(The world is ugly,
but you’re beautiful to me.)
~My Chemical Romance
HELL
Alec slowly stands up, his hands firmly grasping a smooth surface carefully tucked into his ragged sweatshirt pocket. He makes his way past the old, faded and heavily graffitied desks, memories flying to the front of his mind, their prime position as of late. He’s shedding them as he walks forward, looking straight ahead as the other students ignore the pain and the past that’s falling over them like a curtain, a distorted veil that bleeds out the truth that’ll never run in their veins.
Magnus, his best friend, gone. Left him all alone. Maybe Magnus would still be around had these foul people been nicer, or if Alec had stood up for him just once or twice. Too many people had asked Alec why he was even friends with someone like Magnus, too many people wanted Magnus to be alone and miserable. Too many questions and too much hate about the way he dressed, too many cruel gazes and harsh laughter at the way he held himself. At who he was. Alec was all Magnus ever had here, in this place, where nobody wanted to be near the ‘fag.’ Funny, Alec was the one they should have hated more. At least Magnus liked girls, too. But Magnus is gone, now.
“Mr. Lightwood, what are you doing?” He’s at the front of the room, smiling a broken half-smile. Some of the students look up at him uneasily, his eyes just a bit too manic, but others continue with their conversations, oblivious to what’s going to happen. Stuck in their fairy tales where everyone has been cut out from the same piece of paper, their hands folded together so they’re all a happy club with shaky crayon smiles that they’ll never get rid of.
“Are you all happy?” Alec asks, catching more and more attention. “I’m not. But you all seem to be. You seem so happy, so at ease with a life on your hands. I bet you don’t even think about it. It didn’t matter to you, it was just something for fun. You know, I can still remember it. I can hear the awful noise ringing through my head, the loudspeaker coming on and announced that Magnus’s body had been found on his bedroom floor.”
“Mr. Lightwood…”
The students are all looking at him now, more or less, mostly less, interested in what he’s going to say. Thinking of the next joke to make at his expense, the next punchline to rupture that awful thing in his chest that they all seem to lack.
Alec chuckles slightly, his vision becoming blurred and uncertain as his tear ducts begin to operate, and he’s crying for the first time since his secret boyfriend died.
“Do you remember laughing?” Alec spits, his voice becoming rough as anger stops taking the passenger’s seat. It hasn’t been in the back seat, forgotten, for months, since Magnus died. “I remember running through the halls, just trying to find a place where I could be safe and stop hurting and just get away from it all and I remember hearing entire classrooms erupting in a disgusting laughter, a twisted joy. You were laughing because my best friend died.”
Alec pauses for a moment, afraid of what he’s about to do. Magnus probably felt like this, too. It doesn’t matter how fucking scared he is right now, he’s going to do this, he’s going to teach them a fucking lesson because they fucking deserve it.
“Magnus wasn’t a bad person. He was smart, funny and he knew how to make me smile. So what if he was bisexual?”
“Fag,” one of the boys in the class coughs into his hand, causing a wave of giggles to overtake the room as the people around him shrink up their hearts just that much more, making the Grinch look generous.
The teacher walks over to Alec, placing an arm on his grey-clad shoulder. “Alexander, while we appreccaite that you’d like to talk about this, you must understand-“
“But you don’t understand!” Alec screams, violently pulling away from his professor. “You’re all disgusting. You’re ptiful, you’re laughing because someone like me did something like this,”
He pulls his hand from his pocket, bringing with it an item that causes fear and panic to lace the room, running like a river of ice through the class. God, they’re conceited. He wouldn’t waste this on them, no, they’ll learn better this way.
He brings the gun up to his chin and fires a bullet into his head.
