Chapter Text
It's been three weeks since that affair with the X-Men, three weeks since she contemplated her own miserable life without attracting the attention of a single telepath, and Nell's life hasn't exactly gotten better.
It has also been three weeks since she has left her room so, yeah, definitely not better. She avoids her roommates, venturing out only in the dead of night to scarf down some dry cereal or unseasoned instant noodles, though the thought of food alone is enough to make her gag. She's lost weight, she knows she has, even though her floor length mirror has been thrown onto the floor and she tries not to look at herself in the bathroom mirror. The first week her phone vibrated almost around the clock, but she ignored it until it died and hasn't had the care to charge it. Her roommates care, she knows they do, but the door is locked and their lives are busy, and besides, they're not even particularly close; they're not friends. As for her friends, well. She's been ghosting them for a longer time than she's been depressed, so she may not even have friends. And once her savings run out and she can't pay rent she's not going to have roommates either. Whatever.
She hasn't had the care to do much of anything, just lying in bed and staring at the wall, taking a shower every few days maybe. Her hair, though, her hair has reached unprecedented levels of greasiness. It's the longest it's been since the Great Fall and also the least healthy, all splits ends and clumps and tangles. Just a month ago the idea would have been unimaginable. Now it's nothing. Everything is nothing.
Her laptop is the only thing in her room that gets any use, constantly plugged in on a winter coat she neither needed nor wore and has been meaning to donate for the past two months. She checks it about as much as she showers, usually just to remind herself how many assignments she is behind on, how many classes she's missed. How much she is ruining her own life and how, deep at her core, she doesn't even particularly want to go back to it once this dark cloud passes. If it passes. And isn't that something? Nell has a good life, she knows she does, and yet the idea of returning to it makes her want to rot. Not even the idea of having to fix this whole mess, either. If she could go back to her life before all this, back to being top of her class at a university she likes, back to the degree she gushed about and the job she adored, back to being a part-time X-Man? She wouldn't.
She wouldn't.
The thought makes her sit up. The action makes her back twinge.
During her recovery, first at a hospital in Laos and then back in the mansion, all she had wanted to do was go back to how things had been. But now, less than a year later and she dreads the thought. She is twenty years old, and just barely. She has her whole life ahead of her; this does not have to be that life. The thought stirs new life into her and she feels invigorated, though standing makes her realise how fucking hungry she is. Brushing the thought aside, she looks around her room. The floor is not particularly dirty, given she hasn't been eating in here or changing clothes. Everything feels suddenly manageable, but wholly unimportant. Her life needs to change, and it needs to start in this room. This musty, dirty room.
She picks up a skirt, holding it out for inspection. It's short, preppy, similar to a lot of her clothes. Does she like these clothes? Or is this what she wears because this is What Nell Wears. Nell wears preppy oversized sweaters and cute skirts and pulls leg warmers over her boots so they don't stand out as much, puts ribbons and clips into her hair and puts on sparkly lip gloss and brown contacts and wears reading glasses even though she barely ever reads. Nell goes to every class and every party. But how much of that is actually her, and how much of it is some performance, how much is a disguise? Leg warmers to hide her boots, long sleeves to hide her burn scars, contacts to hide her eyes. Skirts that are inconvenient to run in so no one could consider her a threat, hair worn differently than Meteorite so no one could ever conflate the two. Is this how she plans to live the rest of her life? The whole point of reaching out to the academy and joining the X-Men was to embrace her differences, to not have to hide, so why is she doing it now, when she is stronger than she has ever been and will only get stronger?
Somewhere beneath all this is the real her. Or a more genuine version of her at least. She just has to find it.
The skirt gets tossed aside as she marches into the bathroom. Her hair is a uniform length, reaching her chest, and is practically dripping with grease. Change starts here.
Ten minutes later she stands in front of the mirror in only a towel, wet hair hanging limp. She rifles around in her cabinet until she finds her haircutting kit, pulling out the scissors; these split ends have got to go. Though, as she holds the scissors up she hesitates. She could lob off and inch and continue as it was, or...
She instinctively reaches for her phone to check Pinterest before remembering. Right. That would be the next order of business. After eating. Whatever, she'd figure it out.
There is no reference picture, there is no plan. There's just Nell, the scissors, and a whole world of possibility. She lifts the scissors up higher, to her chin, and cuts. Then she keeps cutting. And at the end of it there is a lot of hair in the sink, and the haircut doesn't look like anything she's ever seen, but it has all the elements she likes, has the long half-bangs, has enough length at the back for her to braid. It's totally different, but it might be totally her. Once she styles it. The house is empty as she wanders downstairs, clad in clean pyjamas, but a quick glance at the clock tells her everyone is in class or at work, and so she makes her food in silence.
As she finishes her second bowl of plain porridge whatever energy had overtaken her takes its leave, so she sticks her bowl in the dishwasher and trudges back upstairs, falling into the same old sheets. Baby steps, she reminds herself, baby steps.
She wakes thirteen hours later with the sunrise and she is hungry again. Not bothered to change she just pops into the bathroom to quickly brush her hair. For a second she doesn't recognise the person in the mirror, before remembering the scissors and the bag of blonde hair sitting in the bin. She tilts her head around, observing. Its bedhead, certainly, and she needs to redo those rat tail braids, but she... she looks good.
Her roommate Darren spits his coffee out when he sees her and she laughs and laughs, until they're both doubled over cackling and there's coffee all over the counter and she still kind of looks like shit, but the sun is out and she has things she needs to do, people she needs to call, and she finally has the will do at least some of that, and for the first time in perhaps a long time, she feels really truly optimistic.
