Descent [MC:SM]

1: the path to paradise, and likewise the road to ruin

The meanest dog you'll ever meet, it ain't the hound dog in the street He bares some teeth and tears some skin but brother, that's the worst of him.
The dog you really got to dread is the one that howls inside your head

It's him whose howling drives men mad, and a mind to its undoing

-Hadestown, the musical

***

Jesse came to the conclusion the world wasn't fair too early.

It was dark and stuffy under the blanket, but it muffled the sounds of his mom and the man who was currently staying with them well enough. He wanted all of it to stop: the father figures he thought he could trust before leaving him and his mom in a lost heap, the shouting, watching her cry for hours one day and being too loud the next, staring at the red cuts on her arms, being treated like a nuisance because nobody wanted Natalie's kid, just her, and that ended after some time, so much more.

Nobody wanted the kid who couldn't speak English, much less talk in general, and cried when the noise level got too high, not the kid who had nightmares way too often and sat by himself too much and freaked out when he made a mistake.

It was dark and stuffy under the blanket, but Jesse had Reuben, a fuzzy pink bundle in his lap among all the pain in his broken world. The one constant thing he could rely on, nuzzling into the crook of his arm at night and munching on potatoes right out of his palms and playfully nibbling at him when Jesse cried, trotting at his ankles wherever he went.

Reuben had been the center of his life apart from his mom for a long time, and Jesse felt like he'd been hit with an anvil when he died. Without his pig the loneliness as a child would've been unbearable, and with him gone Jesse felt as though a small portion of him was missing. A year later, he still missed Reuben, still wanted him lying at his feet in the morning, missed the sound of his hooves thumping on the ground beside him.

Jesse had wondered if everything was his fault-- his mom, the pain of the people around him, and as he experienced more what happened to his team during the Portal Hallway, all the deaths since the Witherstorm, and still did.

None of it was fair, the world wasn't fair, what he had to continuously go through wasn't fair, but he had to keep going. For his mom and Olivia, then his sisters and brother, then for Axel and everyone who counted on him to step up and be responsible, to support and be someone who could always support others.

After giving up once and failing, he couldn't let that happen again, no matter how much he wanted to stop, no matter what he needed in the moment. Recently it had started to get worse-- the depression and mania, feeling anxious and PTSD attacks. But Jesse ignored it all, focusing on the needs of those around him, leaving his unstable mental state to fester like a wound.

As if that wasn't enough, Beacontown was rapidly increasing in size and population, and Jesse helped more and more often to cope with what he didn't want to think about. There was also the problem of who would take charge, who would make the decisions for the city as a unit, and he felt very pressured to fill the role more than he unintentionally did. With Beacontown growing in status, more people moved: more arguments he had to settle, more chaos, more projects, more conversations with the mayors of other towns, more work, more problems, more responsibility.

It was getting to be too much to handle. Jesse didn't sleep regularly anymore, maybe eating a snack twice a day, laying awake for hours when he did get a chance to rest, waking up at dawn and returning late in the night. The Order rarely saw him at all, and he backed out of their requests to spend time together.