TRIGGER WARNING: Depictions of the club members handling depressive episodes.
June 4th, 2024
Depression fell over Keiichi only once, when he reached the top –and found apathy. Always pressure, always success, but less and less praise, less and less rewards.
His depression was redirected outwards. If he could not take joy in things, then he wouldn't give joy to other people, either. If his mom worked hard over breakfast, he wouldn't eat it, and serve her right. It didn't matter if his stomach felt hollow and achy for most of the day afterwards; he didn't care.
He could just say that he was busy, that he wanted to get to class earlier to study, and she wouldn't even be upset. That annoyed him. So he could starve himself and she wouldn't care, just for his stupid grades?
Huh. He'd… he'd show her, he'd do something she wouldn't like. Probably. Somehow. He'd find another way to rebel.
Keiichi treated his depression like a pebble in his shoes; a hard, persistent point of annoyance that shortened his temper and made him keen to spread the bad mood around.
Mion curled in on herself when the depression came. When she didn't feel like enough, when she felt like she could have saved Satoshi, when all of her dues and duties and performances and guilt came seeping in…
She went quiet. She withdrew.
She wasn't born the heir, but she'd been taught to be the heir, and the Sonozaki family taught that vulnerability must be hidden, that flagrant displays of emotion were to be kept behind closed doors.
So Mion closed her doors and buried her grey feelings deep, deep, deeper down, covering them with layer after layer of duty and obedience and friends and fun. She fought it like any other enemy; by studying, deconstructing, and then ruining them. Sadness was just another enemy to beat.
So –she took a step back. She severed the hurt before it could linger and purged her wounds before they could fester. She tossed her sorrow to the back of the closet and forced herself to look to the brighter days ahead; and if they weren't there already, she made them be. She dragged her friends into tempestuous games of glory and fun and wild, dizzy laughter until she forgot what she had to be sad about, much less that she was sad.
Even in times of deep, bitter hurt –when games weren't enough– she still withdrew quietly, locking her feelings away from all but a few; the friends she used to help cleanse the poison from a wound.
Shion shut down.
The birds didn't stop singing –a ridiculous poetic convention, she'd always felt– but now they just made noise, instead of their happy trills. The sun didn't stop shining, but it was always too bright or too grey; it made her eyes hurt. Food was too bland, too textured, too flavorful, and she gagged to think of forcing it down.
Everything became… too much.
All she ever wanted to do was drag herself, lead-weighted down to her bones, into the soft safety of a fluffy blanket, curl up, and weep the world away. She wanted the whole universe to whirl around and come to a halt with a reality-rocking crash, wanted to plunge anything and everything into a black, endless, silent abyss, just so it would stop.
It was always too much. It was all too much.
But since she couldn't destroy the world, she simply locked the world away, falling into a dim grey haze of routine that shied away from the slightest change, the slightest effort, the slightest intrusion of a honor anything into her bitter, despairing sorrow.
Satoshi probably used to react to depression differently, but now, well…
After years of being an outcast –unwelcome in every village activity, shunned at every facility– he neither tried to hide, nor expected to receive sympathy for, his moments of despair. Why bother? No one cared to help. No one cared to notice. He was a Hojo, and his family were vermin in the eyes of his neighbors.
It wasn't fair, of course, but he'd gotten used to things that weren't fair becoming the norm.
So he just… existed. He went about his day with the grey mantle of depression lying heavy on his shoulders, but he paid as much attention to it as dandruff.
Why bother caring? Why bother worrying? No one was going to help, and he had no way to help himself. There was no point in wasting his slender resources trying to fix it.
He couldn't do anything. He was helpless.
All he could do was wait for the few moments when things temporarily changed for the better.
Rena liked to think of her life as shining bubbles of wonderful, sparkling memories… but she knew that deep down underneath, all those dancing glints and sparkles just overlaid a sullen, remorseless, endless grey sea the color of dirty dishwater.
It was a stone around her neck, thick iron chains on her ankles, and she fought it, forcing herself to find something cute every day, to smile, to be happy, to leave those thoughts and that terrible persistent dragging weight behind. Some days she had more success than others.
It wasn't fair. She poured all this love, all this light and happiness and joy into her mind, ceaselessly and without relenting every day, and still the depression waited to pounce, lunging out whenever she let her guard down and sinking its poison fangs deep into her mind.
It truly wasn't fair. If she spent all her days playing with her friends, smiling, laughing, finding adorable things to take home or polishing her treasures, why didn't those loving memories, those joyful feelings, simply outnumber and crush that terrible weight beneath them? Math said they should –it simply wasn't fair.
But Rena was a fighter to the end, so she kept planting her feet in the dust, fixing a smile on her face, and going about her childhood days with her beloved friends.
Rika didn't know what it was to not feel depressed. It was like a set of sunglasses bound over her eyes, a tint that shadowed everything she saw.
She might be able to snatch a particle of release playing those delightfully wonderfully unpredictable games with Mion and her friends, but there was always the thought, the sorrow, gnawing at the back of her head, like forgotten homework or an upcoming appointment.
This will not last. This will end sooner than you wish.
How could anyone be happy, truly happy, in the face of that? Knowing everything that she knew?
She could smile and feign cheerfulness, but Rika was a swimmer with tied arms, desperately kicking her legs to keep her face above the water. The barest pause, the slightest rest, the most tiny slackening in her efforts, and she would go under and drown. She'd lost courts of the false starts to that she'd had already, the moment when the water had closed over her head and only a moment of frantic, soul-burning efforts had kept her from succumbing.
Her despair had been ground so deeply into her heart that the only thing that kept her thin spidersilk strand of hope from snapping was the thought that, someday, she might be free and it all might end.
Satoko isn't the type to get depressed. Her spirits naturally rocket to the sky like fireworks, and to crush and extinguish those flames means grinding her down so deeply that there is nothing but bare ash and embers. She doesn't get sad, she gets angry –or she simply stops.
A lot of animals have that reaction –a fawn's instinct, when threatened, is to freeze and hope it isn't spotted. Satoko does that. She goes still. Quiet. Limp.
If you are not a burden, you are not noticed. If you are not troubling, you are not seen. If you do not object, you will not be spoken to.
Deflect. Deflect. Deflect.
Defense mechanism or not, it works. If Satoko lets her mind retreat to a quiet blank place that only stirs to give her body whatever instructions it needs to complete a task, she does not have to think about what gives her sorrow. If she detaches her thoughts from what makes her sad, she can complete her tasks and not remember why it hurts.
If she doesn't think about it, it doesn't count.
Ignoring it until it goes away might be cheap, but that is how Satoko handles her depression, nonetheless.
Hanyuu… is not particularly built for melancholy. She had never learned the words and meanings that were currently thrown hither and yon to describe a person's mental state, and while yes, she grieved, and yes, she held onto her hurt, she did not particularly…
It was hard to describe.
Whatever else she was, Hanyuu was also primarily a spirit long gone, and her emotions did not sustain themselves when she did not think about them.
Of course, she sorrowed for Rika! And of course, her despair was black and deep, growing darker with each failure! But…
Grief was a constant companion, and had been since before her heart had given its last doomed beat and her former vessel sank into the ooze of the swamp. Rika knew joy and life and fun, but Hanyuu was nothing but an observer, an unseen pair of eyes, and had been for so agonizingly long that even her emotions seemed to come to her secondhand, like a tale told or a play being watched.
They struck sudden and bold, sometimes, that is true. She could still feel, with all the raging intensity of the living and the icy depths of divinity. But it was not often; she did not let it.
Hanyuu did not think her heart could handle such a breaking again.
11.49 AM, USA Central Time
