She lies, perfectly still and unconscious, on her jagged bed of broken dreams. She is warmed by nothing in her icy environment- rather, she is made feverish by the fiery hatred for herself burning within her. Her body lies bare to the grayish pre-dawn light pouring through the window, harder than marble and a more beautiful shade of white-blue than any stone. Her slim hips and long legs twist almost convulsively, while her hands (the long fingered, wide palmed hands of an artist, or surgeon) form themselves by some enigmatic process into unholy claws, similar in destructive power to those of the Beast she has stood brave in the face of so many times. Unwillingly, she shreds at her neck and throat, and awakens with a small groan- even this incoherent noise is beautiful, coming from one such as her- and pushes her aching body into a kneeling position. Her head bowed towards the floor, she stares at the blood encrusted under the white crescents she has always kept pristine, and growls once in a rage, an almost inaudible noise coming from deep inside her chest. She pounds her fists into the stained carpet, manufactured twice as many years ago as she has been alive, and her martial artist's muscles ripple in time to the floor quaking. Suddenly, her evanescent rage is spent, and she collapses on the floor once again, sobbing hopelessly between strangled gasps for breath.

"Please. Please, I'll do anything! Anything, but no more. Oh, God. Goddess, anyone, please, no more! Please…"

Her prayers freeze, and for a moment, the small cloud before her mouth goes unreplenished and dies. Now almost divinely calm, she stands and walks to her dresser, catching one knob and throwing the attached drawer across the room in one smoothly powerful motion. From the scattered contents, she selects a plastic bottle of white tablets. Five of these are quickly crushed between the sole of her skate shoe and a psychology text book. One nostril closed by her index finger, she inhales the powder that wasn't spilled or ground out. She settles gracefully onto the floor, to sit with her legs crossed beneath her, back bent slightly by the weight of recurring traumas. Giggling for the first time in years, she reaches under her pillow to withdraw an already stained razor. She scores her forearm- once, twice, a dozen, two dozen times- and sees purity first dripping, then gushing, across her ribcage, over her stomach, down her legs, to finally forsake contact with her and grace the floor. She glances up a single time, to smile at the picture tacked onto the wall, providing the room's only color.

"Good-bye, Skyler." She curls into the fetal position, her head resting on her damaged forearm, her hair quickly becoming bloodied. For the first time in longer than she cares to remember, she is at peace. "Good-night."