Rep felt like he’d been avoiding the world for a very long time. Months, maybe even a year at this point. His only real human contact had been Jordan, Harrison and kid (and his kid wasn’t human at all) and his time spent at the bar. He didn’t talk much at the bar unless it was to console some drunk reliving the past horrors of their time on the island. Mostly he just watched other people do whatever they were doing and thought a lot about everything.

He was getting tired of it. He’d let himself fall into the same sort of rut he’d been in before the island, avoiding everything, shutting himself in a room with his work and games and feeling alive only when he was out hurting other people or creatures. It just wasn’t all ******** ok. It had taken a while but he’d hit his limit of isolation, unwilling to be pushed back any ******** longer from the island he cared about by his own fear of what he was capable of. It was a decision which came seemingly out of nowhere, like a sudden bolt of lightning as if something in his head had just clicked and he was awake. The weather was getting cooler in subtle ways and while cliff diving the way he did every day first thing in the morning he made up his mind. He wouldn’t be ******** hiding any longer.

He was suddenly ready to put himself out there again and the sensation was dizzying, the world a place fraught with dangers which couldn’t be fought off with a huge ******** axe.

His reasons for withdrawing from island society had been a list a mile long but he’d worked through each of them in time and gradually, bit by bit he’d found himself willing to start taking risks, a decision culminating in this decision. He’d just spent a long time licking his wounds and it was probably about ******** time he got a few new scars.

The first problem he’d had to address had been that of loss. So many of the people he’d known when he arrived on the island had moved on to other bases or died in battle leaving him essentially stranded without a friend or support group and the more these losses piled up and he adamantly avoided dealing with them the more he pushed away the people who were still around to care about him. Rin’s death had broken up his friendship with Melvin, but that had been at the end of a long list of broken relationships stretching all the way from Jerry through Candace and Clerise to the present day. The idea of dealing with it all again was harrowing, but he had Harrison and Jordan and maybe, just maybe he could move on from it all. Maybe one day there’d be people who would stay.

The second thing which had kept him trapped and avoidant was his own temperament and strength. The fact that he couldn’t trust himself around other people, especially not fragile newbies had been an ongoing problem without an answer. He’d been so terrified for so long of his temper, traumatised more than he could admit by the double whammy of red eyes and the ongoing fight against creation and the legacies that he’d become concerned that he would harm him people or worse just by being around them. Mask had taught him that wasn’t the case. The kid wasn’t functionally fragile but at the very least appeared that way and he’d not hurt him at all. In the end avoiding people wasn’t controlling himself and he’d never learn to do it if he didn’t practice. He might well even be as dangerous as people said but in the end so were other people, people who could help him and he couldn’t hide away for ever.

The final problem in his way was that he’d somehow convinced himself that even ignoring all the other mitigating factors, he wasn’t deserving of friendship or being a part of everything. Even moving into towns had been a horrible and arduous affair, convinced that the moment he moved into a house that everyone else would move out around him or say that his presence had somehow tainted their homes and ruined the community they’d fostered. This - he had to grudgingly decide – wasn’t true. He was worthy of love and friendship and capable of giving it to others, it was just hard and it would always be hard, his jealousy a constant barrier along with his innate insecurity. He’d never be a good friend to most but perhaps he could against all odds find some few misfits who didn’t hate him and could tolerate his strangeness in some small way. Maybe if he was lucky he’d even recover some of the friends he’d lost along the way.

It was just scary. Really scary