I'll stop the world, I'll stop the whole world

From turning into a monster, eating us alive

Don't you ever wonder how we survive?

Well, now that you're gone, the world is ours

Well, you find your strength in solutions

But I like the tension and not always knowing the answers

But you're gonna lose it, you're gonna lose is…

-Monster by Paramore

Eli never liked the rain.

Hell, he never liked snow, either. Or hail or sleet. Or sunshine or overcast or partly cloudy. All weather pretty much pissed him off, but sometimes, on cool fall mornings when the trees looked like fireworks, he would walk or just sit there with Julia, and he'd realize that everything was better when they were together. No matter the size of the black cloud that was hanging over Eli's head, Julia had the power to make it go away. She also had the power to make it a thousand times worse, and in a way, Eli had the same effect on her.

Mostly, they tried to make each other happy.

Sometimes, they tried to piss each other off.

Eli tried not to think of Julia, because when he did, he remembered all the reasons why he'd held the knife to his wrist that day. Sometimes he thought that, no matter how often Clare was around, no matter what she did, he'd never really forget those reasons because he'd never be able to forget Julia.

Most days, he was able to put it out of his mind, but sometimes, when he was staring out the window and the rain was pouring down, drenching the earth in a flood of a million tears- however stupid and sappy and emo that sounded- he just couldn't.

He closed his eyes, and he thought of Clare's scars, the slightly raised slashes standing out with horrible clarity against her skin. The thought of her hurting herself, the thought of her in any sort of pain…

Hypocrite. That was what he was. He was a fucking hypocrite.

He'd told Clare that it was wrong to hurt herself. And it was wrong. She shouldn't do that; she shouldn't be driven to such measures. There was always another option, always another route to take, but he'd done the same thing, so how could she believe him?

That was the problem he kept running in to. She had no reason to believe anything he did or said, no reason at all.

That wasn't his only problem, but it was major enough to distract him momentarily from the rest of the complications of hell.

000

Nothing really changed.

And at the same time, everything changed.

It was as gradual as it was sudden. It was as if, one day, Eli walked into the school and half of them hated him and half of them didn't care, and he was left to wonder if it had always been that way and he was only clued in right then, or if there actually had been some shift in the balance of the universe- or, at least, a shift in the balance of high school- and they were split in half, the people who wanted to kill him themselves and the people who just didn't give a shit one way or another.

And then there was Clare.

Eli remembered reading the Bible once, when he was about nine or ten, just sitting down and thinking that he'd read the Bible cover to cover to figure out what was so spectacular about Christianity. His parents weren't huge on religion; he'd been to church once, but that had been when he was just a little kid, three or four or something and mostly he just remembered people standing up and singing.

Anyways, so there was the fourth-grade Eli sitting there, thinking that it would be easy as anything to just read the entire freaking Bible in one sitting.

He got stuck about a page into the thing. The world wasn't created in seven days; the Earth itself was "created" over a period of thousands or millions or even billions of years, he wasn't sure on the number, and then it took forever to actually cool down and then another forever for life to emerge, thought scientists didn't know exactly when that happened, either…

The point was, God didn't just wave His hand and the world popped into being.

And God certainly didn't just wish mankind into being. There was rock-solid proof that humans evolved or something, and it didn't make sense how someone could just pluck a rib right out of some guy named Adam's chest and then suddenly there was a chick named Eve and they were perfect and happy until this talking snake convinced Eve to eat an apple, which was apparently against the rules and they were kicked out of paradise and basically doomed the rest of mankind.

Way to go, Eve.

So nine-year-old Eli had skipped around, flipping through the thin pages and frowning with his fists balling in frustration because he didn't understand at all. Forty days and forty nights of rain? Two of each animal on a boat? Some king who wanted to cut a kid apart and give half to each woman?

It didn't make any sense back then, and it didn't make any sense now.

Then there was light. Then there was animals and trees and plants and Adam and Eve. Then there was sin and knowledge and free will and pain and heartbreak and murder and war and rape and betrayal and lust and the Seven Deadly Sins. (He wasn't sure if that was supposed to be capitalized or not; who really knew when that book was concerned?)

Then there was Jesus and redemption and forgiveness and resurrection.

Then there was Christianity.

Then there was modern society (though this part wasn't in the Bible) and Protestantism and freedom of thought and, eventually, freedom of speech and religion and the right whatever and the freedom of independence or something (that was America, after all) and then there was confusion.

In Eli's mind, by fourth-grade rationality, nothing so confusing could possibly be real.

It took him a few years to make up his mind. Looking back, what truly sealed the atheism deal was Julia's death, because there was no way the Christian God, if he was so loving and kind and merciful and real, would just kill off someone like her.

And then there was Clare.

But Eli had always questioned his beliefs.

Anyways, people hated him and people ignored him and Clare… well, Clare was a mystery. She was as mysterious and confusing as God was, except for there was no way Eli couldn't believe in her, not with her standing right in front of him with a smile that didn't nearly cover the fact that her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. She'd been crying, probably all night.

He wished that she'd call him or something when that happened, that she'd trust him just a little bit more.

It all boiled down to trust, didn't it?

Trust and faith. Trust in God, trust in each other, trust in themselves. In God we trust. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth will set you free.

He was still confused. No, he was going fucking crazy, and here was his girlfriend (she was his girlfriend, right?) looking like she had sobbed her eyes out for forty days and forty nights and flooded the whole world with an ocean of salty tears.

He wanted to tell her about the guys who laughed and fist-bumped each other and punched him in the face when no one was looking and acted like they were God's gift to humanity and he was the spawn of Satan or something.

There he went with God again.

He wanted to tell Clare that he was so fucked up and so pissed off and so empty and so tired of everything, tired of all of this, and that he still wanted to kill not only himself but everyone else. He wanted to watch them bleed. He wanted to hear them scream.

He was Elijah fucking Goldsworthy, and he scared himself.

Maybe they weren't the enemy. Maybe he was the enemy.

Maybe he was a monster.

But he threw his arm around Clare's shoulders anyways. He kissed the top of her head and asked her what was wrong in a soft voice and he promised himself that he wouldn't think like that, not anymore. He'd stop thinking like that, for Clare's sake if not his own. He wouldn't tell her, because she didn't need to know about his problems. He could take care of himself.

Because he was Elijah fucking Goldsworthy and he was already going to the hell he didn't believe in, but he wasn't going to drag her down with him.

In a split second, nothing changed.

And in an instant, everything changed.

000

At the beginning of the year, Clare and Eli had skipped at least twice a week. Mental health days, they called them. They would go to the Dot or Little Miss Steaks or to any place where they would be able to hide, where they would be able to sit and escape and have everyone turn a blind eye to them, and they would just sit there and maybe talk but most likely just stare off into space. Just being together, just feeling each others' presences, was enough to make everything a hundred percent better.

But now, Clare wasn't sure.

There had been something in Eli's eyes, something dark and almost scary, when he was walking down the hallway. When he'd seen her, whatever it was hadn't exactly disappeared; it was more like he'd shoved whatever he was feeling away, back into his mind, like he didn't want her to see.

She wasn't scared, not really, not of Eli. She was scared of what he was thinking, of what he was doing to himself. While she physically hurt herself, knife to flesh and warm blood flowing down skin, he… abused himself on a more mental level, never letting himself let go of his guilt over Julia's death. Clare knew that he hated himself, and it just about broke her heart. Why couldn't he see himself the way she did? Why couldn't he see himself through her eyes?

The sleeve of his jacket scratched a little roughly along the back of her neck, and she felt like as long as his arm was around her, as long as his jacket was scratching against her neck, everything would be okay. Eli would be okay, as long as he was near her, as long as she could see him. She had to believe that everything would be okay, that he wouldn't do anything… drastic.

"What's wrong?" he asked quietly, his lips brushing her hair. Clare leaned into him a little, taking a deep breath and trying to ignore the little voice in the back of her head that was screaming Something's off, something's different, something's changed, something's wrong.

Something's wrong.

"Nothing," she replied. It was funny, the word replied. Taken apart, it was rep-lied. Repetition lying, in other words.

"You want to get out of here?" Eli offered, those words he'd said so often in the past couple months. Let's get out of here. Let's blow off school. Let's just go somewhere, by ourselves, and forget the rest of the world. We have each other, and that's all that matters. Let's just get out of here…

"Why not?"

There was no reason why she shouldn't take a day off with Eli. Mental health day, right?

Mental health day for him. She could tell that he was tense, that there was something on his mind, something eating away at him, but she didn't know if it was just the usual or if it was something else, something that had to do with the lies and the secrets and the black eyes and the bloody noses and the split lips that showed up from time to time. She wasn't an idiot; she knew that something was wrong, that something was going on, no matter how many times he tried to blow it off.

It would be good for both of them to just get away from it all for a few hours.

Why not?

000

A/N: No, Eli is not going to shoot up the school. Well… I don't think he will, anyways. Who knows what's going on in that mind of his?

And no, he did not have a sudden personality change. That was him just kind of opening up to himself; don't be surprised if you don't see that side of him for another few chapters. He's got a lot going on in his head right now, and he's kind of… freaking out a little.

If I get a lot of reviews, I'll update early. If not, I'll update in a few days, so no worries.

So review please! I do not own Degrassi.