bartleby steps into the touch, blank-faced, the best he can do to hide his desperation. thousands of years of wanting and he still hasn't gotten used to the feeling. wanting so bad that he'd end all life on earth to satisfy his childlike desire to go home. his stomach is in knots, and it's pathetic that emotion should come with physical consequence. a reminder that while he looks at johnson and thinks "us," he is being regarded as a "them." one of many ants let loose on the picnic scraps of earth.
for all his self-aggrandizing and rampant egotism, bartleby likes to be apart of an us. without loki, he'd surely have found a way to off himself long before electricity was ever a glint in some stupid homo sapien's eye. if he had to exist for himself, there would be no point in existence at all. in that way, his love will always be selfish, a biting need with a tirade of conditions. so, it must be that he was made wrong from the start, and that She always knew he wouldn't cut it as a holy being. the farmer's two-headed calf, blessed and cursed in the same second of birth. so much for free will, and he was just beginning to get accustomed to the foolish idea.
"try me," an invitation to violence. to feel the divine, even in the form of destruction? well, beggars can't be choosers- and the longer he's been stuck in this body, the more he's attracted to the idea of it being ripped apart.
"i'd like to see inside." there has to be something.