They sat there taunting him as he towelled off after the shower, an innocent looking little square slab which loomed large in his thoughts.
He had refused to touch the scales since other people had forced him to eat their way. At one point they’d been his friend, a satisfying counter to watch ticking down as he slowly mastered his own body. It had become an emblem of control, his departure from triple digits veering into the world of enviable and exotic change. It felt like a way of countering the steadily climbing number that was his age. He didn't see the sunken hollows where flesh had clung to bone, he only saw the sharp edges of steeply defined cheekbones and the echo of refined and dignified models in magazines. The stranger he looked the more he felt it suited his divinity, seeing the divine in things others might consider horrible rather than the plump fit physique of Greek sculpture. That sort of vitality belonged to the angels, to people like Rodney. He was something else, something godly but something darker, something that didn't deserve muscle and health, something that needed to look as hollow as it felt and as immortal and defiant as he needed to be.
When people brought in a dog to his practice, tired looking and dull with its jagged spine jutting through its fur, he had seen something hard to look at, something which had cruelty written on its very flesh. Only when it was animals it was someone else's cruelty, it was someone else's control and brutality. It was wrong, it spoke of cowardice to him and he had equated this with the fact it was projected rather than reflected on the self. Seeing cruelty and control reflected on himself suited him better, it peeled back the flesh of who he didn't want to be and found someone else beneath the flesh, someone closer to the heart (physical only) that he sought.
The dog had been restored through care and attention to the vitality which suited it. He liked dogs. There was something good and truthful in the way they came back despite repeated cruelty, stupid but relentlessly faithful in their stupidity. He had tested his theories himself with his own pets, finding that many would return to him when called long after he'd done everything he could to teach them to fear it. The ones who did not rapidly found themselves thrown into the callous murder machine which called itself rescue, rendered impossible to rehome by their fear and reluctance and put to sleep. He had not felt bad about this, it was after all simply a judgement, weeding out the fallen angels.
Restored, they would be sent to the best homes he had availiable to him and it had been satisfying.
But deep in his very gut he knew he was the opposite of those saved animals, he was something which should never have been saved, which didn't need to be kicked to bite, which didn't need any provocation to turn brutal and ruthless. He controlled himself the way he'd controlled the fiercest dogs, starved and dragged down half unconscious to the floor. It was keeping him alive. In comparison to his own nature, Butch was nothing. Butch was tame. Butch was just the judgement which waited for him at the end of it all like the stagnant ghost of one of the dogs he'd been lunged at by and had put down.
Starvation was a test he had set himself and been passing with flying colours, alive in defiance of the odds, treading a line between life and death.
The anxiety over eating and the hunger pains had become a way of combatting the restlessness when it appeared in him and threatened to make him do things which here would get him killed. It was important, it was life saving, it was what he needed to do.
He looked in the mirror, picking it up to look himself over, lingering only briefly on the scar at his neck. He could already see where the weight was coming back, however subtly, so fixated on it that it was impossible not to see.
Regaining weight was like being forced back into a persona he’d tried to shed. With Jan gone, unable to be maintained on this island so different from the world he’d been created for he was reverting back to Lawrence, finding himself once again thinking the way he had been before the island. Even the dogs, even remembering the goddamn dogs was symptomatic of it. He'd replaced them with cats who didn't trust the same way, who expected only the most glancing care and who simply retreated in fear when harmed. They had helped him forget. Lawrence had loved Mikael and he found himself day by day being nicer, trying harder. Jan liked cats. Jan preferred cats.
Lawrence had kept dogs.
And he had forgotten for so long.
<
He shook his head. It couldn't continue, this debauchery could not be permitted to continue. It needed to end. He wouldn't go back, he wouldn't remember the dogs. He wouldn't remember any of it, he wouldn't let Maja insult him again, he wouldn't try to pretend to be one of them only to fail, only to fail spectacularly in a place which knew what and who he was.
Getting dressed he dried his hair but barely combed it, and looking ruffled and nothing like himself (and nothing like /Lawrence/) he headed for the jungle, not knowing where he was going other than that he needed to be somewhere he didn't need to eat and where they couldn't make him.