Quote:
cw: (unrecognized) catatonic depression
Oh, he realized as he woke. It was one of those days.
He learned to recognize those days by the heaviness he felt in the back of his head. A weight that coalesced back there, congealed unwanted and stayed the whole day. He knew it by how stiff his fingers felt as he became aware of his body, how stiff his core and his legs and his toes were. He'd fallen asleep on his side again, and had curled up like a dead thing. Like a spider, or a pillbug. Felt just as small, too.
That weight in the back of his head told him that he would not leave that room today. It told him that his body would not respond to his commands. It would not explain why it came, or went, or came again. It would be there today, and if he was lucky, gone tomorrow.
There was nothing for it. Get up, he told himself.
You're wasting time. Get up.
He couldn't move a finger, so tightly bound they were. Lying there, he couldn't open his eyes. He was breathing, and he was sure he had a heartbeat. He felt distantly desolate, though he couldn't identify why, or over what. He thought those feelings had no place in a Negaverse General, wherever they came from, whatever their cause. Told himself that, but his body paid no heed.
The halls were quiet. Today, he couldn't prove to himself that he wasn't in a single room at the edge of existence. He couldn't say other people existed.
Of course they existed. Just yesterday, he drained a boy his age unconscious. He'd just bought a second car, was riding high on that sense of accomplishment. He'd been drinking half the night, and likely half the day.
But yesterday wasn't today. There might not be people today.
It was a stupid thought. Faustite knew it. He knew he had neighbors in the barracks, normally heard his couple-rooms-removed neighbor snoring. He knew he could get up, poke his head out of his spartan bedroom, and spot a handful of after-hours officers congregating in the hall, chatting over shitty canned beers. It happened every weekend. All he had to do was move, and he would see.
So get up, he told himself.
But he would not move. Could not. He was trapped here, again, with his thoughts and breathing.
Better that he tried again tomorrow.
So he laid there for a time, silent, listening to his own breathing, waiting to go back to sleep. He was tired, but not, and he wasn't sure how he could feel two opposing states at the same time.
He supposed nothing about this made any sense, but he couldn't ask other officers. How would he explain it? Some days he woke up and couldn't get out of bed? They would laugh, tell him that's a struggle everyone had, that nobody wanted to go to work, that it was part of being an adult, that any free time should be spent taking naps or playing video games from bed or binging Netflix to the early hours of the morning or some garbage like that.
Then what? Push the issue? Tell them he really couldn't get out of bed, and then what? Endure their nervous laughter as they told him to seek his superior? That wouldn't do. None of this would do.
Get up, he tried again.
Get up, he pleaded. Felt a sourness bloom in his jaw.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
