It just didn't seem real.
Rayne had spent his longest term in hospital yet - it had been well over a year. He'd seen so many people come and go. The lucky ones were only there for a few short weeks and never seen again. The less lucky ones were there for much longer, or left but then returned, or even both. And then there were the ones, not lucky at all but still the best at their trade, whose deathbeds were in the same room as Rayne's bed. He had seen so many bodies just shut down, when the day before they could have been just talking to him, faking friendship. These people didn't do friendship, they were far too competitive.
The whole thing was farcical. He was surrounded by women, mostly young girls in their teens or early 20s - he'd been sick with this disease longer than some of them had been alive. It was very rare than someone older came in, even rarer that another male joined the ranks, and none of them were anywhere near as sick as him - Ray-Nielsen Berry-Jørgensen, otherwise known as Rayne Berry, age 34, sufferer of severe anorexia nervosa, and the biggest fucking question mark his doctors had ever seen. How did he always manage to live, through everything? Rayne had cheated death multiple times, and not just with the anorexia, though he'd lost count of the times that his feeble excuse for a heart had stopped, starved of food and energy, and the doctors had come along and stuck needles in him. He'd taken lethal doses of drugs and survived, carrying on as if it never happened. He'd survived both the Wembley and the Kirsty's bombings, came out injured from under rubble and lived on. But why should he live on, to suffer more, when so many healthy people died? God, if such a being existed, had a very sick sense of humour.
And today, he was due to leave. What a fucking joke. There was no doubt that he'd try, have a few weeks' good behaviour, then slip back into the same old patterns again, then end up in this same bed, and have more wounds reopened, hyperalimentation tubing nearly the width of his body inserted into the same old scars. He'd gradually look less like a corpse, then when he looked human, they'd throw him out.
"I don't want to leave."
The consultant shook his head. "Rayne. Look at all you've achieved, all you've gained ...."
"I've achieved nothing, and I've gained weight." He felt a chill down his already stalactite-like limbs at the thought of how this meant that he was fatter than the girls he was leaving behind, his so-called friends. "I'm the same as I came in, just fatter. How is gaining weight even recovery? You haven't changed my mind about food. Nobody ever will."
"But why would you want to stay in hospital?"
"People know me here. I'm a legend here." The girls on the ward marvelled at how much weight Rayne lost; patients had died at double his weight. He knew all the best tricks to get around being tube-fed, and the skin around their skulls would curl up into smiles when he told them. Rayne also told them of his musical career. Some of the younger girls were interested in being singers, and were always asking him for info on how to get into the industry. He was legendary, yes - but only within the confines of the Bethlem Royal Hospital anorexia ward. "Nobody knows me out there any more. I've never been anything other than an underground musician and a hospital patient. 17 years. Seven-fucking-teen years I've had this disease. Half my fucking life. I don't know what life's like without with a bitch in the brain!"
He went down to the ward to say goodbye to the girls. They couldn't believe that Rayne Berry, star anoretic, was leaving. They smiled and wished him good luck with full recovery, but he saw through it. They weren't happy that he had left, just happy that this officially meant that they were thinner even than him.
Skinny bitches, Rayne thought, but hey, hadn't he done the same to all but one of the people who left before him? And hadn't he seen more people leave than anyone?
"I must be the bitchiest of them all," he said out loud as he limped through the seemingly endless corridors of the hospital. He walked past some people as he spoke, heard them giggle a bit, but it wasn't exactly anything new. This was a mental hospital. You were weird if you didn't talk to yourself.
Finally stepping outside of what had been his home and his prison for so many months, he bumped into a familiar face.
The two stared at each other as if in a contest, neither one giving up. Rayne was more than a little bemused - he knew that Dark Blue Music worked with Bedlam, but he didn't expect to bump into someone in the corridors when he was about to leave.
"Rayne," she said. "Aren't you dead?"
"Yes, Stacy, I died many times, but I have a cheat sheet. I'm like Chuck Norris, I never die."
She gaped at him. "You better not do a roundhouse kick, you might crack something."
"Do you think I'd really care? I cracked a long time ago."
Stacy threw her head back and laughed. "I think I like you more than I did when I was trying to creep you out."
"You did creep me out. Just a little."
The girl gave him a toothy smile. "Good."
Stacy "Blitz" McBlister, a short-term bassist in Madbirds while the late Kitena Dale was off having her baby, and very well-known at Shiny Metal Ass Records (for humping a plastic statue of Bender from Futurama, which she still claimed was the love of her life), prided herself on being scary. She had always been one of Kamikaze Kate's "favourites".
The two of them walked through Bromley, Rayne not entirely sure, and not really caring, where Stacy was leading him. She also spoke very little at why she was visiting Bedlam in the first place. "Routine appointment," was all she said, shrugging it off as if everyone in the world had routine appointments at mental hospitals. However, Rayne was much more talkative. He had to tell someone about what it was like inside - the only other musician he knew who had any idea of the mindsets on the ward was Lucas "Comatose" Robbins (strangely, he knew a lot of female musicians, but the only other one who had shared Bedlam with him was Lukey - not for long, but still, he had been there).
"It's sad in a way," he explained. "I'm sure they were all nice once, but we all turn into competitive bitches, and that's far harder to recover from than the weight loss."
"So you're a bitch too?" Stacy smiled. She looked interested.
"King of the bitches."
"I've got a proposition for you." She held his claw-like hand. "Hey, you're not - going anywhere, are you?"
"No, not really. Just home."
"Well, I'm going to test your bitchiness. I know you're fucking talented, yeah? Just need to know if you're really one of the bitch elite. Your test will be tough."
Rayne laughed. "Bitch elite? You mean like Kate and Nick?"
"Kate and Nick and Cassie, and me of course."
"Who's Cassie?"
Stacy jumped back. They were at Bromley train station, and she almost fell onto the track. She picked herself up, and then stared at Rayne, her eyes bearing into him, just as she had when they met. "Do they REALLY keep you that distanced from the outside world?"
"Yup," came the simple, slightly annoying answer.
"Well, let me just say - 'Who's Cassie?' is NOT a question people ask. Everyone knows who Cassie Bitch is."
As they went to buy tickets, Rayne didn't ask questions, but was entranced by thoughts of this Cassie, whoever she was.
Why is she so important? How did she gain the name "Bitch"? Is she a lot like Kate and Nick? Will I like her? Despite having no idea who she was until a matter of minutes ago, he had to know every little thing about her. To him, the name "Cassie Bitch" now stood for something which mattered a lot - the bridge between the outside world and the "bitch in the brain".
((OOC : First Cassie Bi[k]tch post coming next!))
