A Feeling So Sweet

100 Ways To Say I Love You series [Inspired by this.]

1. “Pull over. Let me drive for awhile.”

A huge thank you to @taupefox59  and @alecolightwood for beta-ing this! You have been immensely helpful and I am extremely grateful and you’re both so so wonderful <3

Also on AO3.

They’re on their way back from Alec’s parents’ house. It’s late and all the roads are empty, even the ones going into the city. There’s something soft about the world at night, about a highway lit up by a few headlights and the streetlamps that line the road. Even the glow off the dashboard is anything but harsh, caressing Magnus’s profile and bringing out the faded blue streak in his hair.

Alec hums, running his fingers down the outer seam of his jeans and leaning back in his seat. He glances out the window at the towering trees just beyond the crash barrier. They’re hard to make out in the dark, but it’s clear that they’re far away from the imposing skyscrapers and concrete jungle of the city.

Out of the corner of his eye, he catches Magnus running a hand down his face. It’s back on the wheel by the time Alec’s turned to look at him.

“Are you tired?” he asks, not missing the way Magnus has started to frown.

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146 Things To Do Besides Self-Harm [Taken from this.]

18. play a musical instrument

Somewhere along the line, it had become a habit. The piano was an archaic thing, a remnant from a life Raphael had spent too many decades trying to forget, but its strings had yet to wear thin and its keys bore only a single crack. He always runs his finger across it before he played, a ritual he’d never tried to shake.

The whole thing was a ritual, really. The feeling would rise, would unfurl hot beneath his skin and itch at veins that had been cold and dead for longer than they’d been alive. It would settle at the soft skin of his wrists, curl around him like chains or handcuffs or rope ready to burn through his flesh, and he would spend as long as he could trying to pretend it wasn’t there before finally giving in.

Once, giving in had meant something different. Now, it means excusing himself from the company he always keeps (it’s funny, what losing the people you love to something as trivial as time can do for your comfortability with loneliness) and slipping away to the back room of his condo, the door slammed shut and locked behind him. His steps are always loud, here in the silence of a room that has never welcomed anyone but him and yet is heavy with the memories of a thousand different faces.

The first touch is a reverent one. The piano is old; a relic, a piece of something he isn’t sure whether he wants to lose or hold tightly onto. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship once, his mother’s pride and joy. Her hands were always so light when they danced across it, her smile so serene as she sang breathlessly along. It was the most expensive thing they’d ever owned, and the most priceless.

His fingers rake through the thin layer of dust that always settles between his visits, never frequent enough to keep it from settling at all. His throat becomes dry, his eyes straying to the spiderweb crack on the middle C key, and the bench makes a creaking sound as he pulls it from beneath the hulking beast. In the moments before he raises his fingers to play, it is always a daunting monster with chomping jaws, waiting to devour him if he doesn’t please it. A feeling of fear unfurls in his chest and the burning at his wrists becomes a pressing thing, a demand.

He strokes a single finger across the crack in the most-used key. The ridges of it are perfectly imperfect.

And this, here - the first moment of impact, the first ring of melodic sound through the empty room - is what keeps him coming back. It’s the reason the piano sits here still, over fifty years after its obtainment, and why this is always a private routine, and a private shame.

The music, always the same opening song and then a new one each time, is a rush of water soothing the burn at his wrists. He closes his eyes and it’s all that there is, just the sound of Juventino Rosa’s Over The Waves followed closely by the memory of his mother, with black hair instead of grey, curled over the keys and laughing as he stumbled over the fourth bar for the fifth time. It’s the only time he can remember the life before this one without wanting to go back and change it.

When he’s done, though, and there’s nothing left ringing through the room but the echo of a final note and the clammer of the fallboard dropping back into place, shame takes hold of the places he can never wash clean, no matter how many songs he plays. He crosses the room like a criminal caught just before the act, slinking away with a panicked heart and a resolve never to do this again. Never to need this again.

It never lasts. A day or a week or two months later, the back room of his condo always welcomes its sole visitor back again, arms open and the crack in the key waiting to soothe the cracks inside of him.

146 Things To Do Besides Self-Harm [Taken from this.]

17. call a friend and ask them to come hang out

The phone is… Well, the phone is a lot of things, really. Innocent, unassuming where it sits on his dresser with a blank screen and an empty promise for him to fill with whatever he wants. Daunting, accusing where it sits and doesn’t ring, but begs him to pick it up and call someone. To see the promise he’s made to himself through, all the way to the bitter end.

Get better. Try harder.

He stares at it. At the chip in the corner of the screen from when Isabelle knocked it off the kitchen table. At the scratch on the home button from when Jace yanked it out of his hands and told him to stop pining.

Sometimes, Alec wonders when something as stupid as a phone call is going to stop feeling like climbing Mount Everest.

He takes a breath. It sticks in his chest, heavy, and fills his lungs like acid eating away at the organs. He exhales and the room feels smaller, all the acid in the air and eating at his skin. Only, his skin has already been eaten away at by a lifetime of living up to unfair expectations and punishing himself when no one else will because pain has always been the sole result of his decisions and if it isn’t there then nothing makes sense anymore.

Get better. Try harder.

He picks up the phone. It’s cold in his hands, colder than he’d expected. The contact list is short, ten numbers and ten names and a true testament to how little effect he’s had on the world. How little his life has amounted to.

Get better. Try harder.

He could call Jace. They’d don their weapons and thick combat boots and go seeking the thrill of cutting something and watching it bleed and Alec could pretend he doesn’t seek that when he’s alone, too, and the only demon in the room is himself.

Get better. Try harder.

He could call Isabelle. They’d raid the Institute’s kitchen for ice cream and load a trashy movie onto her laptop, curl their feet up on her bed and huddle together as Alec pretends that his skin doesn’t crawl when someone touches him and his chest doesn’t ache when she’s looking at him like she knows something no one else has figured out yet.

Get better. Try harder.

He calls Magnus. His hands are shaking and he hates it, hates them, hates himself, but there are so many promises he’d be breaking if he put down the phone.

“Promise you’ll tell me if things ever get that bad.”

It rings and the sound is so piercing, so loud in the silence, that it almost shocks him back to reality just like that. Almost snaps him out of the chest-aching, head-burning, hands-shaking world he’s in. Magnus picks up on the second, and his voice is so sweet and so kind that it almost manages it, too.

He swallows. It sticks, acid, and he forces himself not to think about it.

“Can I come over?”

146 Things To Do Besides Self-Harm [Taken from this.]

16. go into chatrooms to talk

She clicks through the tabs with a single-minded focus, a chorus of ‘don’t think about it, don’t about it, don’t think about it’ running through her head.

It’s an accident, finding the chatroom. Or maybe it’s not. Her heart is beating out of her chest and her nails are itching to press against something more substantial than the keys of her computer and somehow she ends up searching for something to distract herself. For something to help.

The chatroom is the third result on the page. There are six people logged in.

She doesn’t say anything, just sits and watches and reads half a dozen people struggling with the thing she’s never had a name for and feels, for the first time, like maybe she isn’t crazy. Like maybe there’s nothing horribly, horribly wrong with her.

“Aline?” someone calls from just outside her door. She doesn’t answer.

It opens, Helen peaking her head through with a curious expression that morphs into understanding the moment she enters. She shakes her head, sidling up beside her and reading over her shoulder.

“Oh, love,” she says, and wraps her arms around her. She doesn’t say anything else.

146 Things To Do Besides Self-Harm [Taken from this.]

15. write a letter to someone but never send it

It sits in the bottom of his desk drawer, the top one on the left where he keeps everything that matters. It’s tucked between a flyer from the first show he ever played and a yarn bracelet Clary weaved for him when they were ten, folded neatly among a clutter of chaotic things that haven’t been touched since he left them there.

There’s no address on it - he hadn’t had the strength to go that far. It’s just paper and blue ink from a pen that started drying up when he reached the part about his mom. That scratched out the part about Clary. That couldn’t write the part about Maureen.

Because here’s the thing: his skin was itching before he even started it, his cold veins aching for something that wouldn’t mean a thing anymore. He knew everything he wanted to say when he wrote it, but some things wouldn’t translate. Maybe because he didn’t speak their language, because he didn’t understand them himself.

Like the part about Raphael, the one that is nothing but a ghost between the lines and a shadow through the text. His sire’s name sits neatly at the top of the letter, but it can be found no where else.

Because here’s the thing: there’s a lot he wants to say to him, a lot he could say to him, but there’s also a lot that would change everything if he did. The thing is that sometimes his veins ache and it hurts, and sometimes (most of the time) it’s guilt that drives the phantom pain. The thing is that he doesn’t feel guilt stronger than he does when he thinks of Raphael.

The thing, in the end, is that there’s a letter in the top left drawer of his desk and he will never have the strength to send it.