Work Text:
Maybe Dustin wants to prove that it’s all so unfair, maybe he’s just another struggling teen, maybe it’s because Eddie fucking died in his arms, maybe he just wants to shatter and not come back, or maybe he just wants to show everyone that Eddie existed. It isn’t fair.
He wants to feel like a real monster, wants to feel the very act of unwinding himself in red spiderwebs across his body, and he wants it to hurt. He wants to laugh and spit at the pain that would bubble up from his skin in yellow orange.
He stares in the mirror. The face looking back is distorted—shadows too long, eyebags stained charcoal, red around the lashes. His face twitches, and for a moment it all breaks—Dustin, his careful composure, Hawkins, his life, and its shitty issues—and he looks monstrous. Like someone peeled back his skin and tied up the jagged edges with jagged knots to leave a jagged something underneath. He wants it. He wants to rip a gash down his face and let the whole world flinch away from it. A lightning strike of energy jerks through his body, and his hand twitches to the shiny porcelain counter, to the thin blade he pried out of his mom’s pink gillette razor.
He grabs it. Everything lies close to the edge.
He stares at the little piece of metal in his hand for a few seconds, all dull and paper-thin. His heart is pounding in his temples, and he has a fleeting thought that if he went through with this, if he actually—he couldn’t come back.
Dustin knows what it is. Self harm, or whatever the glossy pamphlets in the counselors office say, but not really. He’s not some depressed junkie who’s all falling over themselves to slit their wrists and bleed out in a bathtub. He just gets so angry. Earlier, sitting in Steve’s car, arguing about something, Dustin almost screamed, I’m going to fucking shoot myself and it’s going to be your fault. He wanted to make Steve hurt. Monster. His throat feels like it’s lined with acid. See? Anger. Not the hopeless desperation all those godforsaken pamphlets warn about in colorful fonts.
Is this what it feels like? To be split up like Frankenstein’s creature, forever bound to agony? He’s already beyond accepted that he’s a horrible person.
He steels himself, clenches his teeth, and sweeps the razor over his forearm, making a small cut. It feels like time passing. It feels like when he goes to the doctor to get a flu shot and can feel the needle slide in. It hurts, but in a clinical way, like he’s softly slicing down all the way to the bone. Like he could cut rings around himself and unwind like a paper lantern. He doesn’t like it. It doesn’t burn, it hurts like it’s sore. Blood doesn’t even bead around the edges.
And shit. That fucking sucked. 2/10, would not recommend, he thinks dryly.
He lets out a shaky breath and drops the blade in the sink. That’s it. All his crackling energy, melted into air. Into thin air. He’s gonna need to find a way to throw away the razor, he dazedly thinks. Whatever.
It’ll scar, maybe. It’ll heal, definitely. It’s not fair. Monsters are never fair.