My weight had slipped back down into the double digits. Being just about five feet tall, it wasn't really that shockingly low. Although I used to be pudgier, and I had definitely noticed a correlation between the decrease and the regularity of my monthly cycle. Not that I had any reason to keep track of it.
I was skinny, mainly because of constant anxiety and an inability to eat because of it. Judge away, but having a racket of personalities endlessly clashing inside your own head is grounds enough to want to have control over a portion of my life, however small.
My face was still bloated and fat though, especially on Sundays when I threw up the entire contents of a liquor cabinet back into the toilet bowl for the better half of the day. It's fucking typical that I would inherit his propensity for drinking with none of the aspects that would allow me to hold it. No healing to cure the thumping morning-after headache or liver damage I was sure to have.
A day to right myself. Take in fresh air and purge my body of all the poison I'd ingested the night before; the cigarettes, the alcohol I told myself I didn't need. I just liked it, that was all. A few pulls from a bottle of gin in the evening as a nightcap, a way of winding down for bed. Easy enough to take a few more shots, if I was finding it hard to drift off.
Come Monday, I was fresh as a daisy and ready to tackle the week. I was a data analyst at a pharmaceutical company in the city, but mainly worked from a tiny, almost uninhabited office in a basement that looked like it had been the inspiration behind the Gary Heidnik murders. Despite this, I liked my job because it was logical. Things were supposed to add up, and did so gratifyingly often.
The only human contact I had was an enormous guy called Jim, who I was pretty sure didn't have the ability to speak. He sat all day with his over-ear headphones on, face illuminated blue by his screen of statistical data. He was always there when I arrived and didn't leave when I left at the end of the day.
The guy also ate foot-long breakfast subs for every meal and took innumerable bathroom breaks in our one shared lavatory, so I saved my toilet trips for the Starbucks across the street, where I spent every break. On lunch, I would walk for the full hour around the park listening to music, maybe pick up a sandwich if the constant gnaw in my stomach reached a painful level. See, healthy behavior, right?
On Fridays, I would head over to the mansion and work on administration for Xavier because I at least owed the old man that much. Just because he was no longer around, doesn't mean I wasn't still in his debt. Storm would never let me forget that. The apartment I lived in rent-free was his, and I was allowed to stay in it only if I had ties to the cause that put me there. An illusion of independence.
Moria, the resident psychiatrist now Jean was gone, regularly held 'check-ins' with me. Another term of my lease. These were officially to see how I was coping but were actually just another way of keeping me under their control.
She would question me about everything from my daily routine and work-life balance to the details of my every meal and how I was feeling. I always gave her the bare minimum of information, just enough to keep her satisfied and out of my head. A good psychiatrist would have known I was not coping well at all, no matter how well I hid it.
I'd spent at least ten minutes in the mini-mart last week trying to decide on which packet of crackers to buy. Like, crackers are really all the same, right? Same ingredients, same little line of golden baked, salty goodness? Except no. The packets are all different colours, different names; table crackers, water crackers, cream crackers (no cream in them, by the way), cheese crackers, cheese snaps, cheese thins? Suddenly what should have been a simple task turned into an overwhelming one. Every personality seemed to have something to say, a preference. A woman walked behind me, a mom-type, patiently waiting for her chance to get at the shelf, and I could feel myself burning. Like she could feel my inner turmoil by just being near me. Stress osmosis. That was enough to make me leave the store, without anything.
Sometimes, when things got this bad, I wondered if my plural brain would've been better in the regressive. Like his memories. Fragmented and barren, shattered beyond recognition. Only slithers remaining. Nothing familiar, no ties to pull you back to a place, or to people. No wonder he never stayed put.
This week Moria was spouting some nonsense about AA and having a higher power, as if praying to a non-existent god I couldn't even pretend to believe in was a one-way ticket to sober town. Now Moria isn't a path. She can't know I have… dependancies, let's call them. I think she latched on to any small indicator in an attempt to be helpful. Not to me, but the institution. To the people who are paying her. It just sucks she's hitting so close to the mark. Maybe I wasn't as impenetrable as I thought.
Anyway, that particular Friday was difficult. The first in September where all the new kids needed setting up in the system. Piles of inaccurately filled out paperwork and the system crashing was almost the last straw on a very overloaded camel. When the stupid thing rebooted, nothing had saved and I was going to have to start from scratch.
Before I ripped the screen out of the wall by the plug and threw it out of the window, I decided I needed a sanity break, and took my pack of camel lights out onto the patio. This strictly wasn't allowed because of the fire risk and impressionable children, but fuck Storm and fuck her principles. Today it was needed.
I took a deep, calming breath of cigarette smoke and sent a silent prayer up to whatever deity was listening, hopefully the God of malfunctioning electronics. If there was a God for drunks, there must be a God for that, surely?
A text vibrated up my phone in my pocket as a round-eyed child walked past me muttering something about breaking the rules. I flipped the little fucker off as I tapped the ash onto the patio and flicked up my prehistoric phone to check the message. It was from Jubilee.
Have you heard?
I'm going to need some more context, jubes.
He's back.
My body flushed cold. She didn't mean… she couldn't.
I sent her an owl emoji, hoping she would read enough into my bad-tempered sarcasm.
I waited while the three dots bubbled across the little text box, as she typed p-a-i-n-f-u-l-l-y slowly. When the message finally popped up, my worst fears were confirmed.
She did mean him.
The Wolverine was back.