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Don't be mistaken, Connor enjoyed his life.
He had coworkers who respected him and what he did. He had a group of people who he enjoyed spending time with. He painted with Markus. He went out to eat with Gavin and Nines. He watched movies with Hank. He let Sumo use him as a pillow. He enjoyed all of this.
But recently he'd just been… tired. He didn't really know when it started.
He knew that his therapist would always ask him, "on a scale of 1-10, 1 being very good and 10 being very bad, how has your depression been?" And that was helpful for them. Because when he first started seeing her, everything was very hard. He always felt like he was on the verge of a breakdown, and he began to understand what Hank meant when he said "the straw that broke the camel's back." Because people hated him, and he hated himself, and every so often when things got really bad…. He'd consider ending it. Hank never let that happen, of course.
But the scale helped, then. Because things were very bad. He would say "8" and they would talk, and he would cry, and it helped.
And now he was… he was okay. He would say "4" because he wasn't weighed down by self hatred. When he had time to himself, it wasn't spent sobbing because "I just don't think I can handle it anymore". It was spent reading, or drawing, or listening to music. He'd learned that he really liked music.
But in the back of his mind, every so often, he thought the scale wasn't really working anymore.
It began when he started dating Gavin. Things were good, great even. He truly did love Gavin, and so did Nines, and they understood each other in ways others didn't. And that was a great development for him. Because there was a period of time where everything was duller, and more painful. Where everything was either exhausting, or a needed reprieve from the world.
After dealing with that, it's so exciting to be excited about something, for the sole reason because he wanted to be. Not because he needed a break from the world, from his own thoughts, but because he had something he actually cared about.
And then things got hard.
It wasn't even something big. It wasn't like he and Gavin had never had fights before. They used to hate each other, after all. It was the kind of thing that he could normally come back from very quickly. The kind of thing where he knew they really just needed to talk about it, without all of the frustration that gets bubbled up when you find something out about each other that you weren't expecting. They could compromise, because that's what you need to do in a relationship, in order to make it work.
And he'd been feeling good. He'd been feeling like he was at about a 4. But that argument was kind of like hitting a roadblock after missing all of the signs telling you the street was under construction. It was eye opening, in a way. Because it didn't say anything about his relationship with Gavin like Hank had thought. It was a realization about where he was actually in his recovery.
It wasn't like being suicidal.
Because he still had those things he enjoyed doing. And he was still excited about his new relationship. But it was jarring to realize that he'd kind of been using it as a distraction, in a way. Because he realized that he'd been very tired this whole time. And he should have known that, from the way he never woke up with a full charge. From the way he began avoiding watching movies with Hank, because he knew that they would be too emotionally intense for him. It wasn't that he didn't like those kinds of movies, he loved them. But he always made the excuse that he was just distracted. That he was just excited about his new relationship. But he knew now, that he was just too tired to get invested in an emotional story like he wanted to, like he knew he would.
And maybe it could be considered a sign of progress, that he subconsciously knew what he needed to avoid. He wished it could have been more conscious, though. Maybe then he wouldn't be here.
'Here' being his apartment, listening to music, staring at the bedsheets. He hadn't known why, but he knew that the music he'd been listening to had gotten sadder recently. And it was hard to explain, when Nines came home, why he was leaning against the side of the bed with tears running down his face. Because he wasn't sad. He was just tired. And maybe he was sad, about being tired, but not about anything else. Because it was hard to explain that the music had reached a climax that he understood in a way he thought androids couldn't, with a realization about himself that he really should have had a long time ago.
(It was a good thing, then, that androids could interface. If it had been a human, he probably would have just cried the rest of the night without knowing why)
He knew why the scale didn't work anymore. It was because when they used it, it was — for him — a measure of how suicidal he felt. And when he got out of that slump, that idea never really went away.
"But the question isn't 'how suicidal are you,'" Nines explained gently, cradling Connor's head in his lap. "The question is "how bad is your depression?" Apathy and mental exhaustion are both important parts of clinical depression." And he knew that. But it was hard to quantify how bad something was, when it didn't feel bad. He knew it was bad, but it just didn't feel like it. That was the problem.
Nines went with him to therapy that week. "8" He said. "I think… it has been for a while now."
When he saw Gavin the next day, he was not excited.
That's progress, he said. It'll be okay.