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And really, you should have realized that this was coming.
You’d known from the start of your conscious thought that you were building up to an inevitable breakdown; when you were twelve and saw the news and felt everything in your chest wrench and turned off the television anyways, you should have known this was coming. You practiced your apathy (always, you were the best at what you put your mind to and this was no exception) and buried yourself in bullshit so that you wouldn’t think too hard about anything in particular and you knew, deep down, that there was something terrible coming, but you ignored it brilliantly for twenty solid years until one day you couldn’t.
It started with a twitch in your left eye and spread to cover half your face and you couldn’t keep your hand steady to shoot and so you were left without the ringing exhilaration you needed to distract yourself, your own self-conscious self-loathing gripping you by the chin and making you look hard at yourself and, incredibly, there was nothing to fucking see.
Twenty-one years old, poorly-shaven, using your oily charisma to avoid any sort of meaningful anything. Violent, obscene, reeking of tobacco and nobody had seen you like this, had they? No one had seen you for worthless yet because you were so fucking clever, spoke so very beautifully, smiled with just enough teeth to throw them off-balance and moved on before they could get too close to the personal parts. You liked Matt for not asking questions and Edd for filling in the blanks with his own nice little lies and Tom got far too near the truth for comfort sometimes but he was occupied by drowning in his own fucked-up ego and lacked the energy to set you straight and for that, you hated him.
They all believed you when you said the shaking was nothing, ignored it when you dropped weight and stopped sleeping because you told them with your trademark smirk that they should get the fuck off your back and they listened because you said it with just the right combination of wide eyes/bared teeth/smug tone/eyebrow raise to get them to believe you and part of you wanted to let any piece of your expression slip, let them sleuth out your quickly crumbling behavior and ask what was wrong so that you could say “nothing” in just the right way to get them to worry about you but your ego was too big for that and so you crumbled alone.
You ripped your selfhood to shreds and destroyed your room and acted like nothing was amiss at lunch and then went back to your room and laid facedown on the floor and were numb because something had to give eventually but you weren’t quite there, not yet.
You think Tom caught on, at least a little towards the end, when your final defenses were under siege by whatever shriveled morality comprised your noblesse oblige and you were on the verge of tearing your own body to shreds as divine retribution for your failure of character. He said less to you and gave you longer looks and you didn’t have enough left in you to be convincing so you dropped the act for a second and let him see the failure on your face and he backed the fuck off and left you alone like you told him to and you hated, hated, hated him for listening to you.
And then.
You immolated yourself. You sat at your desk and stared at the bones that constituted your wrist and you took a blank piece of paper and wrote down “RED” in big shitty letters at the top and you listed off everything you wished you could be because being Tord was finally entirely unbearable, you fucking hated Tord, you wanted Tord over and done with and you wanted Red to be better than Tord ever was because Tord is the scum of the earth, Tord couldn’t stand up to reality and couldn’t stand his own empathy so he buried both of those down but Red would be better, you vowed that Red would be better as you created him on the page and Tord might have cried for his own egocide but Red was happy to see him go.
Tord had business to close out with his old life so you let yourself be him as you said your goodbyes and they hurt more than you thought they would but not as much as being Tord hurt in those final few moments you were him, not as much as your carefully calculated scummy humor did as you got in the car and you vowed to become Red, become better.
You made it into the city with your new morality, an entirely new personality based on shonen action protagonists and Immanuel Kant and every war hero novel you’d ever consumed (and occasionally cognitive dissonance leaked into your new consciousness and the sources of your selfhood were pathetic, so pathetic, but Red could justify his own existence better than Tord ever could, because Red would fix the world and all Tord had to do was give up his claims to his own human form and that was fine with Tord, really, he hated his face too) and found your way into the city and began screaming the apocalypse on street corners and eating in soup kitchens and the messianic parallels were not lost on you as slowly you began to develop a following.
God gifted you with charisma and that was what you passed into Red, a voice that could quiver with conviction and a face that could contort in the throes of passion and a fist you could shake up to the Lord’s domain until people listened. Red ranted new world axioms to your flock until they became united towards the greater good and Red organized his soldiers into strategic militant formation and Red would fix everything Tord was too tired and afraid to confront and Red would remake the Earth in His image.
You acquire money despite your philosophy because Red is a realist and understands that revolutions based on post-scarcity economic policy needed to be hypocritical for the greater good and you arm yourself because Red acknowledges that true ethical utilitarianism can only be achieved through the spilling of innocent blood but is ultimately morally justified and Red has a strict code of conduct that Tord never had and Red is always, always justified. Your following grows and grows restless and you prepare to commit atrocities in the name of a brighter future and you use the genius you’d repressed out of shame at your own lack of motivation to build weapons that made NATO reel in shock and you conquered and you preached and if destroying the world was necessary in your quest for perfection then Red was willing to let everything burn while Tord cowered in outdated ontological humanism and suffered guilt over civilian corpses.
And sometimes you still heard echoes of Tord in your accent, felt traces of his muscle memory in your smile and you would stop looking in the mirror for days when that happened because Red was willing to crush imperfection and Tord feared for your body and hid himself further in your psyche as you felt Red’s voice deep in your throat and let him do what needed to be done.
You formed an army and it took Red’s name and his sigil and his ideologies and soon it would take the whole world down and force it to kneel before him until you shaped it into something better. He took Tord’s old habits for his own and learned to shoot and learned to build and sometimes, sometimes the line between your selves got blurry and that scared you more than anything. Red pushed and Tord pulled away and the world was becoming aware of your revolution and would fight for its outdated consistency until its dying breath but it could only do so much against Red’s charisma and Tord’s gun and slowly it was dying.
You realized late in the game that you left behind a keystone in your past on which Red’s revolution depended, let Tord fight his way to the frontal lobe and demand to be the one who returned home to retrieve it and when he did everything came crashing down—
(you wanted to lay down on the couch and watch movies and fall into your old apathy and you love these boys, these specters of a softer life, you missed loving people because Red wasn’t created to love and Tord was fading with disuse and it hurt—)
(when Tom came home and didn’t forgive you and didn’t let you forget who Tord was, who you used to be, all the self-defining characteristics you negated and avoided and repressed for years now the target of loathing from an outside source—)
(when Red’s fist connected with the soft skin of Matt’s cheekbone while Tord screamed and Matt screamed and Edd screamed and you were losing control of the situation—)
(when Edd looked at you with betrayal and Red felt nothing, absolutely nothing— )
(when you fell.)
And you,
you sit on a cliffside overlooking it all while Red screams at you to move, to keep pushing, to fight until your body gives out and your death is a just one, the death of a martyr,
while Tord begs you to stay a moment longer and let him grieve for his self-admittedly pointless existence for the last time before his inevitable demise at his own psychological metaphorical hand,
and when the cars come up behind you, you finally know for whom the bell tolls as Red slips into your skin and makes a home there.