Rep was not entirely okay but he couldn’t remember a time when he ever actually had been, it felt like since he was very small he’d been running, going as fast as he could to avoid both emotional and physical pain, never stopping because stopping meant that everything would catch up with him in a catastrophic crash. Sometimes it caught up on its own anyway, but soon enough he’d be running again, fast enough to get away again.

Lately he’d been doing a lot of not worrying, this wasn’t a conscious act nor the result of actually having a good time but was simply because when he hit a critical mass of worry everything just became numb and indifference took over in its stead. He’d been losing time for a start. On several missions and on several different occasions over the last year he’d blacked out and when he woke up hadn’t remembered a thing. Most of the time he’d been alone but the one time that people had been present they’d told him weird fractured stories about Morgana. He didn’t know what was wrong with him or if it was related to his bizarre resistance to the undying and he had not a single soul to turn to about it. This was the major worry but it was far from the only one.

Blue Kingdom was always a concern, the night-time trials and tribulations of his blue self took quite a toll him mentally during the day and he’d had to learn to deal with a great deal of stress from the artefact he’d found. Blue’s life was luxuriant but brutal and he had to witness some truly horrific acts along with what he classed as infidelity without letting it cross the neat barrier he’d built to keep the two worlds distant. He wasn’t Blue, and that was something that needed to be mentally reaffirmed every single morning. He was Rep, he was a hunter, he was pretty pathetic but he knew who he was.

And yet every single time it felt like a struggle, things sometimes bleeding over from the kingdom into the real world, extra clingy with Harrison on days where he’d spent his time in sleep away from The Boss and always there lurking at the edge of waking was the sense of loss as each day anew he woke into a world where Jordan was far away and distant, a cordial friend and acquaintance rather than the intimate close confidant he was at night. He had to witness another him love another Jordan and question why his world was so different. And now he was dealing with Melvin who was living there with him as a reminder that at any time the Jordan on Deus could go off and have a life of his own without him.

There was so much darkness and danger in the world and it was almost overwhelming to him, more suffocating than the huge snake had been, sometimes it seemed so easy to reach for old crutches and he might have if it wasn’t for Harrison.

Harrison was his everything, the single person who made him feel like he could be loved and be deserving of that love. It was impossible for him to give up hope when he looked at the blonde and sassy man he’d chosen as his partner for ever. No matter how horrible things got or how maimed he ended up, he had a reason to come home. He didn’t need to explain the complex nuances of his problems to Harrison, he could have if he wanted but most of the time he didn’t need to, all he needed to do was hold him close and he felt better, as if the problems were halved. He felt safe with him and it was only unfortunate that on most of the things he’d run into that were truly horrible, he hadn’t been with him. It felt like the blackouts would never have happened if Harrison had been with him, as if everything might be a little more normal if he was able to stick with him always.

Still, when Harrison couldn’t be there, he had Tracey who was an ever present guiding presence in his life and in some ways to him the angel reminded him of Harrison, taking the other man’s requests to protect Rep with grave seriousness and doing everything he could to bring him back. It wasn’t the only thing he did with Tracey though, he did literally every single thing in a day with the weapon ranging from making breakfast to arguing about whether or not the new Pokémon was a good game – Tracey said it was silly and childish. He couldn’t imagine life without his weapon these days and in spite of all the overwhelming danger and darkness even if he wasn’t okay, he got by and most of the time, against every odd - was /happy/.