He didn't know why he was doing it.

Rather that was a ******** lie, he knew why he was doing it, it was worse than the drinking.

He'd dreamed last night about the zombies. Except it wasn't the way he remembered it, it wasn't those strangers he'd been killing ******** non-stop for weeks, doomed by their misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong ******** time, helpless shells he cut down like dolls. This time it had been him. He had known in that way you always ******** did in dreams that he was infected, infected in a way that had gotten beneath his skin and into the core of who he was. He had plunged his hands into his abdomen and felt nothing, digging his nails in deep to the easily yielding flesh. He was strong, too strong, unnaturally strong.

It hadn't hurt at all. The blood had been hot as he knew it would be, the slimy membrane of the intestines a convoluted mess of mysteries. He'd reached in and plucked out his organs one by one, his kidneys, his liver, all of it, and it had made sense. He was more familiar now with what the inside of a person looked like than he ever had been, and he realised more than the zombies, more than anything he'd killed, he felt nothing for himself. His lungs had yielded after his diaphragm, and yet he hadn't died, hollow, bloody and enduring. Last had been his heart and he tossed it aside with the rest as if gutting an animal. He remembered it all vividly, the whole thing utterly bizarre on waking, sickening to his rational mind.

The thing that had stuck with him, the fact that he'd been jarred most of all by was the lack of pain. The whole awful thing had been completely void of pain, like watching an autopsy on television with the sound off, just slippery organs that didn't matter. It had left him feeling nauseous and ill, as if the numbness was in his waking limbs, slowly growing and creeping, threatening to take him over.

He was doing this because it hurt, because every vulnerability he showed and people smugly dubbed insincerity or falseness was like a blade into his chest. He felt it so deeply that at times it threatened to take his breath away. They didn't understand because of course they didn't ******** didn't, how could anyone be expected to get any of it when he didn't get it himself? All there was left was that instinct to feel, to hurt in a way that brought the world into focus and made him think that maybe the numbness was all in his head. He'd done it before, sought out loud things to crowd out the quiet and he would do it again, he couldn't cope in the quiet but he could replace it. They wanted him to be nice, to be good and pleasant and it didn't matter when he ******** tried they treated him like an alien and found it absurd and funny. That was the way it should be, it was meant to hurt. It was weird, it was strange, he should ******** stop.

Like this he had nothing to protect himself with, his defences were his aggression, his wit and his insults were his weapons and what had kept him alive all his life by keeping those who could harm him at arm's length. But here they were pushing people away too far, time and time again they wounded the people who wanted to help him. So he'd conceded and tried to give them what they wanted, no weapons, head bowed before them, ******** weak and beaten. But that offended them too, it wasn't enough, wasn't good enough, it seemed false, it felt false to them and that was the way it had been and had always been. He'd wanted to cry when America had used the opportunity to try and make him kneel for her, to tell her all the good things she'd done, to concede his pride and thank her. It was exactly what he'd expected, but in his heart he'd hoped that she'd have noticed how ******** much this s**t was hurting and have relented. But she wasn't wired that way, weakness was up to people to fix in themselves, she made it look so effortless, strong and certain in herself, her choices and the unquestionable value of facts.

Time and time again she left him rent and injured, luring him in with her sincerity only to crush him like a bug under the heel of that unflinching certainty that there was no room for the emotionally fragile in the world of the strong. He came back because he deserved it, because he hoped if enough people ground it into him they might kill that weak part of him, change his very instincts and recondition his brain for the better, but every ******** time he found himself crippled by emotion. When she'd changed her avatar to the breasts he would never ******** have and reminded him all over again of the deficiencies that were written into the unchangeable facts of who he was, he'd felt like the emotions swell like a stormy ocean, heavy and threatening to throw him over, it was a betrayal he'd goaded and brought upon himself, a noose he'd put around his own neck. He laid his weaknesses out there like bait and exulted when they were taken.

Harrison couldn't understand what was going on in Rep's mind, he had that same iron certainty as America written into every fibre of himself too, there was no way to comprehend the fracture that the other man felt running through his every thought. He was his anchor, the good thing, the sanctuary and he'd held him when he cried like a ******** baby (more than he'd admit) over this ache that was also a ******** numbness. He loved every part of Rep and made that clear to him time and time again, but in some way it made things harder to cope with. If he couldn't love himself, if he wanted to destroy himself, everything that was Rep, did that mean he also wanted to harm Harrison whose very happiness hinged on that not being the case? It made him guilty in a deep and twisting way, a way that was too intense to be satisfying like the pain was.

He just wanted attention, he wanted to freak people out, people told him what he was and what he should be.

He didn't know what he wanted.

He didn't know anything, least of all why he was doing this. It should feel good, saying nice things to people and letting them have their good things in their life. It should make him pleased.

It just made him sick, a deep gnawing terror and fear. It was that heart-racing gut clenching thrill you got when you first stole as a kid, when you walked into a shop knowing it was wrong and took something, always waiting to be caught, for someone to say something, anything. It was the intrusive thought that said stop me, save me.

But no one did, and you were outside and away and you had your spoils of victory but it all just made you feel sick and you could only ******** think what now? No one would stop you, the world treated people the way America treated people, it looked down at them and said well you've made your bed haven't you? You could have fixed it, you could have stopped, you could have just not done it. He wanted to plead it wasn't that easy, that sometimes you did things because there were other hurts that got so huge they would kill you, that you just had to do it because your body couldn't handle anything else.

He did this because he was like the man who bit through his ******** tongue during a no-aesthetic amputation just to take his mind off the pain, to split it into many pains, a ******** constellation of suffering that spread the weight across the cracked surface of his mind and stopped everything from falling through.

And always the ******** guilt, always the logical voice that crossed its arms at him and said you have no place feeling this way, you have a husband, you have things other people want, you haven't yet lost everything, only people at rock bottom, people with a terminal illness or bereavement have a right to feel this way. How selfish of you to suffer over nothing, to inconvenience others with your breakdown, with the dissolution of your mental stability. We are scandalised, put that away in public.

He tried to put it away. He'd be good, he'd be nice and they could take what they wanted from him, he'd freeze. He'd told himself he'd never freeze again but he'd do it if it would mean people could come near him again, even if it was just to pity him. This was just the death throes of his pride, it would cease eventually, one day maybe he might not hurt at all. Maybe one day he'd just be able to smile the way they wanted and they'd forget the other him who had been proud and wrathful, fighting with everything he had because he wanted to have ******** dreams, because he wanted people to question the things that weren't ******** fair in the world, maybe one day he'd just be happy and not bored of it, he'd be able to be content without feeling like it was killing him, like every moment of happiness was slowly killing him.

He went out on those missions and he killed people. So ******** many people. Clearing up, clearing up the living and the unliving, bodies which had been alive mere hours before but which were just rubbish to be tidied, human fly-tipped waste. All of them had likely been worth more than he was, just a victim of their circumstances. They'd all been taking control of their life in small and nuanced ways he bet, while he let his slip between his fingers.

Tracey wasn't sympathetic, he couldn't understand this kind of weakness, nor could he treat it. He just said nothing, a force of disapproval and dark bitterness and Rep found himself guilty for letting him down too.

Guilt. He didn't know if he was even really guilty or if his very concept of guilt was as far from the reality of the emotion as the dream had been from the reality of pain and death.

But he would be nice. He would be as nice as he could manage to be, because it left him tensed and shaking with rage.

Rage was the opposite of the boredom and the numbness. It was a ******** fire to stoke and it kept him warm.