It was that time again, Johnny realized with loathing, putting on a scowl. The tufts of hair still remaining on his head were slick and greasy, retaining an unusual sheen. When he ran his fingers through them, his fingers felt uncomfortably oily.

"You reek, 'Nny," he heard Reverend Meat's gravelly voice from where he sat at his desk.

He stood, feeling his skin stick together a bit at his armpit. A groan swelled in his throat, but he didn't release it. Any signs of unhappiness sent Meat on a rant about how he had to indulge, grow fat on temporary pleasure. "What do you know? You don't even have a nose," he said, lifting the strange figure and throwing him into his open closet.

"That should say something to you," Meat said, not reacting at all to what, to something living, would be rather painful. "Take a shower."

"What you smell is dread," Johnny said, casting a cold glare down at Meat before slamming the closet door shut, locking it.

He paced, running slim fingers along his bristly scalp. His hair was growing back, he noted, wasn't sure what to think of that. Wasn't sure if he thought anything at all. Why couldn't he just be indifferent? Why was he plagued with these opinions, these emotions, these… Humanly needs? They all came with being human, he figured. A packaged deal.

Oh how he wished he weren't human.

Seriously, out of the billions of other organisms he could have been born as, been part of the consciousness of, he was human. He was Johnny C.. Out of all the people and cats and dogs and lizards and insects and plants and protists and bacteria he could have been, he was Johnny C..

His rotten luck.

Johnny placed his hands on his ears, but it didn't help with the noise, with Meat's voice chanting, Bathe, bathe, bathe, inside his head. He knew, he knew it was all inside his head. But how come, then, Meat's voice sounded muffled behind the closet door? Why couldn't he shut him up? If it was all in his head?

He stormed into the hallway, but Reverend Meat's rung out just as strong, if not stronger than before. What annoyed him most about it was that the voices were loud enough it felt like he was hearing them in his ears, and he could have been, but he could hear it in his mind, too. Fingernails on the inside of his skull.

He threw open the bathroom door, slammed it shut behind him, and silenced the Burger Boy by curling his fingers below the hem of his shirt and pulling up. He was immediately greeted by the cold, accompanied by the desire to pull his shirt back on. But 'Nny kept going, unbuckling both his boots and slipping them off.

Turning the water on, hot enough to turn his paper white skin tomato red. Batting his hand into the shower to test the temperature. Watching the leftover blood on the walls of the tub run down, a scarlet whirlpool around the drain, and then closing his eyes before opening the clasp on his belt. Unzipping. Dropping it all to his ankles and entering blindly. Closing the shower curtain behind him, encasing himself in hot water.

He just stood there for a moment, comforted by the heat. He loved how it felt on his arms, his neck, his closed eyelids. But admitting that to Reverend Meat was the same as admitting defeat.

Besides, there were plenty of things he didn't like about showering. Plenty of things he hated.

Like being naked, for one. Just as many people liked to think of themselves as the face they see in the mirror, and not the organs beneath the skin, Johnny did not like to think about the skin beneath the clothes.

It was why he closed his eyes. Anything beneath his clothes was not something he liked to think of as part of himself, or even something he liked at all. He was ugly. The human body was ugly.

Johnny reached for the soap, absently running it over his torso, along his arms.

He'd stopped taking regular showers around the same time he'd stopped regularly killing. He didn't have to scrub blood from his skin every day, he no longer knew when to shower until he was incredibly uncomfortable. It was one of the many prices he paid for trying to cut down.

Another was rage. With nowhere to release it, Johnny couldn't quell his anger. And with even more time to himself than before, it would just simmer there in his mind. He dwelled. He dwelled on it all for the longest time, and it'd bubble up, fill him up, and then it would crisp, leaving him with nothing but ashes. Leaving him empty. And when he did kill, the anger remained, unsatisfied, still boiling inside him.

Maybe he should take up a new hobby. Like painting, or arson.

He wondered if, indirectly, the end of the wall monster, Johnny's release, had brought this emptiness upon him. The amount of free will he suddenly found himself with was overwhelming. He didn't know what to do with it all, and he didn't know how to budget his own time anymore. He felt like an actor who was being weaned from the script. No, an actor who was told, To hell with the script, just wing it.

He squirted a quarter-sized blob of shampoo into the palm of his hand, placed the bottle back on the shelf, and began to scrub into his scalp. He often took too much, forgetting how little hair he had now.

He hated it all. He hated bathing and eating and sleeping, what wastes of time. If a person is expected to get eight hours of sleep every day, and there were twenty-four hours in a day, that was an eighth of a person's life, spent sleeping! How primitive, when there were so many other things we could do with that time! Life was short enough as is, and yet people were designed to throw it all away.

Johnny wished he could just be a disembodied mind. Not a brain, a mind. Not physical matter, just thought and memory. Just leaving him to his thoughts, leaving him alone to think.

He'd given up on wishing for death. He knew what lay beyond the grave, and it wasn't in the least what he'd hoped for. …He'd hoped for an ephemeral life leading up to evanescence. For what he liked to think of as eternal apnea, an end of breath, of sight, and… even of thought. As much as he'd have liked to keep his thoughts in this ideal death, he knew they did more harm to him than good, in the end. He just wanted an end to existence. More importantly, to an existence shared with other people.

But now he knew that was not the case, that you continued existing through death, as yourself, and Johnny just wanted to abandon this pathetic little body, this pathetic little life with its pathetic humanly needs.

He turned off the shower and found himself, once again, caressed by the cold, and the silence. The shower curtain made a rattley noise as he opened it. He stepped out of the tub, dripping onto the floor tiles. He grabbed a towel off the floor and wrapped it around himself. Finally, he opened his eyes. And the moment he did, the silence was broken.

It was a sound, barely audible, but a mix between stomping and shuffling across a wooden floor. Johnny looked at his clothes, in a wrinkled heap on the floor. The noise sounded again, this time followed by a thud, and Nny abandoned his clothes there on bathroom floor, scuttling out into the hallway wearing only the towel he clasped at his hips.

Opening the door, greeted by silence. By darkness. Flicking on the lights. Feeling like the only sound in all the world was the sound of his gulp, ringing out crystal clear in the nothing. Taking a step forward, bare feet sliding against wood. Taking another step forward. Lifting Reverend Meat off the floor. Finding that he had been sitting atop a Polaroid photo. Looking at the figure, his silence.

But he would always remember setting Meat down, getting onto his knees, and viewing that photo, that photo that, in a way, would change him forever, if that change hadn't been inside him all along.