i'll face the weather before me [adrian/zedekiah]

tw: mention of alcoholism, abuse, depression and antidepressants

-----

Fuck it, you tell yourself. You've decided that if Adrian is going to avoid you, and seemingly everyone else, there must be something wrong, at least when he's doing it to this extent. He's barely shown up to school. He hasn't been at training from what you've seen, and he isn't answering any of your phone calls or messages. It's gotten to the point that you've made the decision to just show up at his house.

It's been a while since you last saw him. That was back when he was having issues with Killua. He'd come over to your house, and you'd basically snuck him in so that your father wouldn't know. Adrian was a friend of yours, and you cared about him. If he was going through shit again, you wanted to figure out what was wrong. You actually wanted to help.

Having been someone who was pretty aloof most of your life, having a person you actually cared about this much was strange, but it just made sense to care about Adrian. You weren't sure why, but it did. You suppose your reason for not caring about people for so long was because you were such an alcoholic. All you ever focused on was drinking and avoiding things you didn't want to deal with, like your father's abusive tendencies that he always took out on you.

It got to the point where the only thing you ever did was drink and focus on your own needs. Since Adrian showed up as a more prominent part of your life, though, you'd become more of a genuine person. Life just seemed more real to you now. More important. More… enjoyable. You'd basically stopped drinking at this point, knowing how much it bothered Adrian.

It'd been a tough journey, but now you only ever drank in the social situations that really called for it, like drinking a celebratory glass of wine when your father had a really good sales week at work— you didn't really have a choice then, or a beating would be in order. You had to celebrate your father's successes, even if he never actually celebrated yours.

Did you really ever have very many successes? Not really, but they did happen on occasion, like when you moved on to the next level for something involved in your training, or when you won a sparring match that everyone was certain you'd lose. Your father didn't care about those things, though, of course. He was too narcissistic. He only focused on himself.

Standing at Adrian's door, you had a backpack slung over your back. Usually, in past times, it would've contained alcohol. This time, it just contained your training gear, a spare change of clothes and some other essentials in case you ended up needing them, like some cash and your medication that you took for your depression.

Your father thought that taking medication for mental health wasn't necessary. He always said you could just work through it if you were strong enough. So, your father wouldn't pay for it. That meant you had to make the money to get it yourself, which you'd actually been able to do recently since you stopped spending your spare cash on alcohol.

You didn't know what you and Adrian would end up talking about or doing, if anything at all, but you figured that your training gear was there in case he didn't want anything to do with you. You'd just go train if that were the case.

Tap, tap, tap. You knocked on Adrian's door and waited for someone to answer, hoping it would be Adrian and not his father. You'd gotten better at communicating with people that made you uncomfortable as of recently, but you really didn't want to talk to Adrian's father if you didn't have to.

-----