Here we are at part 2. This chapter includes detailed descriptions of skin picking, so be warned. Some people may very well find my descriptions a bit gross. If you want to read this story but don't want to read a pretty detailed description of skin picking, you should probably just skip this chapter. (I'll put a TL;DR at the bottom author's note)

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Janus returned to his room so he could get ready for the day, even if the only thing he really had to get ready for was baking cookies. Regardless, if he really had nothing better to do, then there wasn't really a reason he shouldn't shower and get dressed. It would be ridiculous for him to have nothing to do and then still not maintain his hygiene. So, he really should go shower.

But Janus had some… mixed feelings about showering.

One the one hand, Janus liked to shower. He liked being clean, and he liked being underneath the warm water, his half-snake body craving the heat. But on the other hand, showering was obviously done with one's clothes off, and Janus wasn't much of a fan of that. Taking his clothes off meant seeing his skin, and well, that didn't seem to go very well for him.

But it had to be done.

And so, Janus started with setting his clean clothes out on his bed, grabbing his robe, and heading into the bathroom.

He didn't turn the shower on immediately- he wasn't going to actually get into it just yet. It technically didn't matter if he wasted water because this was the mindscape, and the water wasn't technically real, but well, Thomas didn't like to waste water, and that rubbed off on Janus.

Janus started with his gloves, peeling them off like a shedding snake and setting them neatly on the side of the sink. Then he removed his shirt, then the pants and socks and within a minute, he was no longer clothed. As he put his clothes in his hamper, he caught sight of his hands.

His hands were awful. The skin around his nails was red with inflammation, and small pieces of dead skin remained partially peeled off, hanging on by only a part. There was some dried blood in a few places, mostly from the more recent scabs. He didn't even need to look at his toes to know they looked just about the same.

His legs weren't too bad at the moment, but there was a scattering of tiny, red welts on his upper thighs. Janus ran his bare, scabbed hands over them, trying to feel if there were any raised areas that he hadn't caused himself. He was pretty sure he could feel a few places, though they were small. That, however, didn't actually matter much, and Janus soon found himself picking at the inconsistencies in his skin, squeezing and pinching at the spots and digging his nails in some places. Whenever his nails ended up breaking the first layer of skin a bit, he tore that little piece away, and by the time he was satisfied that he had dealt with his legs well enough for the moment, the number of red dots adorning them had probably doubled.

Next, he looked at his chest, checking to make sure that there weren't any in-grown hairs. Oh, in-grown hairs were absolutely awful, yet they were oddly something he almost looked forward to discovering. It wasn't that he liked having them, but discovering one and ridding himself of it satisfied whatever twisted compulsion this was enough that he could usually stop after that. He could cut it short and not have to keep searching himself. But today, he found nothing and moved onto his arms.

His arms had once been relatively untouched. Once. That was no longer the case. Before, there usually hadn't been much to deal with on his arms. They used to be relatively smooth and uniform (aside from the patches of scales going down his left arm). But then Janus had started taking a closer look, and he found the tiniest imperfections in the skin there, and once he started picking at them, he was ironically the cause for creating the very things he had to pick at. He peeled up old scabs, tiny droplets of blood welling up from the ones that weren't close enough to healing, and he squeezed at newer imperfections that he probably would have left alone before. Once the fronts of his arms were taken care of, he used one hand to help twist his skin a bit so he could try to look at the other sides of his arms as much as he could. He hoped that this wouldn't be one of the times that doing so left him a tiny bruise (those were ugly, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about them until they healed on their own).

And when he was done with his arms, his attention returned to his hands. They really were just so ugly. Even still, he couldn't help but start making them uglier as he started picking at the dry skin at the base of his nails. Ah, his nails. It was ironic that he took such good care of his nails, cutting and filing them to smooth curves of just the right length, but then he went and did this to his skin. What was the point of having nice nails when you had to hide your hands away? Regardless, he kept going, checking each fingertip carefully to make sure he didn't miss anything. There was a piece of skin peeling off from the corner of the nail on his left pointer finger, and he started tearing it away. The skin kept going, peeling into more alive skin and starting to bleed. It stung, but Janus couldn't just leave it like that, so he kept going until the piece of skin was removed.

Okay. Janus took a breath in, giving himself another quick once-over to make sure he didn't miss anything too obvious- obvious to him, at least. Once he found nothing other than the small wounds he had caused himself, he let the breath out. That was enough for now.

With that done, Janus turned on the shower, and once the water was warm, just a bit hotter than it should be, he cleaned himself, making sure to scrub away at his dotted skin and untouched scales.

He knew that he shouldn't be doing this. It was pointless and just made his skin look ugly and become more susceptible to infection. But he just couldn't help it, at least, not right now. Janus had managed to stop for a while, but as soon as he revealed himself to Thomas (he'd only tried stopping in the first place because he didn't want his host to think any less of him than he already would), the urge came back stronger than ever before, and after that discussion with the other sides, it only got worse. Every time he looked at his skin, he noticed something wrong with it, and he just couldn't pretend he didn't see it and move on with his day. Once he noticed something, he had to do something about it. And unfortunately, the only thing he could really do was pick at it.

This was why he tried to cover himself up as much as possible. Sure, part of it was that he didn't want anyone to see his disgusting skin and think he had some kind of skin disease or think he was crazy if they knew he did it to himself, but that wasn't the only reason. Covering himself, quite simply, kept him from seeing his skin, and therefore, kept him from being able to notice anything wrong with it.

But enough of that. He was okay for now, and once he had his clothes back on, he would be covered again. He should be fine until it was time to bake cookies with Patton and Virgil, and that would keep him from doing it for a while too. Maybe he would end up doing it again this evening, and maybe he wouldn't. Even he didn't know yet.

By the time he exited the shower, almost an hour had passed, which meant he had probably been checking and picking his skin for at least forty minutes. Great. Why shouldn't the side with nothing to do waste time on what was probably one of the stupidest things he could waste time on? Why indeed.

He pulled on his robe and snapped his fingers, making his gloves appear on his hands, before he exited into his bedroom. With another quick snap, the robe was replaced by the clothes he'd set out earlier, a golden yellow sweater and his usual black dress pants.

Good. He was good now. He just needed to put on his hat, and then he could read or something until 2.

He was fine.

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Okay, I admit I maybe went a bit overboard with the description here. Sorry.

TL;DR for anyone who decided to skip reading this chapter: Janus has a really bad skin-picking habit that's been getting worse recently. He wears the gloves and non-revealing clothing to cover up his skin.