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It's peaceful. More peaceful than he has ever deserved, if he's honest with himself. Every day he wakes up, goes through a normal day, like any person would and when the light is out, he's in bed, struggling to fall asleep from anticipation.
Anticipation of what, he wonders. It's the only thing that muddles the waters of his new life, safe, content, sane, far away from any trouble as there is a point to being a henchman, you get your hands dirty as you like, but at the end of the day you get your paycheck and it's all not technically your fault.
He recounts the moments of work not with disgust, but with a healthy distance from it all. He did what he wanted until the end, one way or another got what he intended to and still there's that damned anticipation.
There's an itch in the edges of his teeth, a stubborn stain under his fingernails like blood that doesn't go away no matter how hard he scrubs at it.
It doesn't matter if his house is spotless and comfortable, it doesn't matter his clothes are crisp and clean, it doesn't matter the food tastes good and is filling, nothing is ever as good as that thrill he feels the desperation of in his trembling fingers.
He drowns it with music and his collection grows as does his irritation with himself. There's something he can't quite grasp as he stares at a blank ceiling of his childhood home, unable to fall asleep for the third night in a row.
If he was more of a remorseful type, he'd say he's wracked with regret, but he has never felt any guilt for any blood he shed in his lifetime, which has certainly been plenty for someone as unremarkable as he. He was able to built a career of the bloodshed and never regretted any of it, because he was good at it, perhaps the only thing he was good at and does a visionary regret his masterpieces?
He lays in bed, drumming his fingers against the quilted covers that still smell faintly of dust, no matter how much he cleans them, thinking whatever it is wrong with him, it's surely something new.
He's a man intimately familiar with his peculiarities, someone who made a five course meal of every strange twinge his deeply disturbed brain supplied him over the yers, it is still evident that whatever he currently feels is not a typical desire of his, but an obsession of a totally different caliber.
Day by day, he shoves himself against that immovable question and he's no closer to an answer, even the struggling doesn't bring him joy, not even masochistic satisfaction of not getting the thing you most wish for. Just endless frustration that is growing every day until it outweighs every other thought in his brain, until ot seeps into his newfound peacefulness, until it bubbles over and bursts one day.
One day, he's in the forest by the creek, watching the ducks. Nothing is out of ordinary, there are ducklings that cling behind their mother, something Smoothie doesn't particularly understand, something he never really understood nor related to, but there is something he appreciates about the idea. A bond between a mother and a child, though completely illogical, a thing that is so easy to twist and manipulate. He wonders for a moment if the duckling's father is around. If he even cares about them. If he's alive at all.
And then it hits him, like a truck. He's grieving. Oh. That's certainly something new. That anticipation of an edge, that standing on a precipice feeling, that transient state he has found himself in, unable to settle in the normality, it's loss.
The only person who had understood him in his entire life, the only one who was as twisted as Smoothie is, is gone. And it shouldn't have ended that way. For all it's worth, he expected something different, despite working very hard to achieve what he has done. Hoping, against everything that the outcome would be not what he wants, but what he needs.
The favourite foods taste bland and the clean clothes are too starchy, feeling like a peeling layer of extra skin. The music sounds dull and the nature is aggravating and the world goes on. His teeth itch, set on edge, his fingertips itch for some sort of release, some satisfaction he has never before managed to taste.
Smoothie is in love with something he can never have.
Smoothie is waiting to die, he just doesn't know it yet.