jeriendhal | Spin Recovery, Part Nineteen

The next day, searching for a project that would both keep him occupied and out of his mother and sister’s way, Rufus decided to dedicate himself to getting back into shape. Eating three square meals a day for more than a fortnight had gone a long way towards filling out his ribs, but now he was starting to worry about his new weight going to his stomach rather than his muscles. Already his house uniform had filled out, and he found himself having to loosen his belt by a notch to make it comfortable.

Towards that end he decided take up a program of exercise, to return himself to something like the athletic vigor of his youth. He settled on jogging, since weightlifting was pretty much out with his singular arm, and it would give him a legitimate excuse to be out of the house for a bit.

The first day of his attempted self-improvement proved less than auspicious. For one thing it was raining, a constant spring drizzle that encouraged saner folk to stay inside. For another, he had set himself an initial goal of a five kilometer run, something he had accomplished easily in his youth and days as a military recruit. This time though, he hadn’t gone five hundred meters before he found himself leaning against a fencepost, gasping for breath as the rain intensified, pouring down on him in near solid sheets. It felt as if he was trying to breathe through a hole in his chest. After he caught his breath he started walking, trying to pace out the remaining distance.

Den Mother bless, how can I be this out of shape? Rufus felt his stomach knot up and he began to shiver as the rain wetted the comfortable grey ship knits he was wearing, then soaked the fur underneath. He plodded forward, mud sticking to his footpads and the fur between his toes, ignoring the occasional passing skimmer. Soon he had to pause again, plopping down to a sitting position as a wave of dizziness passed. Checking his bearings and the pedometer clipped to waistband of his pants proved disheartening. He had barely gone a kilometer.

Should just turn around and go home. Need a spike to shake this off. The thought ran through his head unbidden and unexpected. Worse, it took him several moments before his reasoning caught up with it and he saw the danger in it. He started shaking worse, this time out of fear, not the cold. Where did that come from? He had been clean for weeks, helped along by a placebo that Doctor Redfur had prescribed. It hadn’t erased the constant want that he continually felt, but it had helped shove it down to a point where Rufus could operate without the constant worry about where he would get his next hit.

The old junkie’s mnemonic ran through his mind, ”One spike, makes it all right.” He could remember, with painful clarity, how finding that next hit when his stash had run low could become an all consuming obsession. How the brief pain of the injector’s needle entering his vein disappeared as soon as the Juno began to work its magic, erasing all fears and cares, leaving him focused for the fight.

Or more often just happy to lie back in bed and stare at the ceiling until I pissed in my pants, he thought savagely, shamefully. He pushed himself up out of the mud and started trudging forward again.

Some two hours later he made it back to the Manor, waiting briefly in front of the servant’s entrance as he stood on the welcome mat, listening to its near subsonic hum as it shook off the mud from under his feet and between his toes. He was shaking, his breathing was labored, his head was pounding and he couldn’t actually feel his fingers or toes anymore, but he had walked the entire distance of his planned route without either collapsing in a heap or calling for a driver to pick him and take him home.

Stepping inside, he ran straight into Bethany, who had evidentially been summoned by a servant who had seen him approaching the house.

“Rufus, by the Holy Den Mother, you’re soaked through! Where have you been?” she demanded, her voice a mixture of fear and exasperation.

He sneezed loudly, wiped his nose on the back of his soaking sleeve and cleared his throat. “Jogging,” he replied, listening to himself drip on the marble floor.

“In the pouring rain? You do know we have a treadmill in the exercise room, don’t you?”

He blinked. Ah, of course they did. “I’d forgotten,” he replied, then after sneezing again added, “besides, I thought the fresh air would do me good. Pardon me, Beth, but I’d like to get upstairs and change out of these things, if I could.” He bowed briefly and brushed past her, heading up the stairs and to his room, where he stripped out of his soaked knits and settled into a blessedly warm bathtub. After spending a few minutes with just the tip of his nose above the water, he felt more Vulpish and less like a drowned corpse.

By the Den Mother, she must think he was a lunatic by now, he thought soberly. Well, maybe he was. He wasn’t quite back to some of the more paranoid moments of his deep addiction, when the question of Where’s my stash? trumped anything resembling common sense, but she was right about there being a perfectly serviceable treadmill, not to mention a variety of other exercise equipment, in the house. Could he make her understand how such a huge home such as theirs could seem small and confining, when he felt so ashamed to be here?

That brought him back around to his failure of the night before, trying to convince her of his twin brother’s existence. I keep acting like this, she’s really going to wonder if I’ve blown an oxygen feed to my brain.

Well, the only way he could prove his sanity to her was by example, which meant he really ought to start acting more responsible and apologize to the other woman he’d insulted last night.

“Computer, open a com line, voice only,” he called out. He rattled off Hazel’s home com code and waited for the connection to be made.

A smooth, feminine AI voice answered his call. I’m sorry to report that your com code has been blocked. Please do not attempt to call this location again.

I should be more surprised than I am. He had truly managed to upset her, apparently. Well, at least there was one way he could still try to apologize to her, and with her crutches she wasn’t likely to be able to outrun him.

TBC