Chapter Text
Thirty-two minutes. That’s how long it takes to get from the university back to my apartment using public transportation, and also how long I’ve been holding my emotions in for. But, when the door clicks shut behind me something inside of me clicks as well, and I slump down to the hardwood floor of my apartment, drop the box of everything from my desk on the ground next to me, hug my knees, and cry. Fuck.
Six years. That’s how long I had had that job, and now I don’t. I loved that job. I made friends, got to do research, and was able to have some semblance of a normal human life. Fuck, if I’m thinking about my life, that job was most of it. My eighth birthday was exactly a week ago (not that I did any real celebrating), which was two weeks after the department chair had let me know that 'due to budgetary concerns, my position was being made redundant as of the new year,' which is absolute bullshit on the university’s part. At least I got to come in today after the semester break and say goodbye to everyone, but now I’m home and it’s barely noon and here I am. Sitting on the floor next to a box of memories, crying.
I wish I could say that these sorts of emotions are a rare event for me, that it always takes something as significant as getting laid off to reduce me to a blubbering mess, but it’s been happening more and more often as time has gone on. It used to be easier to cope with things, and it’s not like I’ve been doing anything differently in the past couple of years or making any big changes in my life, but I still find myself… handling things worse. Having bigger reactions to smaller things. Needing to work harder to push aside the impulses I can’t indulge in. Less able to handle the memories that flit through my mind every time I do something even remotely hurtful on accident.
For the umpteenth time, I acknowledge the fact that I am in desperate need of therapy, and then once again resolve not to do anything about it. I don’t need to let out the scream that I can feel building in my chest to know how badly actually talking to someone about my problems would go. I know, extremely healthy response, Sam, but what else can I freaking do.
The fact that I have been on the floor for around five minutes already is a relatively reliable indicator that I’ve already crossed the line into being mostly nonfunctional, which is just absolutely spectacular, since it means I’m going to have to take some shortcuts to do literally anything for the rest of the day and not just be a depressed mess on the edge of my living room for who knows how long. It’d be great if I didn’t have firsthand experience of exactly how uncomfy six hours of laying on the rug is, but the knowledge does come with the advantage of usually providing the bare minimum amount of willpower to prevent it from happening again. It doesn’t do anything about the self-hatred, but, y’know. You take what you can get.
I give myself another five minutes of wallowing, which is mostly to try and give my breathing a chance to calm down. Once that’s done and the remaining tears on my face join the ones that have already dripped onto my skirt, I count to three and lift myself upwards, pulling on my flight just long enough to get my legs under me before letting gravity kick back in. The box I brought home gently floats up from the floor with another twist of will and glides over to the kitchen counter for future me to deal with, and I kick off my shoes, though I don’t bother to use telekinesis to put them back on the little shoe rack by the door. It’s not like anyone else is here to see the mess.
Once I’ve crossed the living room and walked into my bedroom, I stand in front of my desk and stare at my laptop for a solid minute, my brain warring against itself thinking about what comes next. Despite the fact that a big part of me wants to get something done today and get the ball rolling on finding a new job, something that I probably should have started doing weeks ago, I eventually come to the conclusion that the best course of action is to once again screw future Sam and leave the resume-writing and job hunting and all that other stuff to her. Instead I, present Sam, will take on the noble and necessary task of continuing my mental breakdown face-down on the bed. This is marginally better than having a breakdown on the floor of the living room, so I’m going to consider this a win. God knows I need one, though best I can tell, there isn’t actually some sort of divine creator of the world that enjoys making my very existence a living hell. I still don’t know why I’m the way that I am, why I have to live with these chains on my soul, why the fuck I even exist in the first place, but rationally I can’t expect there to be some all-powerful being who delights in my torment whom I can blame for every bad thing that happens to me and perhaps one day punch right in the face. Still though, sometimes it’s hard to be rational about it.
I roll onto my side and curl up into a ball again, not even bothering to get under the blanket as I flip off the light switch with a mental tug. God, what am I going to do now? I have enough money saved up to cover things for a couple of months, so thankfully the financial side of losing my job isn’t a huge issue, but it’s not like I can just coast. Half the reason I originally tried to get a research position was to satisfy the portion of weird urges I get on a daily basis that wouldn’t be actively harmful to indulge, and the other half is that being alone all day with my thoughts is absolute torture. The weekends are already bad enough, I don’t think I could handle it long-term again. Things were manageable when I was still building my knowledge of Earth and normal human life, but that was years ago. I’m not functionally amnesiac anymore, which ironically makes things harder for me. At least back then I had direction. Right now my life is just… day-to-day surviving.
I lay there for a while, curled up, mind flitting through all the usual bad thoughts. I might have fallen asleep for a bit, I’m not sure, but either way when I finally look at my alarm clock it’s past 4pm, which means I’ve wasted half the day being a depressed mess instead of doing anything remotely productive. It also means I haven’t eaten anything in over eight hours, which my stupidly needy body is all too happy to bring to the forefront of my attention. The ironic thing is I don’t actually need to eat if I don’t really want to, it’s purely a consequence of keeping my body as human as I can pretty much all the time, so I’m perfectly capable of getting rid of the feeling for a day all for the low low price of retriggering eight years of trauma and causing a series of panic attacks that last for an hour on average, in my previous experience. So yeah. I need to get out of bed.
I am still in bed. I need to get out of bed.
I need to get out of bed.
I need to get out of bed I need to get out of bed I need to get out of fucking bed fuck you stupid depression fuck you human body fuck you Sam I’m going to slam myself into the fucking ceiling if I don’t get out of bed and then where will you be now you stupid fuck just move your lazy body you goddamn piece of shit and do something productive for once in your miserable life this is why I deserve to remember every single fucking person I aaaand I’m standing up.
Ten out of ten perfect success.
Unfortunately I did not account for the fact that eating means I have to actually, y’know, make food, and when two minutes of staring silently at the open fridge somehow fails to yield any sort of energy to do so whatsoever, I’m forced to acknowledge that I’m going to have to go and get takeout or something. Obviously a spectacular financial decision to be going out to eat the day I lost my job, but it gets me out of the apartment again and physical activity is probably something I can count as another success for today. I let the fridge door swing shut behind me as I turn and walk back out of the kitchen to the living room, picking up my work shoes from where some idiot left them on the floor and swapping them out on the shoe rack for my sneakers. After putting those on, grabbing my bag, and running my fingers through my hair in a semi-successful attempt to make it presentable after my four-hour flop, I am officially ready to head out.
I still don’t actually have a plan of where to go, though, so after stepping out of the building I start walking in the direction of one of the random clusters of restaurants in Brockton Bay that are both actually decent and within walking distance of my apartment. The early January New England air manages to perk me up a bit more, as even if my jacket is mostly just for appearance’s sake over comfort it’s not like I can’t feel the cold. I could try and decide exactly where my final destination is before I get there, but that would require thinking and my brain is not being cooperative about that right now, so instead I fish my headphones and MP3 player out of my bag, crank the volume up to a level that would probably be dangerous for normal humans, and hit shuffle.
It’s extremely ironic, but music is one of the few things that are genuinely, consistently successful at distracting me from my own thoughts. The urge to sing along to ones I know is of course super dangerous, but focusing on not absent-mindedly letting a line or two slip out requires the perfect amount of effort to occupy me while still letting me enjoy the song, and can always be mitigated by listening to something I don’t know. That’s part of the reason why I try to change around the songs on my MP3 player so much, and the other part of it is that discovering new music is just pretty much always enjoyable. My taste in music is the opposite of picky, something I’m very grateful for.
As I walk, the ambiance of the city I’ve lived in for most of my life surrounds me. The southern side of downtown Brockton Bay is far from indicative of the area as a whole, but what slice of any decently sized city is? My research position paid well enough to let me get an apartment in a nicer-than-average area, as long as I was relatively frugal otherwise, which wasn’t a problem for me. Though, being in Brockton Bay, 'nicer-than-average' didn’t really count for much. It at least avoided a lot of the problems other places in town had that I’d sometimes hear my coworkers talking about, like the frequent muggings and egregious lack of public maintenance, but there was still the Empire Eighty-Eight to worry about, as well as all of the other general problems that came with living in one of the most cape-dense cities in the US. At least looking pale enough to catch a sunburn on a rainy day reduces some of the harassment I get.
No matter which way you look at it, however, Brockton Bay as a whole is objectively a bit of a shithole. The economy has been in shambles ever since the port shut down, two racially-motivated cape gangs and a huge mercenary group operate in the city only partially checked, and even discounting the organized crime the general rate of low-level crime is way higher than the national average. Just stepping within the city limits is basically asking to roll a die to determine what sort of criminal injustice you have a chance of being caught up in. The sheer amount of background conflict suffusing the city is almost unnatural, and unfortunately that makes it one of the best places for me to live I could ask for.
I get a lot of… weird compulsions, on a regular basis. I can only assume it’s just part of the fucked-up package deal that comes with being who I am, because if not it’s a really freaking weird way for more aspects of my mental illness to present themselves. Some of them are more easily manageable, like the cravings I get for doing research and acquiring information, which my university job took care of nicely. Doesn’t matter the topic, just doing it at all is enough to scratch the itch and provide a tiny rush of endorphins, though I’m fairly certain I’m 'supposed' to be using certain other abilities to fill that void instead. The natural inclination to hum or sing when I’m not paying attention is something that I’ve worked hard to make a habit of not doing, and is also pretty understandable, as it and screaming are the things that actually take what I can do from 'more-powerful-than-average parahuman' to 'living WMD.' The one that would cause me the most problems, however, is my constant drive for conflict, and the only way to shut up the little sociopathic voice in my head constantly screaming at me to ruin that relationship or make that car’s brakes seize up or get that politician to just say a teeny tiny racial slur on national television is to immerse myself in enough conflict to satisfy it. Hence living in Brockton Bay. It took me seven months of searching to find this place, and just existing here is like a soothing, fucked-up balm on my soul made of gang violence and hate crimes. Is it a significant contributor to my depression and the source of a lot of the problems in my life? Yes. Is it worth it to never let my mental state slip to the point where I crack and decide to see how it would feel to go and decimate a major population center of my own volition for once? Also yes.
I’m startled out of my thoughts by someone walking in the opposite direction on the sidewalk roughly shoulder-checking me as they go past, which is, y’know, absolutely wonderful and also kinda thematic with how much this town sucks. I turn around to maybe say something to them, but the guy is already like thirty feet away, full-on sprinting back the way I came. Great. Guess it’s my responsibility to get out of the way of people out for a run, and not theirs to actually keep an eye out for other people.
…Okay, maybe that’s a little disingenuous. I was pretty lost in my thoughts there, and the music is kinda doing the opposite of making me aware of my surroundings. I sigh and turn back around, only to immediately jump sideways to dodge yet another runner. Holy shit, okay, that one definitely wasn’t my fault, I was turned around and it’s not like I’m standing in the middle of the sidewalk or anything! I pull my headphones out and take a look around the street I’m on to try and see if there are any other members of whatever local jogging club this is that I need to get out of the way of and…
That’s a lot of people running.
And screaming too.
The crashing and roaring sounds coming from down the street are audible now too, and probably have a lot to do with the the general state of panic everyone seems to be in. Wow I really need to work on being more observant. Okay, normal human reaction to a violent cape fight happening in the vicinity. …Running away seems to be the obvious conclusion that everyone else has come to, so I think I’ll do that too. Great, good job, brain.
Course of action set, I start to turn back in the direction I was coming from, shoving my headphones back into my bag as I do so, only for my eyes to perfectly track a giant flaming metal monstrosity as it careens down the street, gouging a giant divot in the asphalt before crashing into a parked car around forty feet ahead of me in the direction I was about to run. The car ends up being the weaker of the two, half-compressing and half absorbing the momentum and being sent flying across the sidewalk and into the storefront directly opposite. The metal wreck left on the side of the road in its place roars, rippling with flame and scales and presumably very angry at whoever just smacked him down this city street like a baseball.
Okay.
Okay that’s Lung.
Okay that is an already partially powered-up and very pissed-off Lung right in front of me, cutting off the path I was just about to take to escape.
Fuck me I am having the worst day.