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It wasn't until 9:30 in the evening that you finally woke up on Saturday evening, almost 24 hours since passing out, starving, thirsty, and head throbbing in pain. So, you did what you figured was the logical thing to do: you slowly sat up and scooted yourself over to the wall, and leaned against it, as you looked around. There was no sign of you struggling, because well, you were fine and then you blacked out. The door was still locked, everything was where it was supposed to be, and you realize that no one broke in. No one was here to hurt you, just something happened, something triggered the headache you got hit with, something triggered the pain that caused you to black out. It's all mental.

Of course it is, I'm friends with a mercenary comes your voice out of nowhere, and you don't even realize it until it's too late and your hand clasps over your mouth. Okay. So this usually means the shift happened, and while you're not that okay with the shift, that means that you'll eventually just get your life back. Right? Something tells you that it isn't the case, because it's not when it usually happens, there are usually more people trying to talk to you, to have you do crazy weird stuff, and there isn't anything. There's no check-in from Wade and Ghost, there's no chatting with Natasha over the latest crazy (and things always get crazy, it seems) event. It's just you, your phone is silent, and things seem off.

You struggle a bit to get up, holding your head in pain once you fully stand and you brace yourself against the wall. It takes a moment to clear your head, and you don't really succeed. You find yourself wondering why you feel the weight of both minds, both set of memories right now, so randomly. You slide against the wall, following it until you get to the couch and you fall into it, grabbing the bottle of Advil and water nearby, and quickly pop a few of the pills, swallowing them as you try to figure out why things are worse this time around.

You know the answer to this, you tell yourself in your head, and the worst part is that you know it's the other voice, but it feels like you. There is a rumor that you've heard about being one with your 'other side' and you find yourself terrified wondering if this is true. That if you experienced the 'veil being lifted' and you're not sure what to think of that. Because if that's true, have you completely lost who you were before? Have you lost the life you had? Or do you gain a new one? Or will you just need to compartmentalize everything into one? Your brain can't take that much thinking...and it's evident by how your head is pounding even worse than before.

If this is what it was like, to be two people all the time, you don't want it but you also know you have no choice in the matter. You're stuck, no matter what now, if this is your new reality.

Usually, the quickest way to figure out if it's the shift or not, usually something is happening on the news. Earthquakes or weird sightings that would make the Aliens guy from the History Channel freak out. But when you turn on the news, it's nothing out of the ordinary, nothing stranger than Trump still running for president and people still supporting him. (There's also another report on your mother, the disgraced now ex-Senator in jail still fighting for her release, but you turn the channel on that really fast. No point on watching something that you already know all the facts about.) There is nothing weird about the day.

There is nothing crazy about the day or the week, perhaps the weirdest part is the weather forecast for the upcoming week shows that temperatures might reach the eighties in October. That was weird right? But not the weird you're looking for.

You spend the rest of that night trying to figure things out, going through memories and trying to see if this is your new reality. The more you look at things, the more it seems it is. Weasel, Jack, whatever you went by, was now stuck as Drew Powers and now both sides were going to have to learn to live in harmony, or something horrible was going to happen. Because well, something horrible always happened to Weasel and Drew, maybe that was why it was always a 'good' fit, for you to be stuck together like that. Stuck together, and now blended as one, how fucked up was that?

As Sunday rolls around, you spend most of the day looking into your notes that you wrote as Weasel that you had never found before. List of people and who they are, and you start to go conspiracy theorist. You get out a tack board and you start to get photos of your friends, putting them up on the wall and putting up comic character photos. You tie a string from one photo to the next, creating a piece of 'art work' that you haven't done since you were in college and on a lot of different recreational drugs. But you're sober as hell right now, and that scares you because you know it's real. You spend all Sunday making this list, checking your phone for messages to see if you're not making this up, but it's real. It's really real, and you'll just have to learn how to deal with it.

Monday rolls around, and you prepare to get to work, and when you do, that's when things start to fall apart. Friends are missing, one of your bartenders hasn't shown up for work...so maybe things are that weird shift week. Right? No, still wrong, you're still stuck but this time you have working knowledge of what happens in those blackout weeks.

So you start to build something you haven't built in a while. Because if you have to deal with this shit at all times, you might as well have a robot assassin bodyguard as a sidekick to protect you.