For the first time in his life, the sanctity of the road did nothing to aid him in his hour of need.

He had taken to the road every time that the humanity that had survived the years of close proximity with his killer's instincts, had risen up in protest; whether it be anger or joy, angst or sadness, or the unexplainable emptiness that humans alone can harbour. He had grappled back those emotions just as he had pounded across nearly every square of the continental US, pushing the miles of asphalt behind him.

The roar of his engine had always been enough for him; the biker and the machine fused together so perfectly that he barely knew himself without it. His Harley expressed everything that he couldn't afford to feel: the throaty growl echoing every kind of cry under the sun.

He had always transferred his humanity, his feelings, into the machines around him, fusing them to him as if they were some kind of life force.

His gun knew anger, fear and determination; it had absorbed the tension in his grip, torn the feelings from his very fingerprints, worn the skin of his palm down in order to reach further in and extract more of his pain. His Harley knew the softer, more vulnerable side; the sleek metal frame had weathered the miles that he had attempted to put between himself and his heart, aided in the dismissal of any rogue tears that so dared to fall, abandoning the unpalatable evidence on an unrecognisable stretch of asphalt.

But his one viable crutch to lean on was doing fuck all this time around.

The anger that raged through his veins, burned through every muscle in his body, causing his entire being to shake with the unfiltered tension, attempted to exit in the expected way. His empty fist had clenched so tightly during the short walk to his motorcycle that his ragged fingernails had punctured through the worn leather of his riding gloves, biting into the very skin of his palm. His Glock lay abandoned next to the head of the dead behind him, tossed aside for its idleness in curing his condition.

As he sat astride his bike, the vibrations and rhythm, that usually would have flowed straight through him and helped him feel at one with the engine, jarred against every nerve within him. His gun hand still fought to find the trigger of his beloved Glock, but it found only his throttle instead.

Tearing down the tarmac strip of some backwater highway in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, he felt himself begin to crack. His flawless armour, the numb facade that the rest of the world believed, began to develop chinks; it let in the goddamn sunlight that had once warmed his back as he travelled to places known and loved. The rays now simply burned through his paper-thin skin, casting illumination to even the darkest corners of his cold, black soul. Every feeling, every emotion that he had ever repressed lay within him, turned to stone under the pressure he exerted in order to keep them under wraps, like carbon turned to glittering diamond, finally sharp enough to break through the thickest of skins.

The sunlight seemed to reflect off these crystals, causing glares in his vision, hiding the road from his sight.

A sob ripped through him and he wondered, for the first time, if perhaps the visions in front of him were real, if perhaps they were the tears finally come to taunt their master.

He had surrounded himself with so much death, so much pain and suffering, blood and gore, that he had begun to find that its presence settled him. He was in control and the pain was not his. The delirium that he brought to the minds of others somehow quieted the din that resided within his bone dome; the phantoms and hallucinations that accompanied his victims' pain playing well with his own.

He had followed orders, followed the outlaw code of action and reaction, echoed his leaders wishes and fought someone else's fight for so long now that he barely knew how to do anything else.

He liked order, control; a solid reason why. He would take those any way that he could: falling in to rank within his brothers, confirming his instruction with his leader, laying his tools out for use, taking the time to understand his projects and how best to receive the results he wanted; choosing which would be someone's last breath.

But real life, outside of the law, outside of the outlaw, didn't follow rules, it didn't give a solid reason why. He didn't know why the sky was blue or the trees were green, or why man had decided to cook their meat; he didn't know why people were different and couldn't all fit into a box, an easy category, in order to be understood. He didn't know why humans felt, why they cried, laughed or sang, or why they loved. He didn't even understand what love was.

He didn't know why some people lived and some people died, and why doctors couldn't always explain it. He couldn't understand how so much could be left unknown when it resided in our very bodies: why the brain remained a mystery when something as simple as a joint could change the way he thought. He couldn't understand how someone could be both there and not. How their face could still exist, but their soul was lost.

He'd seen a thousand lives die in nameless eyes, seen bodies crumple as their owners gave in. But he had never looked upon someone's face and wondered why it looked both right and wrong, thought how colour change and muscle contractions could make a person.

Until her. Until she lay unmoving under his gaze: her arms no longer reaching to cradle him close as they always had, her lips no longer smoothing into that smile that meant home.

Home. He had no home. He had always belonged to the road, felt complete with one machine between his legs and another in his hand. But there was something about blood, something about family, that still called out to him.

Perhaps he didn't love the way that others do; perhaps his heart was a size too small and his skin a shade too thick. But she had meant something, stood out in his mind as someone special. He had provided her in her ailments as best he could: taken what he could from the road and thrown it back to her.

He would live and die and kill for his family, even if he didn't really understand why they were different.

He would do so to protect them, to keep them safe and alive, in order for them to remain whole, never the thought in his mind that nature might have a different plan to himself.

For all the sinister and macabre that he buried himself in, it turned out that the killer was not quite as adept at dealing with death as he thought.