My updates on my other stories have been horribly off sched. I'm sorry. School is terrible and seasonal depression and all this other crap... I've been struggling with seasonal depression recently and I decided to try and get back in the writing game, so I made this. It's a thing I made. With Ruvik. So. Yeah.

Enjoy...

He remembered being endlessly entertained by the adventures he and Laura would have while playing in the barn near their family's house. Some days, they would pretend to be tough gang criminals, and the barn was their hideout. Other days, they traveled to space or became pirates and discussed in-character how they should absolutely be allowed to watch *Poltergeist*, especially since Ruben was impressively brave compared to most 8-year-olds

He never fully understood why it was fun for him, it just was.

But as they both grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made the games fun. He remembered seeing it in her eyes too as they stood in the empty barn, feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same. They played out all the same storylines that had been so fun to them before, but the meaning had disappeared. Games like tag and hide and seek were also loosing value. He could no longer connect to his imagination in a way that allowed him to participate in the experience.

The depression that had set in when Laura died felt almost exactly like that, except about everything.

At first, though, the invulnerability that accompanied the detachment was exhilarating. At least, as exhilarating as something can be without involving real emotions.

The beginning of his depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief. He had always wanted to not give a fuck about anything. Ruben, as of recently, viewed feelings as a weakness — annoying obstacles on his quest for total power over himself. And he finally didn't have to feel them anymore.

But his experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there was a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck. Cognitively, he might know that different things are happening to him, but they wouldn't feel very different.

Which leads to horrible, soul-decaying boredom.

Ruben stopped trying to get out more. Most fun activities just left him existentially confused or frustrated with his inability to enjoy them.

Months oozed by, and Ruben gradually came to accept that maybe enjoyment was not a thing he got to feel anymore. He didn't particularly want anyone to know, though. He was still sort of uncomfortable about how bored and detached he felt around other people, and he was still holding out hope that the whole thing would spontaneously work itself out by the time he finished his work on STEM. As long as he could manage to not alienate anyone, everything might be okay.

However, he could no longer rely on genuine emotion to generate facial expressions, and when he had to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating his face into shapes that were only approximately the right ones, alienating people was inevitable. And wholly embarrassing.

Dr. Jimenez made a habit of trying to cheer him up, giving him advice on his current predicament. Marcelo was insistent that he knew best, working as a psychiatrist and all, but Ruben throughout the years had learned to tune him out.

It's best to explain how it can be awkward for people who still have feelings to be around depressed people. They might try to help a depressed person have feelings again so things can go back to normal, and it's frustrating for them when that doesn't happen. From their perspective, it seems like there has got to be some untapped source of happiness within you that you've simply lost track of, and if you could just see how beautiful things are...

At first, he'd try to explain that it's wasn't really negativity or sadness anymore, it was more of this detached, meaningless fog where he couldn't feel anything about anything — even the things he loved, even fun things.

He had become horribly bored and lonely, but since he'd lost his ability to connect with any of the things that would normally made him feel less bored and lonely, he was stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract him from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it was.

But people, especially psychiatrists, want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they'll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative; like maybe you WANT to be depressed.

Dr. Jimenez's worthless optimism started coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at Ruben's face. Arguing only seemed to make Marcelo feel vindicated, so Ruben just learned to nod quietly and move on. He did, of course, still the subjects the doctor was offering, no matter how much he hated the lectures on hope and emotions.

That was the most frustrating thing about his situation.

Depression isn't always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something — it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing. You can't fill it up. You can't cover it. It's just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem. It would be like having a bunch of dead fish, but no one around you will acknowledge that the fish are dead. Instead, they offer to help you look for the fish or try to help you figure out why they disappeared, which is infuriating, considering their proposed solutions are for a different problem than the one you might have.

But, all of this depressed nothingness was holding him back, which only made everything a million times worse.

Perhaps it was because he lacked the emotional depth necessary to panic, or maybe the work that kept him distracted in long enough bursts to not make him suspicious, but somehow, Ruben managed to convince himself that everything was still under his control...

Right up until the point where he noticed himself wishing that Laura's rebirth didn't depend on him so he wouldn't feel obligated to keep existing.

It's a strange feeling, realizing you don't want to be alive anymore. If he had feelings, he might have actually felt surprised. He had spent the vast majority of his life actively attempting to survive. Ever since his most distant single-celled ancestor squiggled into existence, there had been an unbroken chain of things that wanted desperately to stick around.

Yet here he was, casually wishing that he could stop existing in the same way you'd want to leave an empty room or mute an unbearably repetitive noise.

It took him a few months to process the information, but by the time he was ready to give up and call it a life, MOBIUS had already snatched the chance away from him. He could've gotten away from them, too. He could have burned that whole placed to the ground. But he didn't. He had no idea what was in store

Yes, it was unfortunate, but what entity could have seen that coming? The probability of death had literally been taken away just as he learned to accept it.

He might as well have just changed his name to Justin Bieber, because this planet just fucking hates him.