Author's Note: So, this chapter is pretty dark, but it gets better after this, I promise! Don't hate me, and review please! (I like reviews. They tell me if I'm doing something good or not.) Next chapter should be up tomorrow, btw. Oh, and it might be more like five or six chapters

Trigger warning: self harm. Much more so in this chapter than in the last, and a little descriptive, so be warned.

"WHAT'S THIS?" Catherine screeched, her voice so loud Beca winced. Suddenly, there was silence in the next room, where the adults were enjoying their post-dinner minibar. She grabbed Beca by the wrist and dragged her into the room.

"JOHN! SHEILA!" she said, almost throwing Beca towards them. "LOOK AT HER ARMS!" She released Beca's wrist, only to have it taken up again in a vice grip by John Mitchell, who now has a clear view of the thin scars running up and down her lower arm, and clearly continuing up under her sleeve as well. He yanked the sleeve further up, seeing signs of scars both new and old.

"Rebecca Joan Mitchell," he intoned, "what have you done?" She stayed silent; did he really expect her to answer that? Here?

"Rebecca, answer your father," Sheila prompted.

"Do we really have to do this here?" Beca finally said, trying to wiggle her hand free. He only tightened his grip.

He looked around at the expectant faces of Sheila's family. "Yes."

"It's nothing. Really."

"I can't believe you, Rebecca Joan Mitchell. What on earth is this about? Are you just trying to get attention or something? What could possibly prompt this behavior? It's unacceptable, that's what it is. Now sit." He forced her into a chair, letting go of her wrist in the process. Beca pulled her sleeves back down and rubbed her wrist, feeling the circulation seeping back into her fingers.

"After all I've done for you, all the chances you've had, this is how you repay. Despite my best efforts, you're turning into your mother, Rebecca, and that is unacceptable. Do you know how much money I spent on her little therapies while we were married, so she could whine about her childhood and her imagined problems, and then have some quack tell her the only way to get better is to keep paying him my money? I finally had enough and found some more worthy of me. And to think, they gave her custody and not me."

"Don't say that about my mother! And you hardly even fought for me! You told the judge you didn't care!" Beca was incensed enough by now to just let loose and screw the consequences.

"And you blame me for that? Look at you. Who would want you? Do you really think that all your problems will just go away if you wreck your skin? Your mother thought that once, too. I doubt you remember, you were barely three at the time. We told the doctors it was just a slip of the paring knife as she was preparing dinner. That's when I knew she was crazy, and I still stayed. What problems do you have anyway? You're not homeless, you're not hungry, you're getting a good education and keeping free of debt. Maybe I should have just taken you from her, she's obviously been a poor parent."

"I said, stop talking about my mother!" Beca stood up, and before anyone could stop her, ran out the door and into the night. The hours of cardio from Bella practices served her well as she sprinted away, not knowing where she was going, just overpowered by this incredible urge to get away. Finally, she slowed to a stop, breathing heavily, tears streaming down her face, as she took in her surroundings. She was near a park, a big one. It was empty, closed actually, since it was night, but she couldn't find it in herself to care about that as she entered it.

There was a gazebo toward the center of the park, and she sank down there, on the floor, letting the tears rush down her face, as her mind overloaded with thoughts and images. She was upset with Catherine, with Sheila, with her father, for putting her through that display back there, more so with her father for his comments about her mother. But mostly, she was upset with herself.

Failure. Useless. Unlovable. Fuck up. The words attacked her psyche. Can't do anything right. Feelings of guilt and shame welled up inside her. Shame for cutting; he was right, no one would love her. In the months she and Jesse had been together, she had never let him see her fully naked. After relapsing in her cutting after that disaster at Regionals, she had been body shy. At first, it was all on her thighs, less hard to keep hidden. But then, once the weather turned colder, and the long sleeves came out, it became less important to keep it off her arms, and that, it seems, was where she screwed up this time. Sure, there were some old white scars there, but she was so pale, they were hardly noticeable under the best light. And the worst of them were hidden under her tattoos, anyway.

And guilt, guilt for her mother. Her mother who never knew, never could know; the school counselor had helped her, and actually agreed to keep it from her mother. She knew they were going through a rough time; as her father had just alluded to, Beca's mother had never been a terribly strong woman, and Beca had largely been propelled into the position of caretaker when her father left. It wasn't all bad; sometimes months or even a year would pass by with no problems, when her mother held down a job, did the grocery shopping, paid the bills. But other times, she would slip into a dark depression and it would be left to Beca to cash the welfare checks and use them to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. And now Beca was here, in Georgia, leaving her mother to fend for herself in Oregon, living off social security disability checks, where she would probably be spending the holiday entirely alone. And that, more than anything else, wore on her. And contrary to what her father believed, she did remember the incident he was referring to. She had been five, not three, and she remembered the blood on the floor and her mother being away for a few days. She remembered the fighting and how she had to start all-day kindergarten halfway through the year. And it had been her greatest fear ever since to come home and find blood on the floor again or now, in this case, to get a phone call from the person who found blood on the floor. But without her father's support, she could never have financed college, and going to college was the first thing her parents had agreed on in years. She had wanted to move both herself and her mother to L.A., where she could get into the biz, make some money, and support them. But no one ever listened to what Beca wanted.

And her father wondered why she cut. This wasn't the half of it. Speaking of cutting, in her hasty departure, she had left behind both purse and phone. The phone may have been useful, but it was a certain shiny silver object in her purse that she wanted right now. She wanted to release some of this dreadful emotion inside her, before it came up to suffocate her. And really, there was only one way she knew how to. She pulled her sleeves up, examining the evidence of previous sessions, and noticed a purpling bruise being to form on her wrist. She could see each individual finger of the hand that made that bruise, but she felt as though she was looking at it remotely, like the wrist wasn't attached to her body. Oh fuck, not this again, she swears softly to herself. The school counselor called it depersonalization. Said it was one of the reasons she thought Beca had turned to cutting to begin with, as a way to feel in her body again. She suggested ice cubes, or rubber bands. But Beca had neither of those with her now. She shifted her body, and, feeling something cold brush across her leg, decided to investigate. It was a safety pin, holding a small rip in the side of her trousers together. She hadn't even noticed when she had put them on earlier, and neither had her father since she passed his inspection. Quickly, she undid the pin, and studied it carefully, with eyes and fingers, as if she had never seen such a thing before. And indeed, she was seeing it in a new light, seeing it as something sharp and shiny.

Beca had a routine for this, a ritual you could say, and this certainly wasn't it. But the temptation, the need, the siren song of scarlet was summoning her, and she felt powerless to resist its lure. She pushed her sleeve up further, and brought the sharp tip of the safety pin to the area near her elbow. She pressed down, gently, and dragged the tip along her skin for about an inch, then examined it in the faint streetlight that came in through the slotted sides of the gazebo. She could barely see it; it certainly wasn't bleeding. She tried again, pressing down harder the second time, as a short rush of breath left her lips. It took more pressure than the small blades she took out of disposable razors, but the effect was the same, as a huge amount of tension rushed out of her small body with the release of a few drops of blood. She dragged the pin along her arm a third time, in the same groove as the previous, until she saw a dark line of blood along the entirety of the wound, even in the dim streetlight. She chose a new patch of skin again and did the same, again and again, until seven fresh cuts were on her arms. Then she stopped. She always stopped after seven, and never went too deep. She had never needed medical attention, never cut so much as to pass out, never gotten an infection using rusty blades. The care she took with it had been one of the main reasons her counselor had agreed not to notify her mother. She cut safely, which helped keep her secret hidden.

Even if her father had given her a chance to answer his accusations, she really didn't know what she would have said. Nobody who hadn't tried it would believe it worked, but somehow, it did. She just felt better afterward, she couldn't really explain it. The best explanation she could come up with had to do with a first aid class she had taken once in school. Her teacher had explained that the body had powerful mechanisms to deal with pain, natural painkillers, so that even someone with a broken leg could get up and get help for themselves. It was a survival mechanism, that really only worked for a short time depending on the circumstances. When you reached safety, that's when it usually really started hurting for people. As a paramedic, he'd seen people after a car accident chatting away, seemingly only lightly injured, only to have them die hours later from massive internal injuries. Beca had absorbed this, and then tried to apply to it to the question of why self harm worked. She came up with the idea that pain was pain, be it mental or physical, but that the body could only produce these natural painkillers after physical pain. Self harm was like changing mental pain into physical pain, so as to get the benefits of these natural painkillers. She later found out that these natural painkiller were, at least in part, endorphins, and that endorphins are mood elevators, which further seemed to confirm the explanation she came up with. Even later, perusing the internet, she released she wasn't the first to come with the idea either.

But whatever the mechanism, it calmed her mind enough for her to stop crying altogether, and to enter back into the here-and-now. She was alone, at night, in an unfamiliar area, with no phone and no money. That was not a recipe for success. It was Christmas eve, which argued that most people would be indoors and most things would be closed. She did not remember how she got here from Sheila's aunt's house, not that she wanted to go back. But she did need to do something; she couldn't stay in the gazebo forever. She pulled down her sleeves, feeling the fibers of the sweater rasp against the fresh cuts but it was not a sensation that bothered her. Rather, it centered her, kept her in the here-and-now.

Beca got up, deciding first to solve the problem of where she was before figuring out what she was going to do now (the much harder problem). After much wandering through the park, and detours to read nearby street signs, she realizes that she's not so lost after all after passing a (closed) outdoor ice rink. Fact is, she remembered coming here with Chloe a couple of weeks ago. The memory rose, fondly, as she stared at the rink. Chloe had come knocking at her door one evening, begging Beca to come skating with her. Beca, who had grown up in Oregon, had much more exposure to ice rinks than Chloe, who had grown up in Florida. Chloe explained that she had been on ice skates on those indoor skating rinks, but she wanted to try skating under the stars. She had turned those big blue Disney eyes on Beca, who caved and agreed to join her. The night had been so much fun and laughter, first the skating and then warming up with hot chocolate afterward. It had been the first time she had real fun after breaking up with Jesse almost a month prior to that. Memories of Jesse and their breakup rose with that thought, but she pushed them relentlessly back down, not wanting to deal with him and his complaints of her "frigidity" right now.

Being that she now knew where she was, she also knew how to get back to campus. It would be a long walk, but it was possible. She could actually stay on the bike path most of the way, keeping herself off the road on the off chance somebody might be out looking for her. She still didn't know what she was planning to do once she got back. The last thing she wanted to do right now was see her father, but she did want to get her laptop and mixing equipment from his house. Also, her dorm was closed over the holiday, so she couldn't crash there. She wanted to fly out and surprise her mother for Christmas, but she didn't have the money for the last minute plane ticket, nor would her mother if she asked. Last year, even though she'd been at Barden, her dad had given in to her pleading and bought her a plane ticket to Oregon for Christmas, under the caveat that she'd spend the next Christmas with him. Look how well that turned out, Dad, she thought sarcastically to herself.

As she walked back, it started to pour. It was like the skies just opened up and released a flood of water, soaking her instantly. She was maybe, by her estimate, about three-quarters of the way back, and the clock she had passed earlier had said it was after midnight. But there was nothing to do but plod on at this point, now wet as well as miserable and confused.

She must have zoned out for a while, for when she came to, she found herself in the vicinity of Chloe and Aubrey's off-campus apartment, and stopped for a minute to think. Of everybody she knew, Chloe was the one she most wanted to be around right now. Chloe was the one who could make everything better, with her gentle smiles, soft touches, and comforting words. Chloe was also home. In that moment, she wished she wasn't, she wished Chloe was down in Florida with her family as per usual on Christmas, because as much as Beca wanted to see Chloe right now, she also really didn't. It was fear, fear of rejection, fear of bothering her friend, fear of vulnerability. Because if she ended up at Chloe's doorstep, Chloe would no doubt get the story out of her, and of all people, Chloe was the one she least wanted to lose from her life. Look at the reactions she just got about her cutting. She didn't think she could make it if Chloe hated her too.

She paused near the apartment building, seeing a soft light and hearing a gentle sounds of Christmas music coming from Chloe's window. It would be selfish to ruin her Christmas, right? She doesn't need my problems, not on Christmas, right? She was just about to leave when a cold wind erupted, racing around her and freezing her to the core. Teeth chattering, body shaking, she raced to take cover on the porch of Chloe's building, and upon seeing her name on the call button list, saw her finger reach out to hit it without even releasing what she was doing.

A few seconds later, over the tinny speaker, she heard, "Hello?"

"Chloe? It's Beca."