent smile that had so enamored him and tell him that she's proud that he chose to live when it would have been easy to die.
That's what she'd say to him.
If they were still talking.
If he could call her with the pills in his hands and the tears in his eyes and beg her to talk him out of it.
She would. Because that's what good people do.
Even when they stop loving you.
They take away his pills. Say he's too dependent on them. And they just take them away.
Sleep fades out, replaced by the constant, gnawing dread he had once been so accostumed to. He doesn't remember it being this bad. He doesn't remember how he used to find the eye of the storm and ride out the blinding panic.
He goes to class. They make him.
He lasts twenty minutes.
Then he's running.
He throws up in the bathroom, and Dawes sends Adam to check on him and, no, he is not okay.
But he remembers using a golden tongue to weave silver lies, once, and he makes the right words come. "I'm fine. I think my milk's gone off though."
And Adam laughs and believes him.
He writes a book. Calls it "As the World Fades to Gray".
It's his life, in bits a pieces.
He never shows it to anyone
She stops wearing her purity ring.
And Jake looks so pleased with himself.
And Eli just feels sick.
But he lies. To everyone about everything now. Even himself. Especially himself.
He pretends he doesn't notice. Acts like he doesn't know what this means.
And tries to forget that he was so sure that she was always going to give him that silver ring, right after he gave her the gold one that promised forever.
Fiona seems to take a liking to him, though he can't figure out why. And one day, they're sitting outside, not talking because they're the kind of friends who enjoy the honesty in a liar's silence and they're both delightfully devious liars, when he pulls "As the World Fades to Gray" out of his backpack.
It's typed, doubled-spaced and neat, with the page numbers marked clearly on the top of the left hand pages, the way he read online you're supposed to do.
He hands it to her without a word, and she takes it without looking at it or him.
She puts it in her purse, and Eli hopes he never sees it again.
He turns seventeen, and tells no one.
Fiona hands him a red-penned copy of "As the World Fades to Gray". The annotations are written in a script he doesn't recognize, but the Happy Birthday he recognizes as hers.
They never discussed this. Not before he gave it to her, not after. He was never sure he would hand it over, let someone else read the emotions that he had crafted into prose. But he had, and she wasn't surprised, not even a little.
And, without asking, without finding out what he really wanted, she pushed it through her high society friends and got it read by someone who matters.
He doesn't know whether to thank her, or strangle her.
He does neither, and she seems perfectly content with that.
He graduates, and his parents hug him and say they're proud. Adam demands that he return next year for his, and Eli agrees. He's grow so far apart from Adam, and it makes him so sad. And worse, Adam doesn't seem to have noticed the growing distance between them.
Fiona steals his cap with a laugh, and scribbles down the number he's supposed to call when he finishes revising.
He doesn't tell her that he'll probably never call. That he finished this last draft, the final draft, three weeks ago and never said anything because he's not sure he wants it to be the success the editor keeps promising it will be.
It was never meant to be read.
It's a best-seller.
He dedicates it to Clare. Of course, he does. He wrote it for her.
He dedicates it to Fiona too. She made it happen after all.
He sends them both free first-editions with his signature scrawled across the the title page.
Both copies say "I love you" to both girls.
He means it, in different ways. And he knows that Fiona knows that.
He wonders if Clare does.
"Love Roulette", "Descent", and the novelization of "Stalker Angel" follow its footsteps. Signed and dedicated to the two girls who built him up and tore him down and put him back together again. He signs "I love you".
And maybe, just maybe, the world is starting to come to color again.
But it's still too dark to breathe.
He's twenty-three, a top-rated author, wasted out of his goddamned mind, and wondering if they would think it was accident if he slipped of the ledge he's sitting on.
It's raining, hard and cold and everywhere. Each drop stings like being pelted with tiny balls of glass, only his skin refuses to break and bleed.
Hmm, there's a novel in there.
Stirring around in all the despair and anexity he never outgrew but got so much better at hiding. It would be a best-seller, he knows.
If he lives to write it.
He doesn't give the manuscript to his editor. Doesn't hand it off to his agent. Doesn't send it to Fiona as a sneak-peek surprise.
No. He sends "The Method of Madness" to Clare and Clare alone. Unedited, unrefined, untouched by any hand but his own.
He signs it with "I loved you".
He jumps.
.
.
.
.
But he doesn't die.
Sales skyrocket when he's in the hospital.
And he gets better because he finally knows what's wrong.
Bi-Polar.
Lithium.
He writes the words that describe the color sinking into the gray. And inky black stains that still remain.
They let him out.
"Shades of Gray", is number one for three consecutive months, bobbing up and back down after that, remains in the top ten all year.
And Clare calls him.
They don't have a world-shattering conversation where they realize that they've always meant to be together. They don't meet. They don't fall back in love.
Eli doesn't tell her that he never fell out.
Because she's married now. Happily. For a few years now. And pregnant with her first kid, who Eli is sure will have her baby blues even if she wants to debate the validty of random genetics. She teaches English III at the high school where they had fallen in love. And she's always voted favorite teacher.
And, she admits, every time she sees a dark, emo/goth kid, she thinks of him. Only for a moment, in that reminscent way one remembers high school.
He laughs and tells her he thinks of her every time he passes a church. He doesn't tell her that it's because he always thought he would marry her in one. And their kids, all dark-haired and blue-eyed, would be baptized there. And he would go every Sunday for the rest of his life because it mattered to her, so it mattered to him.
And then, they say goodbye, and hang up.
He writes "The Way She Loved Me". And it's a beautiful, tagic departure from his usual works.
And she calls him again. Tells him she's so glad he's finally, finally been able to put his past, their past, behind him.
He doesn't have the heart to tell her that he hasn't. He never will. And there's a different version he wrote just for himself, and maybe someday her, with a different ending.
He bequeaths sthe manuscript to her in his will.
He goes to see her.
Does a reading for her classes. And he wants to weep because this is where it all started and where it all mets it's end.
He meets her husband, a quiet man. A preacher at the local church. Eli shakes his hand and tells him to never let her go. He smiles and swears that he won't.
She looks lovely as ever, belly just starting to swell with the child that should of been his, but isn't. And she's so happy that it breaks his fragmented heart. Shatters him straight through to his dirty, black soul.
He doesn't know what he was looking for when he came, but he knows he found it.
His work returns to his more comfortable, darker themes.
And he is successful, because everything he writes turns to gold.
"Stalker Angel" and "The Way She Loved Me", his two most contradictory books, get movie deals.
And his pieces, they're still black.
And she's still white.
And the world isn't gray.
He dies at the age of thrity-three.
At the hands of a fan-cult who read and took "Stalker Angel" to the extreme he had considered only subconsciously even in his darkest days.
It is not an easy death; he no longer wishes to die. Hasn't for a long time now.
He struggles. Fights to live.
Throat slashed, blood pouring out and pain pouring in. The eyes of the delusional, the unwell, staring fanatical and devoted into his own.
He dies.
Clare reads the unpublished draft of "The Way She Loved Me" two years later.
And she cries. She cries like she did the day she found out he was gone, and the day she went to his funeral.
She cries for the poor, broken boy who struggled so desperately with all his darkness. The boy she had loved with all the might her fifteen-year-old heart could. The boy she had soothed in an old vintage hearse when he knew that it was a war he wasn't winning.
She cries for the man who had thought the battle lost, and jumped to escape it.
But, most of all, she cries for the man who never stopped loving her. The man who had sat at her table with a smile across from her husband while she carried his child. The man who never let her from his heart, even when he allowed himself to be pushed out of hers.
She cries for Elijah Goldsworthy.
The boy he was. The man he became. And the love he never let go.