Like most days where ‘heroes’ feel down, this was hardly anything special. It was raining and cold and every so often a bolt of lightning would light up the sky. Given that America wasn’t fond of cold weather in the first place, he was understandably less than thrilled when he glanced up from a governmental report to look out the window.
Sighing, he closed the curtains and hoped the thunder wouldn’t be too loud.
Murphy’s Law wouldn’t even allow that small mercy. After all, if it was already an awful day, why on earth should the Universe be inconsistent? So Mother Nature of course had to kick it up a notch, the thunder louder than ever, the rain pouring down at an almost obsessive rate.
America just sighed again, leaning closer to his papers, trying his hardest not to get distracted. It was already hard enough to see, as his eyesight had just been getting worse and he needed a new prescription, but he had a migraine on top of it.
So, naturally, right when he was trying to finish up the report, the lights cut out.
Realizing that there wasn’t much he could do, he just laid backwards and gave up for the day. He had a vague hope that tomorrow would be better, but knew in his heart that, like all the days before it, it’d still be full of people who either didn’t appreciate him, expected too much of him (or worse, too little), or just plain didn’t like him.
He drifted off into an uneasy sleep, the thunder fortunately kept at bay by the loudness of his dreams.
---
America woke late. He knew very well that he’d just been sleeping later and later, and that maybe he should stop, lest he get in the habit of getting more than five hours of sleep as he’d been doing for the longest time, but it just felt so good to escape for so long.
Still, when his boss called only a few minutes after America had woken, the nation couldn’t help but feel a bit depressed.
“Did you finish reading the report I sent you last night?” his boss asked in the ‘Presidential’ tone that America had grown to hate.
“The power cut off,” America tried to explain. “But I got the gist of it. More tax cuts for everyone, huh?”
“If you’d actually finished the paper you’d have known that I also proposed a few more trading regulations. We can slow the debt accumulation by at least fifteen percent—”
“Yeah, I know,” the nation replied, rubbing at his forehead. “But we need to start paying it off as soon as possible. The economy isn’t going to get better until we fix it. And I don’t want to just keep piling it up for the next generation!” He sighed, realizing how harsh he’d sounded. “Sorry, sir. I’m just… really, really tired of feeling the economy get worse. It’s about to the point where it’ll make me physically ill, you know?”
The president stayed quiet for a while. “Well, maybe if you actually showed up to the meetings in D.C. and proposed these things, you’d get some more ground.”
America tried to protest—tried to tell him that he wasn’t supposed to interfere—but before he could get more than a strangled “But sir!” out, the president hung up.
He stared at the phone for a while, wishing he had the nerve to call back, to yell at his president and say that if he couldn’t even treat his nation’s representation right then how was he supposed to treat the actual people right, but America felt too tired to much of anything. He fell back against his pillow, fully intending to sleep the rest of the day away, if just for a break.
Dreams and nightmares and the vaguely creepy, vaguely twisted parts in between kept waking him up, though, and by midday, he gave up. He scanned over the report again, fully expecting to see an actual proposal of trade regulation. Near the bottom, he saw it—half a sentence, maybe, and used words such as ‘if’ and ‘perhaps’ to explain it.
Insecurities and Depression 1a/?
---
Like most days where ‘heroes’ feel down, this was hardly anything special. It was raining and cold and every so often a bolt of lightning would light up the sky. Given that America wasn’t fond of cold weather in the first place, he was understandably less than thrilled when he glanced up from a governmental report to look out the window.
Sighing, he closed the curtains and hoped the thunder wouldn’t be too loud.
Murphy’s Law wouldn’t even allow that small mercy. After all, if it was already an awful day, why on earth should the Universe be inconsistent? So Mother Nature of course had to kick it up a notch, the thunder louder than ever, the rain pouring down at an almost obsessive rate.
America just sighed again, leaning closer to his papers, trying his hardest not to get distracted. It was already hard enough to see, as his eyesight had just been getting worse and he needed a new prescription, but he had a migraine on top of it.
So, naturally, right when he was trying to finish up the report, the lights cut out.
Realizing that there wasn’t much he could do, he just laid backwards and gave up for the day. He had a vague hope that tomorrow would be better, but knew in his heart that, like all the days before it, it’d still be full of people who either didn’t appreciate him, expected too much of him (or worse, too little), or just plain didn’t like him.
He drifted off into an uneasy sleep, the thunder fortunately kept at bay by the loudness of his dreams.
---
America woke late. He knew very well that he’d just been sleeping later and later, and that maybe he should stop, lest he get in the habit of getting more than five hours of sleep as he’d been doing for the longest time, but it just felt so good to escape for so long.
Still, when his boss called only a few minutes after America had woken, the nation couldn’t help but feel a bit depressed.
“Did you finish reading the report I sent you last night?” his boss asked in the ‘Presidential’ tone that America had grown to hate.
“The power cut off,” America tried to explain. “But I got the gist of it. More tax cuts for everyone, huh?”
“If you’d actually finished the paper you’d have known that I also proposed a few more trading regulations. We can slow the debt accumulation by at least fifteen percent—”
“Yeah, I know,” the nation replied, rubbing at his forehead. “But we need to start paying it off as soon as possible. The economy isn’t going to get better until we fix it. And I don’t want to just keep piling it up for the next generation!” He sighed, realizing how harsh he’d sounded. “Sorry, sir. I’m just… really, really tired of feeling the economy get worse. It’s about to the point where it’ll make me physically ill, you know?”
The president stayed quiet for a while. “Well, maybe if you actually showed up to the meetings in D.C. and proposed these things, you’d get some more ground.”
America tried to protest—tried to tell him that he wasn’t supposed to interfere—but before he could get more than a strangled “But sir!” out, the president hung up.
He stared at the phone for a while, wishing he had the nerve to call back, to yell at his president and say that if he couldn’t even treat his nation’s representation right then how was he supposed to treat the actual people right, but America felt too tired to much of anything.
He fell back against his pillow, fully intending to sleep the rest of the day away, if just for a break.
Dreams and nightmares and the vaguely creepy, vaguely twisted parts in between kept waking him up, though, and by midday, he gave up.
He scanned over the report again, fully expecting to see an actual proposal of trade regulation. Near the bottom, he saw it—half a sentence, maybe, and used words such as ‘if’ and ‘perhaps’ to explain it.
America crumpled up the paper and threw it away.