Work Text:
You've been in here for too long.
You feel it in your joints, the slight ache from being positioned like this for so long. You don't check the time, but you're fairly sure you've been in here for about an hour now. You can't help but sink a little further into the water. It's too cold, it's been that way for too long. Without adjusting to devastatingly you turn the water back on. After a few moments you can feel the water slowly start to warm. It's too hot, your skin starts to sting but you don't mind it too terribly. It's become a comfort.
Your name is Rose Lalonde and you are not feeling your best.
In all honesty, you haven't been feeling so great for quite some time now. You've just had a fog looming around you, making everything just a little more.. Difficult. You've been more sluggish, your smiles have been selective and forced at best, and you've failed to do the things you enjoy in quite some time.
With your hobbies, you know this feeling probably has a scientific name and an easy way to deal with it. You also know it would be wise to bring this up to someone. (Then again, who would you even bring it up to? Your mother?) But you lack the motivation. You lack the motivation to deal with that like you lack the motivation to climb out of the bathtub.
In some ways, it feels almost poetic. You'll slip your head under the water and just like that you're submerged. Just like the way this feeling submerges your mental state.
At least with the water you can pull your head up before you drown. If only you had the motivation to pull yourself up mentally.
But it's far easier to let the water soak into your mind, let it seep down into your day until it starts becoming a chore just to sit through your day to day life. Things you enjoyed don't bring the same smile to your face. If they encourage one at all.
Maybe you're already drowning and you just don't care. Sure, You don't enjoy the demons that crawl through the water, circling your thought processes like sharks drawn to blood, but in the quiet moments, in the silence of the night with the shadows looming around you and the weight of the day weighing down on your shoulders, they're the only comfort you have.
You reflect on how even sleep has become a chore, just like the rest of your day. If only you could sleep here, with the warm embrace of actual water to lull you into a calm, numb state and the feeling that somehow it's easier to deal with everything in here. Detached from the world, able to hide from the planet's woes with a dunk of your head. Soaking yourself into the stinging water that's too hot. It becomes the most pressing issue you have to deal with, and you wish it could stay that way.
But you're already pushing on being in here for too long. Your mother's going to start worrying, pestering you about how you are, attempting heart-to-hearts that feel forced, tainted with the stench of alcohol on her breath. (You wonder why she bothers, you're hardly certain she even cares. You suppose the sentiment is appreciated nevertheless.)
As you have every night this week, you sit up with the choppy movements of a broken-down robot and start to drain the tub.
You hug your knees as you watch the water swirl down, away and out of your life. With the same, repetitive structure you've used for several nights now, you let a few quiet tears roll down your cheeks. The water rushing down the drain covers any soft sounds you make. Shuddering breaths swirl down the drain, chasing the bathwater and your tears.
This way you have the excuse of the water to cover up for it. You can blame the bath for your red face or the liquid on your cheeks. You weren't crying, no. You're Rose Lalonde. You don't cry. You don't have cracks, you help your friends fix theirs. You know how to do it, you've done it plenty of times. Carefully patched their pieces together and smiled when they stood back up. You don't crack.
And yet, as you watch the water swirl away and feel the cold bite of the air around you, you do. You crack in the solitude of a small room with a locked door. Perhaps this is why you can't bring yourself to tell anyone about this. You've got an image to uphold. You can't let your friends see you shatter, so you'll stay strong.
You'll wrap yourself up and climb into your pajamas, slink your way into your room, and curl up in your bed. You'll pull the fluffy blankets around you and wish they bit your skin like the hot water did, but they never do. They offer some sort of false comfort that you suppose you should enjoy. But you don't.
You pretend you're asleep all you want, but you're awake for hours. Balanced on your sinking life raft, batting sharks away. Squeezing your eyes shut and counting the sharks in the hopes you'll drift off before the sun rises and marks the start of a new day you'll have to drag your way through, demons following your every step and shattered porcelain clattering to the floor.
You're Rose Lalonde and you are fine.