The jungle was not a pleasant place. Lawrence knew this before he had walked out of his room and out into it but it was amazing how spending time there really drove the fact home. There weren’t any bugs, that was one good thing, or at least hardly any, the ecosystem consisting primarily of plant life. He wondered if even the bacteria which broke down fallen trees were stunted by the effects of the island or if they had recovered the way places like Melvin’s greenhouse had. He hadn’t thought to bring supplies or anything important to survive out here, simply needing to surrender to the raw and basic instinct to /leave/. It reminded him of when he’d first arrived in the US, a fugitive from an old life and wandered like a detached zombie. The heat had gotten to him for a while, startlingly hot and leaving him thirsty and dehydrated in no time at all but he’d adapted, he always adapted. He’d taken a lot of risks back then, but he’d been younger and more desperate than he was now, willing to bet on someone’s stupidity and inexperience in wielding a gun to get a foothold and go from there, moving through the effortless loopholes of the law, armed with the realisation that random attacks with no motive almost always went unsolved. On the island nothing ever went unsolved, someone was always watching, always meddling and aware of even the most private moments of one’s life. Back then it have been a long way away and had crafted Jan piece by piece out of necessity to fit his new start, needing to leave people feeling comfortable and unsuspicious or at least feeling superior to him long enough to rob them blind. He had survived and thrived and it had made him feel like he was alive again.

He didn’t really have Jan now, Jan depended on too many things which were not present on the island, stripped back bit by bit the same way he’d built the layers up, trying to fix what was wrong and only leaving himself exposed in the process. Everyone was too young here and too different from the marks he’d met when he was free to pick and choose his prey from the thronging crowds and masses of humanity, and not only young but damaged. Every single one of them had broken away from their old life for some reason or another and that made them vulnerable certainly but it also meant that many of them were used to people like him, making everything more difficult and unpleasant with the long list of his past infractions marched out for all to see periodically.

The dissolving had begun with the resurrection of the name. Lawrence was supposed to be dead and yet people consistently insisted on using that name, as if tying him to some old persona and self meant that they deserved a hearty pat on the back for their cleverness rather than the cruelty they received. It was a kneejerk reaction for him, a flinch at being tied to a past that was no one’s business and denied the new beginning he was rightly owed. The path to divinity he’d learned long ago was a road which was paved with many faces and skins, sloughed off as they lost their usefulness the way the people along the way so often were. There was a reason Satan had chosen the serpent for his own. Here though he was denied that process, stuck with a skin he could not tear off an a skin he had begun to physically try to remove by metamorphosing his very self into something new.

They wanted to put him back and he wouldn’t let them.

The first night was awful as far as comfort went, heading out into the evening Butch scolding him and complaining all the while as they moved carefully through the dense trees. The only thing he’d thought to bring that was sensible had been more out of robotic habit than thought. The long mission cloak he favoured when out in the elements at night, provided good protection from rain or sun and also it turned out kept you warm at night when there weren’t any blankets to be found. That first evening he realised he wouldn’t last very long out there without water and made a nocturnal trip back to the facility only long enough to gather a few bottles from the cafeteria and head back out, this at least secured he settled down and tried to sleep but found himself awakened several times by discomfort, the suspicion that shadowlings were nearby and the cold. In the end he took shelter in the cavern by the sea and slept more soundly.

The daytime hours were spent further out in the jungle, or at least that was the initial idea, heading far from the facilities into towns where no one generally ventured too much, but towns were always a siren song and there was only one place he could end up. Flighty like a cat and already feeling unshorn and scruffy he lingered by America’s house unseen, spending several hours there, always on alert for anyone nearby who wasn’t the redheaded huntress. Spooked by someone passing by, he had slunk away again.

The second evening saw gnawing hunger setting in with a vengeance, and though eating when he wanted was one of the main reasons he’d run off, he could not yet subsist on nothing. It meant paying a visit to Horace in the dead of night to cryptically demand some of his snacks before once again vanishing back to the jungle. He knew it was working when he realised once again that his back was starting to ache as Butch struggled against his determination, growing irritable as they both got more and more hungry.

They had a few arguments, the ghost snarling about unnatural things, about hunger and sexuality and how Lawrence had it all the wrong way around, how he needed to indulge to get better, to become superior. He summed it up in his fractured way as Bite to Fight to Bide and Lawrence obviously did not believe any of it. Butch did not understand what it would mean to revert back to that old version of himself. It would get them killed, it would get them used and abused and worst of all it would get them humiliated. It was going back to the beginning of a path he’d started out along so very very long ago and with less time than he’d ever had.

Time was running out, he knew it, he could feel it in the ache in his back and in the shifting of day to night writ large on the sky over his head. He wasn’t getting younger, only older and his birthday was next month. He’d be 42, ticking closer and closer to 50 and the downhill slope towards ultimate death and the failure in attaining immortality that represented.

He was lost if he was honest, he didn’t know what direction he was supposed to go and it resulted in him withdrawing from everything he could, tethered only to America, Melvin and Rodney, two of whom he couldn’t even approach.

By the third day the thing that was bothering him most was not the hunger, it was not even the dirt on his clothes (he would replace them with overalls some night when he could sneak into the facility unseen), it was the fact that of all things he had forgotten to bring with him, he had forgotten a razor. Normally Butch’s claws sufficed to keep a beard at bay in a pinch, but the rest of him was just as predisposed to end up distinctly bristly and imperfect and this fact was what bothered him the most, his vanity rankled by the fact that his genetics had damned him to a life of much of his beauty being crafted of effort and intention.

His priorities were probably skewed he knew, unconcerned by the protests of his body as he set it back on the road people had pulled it off of, but it was one thing to starve, it was another to starve looking like a scruffy fake watch salesman and once again he found himself locked in another truly absurd effort of decision making. Beauty or Control?