Work Text:
It’s like a wave.
It swallows you whole, approaching from the distance like a tsunami. All you see is the tides receding, new bright treasures shown from the sand. And then, all at once, you’re swallowed by the water. It’s a wall of impassiveness, and inside the brunt force of the wave is nothing but empty air that still tosses you around and around and around. You choke and gag and drown on the grey of the wave, body lax even as your lungs ache for air. It doesn’t feel like drowning at first, you feel light and strange, as if numbness to even the sadness is poured over you. Your fingers run through the not-water and feel nothing. Your hair is tossed in the current and you feel no joy. Your limbs are tangled so that you can’t tell your left foot from your right, and you still can’t feel anything but the water pressing against your lungs.
You don’t eat.
When you have dinner with the three of them, you barely eat half of what they have on their plates. Sometimes, you’ll go out at a restaurant, and you won’t order anything but an appetizer.
Hanzo is by no means a glutton, keeping track of what he eats and how much so he can stay in peak physical shape. Jesse, on the other hand, eats anything and everything in sight. Gabriel is much the same as Hanzo, although he even out eats Jesse trying to feed his enhanced body. It’s a good trait, coming in handy when one of you makes too much food, or when you’re too afraid to finish the last bites of your meal.
Jesse will scoop up the last bits of whatever you eat at your request, humming in delight as he presses a quick kiss to your cheek. The sight always makes your other two lovers smile, but on the inside, a twinge of worry stirs in their chest.
Gabriel’s abuela always comments on your eating habits. You eat more than normal around her to please her, but by midnight you are kept awake, pacing and taking deep breaths as the panic spreads through you. You’ll tell your partners to go to bed, but as always on bad nights, at least one of them will keep vigil with you. They’ll sit by you, refilling your cup with more water as it empties and accompanying you if it’s bad enough for a midnight walk. On the worst nights, when you’re certain you might throw up, they’ll be there to rub your back as you shake and cry and swallow water and more antacids at a snail’s pace. Sometimes, they’ll even help you break the medicine into halves, so you can have less to swallow at once.
But sometimes, you just don’t eat. You’re meticulous with pacing yourself, always leaving at least an hour between the times you eat something. However, after any sort of extended travel or stressful event, the weeks afterwards are filled with sporadic eating. You’ll eat for breakfast, and only eat again nearly six or more hours later when you’re angry and bitter and so starving your entire chest feels caved in. You eat just enough to quell the starvation, and then repeat the cycle.
Sometimes, you binge eat. You eat enough to be full and more, and then take long midnight walks. You eat more and more, and then worry in the shower that you’re putting on extra weight. Soon, you eat all through the day, and all night, every worrisome thought taken away with an extra forkful of dinner.
It worries them. Jesse tries to remind you of meal times, hands coming to rub your shoulders. Hanzo will research recipes for the most nutritionally filling dishes, attempting to make up for all of your missed meals. Gabriel is the one who does the most of the actual cooking, seeing as you all agree that he makes the best food.
Even then, you don’t eat. When you eat less than half a bowl of mac and cheese and don’t even scoop around in the pot for extras as per your usual routine, they begin to watch you. And they worry.
You’ve stopped sleeping.
You stay up late, always playing some video game with a deadpan look, quitting after becoming bored and moving on to the other, cycling through your four favorites within the hour. In the wee hours of the morning, when Jesse comes into the kitchen for his midnight snack, he always ruffles your hair and kisses your cheek before telling you to head to bed soon. You’d smile and assure him that you’ll be there in a minute. When Gabriel gets up for his early morning water and bathroom break, he rubs your shoulder without saying anything. You hum, and tell him that yes, you’re going to bed. An hour after he comes by, you finally crawl into bed, two hours shy of Hanzo’s awakening time.
At first, this is a rare occurrence. You love your sleep, and get hideously cranky without it. You’re usually the first or the second in bed, and your lovers know better than to take up your spot, surrounded by pillows and blankets and the numerous fans in the room cooling your body and bed from the amount of body heat produced by four different people. Your bedtime cuddles are your haven, your perfection.
It takes something enrapturing to take you away from that, almost always a video game or occasionally a very good fanfiction. Your lovers might tease you if the mood is light, making sure to remind you that they’ll steal your spot if you don’t hurry up and come to bed. They never do, privy to your wrath and ire too many times to risk taking your spot.
When staying up to three or four in the morning becomes a regular occurrence, it fills them with concern. They begin to try and coerce you into bed with promises of extra love and kisses. When that doesn’t work, they try to bribe you with having Hanzo be the one to cuddle you goodnight, him being the least hot out of the three and the rarest to get cuddles from. When you begin to reject even that, saying that you’ll be there in a minute and slithering into bed at five am, they try to brush it aside. Everyone has off days, says Gabriel. Nothing wrong with staying up late, says Jesse. They are just interested in a new game, says Hanzo.
You start to fall asleep on the couch, never crawling into bed, passing out when your body gets too tired. You start taking naps in the middle of the day, becoming lethargic only two hours after you wake up. They worry more.
You’ve lost your passion.
With everything else, it starts slow. Just to you, though. Your favorite games, once able to play for hours upon end, are now boring after just twenty minutes. You rapidly switch between games, until you give up, settling for reading instead.
Your favorite fanfictions are no longer funny. What once brought an overeager smile to your face, now brings nothing. Works, once filled with joy and nostalgia, fail to spark anything inside you. The only thing you read is angst, and not even the ones with happy endings give you energy.
You can’t maladaptive daydream anymore. The music that once inspired bright, colorful fantasies and daydreams now feels like noise in your ears. Whatever hyperfixation you had slowly fades away, and you try to grasp onto it, digging in with all your strength, but it’s not enough. The fantasies stop coming, the ideas stop flowing. Your daydreams look more like a blank slate instead of the wondrous pictures and stories you had created for yourself. Instead of going to the park or on a walk or even pacing around your room, you sit in silence, the endless music that flowed out of whatever device you were currently using suddenly paused.
When you stop writing, your lovers take notice. On your best days, you were proud to show them everything you had written, from your cheesiest fluff to your filthiest smut. When you suddenly stop showing them your works, they noticed. And when you gradually started writing less and less, the sounds of typing absent from your workspace, they finally converged and began to talk.
They are so worried about you.
You’re eating is nothing like it used to be, binging one week and starving the next. You don’t do anything fun anymore, rejecting any and all chances to go outside, instead staying in and staring at the TV for hours on end. You stay up, sleeping on the couch instead of crawling into bed, going days without showering when it used to be the second thing you did in the morning. You’ve stopped engaging in sexual activities, which was normal for you, your libido often leaving for days at a time, but it had been nearly two months without any sort of action. And worst of all, you had stopped paying attention to them.
You gradually gave less and less kisses, and became more and more distracted as time went on. You opted out of going out on dates to stay at home, insisting that you were just tired. You hugged them less and less, and your conversations began to decline. Once able to ramble on with each other for hours now turned into small, two minute conversations. Eventually the only way they could get you to acknowledge them at all is by getting right up in your face, Jesse once having to go so far as to shake you out of your trance. You still say I love you, and you still pat their arms when passing in the hallways, but that is all they’ve gotten from you in nearly three weeks. They go to bed with your side cold, still left open after all this time.
It all comes to a peak. Gabe and Hanzo are reading, part of their bedtime routine. Jesse is curled up beside Gabe, until suddenly, he rolls over onto your side. Gabriel and Hanzo look over, an unspoken rule now broken, and they stare until they realize Jesse’s shoulders are shaking, muffled sobs suddenly escaping. That night, they all talk for a long, long time, every person spilling tears at least once. It’s all about you, about why you’ve withdrawn from everything and everyone. Gabriel wants to go downstairs and bring you back up, but Hanzo rejects the idea, saying that you’ll be better rested in the morning. They all settle in together, Jesse’s body taking up your side of the bed, and Gabe and Hanzo have at least one limb in the area as well.
You open your eyes, and wake up.
It never really gets that bad. You skip eating, sure, but never for more than five hours. You lose sleep, but you’re always in bed by one thirty. Your passions aren’t gone, but dulled. You don’t know if you’ve ever seen Jesse cry. The only thing that is perfectly correct about the dream you had, is how much they worry about you.
They hold you and night and don’t understand why you’re still reading at midnight. You’re bossy and snappy and rude and they still put up with you. They hold your hand over dinner and when you apologize for being so out of it they tell you that they love you, so much. And when you come home from work and you’re so tired you fall asleep until dinner, you always seem to wake up to one of them spooning you from behind, hands on your hips and breathing soft near your ear. It’s too much, sometimes.
You don’t cry, because you force the feelings of self-pity away from you, and that is what makes you so cold, this time around. But they understand that, as far away from them it is, and they don’t mind it at all. They hold you and play games with you and they encourage you to talk, no matter how much your mind tells you to stay quiet.
You don’t want to look embarrassing. You don’t want to be somebody who’s always complaining about their mental health. You’re afraid you’ll lose them if you’re actually yourself, sometimes. You don’t talk because at the core of it, you don’t want them to know that you hurt, even if it’s written in every single thing you do.
And they understand that, on a basic level. Gabriel understands not wanting to have feelings, having to turn them off to do things that would make your stomach churn. Hanzo understands the need to hide one’s self, to put yourself behind a wall that others cannot understand. Jesse understands the need to look perfect, to be everything you want to be so nobody can tell you that you’re not strong enough.
They don’t tell you this alright, but you read it in every hug, every kiss, every good night and every good morning. And when the time flies, the emptiness never really goes away. But it recedes, like the tide, and the sands that were swallowed in the waves sparkle in the dawn.