Doubt

one

Demi Lovato is destroying herself from the inside out. She is twisting, tangling, crushing and burning. She is beating Death at his own game.

And the fact that this is all apart her own doing strikes her harder than it really should. After all, does she not only inhale her hatred but exhale it too? Do her words not argue and slur at the midnight hour?

She will be exiled to an eternity of darkness in just under six months, can she not be even a tiny bit upset? May she not throw a hissy fit?

Demi promises that she is older now, more mature. For she will simply sulk in an adult like fashion.

She drinks.

The glass bottles in which she drains every night are her pacifiers. They bottle up her cries and they soothe her until she has no fight left in her ghastly body.

"This isn't right," Wilmer claims as he paces the floor of their L.A. apartment, doing well to ignore the strong smell of liquor tainting the walls. "You can't keep living like this Demi. It isn't healthy."

The woman with coffee bean eyes stares out a window as if his words matter not to her. They do, she tries hard to remind herself, what he says matters. When she turns to look at him, she takes in his appearance as if he were a work of art.

The laugh wrinkles carved into his face, the way his cheeks usually cave when smiles a certain way and she even decides to remember the facial hair that she fancies so much. All of him was so beautiful, too beautiful to forget.

"Are you even listening to me?"

She blinks. "I'm sorry." She says, though her voice is void of emotion and even she doesn't believe what spills beyond her lips.

Her husband's head falls into his hands, his shoulders dropping like rock in defeat. "I just - I don't know anymore. I've so hard and she's giving me nothing." He speaks as if she isn't there, drinking in his every move. But she doesn't care, she's lost her will to fight.

"Demi, I just want you to give me something, anything. I want you to show me that you care. That what's happening isn't going to take over your life."

"It already has," she whispers and the scary thing is that she wasn't lying. There were no vemon in her words.

Wilmer catches it and he holds her words in his mind, knowing the truth they have brought and he pleads with her. "Please. Anything."

She is staring out the window again but the view of the stormy sky hasn't changed. She wonders and doubts but in the end her answer is the same as the last hundred times she has thought this through.

"Athena."

---

"You are Athena Watterson." the girl with eyes the color of Venus repeats to her reflection, hoping the blotchy skin and puffy eyes doesn't interfere with her strong façade.

"You are the luckiest girl in the world. People would kill to be in your shoes." And she gives a watery smile and smoothes out the wrinkles in her salmon dress. She isn't ready to face the world. Not just yet. But she is Athena Watterson and Athena Watterson does not hide from the world.

So she covers everything that they would see as a flaw or weakness and repeats a prayer she's heard the elders say to a God she doesn't quite believe in and exits the bathroom.

She is watched. She is calculated. She is welcomed.

Her mother's hand lightly rests on her left shoulder always and she reminds her - manners, bright smiles and appropriate laughter. Manners, bright smiles and appropriate laughter. Manners, bright smiles and -

The hand is gone and so is her mother. She is alone and she is smiling. Bigger, brighter, better.

She laughs louder, brighter, better.

And she dies more, more and more.

.