Halstead Imagines

Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

A/N: This was originally a headcanon request I got on tumblr, but it turned into a full-on imagine (request from @ yourfriendlyneighborhoodhufflepuff). As always, thank you for reading, and please remember to vote and comment!

Trigger warning: depression and suicidal thoughts. DO NOT READ IF THIS WILL TRIGGER YOU. I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH. 

It never used to be this bad. Sure, it would happen once in a while, for example, high school geometry class, but it was never a recurring thing. Maybe it's all the homework for subjects you didn't see the point in learning and teaching yourself--after all, it was your freshman year of college--maybe it was that you had to make new friends, hell maybe it was fucking seasonal because it was starting to turn from summer into fall and the days were getting shorter and the nights longer. Sunlight made people feel this way, right? All you knew is that you'd be sitting in class and just staring off into space, hyperfocused on what the professor was saying, but not be able to retain what was being talked about, and then you'd have to go to the bathroom and slow your racing heart.

And then, if that wasn't enough (the hyper-focusing and all the other stuff typically only happened once a week, so you could deal with it), you felt like you wanted to cry all the time and you didn't know why. You'd go home and thank the Lord that Jay was still at work and just slump against your bedroom door and stare off into space, pleading with yourself to cry. But it never came.

The last time you remember feeling like this on a consistent basis was when your dad died four years ago. You had an okay relationship with him (all of Pat Halstead's relationships with his kids were complicated to some extent), but you lived with him up until he died. He was your sole caregiver; your sole parent. Yeah, you didn't agree on some things like moral values and politics, but he was still your dad and you still loved him.

Despite this, you hadn't cried when you found out he died. You had waited three days to cry. You were in the church, standing between Jay and Will in the very first pew when it hit you. You'd never see your dad again. He was actually gone.

You took a sharp intake of breath and grabbed onto Jay's arm. This was the part of the service where everyone was standing up. Jay looked down at you and you crumbled. All the tears you had been holding in came out at that very moment and you buried your head in Jay's chest. He wrapped an arm around you and just rubbed your back. Will noticed ad had grabbed one of your hands and held it. Once you had pulled away from Jay, Will pulled you into his embrace. He kept an arm around for the rest of the service.

But, that was the last time you remembered feeling sad, feeling...whatever the fuck this was. Numb maybe? And that was only for three days. Sure, sometimes around your period, you'd feel like this, but you blamed it on your hormones going crazy because your uterus was shedding since it didn't get a baby to house.

But this had been going on for over six weeks at this point.

This wasn't normal. You knew this. But, you didn't know what it even was that you were feeling. (Was not feeling feelings an actual feeling? Probably not.) So, how would you even go about explaining it to someone?

So, you kept quiet and did what you did whenever you were sad.

Paint and bullet journal. (While listening to sad music and hoping that the tears would come. Spoiler alert: no matter how sad the song was, you still couldn't cry.)

***

4 weeks later

Okay, so you thought this was going to get better, but it had actually gotten worse. Usually, before class, you'd get up half an hour before you actually had to and draw or bullet journal and drink a cup of coffee. Basically, you'd relax before the day started. But, now you just hit snooze. And, eventually, you just pushed your alarm back and slept for half an hour.