Who's ready for some overly depressing character musings for the Captain Underpants cartoon?
Summary: Sometimes Melvinborg was awoken in the middle of the night by nightmares. Other nights he just didn't sleep.
Sometimes he was awoken in the middle of the night by minor nightmares. They were nothing major, really, just vague sensory details that he only barely remembered when he woke up. Sometimes there was a residual phantom pain of burns on his robotic limbs that couldn't be burned, but it was nothing he couldn't ignore enough to go back to sleep.
Other nights he had dreams (not nightmares. He refused to admit that something so relatively commonplace would frighten him even subconsciously) about the hospital. When he woke from those, it always took him a moment to remember that he could move both of his arms, memories of the numb paralysis of the hospital bed blending with the lack of sensation from his unfeeling metal arm. But it could move, he could move under his own power, he was fine. He spent a large remainder of those nights pacing before he attempted to go back to bed, just to remind himself that he could.
The night after the mutant invasion he had no nightmares because he did not sleep. Seeing those creatures again, as pathetic as it sounded considering they were half-rear end, brought too many unpleasant memories to the surface, and the thought of them kept him awake. He closed his eyes, but he re-lived the stomach dropping feeling of a car in free-fall as the engine went out. His eyes shot back open. Closed his eyes, and felt the scalding oppressive heat of an explosion that was far too close. Shot awake again. Shaking the thoughts off, and shoving them to the back of his mind where they belonged (he was not pathetic, he was fine. He could walk and see fine, the accident didn't matter anymore, why was he still thinking of it), he got out of bed, threw on one of his shirts, and grabbed his laptop to go sit in his office instead. If he wasn't going to sleep, he was going to get work done.
Of course his browsing could only stay so productive at, he checked the time, 2:30 am. Before too long, he stopped even pretending to work, and went right back to staring into space and thinking far too much.
Those stupid butterflies, he morosely mused, staring blankly at his laptop screen, were one of the last things he had seen with fully human eyes, and wasn't that a sad going away present for half of his vision. If he had decided to intervene somehow today, he couldn't help but wonder, would he be fully human right now? That was a mental trail that, despite the whole reason he was here was to change the timeline, he didn't want to go down. Instead he took the question and shoved it away with all of the other thoughts he was going to ignore.
He distracted himself with busy work, planning on ways to impress Elitinati, and sketching out blueprints for inventions that would probably be scrapped in the light of day, until school began the next morning. (By then his history looked kind of like: 24 hour cupcake stores near me, Elitinati-homepage, Elitinati-Admissions, Elitinati-Contact Us, what flavor ice cream are you quiz, treatments for insomnia, Star Wars discussion board, and several other searches as he cast out at random for something to distract his mind with.)
But it was fine. That hadn't been his first sleepless night, and he knew how to keep his mind busy. It was something he was quite good at. There was always something to do, after all. Some idea to chase down, some invention to plan out. It was probably for the better he didn't sleep-more got done that way. (Some nights he was kept up by nightmares, some nights he stayed awake to avoid them, other nights there was just something in him that kept him from falling asleep, and he refused to look up what it was for fear of seeing things like "PTSD" or "guilt" and having to deal with the building pile of thoughts at the back of his mind.)
It wasn't like there was anything he could do about it anyway. What, should he go see a therapist? It was a little late for that. And what would he tell them, anyway, that he was kept awake by the image of two of his former classmates that he had left for dead (but they currently weren't dead, yet and it just served for another reason he hated seeing George and Harold's faces everyday).
Recently his nightmares had started to include George and Harold. He did his best to ignore it and wave it off as random data being processed by his brain, and that it didn't actually mean anything. The human brain, after all, did many strange things. (They had been in his dreams before, saying vague things that sounded like accusations, but since he had come back to the past they were showing up more and more. He tried to not think about that, either.)
Typically, if he had these dreams and he woke up between 11 and 1, he could ignore them like all of the others and get back to sleep. And if it was 4 or later, then he could just accept that he was awake, and distract himself with getting ready for the day, school would start in just about three hours at that point. But during that inbetween, the witching hour in the darkest part of the night, he would lay thinking, debating on his choice to leave them for dead. At the time it had been a pretty clear decision, fuelled by anger. The two had just ruined his chance at his dream school, and in general worked very hard at making his life a living nightmare. If he couldn't avoid them forever by transferring schools, than that would make sure that their paths would never cross again. He didn't feel bad about it until the next morning, and by then it was too late to do anything to do anything about it.
He wondered, in these dark hours when he was all by himself and had spent the day seeing the boys' faces and hearing their voices for real, and then remembering vague pleas and accusations of the imagined, if he still felt bad about it. (It had occurred to him a couple of times that if he got himself into Elitinati early enough, then maybe this Melvin wouldn't have to make the choice he had. In his half-asleep state at 3am, he thought that some part of him secretly wanted that.)
Through all of the nightmares and all of the sleepless nights, he kept going anyway. Constantly reaching for that seemingly unattainable dream. Once he changed the timeline, after all, he would be significantly happier, and then he wouldn't have to deal with them anymore. Until then he just had to get through a few more nights.
Between kinda murdering two classmates when he was 9 and being in a horrible car accident where half of his body was completely wrecked to the point of needing to become a cyborg (and that's just what we know has happened to him in canon) Melvinborg is absolutely a mental mess. Look at this man and tell me that he gets a good night's sleep every night. I doubt it.
It was fun overly researching this stuff. My favorite find was this quote on car accident trauma from the almighty WebMd: "The most important factor in recovering from the trauma of the accident is recognizing that you are having a problem and getting help, Mayou says.
Like other types of trauma, car accidents can cause long-term stress that affects your work and relationships and can eventually lead to depression, anxiety, and sleep problems, says Alan Steinberg, PhD" And something very strongly tells me that Melvin would not consider getting mental help of any kind. So here we are. Hope you liked, R&R, have a good day.