"Depression isn't a war you win. It's a battle you fight every day. You never stop, never get to rest. It's one bloody fray after another."

― Shaun David Hutchinson, "We Are the Ants"

___________________________________________________________________________

My head hurts.

In some ways, that's… kind of encouraging.

In others, it just hurts.

I'm alive. I got to wake up. I was right; it's fine if I die.

Not that there aren't consequences. In this case, that my head hurts just the fucking worst. I don't know how long it takes me before I can so much as move, but I know it isn't a short period. Maybe… something like an hour? Only afterwards do I manage to finally exhale on purpose, or even think of opening my eyes.

My eyes are gummed up, like I've been sleeping for… I don't know, a long time. I can't open them for a bit, beyond just the pain and the exhaustion- it takes a monumental, incredible effort to slowly, bit by bit, raise my hand up to my face.

I lift the visor off-

Mmh. Sticky.

It feels… warm.

The visor feels warm, and sticky, and kind of… wet. I… I don't know if there's a smell or not? There's that sort of disconnect, when you're pretty sure you know what a smell is, or that it's there, but are so used to it that you can't properly identify it anymore.

I would push it off right the fuck now, cause there's a warm weird sticky wet thing on my face, but turns out that that's a bit beyond my abilities at the moment. It takes me close to another five minutes or so before I manage to lift my arm with enough strength to actually push back against the weight of it.

Slowly, I peel and push and pull the visor off of my face, until I've managed to drag it up high enough that light comes back. With further effort, I manage to pull open an eyelid, finally managing to heft away the thing on my head, and move to wipe at the gross, half-dried mess around my eyelids.

My hand comes away sticky and dry and crusty, and at last, I can let the light in and see.

My room is a mess.

The first thing I see is the space under my desk. Pretty easy to catch a peek at that angle from where I am, splayed out uncomfortably on the floor.

The tupperware has broken open. Strands of mold have blossomed from it, shooting veins up the walls and out to the sides, making the space beneath the desk a mess of sludgy grey mass and fuzzy strangeness. The containers themselves are cracked, the plastic torn open even beyond where the lids were cracked off, and there are shapes within, some of them clearly fungal, others… different. Like a mixture of soft tissue and fur, like misshapen muscles, covered in fuzz and more recognizable mold, hints of fungal caps and veins of mycelia.

I can still see the shape of something beneath. The edge of a rat's skull, poking out from the top of one container, a stray strand of something that might be a twig but is far more certainly a spider's leg. The longer I look at them, the more I can hear something in the back of my head, the whispers getting a little louder, bit by bit.

They're not the only things that have changed in the room.

The voices dwindle, falling apart to meaningless noise as I turn my head away from them, ever so slightly. My neck hurts, and my head hurts, it hurts, so it takes time, but it's not hard to tilt my gaze down to one side.

Next to the desk, just off to one side, there is a crack in my wall. That crack in my wall has meat inside of it.

That crack has gotten wider.

What used to be just enough to reach a hand in has expanded, extending out to either side and up to the ceiling. I can track the point where ceiling meets wall and am surprised to find that it doesn't simply move in another direction, but actually turns to… a different muscle groups? Fibers moving in another direction, coming from a different source, intermingling in a line of cartilage or tendon at the join between the different parts of it. Less like an undifferentiated wall of meat, more like… actual muscle, belonging to an actual creature.

As if sensing my gaze, it twitches, the movement sending a shiver through the plaster.

Alive. Not just meat, but alive.

I let my eyes roll, finally turning to stare at the most important part of all this.

The visor has changed.

In most of the obvious ways, it remains the same, still made of metal and plastic, still connected by wiring, still sleek and black and mechanical.

In other ways, it's anything but.

There's a pus-like sludge covering it, a thick yellowish mucus that stretches strings out to connect to my hair, to the sensors touching my hands and torso, and to the power outlet at the wall. It's slow-moving, like molasses, but I can still see bubbles, like there's oxygen moving through it, or heat. Bits of steam waft up from it, rising like heat into cold air, even as it slowly oozes its way off of the headset and onto my fucking carpet.

I know for a fact that it's the same shit on my face, covering my eyelids, coating my hands now.

Another bubble pops up, coming from the connector ports. From where the cartridges sit.

I feel like I'm going to be sick. I feel like I might vomit. I feel like the front of my face is bulging, like there's a pressure coming out from inside my eyes and trying to mash its way out of my fucking faceplate. It hurts.

But hey. I'm alive.

Slowly, I try to lift my arms up behind me, enough to raise off the ground. My left works just fine, in spite of the pain, but my right-

My hand is… numb.

I look down at the Glove.

It's still there, hasn't gone, hasn't vanished- but what was once a single, solid mechanism, a weirdly-segmented series of joints and tendons, now lays splayed out in a mess. Each finger is three or four times longer than it should be, the tools of bone and sinew draped across the ground rather than properly bound up and connected to each other.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

I can't feel it.

Deep breath. Deep-

Fuck. Now I can smell it, because now I can taste it. Wet and warm and bloody, like thin blood off of a steak mixed with pus. Fuck, the room reeks.

I lift my arm and watch as the tendons and disconnected bone and muscle sort of limply hang from the end of it. There's still a remnant of my original hand in there, covered by a weird film, even as its parts are all spread about and open. It doesn't hurt, but I also can't move it, can't interact with it.

The Glove is, for the moment, seemingly inert.

I can't feel my Blood.

It's beating, I'm warm, I'm alive, and hell, beyond the Glove, my arm hasn't fallen apart at the literal seams. I don't know if it's all gone, there's still clear evidence of something supernatural keeping me together but…

Fuck. Fuck.

I remember what it was like. I remember how I was thinking at the time, the way that it matched so many other dark and violent episodes of my life. Like I didn't care. Like nothing really mattered, not myself, not my pain, and only barely anyone else.

That's the thing most people don't really get about self-destruction, about depression that bad- it's as much a condition as it is a defense mechanism. As much as the dopamine receptors in my brain are fucking fried, the apathy is a still a shield, still there for a purpose, at least part of the time. Most of the time it is just an absence, but when it isn't, it's there to keep the screaming, crying, throat-tearing, nails-across-skin pain and fear and grief away, because that's what's left when you remove all the parts of the animal made to feel good.

The emptiness keeps away all the bad shit. Sometimes, though, the emptiness is worse.

And brains make the bad shit for a reason.

I hurt someone.

The Bloodling is quiet in my veins.

It was screaming at me in its own way, fighting with everything it had to hold me together. The game-world of the Grey that I was in started breaking down alongside my mental state, the hours of walking through empty, barren tunnels giving my brain the room it needed to crack and stop being able to cope with shit. Glimpse Beyond pushed further than I'd ever pushed it, and at the end…

I can barely recall what I was. I remember the conversation, the emotions and thoughts moving through me, but the space feels alien now, like trying to describe a flavor I've never had before, or maybe have had, but don't know the name of. I was… dissipated. Spread out as a cloud of spores, as a network of a singular thing, unbound from the conventional structure I need as a human.

It's not an excuse.

I felt it screaming. I felt it struggling to hold me together, and I pushed myself anyways, stayed in there anyways, because it's fine if I die, right? I come back if I die, at least in the game, and, notably, at least once in real life. So my total lack of regard for anything and anyone is fine, because it was always only me getting hurt.

Except now the Glove is silent, and my Blood is still and rhythmless, as incapable of dancing as it always was.

The Bloodling has gone quiet.

I don't cry. I don't let myself. I force air into my lungs, pushing past the lump in my throat and force myself to focus, to think.

My arm is still held together. The Glove is still here, just… deactivated, maybe, incapable of holding itself together "properly". I grab my left hand and start pulling at one of the seams on my right arm, gently but insistently.

It hurts. It didn't, before. Now, I can feel it, the way that the bloodflow shifts precariously, the way that muscle groups meant to be one and the same are instead pulling apart like so much shredded meat.

The seam I am pulling open starts to ooze, bright crimson and a lighter pinkish fluid leaking out of the join between different segments. I stare into it, into the hole of the wound I am making, desperate to see if I can find any hint, any minute glimpse of the strange, puppy-like thing that has kept me alive and protected me and done nothing but help.

And I hurt it. Because I was too messy to care about… anything.

Fuck.

FUCK.

The blood is bright and crimson and my head hurts and it hurts worse as I force myself to look, to see, to drink of the Glimpse Beyond and see behind what reality looks like to something closer to what reality is.

Nothing.

The blood is just blood.

I see glimpses in it, flickers of interpretation, but they're not what I care about. Sometimes my veins are like hallways and sometimes they're like roots inside of fleshy soil and sometimes they're a sea of hands all joined together and pulling with and against each other, but they're always empty. There's…

Fuck.

It's so quiet in my head, with only my heartbeat. When did that become the case?

There.

A glimpse. A glimpse of something along a closed door in the hallways of my arm, in between different apartment blocks that are paintings that are whirlpools that are muscles. Right alongside what I think is an artery, along the widest of the tunnels, there's a glimpse of something leading back towards the center of my body, retreating away from the Glove. A hint of a crimson deeper than that of blood, purer somehow.

It's not here- but it was.

Looking for it now, I see more glimpses of it. Bits of scabrous growth lie between different "buildings", a half-comprehensible urban sprawl oozing out of seams of flesh and skin and making my nose bleed to look at it. They seem to be built around cracks in the pavement, holding together parts of my arm that don't quite fit with city planning, that-

Fuck. I think my nose is bleeding. And my ears, maybe.

GLIMPSE BEYOND HAS GROWN!

I blink, and I'm staring at an arm again, partially open to the elements, actively bleeding. But I can still kinda-sorta trace the other aspects of what I saw, the trail of awkward artificial patches holding my arm together even now.

A trail leading up the artery, towards my chest. Towards my heart. Scab-like connections, black and sticky, that I don't recognize from anything medical I've ever seen, and which don't seem to be directly connected to my body or feeding off of it.

Ok. Ok. Think.

If it's not coming from my body… if the arm is still held together while remaining unhealed, if the Glove is still alive and connected, just… "unpowered"? Then…

Fuck.

It's still here. Or… something of it is. Some small part. Considering it literally used to look like blood cells, maybe just the tiniest bit- but enough to do the minimum, to keep me whole and alive, even if it can't manage the rest of what I've attached to myself.

Maybe it's wishful thinking. Maybe it's desperate, delusional hope that I didn't drive a weird, seemingly innocent, affectionate little creature to death trying to compensate for my lack of self preservation and stability. But… I think it's still alive, in me.

Weaker. Hurt. Maybe resting, but alive.

Maybe.

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, tasting iron in the back of my throat. I… didn't realize I could push a skill that hard. It takes all I have not to just melt back onto the carpet with the half-living sludge all around me (that I'm going to have to clean, gods fucking damnit).

But I don't. I just cradle my arm instead, draping the disjointed Glove over my lap and hugging myself.

Jay was right.

I ignored the warning signs. Maybe it was the right idea to push back into the game, get more power from it, but it wasn't the right idea to do it now, as I was, already on the edge of yet another breakdown.

I need to be better. I need to make myself better.

I can't let this happen again.

I need help.

It takes me a few minutes to get up. When I do, a gush of blood leaves my nose and ears, stagnant from my stillness and now displaced by gravity. Frankly, I think the whole carpet is just going into the fucking garbage at this point, or maybe a fire. But still, I make it to my feet, still cradling my arm and the Glove, shuffle-stepping over towards my desk and collapsing into my chair.

Slowly, I let go of myself and reach to the table, pulling a little piece of paper from where I left it, close to a week ago.

I hold the little business card in my hand for a little while. Then, I grab my phone.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.