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“If you can’t see the ribs, you aren’t trying hard enough.”
The memory of those words, whispered into the silence of a moonless night, felt like a jagged shard of glass lodged in Cricket’s chest. It was a mantra she had curated in the dark, a secret religion of deprivation that had once felt like the only honest thing in a world of HiveWing deception.
Now, as she lay staring up at the vaulted, amber-glass ceiling of the Sanitarium, Cricket felt less like a dragon and more like a shooting star that had finally hit the earth, crashing, burning, and shattering into a thousand irreparable pieces. The sensation of falling wasn't physical anymore; it was psychological. She was plummeting through the layers of her own identity, descending into a version of herself she didn't recognize and, more terrifyingly, a version she despised.
The Sanitarium had been a place of sterile white linens and the cloying scent of medicinal herbs, a gilded cage where the HiveWing healers had meticulously rebuilt her. For months, she had been the centerpiece of their clinical attention, a project in restoration. They had treated her starving body with a frightening level of precision, coaxing her back from the brink of organ failure. Her recovery had been, by all medical accounts, a triumph. She had learned to swallow again, to tolerate the sensation of fullness, to allow the nutrients to seep back into her wasted muscles.
But the victory came with a cruel price. The prolonged starvation had left a lasting scar on her interior; her stomach had suffered partial paralysis, a sluggishness of the digestive tract that made every meal a labor of endurance. She could eat, yes, but the process was often accompanied by a bloating, heavy discomfort; a physical reminder that she had broken herself so thoroughly that she could no longer simply function.
During the height of her fasting, Cricket had viewed her shrinking frame as a masterpiece of discipline. In a life where she felt powerless, where her intellect was often dismissed and her curiosity was viewed as a liability; the control over her own hunger had been her only sanctuary. She had exercised until her wings trembled and fasted until her vision blurred, convinced that the only thing she was truly proficient at in the entire world was the art of disappearing.
Then came the recovery. The weight returned with a relentless, suffocating speed.
One hundred and twenty pounds. That was the number the healers had recorded. To the doctors, it was a miracle of restoration; to Cricket, it felt like a sentence.
She avoided the mirrors in the sanitarium, but when she accidentally caught her reflection in a polished brass basin, she felt a surge of genuine nausea. She didn't see a healthy dragoness; she saw a slab of pork fat. She saw a softness where there should have been the sharp, elegant lines of a scholar. Even though the charts told her she was technically still underweight for a dragoness of her stature, the perception of her own body had become warped. She felt bloated, heavy, and grotesque.
Mathematically, she knew she was still sixty pounds away from being considered 'average' for a leaner HiveWing. In the eyes of the world, she was still frail. But in the oppressive silence of her own mind, she felt immense. She felt an agonizingly visceral need to scrub the weight off her skin, to claw back the emptiness she had worked so hard to achieve.
She wished she could simply be. She wished she could embrace the warmth of a full belly and the strength in her limbs without feeling like she was betraying herself. But the hatred was a cold, living thing, coiled in her gut alongside the paralyzed muscles of her stomach.
Yet, beneath the self-loathing, there was a deeper, more paralyzing fear. It wasn't just the weight; it was the gaze of her parents. The thought of their disappointment, not that she was overweight, but that she might fail to remain 'recovered'- was a weight heavier than any pound of flesh. She lived in a state of perpetual tension, trapped between the desperate urge to return to the purity of starvation and the terror of being sent back to the Sanitarium.