//Hell if I know where to start,// Jono muttered. //It bleeds. Christ, does it bleed. There are moments when it's odd that people aren't calling me Starsmore, and moments when I'm proud to be the General and moments where I have difficulty bloody remembering it, because in my head I'm a scared kid breaking out of a sodding high-security prison, blowing the Ghost Rider straight back to Hell. I don't know anymore if human beings are normals or flatscans or landens or preaks. I don't know if I'm a hero or a villain, or some sad, sick, tired bastard somewhere in between. I have friends, in my head, who are alive and who are dead all at the same bloody time, and it takes me full minutes of raking my brain sometimes before I can remember which it actually is.//

He shrugged his shoulders a little, closed his eyes.

//I wake up at night, and my body is completely the wrong shape, I'm too small or too whole or there's too much of me missing. Sometimes it's a terrible bloody mess between the three.//

//It's always cold.//

If not physically, then mentally, emotionally. There had always, always been something cold. Odd, for a man on fire. But there it was.

//My name stays the same. The joke of a family I left behind doesn't change. The pain... there's a constant, I suppose. The guilt... surprisingly, the guilt isn't a constant. Sometimes I'm too angry to loathe myself. Sometimes I'm too numb.//

//... The people, I suppose. At least, the ones I met because of Fandom. There was no Fandom in Weapon X, no happy high school years during the end of the world as I knew it.//

He glanced toward his jacket, slung surprisingly neatly, for Jono, over the back of a nearby chair.

//There's a letter in one pocket... No other me has had that. S'a touchstone, of sorts. I don't have many of those.//

Jono shifted his weight around a little more, leaning his head right up against Hannibal. He wasn't going to talk about that without some sort of physical grounding in the here and now. Didi might have been part of his history, but she was still a few lifetimes ago, now.

//She was my second girlfriend,// he shared, quietly. //Second girl I ever really loved. First who loved me, in spite of what I was. God, she was... I call a lot of people 'Sunshine,' fine, but she was... more. She owned it. If other people were sunshine, she was the day. And... we knew, going in, that it wasn't meant to be.//

It was, after all, not given to mortals to love the Endless.

//Didn't care. Didn't matter. Decided that it was worth the pain that was coming. And she's one of the few things in my life that I don't regret.//

//Didi,// Jono replied, opening his eyes and staring up at the ceiling. //When I knew her, when we were together, she was Didi. And...//

There was a twist of something in his chest, fire tying itself in knots. Something. A sudden realization that he couldn't breathe.

Maybe a desperate longing to be able to properly cry.

He had no idea, anymore.

//... And then one day, she wasn't Didi anymore. She was Death, and she went her way, and I stayed behind.//

//Wouldn't metaphor make it all so much simpler?//

He shook his head a bit, lifting a hand to lightly rest over the one on his chest. Not that he was afraid that Hannibal was going to pull it away, but... it was nice. Still nice. The man wasn't afraid of him.

It meant... it meant more than words.

//Didi and Death are one in the same, but separate, different, distinct. Didi was... she was an interlude, the sort of interlude that she gets every hundred years, to remind her what the worth of life really is. She wasn't meant to love, she wasn't meant to be loved. I never was terribly good with rules, I suppose. Her brother hated it.//

Suck it, Dream.

//Dream,// Jono corrected, shrugging his shoulders a little. //They had D-names, th'lot of them. Delirium and I got on alright. Dream, not so much.//

Shocking, wasn't it, that he got on so well with the broken, insane one?

//Ah...//

Huh. There was a question he'd never really thought about, much.

//Well, I never slept well... The nightmares got worse after, but... probably because so did everything else.//

Jono shrugged his shoulders a little.

//I met him on one of those parents weekend things. For a family of immortal personifications of intangible concepts, they have moments where they're almost startlingly mundane.//

Dream, for example, was very protective of his big sister.

//I don't think I'd go so far as to blame him for my difficulty sleeping. I don't imagine his sister would be terribly thrilled with him if she were to find that he was keeping me from sleeping on purpose. And the places I've been... the ones that haunt me... they're the sort of things that would give anybody nightmares.//

//Dinah. Momoko. Almost everyone,// Jono allowed, nodding a little. //With the exception of people from worlds similar to mine. We've got a Kitty Pryde, where I'm from. And an Emma. Worthington, as well... It's the ones from home I get mixed up about.//

Jono nodded a little bit at that.

//I lose th'lot of you, sometimes. For moments, usually. Just enough for me to wonder what I'm missing. But my phone wouldn't have that same problem. And... I call my voicemail, and I can hear her voice.//

He'd lost that voicemail for a while, after his whole Weapon X mess. He'd recorded over it while he was a part of the program, and then had recorded over that to wipe away the voice of a him who wasn't really him. But Legion's pissing around with the very fabric of reality had given it back to him somehow, and even though he was able to, there was no way in hell he was going to record over it again.

... He'd made recordings of it, to be sure.

//She was actually one of the more level-headed people I've ever known,// Jono replied with a shrug of his shoulders. //Compassionate, smart, warm. Lord, she was so warm, Hannibal...//

He shrugged his shoulders.

//And she knew when to tell me to stop being a moron. I need that, you know.//

Jono gave his shoulders... another small shrug.

//I... might consider that,// he replied, though he didn't sound terribly convinced. //I specifically turned down an offer to bury some of them, before. The Fortress X ones. For as much as they mess me up, as much as they bugger with my head, they're... context, of a sort, as well. It's difficult to explain this,// he gestured to his chest, //after a couple of years being big and blue.//