Disclaimer- (I figure I should start using these…) None of the characters from Jhonen Vasquez's Johnny the Homicidal Maniac belong to me. I am not profiting from this story; I am writing it for recreational purposes and writing practice only. I am not, nor will I ever be, Jhonen Vasquez. Thank you.
"Mr. Samsa," Johnny muttered, trying his best to… coo. He figured it sounded creepy coming from him, but it was worth a try. "Why don't you be a good little roach and… Come here?"
Mr. Samsa didn't budge, though his antennae twitched.
"I know you hear me, Mr. Samsa," Johnny said, a little exasperated. A little put out. "Come here, Mr. Samsa, please? I promise not to squish you today. I promise, I promise, I promise."
Again, Mr. Samsa refused. His will power was astonishing, as always.
"With all my heart, I promise you," he was whispering now, desperate. "Come. Here, Mr. Samsa." He needed to try something else.
He set his fingers down on the table, index and middle, like the legs of a little person… A little person without a neck for its head, without a head for its face, and nubs where its ankles should be. Nonetheless, he made this little hand-person totter forward to greet Mr. Samsa. "Hello Mr. Samsa," he said, giving the hand-person a squeaky little voice.
Mr. Samsa inched backwards.
"No, no, Mr. Samsa," Johnny hissed, progressing his hand forward, closer to him. "Mr. Samsa, today, I'm your friend!" Mr. Samsa began to scuttle away from his fingertips. "God d- DAMMIT, Mr. Samsa!" He cried. "I'm sick! SICK! Of your holier-than-thou ATTITUDE! Fed. The fuck. UP!" The hand-person fell apart, and Johnny reassembled it into a fist, dropping it onto him like a hammer on a nail. His exoskeleton crushed easily beneath it, like it always did. "See, Mr. Samsa," he rasped as he smeared him across the table. "That's the difference between you and I. You may be immortal, but every. Time. You return… You're no stronger than before. You," and he chuckled a bit here, "Hah, haha, hah, never learn, do you? Hahaha, while I adapt, you can only just continue. The same Mr. Samsa for aaaall eternity. Hah! It's funny, isn't it, how my strengths are your weaknesses, and vice versa? How we'll keep trying to be more like each other in a useless struggle?" The laughter had died by then. He fell to his knees, looked at the side of his hand, and then to the floor. He leaned over the table, almost pressing his lips against the wood next to the chartreuse smear, and whispered, "Come back soon, Mr. Samsa, please… We'll try again. I'm so sorry."
~xxx~
Reverend Meat had been silent for days, and like the pathetic human he was, Johnny quickly found himself lonely. And as ridiculous as it was, that Johnny could stand up to hunger, to thirst, to sleep, but he couldn't fight loneliness, he found it to be true. He was so lonely, he sought companionship in Mr. Samsa, of all creatures.
He thought of Nail-Bunny often, and tried to have little conversations with him in his head, using Nail-Bunny's soothing voice, and it did that, it soothed him, but nothing more. He found no satisfaction in this. He knew that, even if Nail-Bunny had been a voice from his own mind, he hadn't created him consciously, and he would never be able to.
Nail-Bunny was gone for good.
And he found everything he'd worked for crumble away. It began with nibbling, but he found himself binging. Even though most of his food was stale by then, he ate it all to fill a void.
The silence. The silence created by the lack of voices was unnerving him, screwing up everything. He wasn't used to being left in the silence, the only voice being that of his own thoughts.
He was cracking further, a feat he had thought impossible, his insanity twisting and contorting unpredictably. There was no telling what it'd become, what'd he'd become, what his now impressionable mentality would warp into.
A long week of silence had passed rather painfully. Maybe he could have gone longer, but at that point he was out of food, and, as it always did eventually, that forced him out of the house.
~ooo~
The Supermarket. Super.
Spoon-fed, ungrateful little brats tugging on their mommy's sleeves, begging for candy, or useless toys. Temporary gratification. Meat would have liked them. They were the type of people Johnny, on the other hand,would have loved to disembowel.
Johnny wheeled a squeaky cart through automatic doors, contemplating what to get. What he wanted, as much as he hated the very concept of want. There were so many things he wanted, now that he found himself succumbing to himself.
He got fruit, and all sorts of vegetables. Bread, meats, cheeses. Chocolate. Meat would be proud, he thought with disgust, as well as severe disappointment in himself. In his will power.
Oddly enough, he wasn't in the mood for a brain-freezy, or even a cherry fiz-wiz. Johnny needed something… Something substantial.
In line, waiting for a woman to unload two carts full of food onto the exhausted black conveyor belt, he eyed his own food hungrily, practically drooling. It all looked so good.
"This looks so good!" He heard his own voice, a little less concrete than it was presently. He blinked, and he saw Genesis, sitting at the other end of the table, grinning ear to ear, her cheeks rosy.
"Taste it," she urged eagerly.
Looking down, he saw carbonara, with a side of garlic bread, with another side of Caesar salad. It looked and smelled great. "I don't even know where to begin," he heard himself again. "This is amazing."
"For you," said Gen, dramatically, "It's nothing."
"Oh, Madam," he continued the act, "How can I ever repay you for this generous meal?"
"It's nothing, sir."
"Sir?" He looked up. It was the nasally cashier. "Sir, it's your turn to load your groceries up."
Johnny nodded. "Uh, sorry, my apologies."
"Whatever."
Johnny squinted at him, but took a deep breath and focused on hauling out his groceries.
~ooo~
It was the bookstore where he'd met Devi. Looking in the shop window, he could see that she wasn't there, but he went inside anyway. Plucking a book on cooking off the shelf, checking it out… Sitting on the bench outside and cracking it open.
But being there made him think of Devi.
He still… Liked Devi, didn't he? Like, really liked her?
"I've got a secret." He looked over, and Genesis was sitting next to him on the bench, eyes hidden by her downturned lashes. A bashful little smile on her cherry red lips, with maybe a hint of mischief hidden in their corners. "I really like you."
"Uh, really?" He cringed as his voice cracked on the word "really," and she snickered at him. He heard himself clear his throat. "I uh, um... Really?" He managed it that time.
She nodded a tiny bit. Her mesmerizing charcoal eyes met his, but he found himself watching her lips part to form the words, "Anything else you'd like to say to that?" …then her fingers as they slid onto his, falling and fitting easily in the creases between them, then back to her lips as they met his.
He actually closed his eyes, bracing for sweet, cherry impact. But he felt nothing.
When Johnny opened his eyes, the memory had left him. He shook his head as if to clear it, and returned to browsing through his cookbook.
Running his thumb across his lips a couple times, he thought, Maybe it's better if I move on, for me, and for Devi.
~ooo~
Johnny returned home, feeling less lonely than when he'd left. Genesis was filling a void inside him, or at least memories of her were.
That's right, they were only memories. Johnny couldn't allow himself to get sucked up in them… She was gone. Well. At least he was certain he wasn't about to see her again. He was… Almost completely certain about that.
Damn it.
He was falling for a girl he knew only in memory.
Reverend Meat still taunted him with his silence. Right when Johnny had questions for him, he had to go quiet, didn't he?
Suddenly, he thought of something he'd said to him once, "You don't remember the pretty girl that gave me to you? Being in her room? Doing what you did? What she did to you?"
And it all came back to him. He was in her room, creeping out from under her covers. She grabbed his wrist, her slightly chewed fingernails pressing into his skin. She looked up at him, part of her face still buried in her pillow, her drowsy charcoal eyes telling him to stay. "Go back to sleep," he whispered affectionately.
She shook her head. "'Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life…'"
Johnny blinked. "Who said that?"
"Virginia Woolf."
"Who?"
"I dunno, I heard it somewhere, once."
He thought about the quote for a minute, nodded slowly as he took it in, a smile forming in the corners of his mouth as he appreciated it. Then he leant over to kiss her forehead. "Go back to sleep."
"Stay the night, 'Nny," she pleaded, tugging on his sleeve.
"Your parents would kill me."
"What does it matter," he cringed as her voice cracked on the word "matter," and when he looked at her face from a lower angle, he saw her tears. "You're moving tomorrow, anyway."
He bit his lip. "Hey… Come on…" He placed a hand on her cheek. "We… had fun tonight, right? We don't need-"
"But what if we never see each other again?" She was squeaking and snorting between sobs. Johnny tried to shush her, they couldn't wake her parents, but she continued, "Johnny, we're never going to see each other again, and we've never, we'll never-"
"Tonight was a night to remember, though, wasn't it? A good night to leave off on?"
She shook her head. "'Nny," she whispered, clearer than before, fending off the sobs. "I won't be able to live with myself if I never sleep with you."
Johnny shook his head. "I can't." It wasn't right, and to be honest, Johnny wasn't ready for it. Doing… it.
"Don't you love me?"
Johnny scowled abruptly, and found himself speaking in a low growl when he said, "Why would you ever doubt that?"
"'Nny, you know I didn't mean-"
"No, I don't know, obviously," he said, still growling. "Enlighten me."
"Don't talk to me that way."
"I don't know how else to talk to you!" He groaned with exasperation. "How can I talk to you to get you to listen?" She looked up at him, letting go of his sleeve. She looked… Apologetic, and that was enough for him.
Johnny sighed, took a seat on her bed. "…Truthfully, if we're never going to see each other again, well. There's nothing we can do about that. What will happen will happen, and… Well. I don't want to sleep with you because I don't want to leave off like that. I'm not going to sleep with someone who I'm never going to see again. It'll just make things harder than they need to be. Call it selfish if you want, but I think it's just practical."
There was a moment's pause, and then she smirked. "You are so not a teenage boy, Johnny C."
"Pardon?"
"Here you have a girl practically begging to get into your pants, and you turn her down," she shook her head with mock scorn. "It's un-American!"
He had to place his hand over his mouth to muffle the sound of his amusement. "Why thank you, thank you very much." There was another brief pause, and then Johnny leaned over and kissed her. Quick but tender. When he pulled away, he took her hand and asked, "Do you love me?"
Her eyes were shiny, lustrous, chatoyant, like obsidian instead of charcoal. "Yes," she whispered, squeezing his hand in hers. "Of course."
He squeezed back. "Just checking." He kissed her cheek and stood.
"Wait, Johnny," he turned towards her voice. In the dark, he watched her lift something off the ground and hold it out for him. He took it in both hands, examined it, puzzled by the strange gift.
"A Bub's Burger Boy?"
"Look on the bottom when you get to your new house," she said, a sort of embarrassed, shy, but at the same time mischievous smile spreading across her cheeks, like the tail of a scarlet comet.
He nodded. "Come say good-bye in the morning, before I leave."
"Okay."
He got halfway across her room before looking over his shoulder, getting what he knew would be his last real look at her, and she looked right back. He could hardly even make out her shape in the darkness, but one side of her face was illuminated in the moonlight. He wanted to remember that sliver of face forever.
Finally he closed his eyes, turned away. Managed a, "Bye," got one in reply, then hopped out her window, Burger Boy clamped beneath his arm. Though he'd managed not to do it in her room, he teared up on the way home.
He rubbed his eyes, hating his involuntary tears with a passion. When he managed the blink away the last of them, he was back in the room, Reverend Meat staring back. He still had the feeling he was laughing at him, mocking him silently. It unnerved him.
This whole ordeal unnerved him. Genesis and Reverend Meat both stood for and represented the same things: Succumbing to one's whims, one's desires, one's needs. Reverting. But Johnny wasn't about to become anyone's slave, not even his own. Not again.
Johnny wanted with every ounce of his being, the one thing he would allow himself to want, to abandon such things, to abandon what it meant, the very essence of what it meant, to be human. To shake off that terrible association he had with such a pitiful race. Such ignorance and stupidity.
Genesis, and the past he associated her with, threatened this. Like a splint, holding the bone in place long enough for it to heal, to go back to… normal. If he continued like this, remembering, eating, loving, there was no going back. Not unless he were to break again. But would fixed Johnny want to break again? Johnny didn't know, because he wasn't that Johnny.
Which brought about the question: What did Johnny want? Desensitization or the Splint?
He ran his fingers along his bristly scalp. He was beginning to get a headache. He squeezed his head in hope of ending the throb, but with no such luck.
Sighing, he looked up, remembering Meat's presence in front of him. Reluctantly, he reached for the figure, lifted him up, and flipped him upside down.
Written in faded Sharpie marker, the message beneath him read, "You'll always have a place in my heart." Below it was a phone number. Her phone number.
~ooo~
"You'll always have a place in my heart."
Kind of corny, when Johnny really thought about it, but… It was fitting, Johnny felt, and it touched him and the heart he thought he'd abandoned, discarded… Figuratively, of course. That needed to be cleared up, considering how insane our main character is. The things he might try to rid himself of that pesky beating. So, yes, figuratively discarded. Of course.
"I looked her up, Mr. Samsa," Johnny murmured, partially to himself. He just needed to hear a voice, even if it was only his own. "I looked up the number, found the address. She still lives in that house."
Mr. Samsa was quiet. He reminded Johnny of a deer caught in headlights. "Cat got your tongue, Mr. Samsa?" He snickered. "Oh, pardonnez-moi, Monsier Samsa. I forget sometimes that you speak a language I can't even hear, let alone understand. I forget that you don't even have a tongue to begin with. Je suis désolé."
"They say you can catch more flies with honey," Johnny wasn't even surprised to find himself in Genesis's kitchen, watching her slather some of honey on a plate. "Or something like that." She set the plate down on the floor and squatted. Johnny squatted with her.
It wasn't too long, not too short, either, before he saw them, hesitating before scuttling across the tiled kitchen floor. A black mob of ants, hungry ants, gathering together for one purpose.
When the golden mass turned a squirming black, she eased a cup over it, continuing to lift the entire plate onto the counter. She peered through the glass, like a child at the zoo, running her finger up and down along its side. "When the honey's gone, they'll panic, trample and eat one another… Until one is left standing," she said nonchalantly, then glancing at him, "And even that one, if it doesn't starve, too, will suffocate." She snickered once, then turned her attention back to her ants.
And it was then that Johnny remembered what drew him to her: In all her loveliness, she was ugly. In all her charisma, she was sadistic. In all her perfection, she was fucked up. Just like Johnny.
Not to say these were traits he admired in himself, but when he looked at Genesis, he saw someone relatable. Someone he wasn't constantly comparing himself to.
Johnny dipped his hand in the jar, hopeful and determined, and lay it on the table.
Mr. Samsa came forward, timidly, to eat the golden honey off Johnny's fingers. A smile formed in the corners of his mouth, and it lingered for a couple long moments as he let the cockroach taste his skin, let him settle in, get comfortable, but it slowly grew into a grin as he, just as slowly, closed his fingers around the insect.
His legs squirmed in his grip, insect feet spinning pointless circles against his palm, getting more vigorous as Johnny lifted him into the air, still spinning when Johnny dropped him into an empty shoebox. He righted himself, then stood very still. Terrified.
"Good day to you, sir." Johnny taped the box closed, isolating Mr. Samsa in darkness.
~ooo~
Todd nursed a bruised cut on his cheek, squeezing it like he could squeeze out all the blood, make it stop bleeding. He didn't like it. It was scary, all those organs and fluids inside him that he couldn't see. Processes he didn't even know about, half of it he had no control over.
There was a part of him he'd probably never know, and it terrified him.
He looked down at the bear on his lap and decided to squeeze him instead. "You're wrong, Shmee," he said, face clenched up, making little canals in his face for his blood and tears to run through. "Daddy loves me, he has to. That's just what Daddy's do…"
"Not necessarily."
Todd nearly jumped at unexpected reply. His eyes snapping open, he was greeted with the sight of the scary neighbor man, who he hadn't seen or… heard from in months.
"I've found that people don't have to do anything, if they don't want to," he said with a shrug. "Fate is a dumb myth, a superstition. Free will's what it's all about." He nodded, leaning back against the wall and crossing his arms across his chest. "Anyway, long time no see, eh?"
Todd was speechless.
Johnny waited a moment before continuing, "I, uh. This is a little abrupt, disappearing for months, and stuff, then coming back… Well. Thing is, I'm… going on another 'trip.' And I'd like you to come with me." Johnny made a sort of "tah-dah" motion with his hands. "How about it?"
Todd opened his mouth to say no, to turn him away forever, but stopped himself. Closing his mouth, he thoughtfully touched the cut on his cheek. After gnawing on his lip for a moment, he looked up and simply nodded.
Johnny grinned, pleasantly surprised. "Really? You'll come?"
Again, he just nodded in reply.
Johnny took him in his arms, squeezing him gratefully. "Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you!" And so quickly Todd didn't get the chance to resist, Johnny lifted him off the ground and onto his shoulders. "You're simply the best Squee ever, you know that, right?" He smiled, and added, "Such a good little Squee!" just before hopping out the window, screaming Squee and all.
Sorry this took so long… I've been busy, sick, writer's blocked… You name it. Not to mention this chapter is relatively big, so it would have taken longer, anyway. But: Yeah. Sorry about that.
I'd also just like to apologize for the kind of shittiness of this chapter. I… Had fun writing the flashbacks, but flashbacks are kind of just… Writing no-no's. Not. A. Good. Idea. In the least. I feel I pulled it off as best I could though. And there are some scenes I like in this chapter… There's just a lot I also don't like. Ah well. Next chapter will be shorter.
Also! I drew the photo of Gen and 'Nny. It's on my Deviantart. Just look up Hemilikapi, it's under the JTHM folder in my Gallery. Check it out, bros! (Now to end this painfully long Author's Note. I bid you adieu!)
-hemilikapi