He awoke with a start to the sound of raindrops softly tapping at his window. He let out a small sigh as he rubbed the back of his head, fingers running through his hair. He slid his hand to his neck and scratched. He needed to shave. It had been nearly a week since a razor has last grazed his skin and removed the stubble, but he hated shaving.

Staring blankly at the window across the room, he saw that it was raining outside, but only barely. It was a small, summer shower. The kind that sometimes passed only to moisten the ground, and at other times raged into a storm. It was too early to tell which kind of shower this was. It hardly mattered either way. There had been enough rain lately, so he wouldn't be bothered with either outcome.

He reached for the glass of water on his nightstand. He fumbled a bit with it and spilled half of what was left on himself and his bed. It wasn't much. He had been drinking ice water to try and nurse away a headache. The glass wasn't quite empty when he was finally felt brave enough to try and find the sleep that had eluded him on this night. It's not that his head didn't hurt, it still did very much so, but he just wanted to sleep. He had heard earlier that day someone saying that headaches are not actually your head hurting, but your eyes telling you that your head hurt and something about blind people never getting headaches. Guy had said something about the brain having no nerve endings to be in pain. At this point, he was convinced that guy had no idea what he was talking about. All he knew for sure at that moment is that he had finally gotten to sleep and now he is awake again, still in pain. The pain was either so bad that the rest of his body was nearly numb to all sensation, or his brain was too overcome with the pain to really be bothered with much else.

Whatever the case, he took a sip of his water, not knowing if it was still cold or simply room temperature. He didn't care either way. As soon as the water, whatever temperature it was, hit his stomach, the sensation of wanting to vomit came again. He rushed to the bathroom, nearly tripping on his own clutter. The only thought he had as he tried so hard to either puke his guts out or not was something along the lines of not knowing how people can drink themselves to this state. He, as a matter of fact, had no alcohol in his system. He had once mused, during a time which his head did not feel as if it were on fire, that if his body would betray him this way on a normal basis, why in the world would he ever need to get himself drunk and possibly experience the so-called "hangover." He did not think of that now, however, he was too busy attempting to decide if it was better to puke or to resist puking. By the time he had made up his mind, it was too late and his body had decided for him.

Resting his head on the cool toilet seat, he was glad that the heavings had stopped. Any other time, he would have made a quiet joke to himself about how close his face was to the toilet, but not today. The toilet was to be respected for it's overall coolness. The raindrops could be heard loudly in the windowless bathroom. The shower had broken into a storm. He laughed a bit to himself. If anyone else would have heard that laugh, they would have thought he had gone crazy. He hadn't gone crazy, no. He had an idea.

Too weak to continue, he decided to ignore the pain and press on. Even though the headache was racking his body and sapping his strength, he would make one last stand. He forced himself up and out the door. Before long, he was outside, in the rain. It was the early morning and no one was awake to see the man, half crazy with pain, standing in the rain, getting soaked.

No one really understood what it was like when these headache came on him. There was a transformation at the time, similar, in a fashion, to the transformation of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. Yet, instead of changing stature and such, the man's personality changed. He became single minded on one thing, to rid himself of the pain. He had tried in the past to wound himself to see if that would lessen the pain, to drink whiskey to try and kill the pain, anything. He became a beast in his own right. At the times he was not the beast, he had come to believe he was simply serving penance for the beast of rage that he harbored all the rest of the time. In his mind, he was simply trading one beast for another. One was a destructive monster that was always kept caged. The other was more of a single-minded brute that had one goal that it worked for and all other tasks were only completed if they could get him closer to his ease.

He had taken to drinking hard liquor now and then. He hated the taste of beer, but loved alcohol. Not to get drunk, he abhorred drunkenness, but to get slightly numb. He drank just enough to numb himself. Not numb physically, and not really emotionally. He was to calm the beast he felt was caged inside of him. He had a taste for things like whiskey and rum, anything that would kick your teeth in. He knew that some disapproved, and others who didn't know would be against it, but he didn't care. He was sure even the ones who knew would be against his reasons. Yet he would still continue from time to time to mix himself a drink or two. He could pretend it was to numb himself from bad memories, but the truth is he wanted to numb himself from simply being bad. Part of him wished the rain would wash part of him away.