This is my first fanfic, so bring on the constructive criticism! I love wordy, angsty Nny, like in JTHM #4, but I understand if that's not your cuppa tea. And my writing can be a bit weird, so if you get toxic shock from reading this, you were warned, ok?

I will write more of this, if I'm together enough.

Oh yeah, and Johnny belongs to Jhonen Vasquez. I'm just a well intentioned thief.

Grotesquely Heightened Desires

Chapter One.

In house number 777 all the lights were off, a cockroach scuttled in the kitchen, and in the bathroom two bodies started to decompose. They had been a couple.

The guy was drink driving, and had rear ended Johnny's grey car with his SUV. Johnny went to deal with it, and they quickly proved themselves to be a pair of noxious assholes. When Johnny got them back to his house, he'd given the guy a long and particularly vicious death, even by his standards. Judging by the noise the guy had made, being skinned alive was far from pleasant. Nny had a lot of fun doing it, though. And after that he'd gone to start work on the guy's pretty girlfriend, and.... But Nny didn't want to think about that. He didn't like himself much, lately.

~

Nny paced the floor tensely. He'd felt he'd needed sensory deprivation. He'd even unplugged all the appliances, because their LEDs and faint buzzings were annoying the shit out of him.

This brought no peace. Moonlight was coming in through the gaps in the boarded up windows. To Johnny, it looked as bright as the fluorescent lighting in a doctor's surgery. He kept thinking he could hear that hateful fluorescent buzzing noise.

It must have been coming from him. So much fuckin' nervous energy, and not a single activity that didn't remind him of something that made him feel.....Sick.

He punched the wall furiously, and pounded his forehead against it, trying to override his feelings with physical pain, but it was not enough, nothing was enough.

"Something's very wrong with me..."

"No shit, Nny" Said Reverend Meat, the ceramic Burger Boy, from its place on the couch. A few hours ago, Johnny remembered smashing the crappy statuette into fragments with a hammer. Then he left the room for a minute to get a glass of water, and when he came back, it was in one piece again, sitting on the couch.

"More wrong than usual, I mean! I'm being manipulated by something outside of myself again! Things I've been feeling lately aren't my desires, just a disgusting caricature of them!" Nny gritted his teeth. "And you're obviously a part of this, Meat! I smashed you and you put yourself together again! I'm sure that's not normal. Why can't the supernatural just leave me alone?! "

"Ah, Nny, you're imagining things. You never smashed me." Meat smiled indulgently. "As for what's wrong with you, I think you need to lighten up a bit. Get outside and have some fun!"

"I don't need to have fun." Nny growled.

"Nevertheless, You'll feel much better if you just get laid, or have a wank, or something. Hell, get wasted! Get high! Take that shotgun you found in that dead jock's SUV and go on a little spree!"

"Gaarrrgh!" Johnny grabbed the Burger Boy and threw it across the room at the other wall. Then he ran over and stamped on and kicked the pieces with his steel capped boots, until they were tiny bits, unrecognizable as anything Burger Boy related.

The violent gesture felt good. But it reawakened the yearning to destroy more. Something living and breathing. The more beautiful and human, the better. This desire was the thing that Johnny recognized as alien in himself. Killing was about necessity, or revenge, or rage, or just destroying the things he hated about the world, or a least, it had been. This new thing represented a contradiction that Johnny couldn't deal with. He had to escape from this bloody sadistic self indulgence! Or rather, the urge to indulge whatever the new Thing was.

He started banging his head on the wall again. He was bleeding a bit, and it was making an interesting splotchy pattern.

"So Nny, what do you say?" Came a voice from the couch.

"No! I'm not doing any of that shit! There is no one I can touch without feeling even more loathsome than I do already! And that does include myself. Fook.... And drugs!! Don't you think my brain chemistry is screwed up enough?! Nny took a deep breath, his knuckles were getting white.

"And you know how I feel about using guns!!!" Johnny stomped out of the room. "Then I'm glad that your problem isn't with mass murder per se." Meat smirked. Johnny slammed the door.

~

Johnny entered the kitchen. He turned on the lights, put some skettios on the stove, and sighed. The kitchen was filthy, as usual. The sink was full of dirty, chipped crockery, and there were several dried splashes of spaghettios on the counter, and food crumbs everywhere. The linoleum was so covered in ingrained dirt and mildew that it was impossible to tell what its original pattern was.

He stacked the dirty dishes on the counter, and filled the sink with hot water and dish washing goo. He took off his shirt and tried to wipe the dried blood off his body with a dish rag. He was covered in that stuff. He needed a shower, but he'd left the two bleeding corpses in the bathtub to "drain". He had no use for blood, these days. Why had he let himself get so bloody? He usually tried to keep it off him, often wearing gloves, just to avoid contact with such things. But this time he was so caught up in the slaughter that he hadn't minded, no, he'd actually enjoyed the feeling. He shuddered.

The skettios were burning. Nny took them off the stove top. He wasn't hungry anyway, but desire had nothing to do with it. He hadn't eaten for days, and he supposed he ought to. Nny poured the burnt skettios into a cereal bowl and sat on the floor with his back against the door. Not comfortable, but better than going back to the living room, and dealing with Reverend Meat. Numbly, Nny spooned skettios into his mouth. He couldn't stay in the kitchen forever, though. What would Mr Samsa do? He glanced around, looking for the cockroach. It wasn't a Voice, like Meat was, but Johnny imagined the roach as a personification of coldness. A good example of how Johnny wished to be.

He saw it on the linoleum across the kitchen, nibbling on a toast crumb. Johnny picked out a spaghettio, and flicked it in the insect's direction. He was pleased to see Samsa drag it into a corner to eat.

" You're right." Johnny said, as if the bug had spoken. " Simply do what is most practical, and nothing more."

Johnny finished his meal, placed his bowl on the counter, and opened the cupboard under the sink. He pulled out some black garbage bags, and a small hacksaw. He needed a shower, and in order to take one, he had to dispose of some bodies. It was a simple matter of attending to physical needs.

~

Nny pushed the black plastic bundles into the trench he'd dug, and started shoveling soil in after them. It was that bleak grey period in the morning, just before the sun started to rise.

He wondered what had gotten into him earlier. Nny had murdered and tortured assholes before, but he couldn't remember ever getting as intensely caught up in it as that. . He'd had so much fun torturing that jock, and was really looking forward to showing his bitch of a girlfriend the same treatment. But when he looked at her, she was so pretty and so scared that.... He slashed her throat with a machete, and she was dead within a second. What he'd wanted to do to her in that moment disgusted him. It wasn't him. The girl had deserved to be tortured, but better to give her a quick death than to let whatever was controlling him win.

He smiled grimly. So he had another beast to contend with? There were things he could do to fight it. He didn't have to be a slave.

He used the back of his shovel to pat the soil flat, then dumped the shovel against the wall of the house. Johnny went inside and took a shower.

~