EASY TO CRASH TOGGLE DARK MODE BACK TO NEXUS OCTOBER 29TH, 1964 One dreary evening, Felix ran over a rabbit. It was an accident. He’d been trying to get more time behind the wheel- didn’t feel right, that obvious discomfort with driving when Linda was sitting in the passenger seat and watching him. No judgement in her eyes, but a flash of anxiety with each sharp turn. A pursing of the lips and a subtle motion of the hand toward the grab handle. He’d started driving around in the evenings two weeks ago, shooting for the time with as few other drivers on the road, and found himself a good stretch cut through the hills of outer Brighton in three days. Nothing but smooth asphalt and the clean trimming of wild grass on either side. That night and in the middle of the road, a rabbit. He saw it, it saw him (the flash of headlights reflected in its wide eyes, the shadowing of its softer angles in that stark light), and then it was gone. A small thump, a little rattle, and nothing but more nothing in front of him. A good few seconds of that tepid existence, an ease to steering which he hadn’t had before, and then he realized what had happened. What he’d just done. The pull-over to the side of the road was a shaky one- he hadn’t been able to work up the nerve to start circling around parking lots and empty two-lane roads yet, centering the car between the painted lines and getting more of a feel for the space it occupied- and the braking even worse. Felix barely remembered to put the car in park before he was up and out, the gravel of the shoulder crunching underfoot. Not dark enough to hide the little figure on the road, but enough to smooth it out into a shape, an abstraction, something which did not hurt. It offered a deniability which he was desperate for before even getting a look at the thing (maybe it was still alive, maybe he’d just clipped it, maybe it’d just startled real bad and wasn’t even hurt), one which he could hold onto if he got back in his car and drove away. Reality still a Lichtenberg figure, a great mass of possibilities, instead of a dead certainty. It would be easy. Felix stalled, hand still on a car door still half-open, and stared down the road at the little thing. He was painfully aware of what an odd scene it’d make for any car that passed by, if they didn’t spot the rabbit and put together the whole story, peg him for the shitty and careless man that he was. He could go. He really could. It was just a rabbit. He sucked in a breath through his teeth, looked both ways to make sure no cars were coming around the bend, and then started walking towards it. He didn’t understand why it was getting to him so badly, why an animal too dumb to run out of the way that might be fine anyways was tearing him up. (He did, though. He got it real well. Sophie’s favorite animals were rabbits, and he’d gotten her a little stuffed jackrabbit a month ago. Rose had thought it was funny. Felix was trying so goddamn hard to endear himself to Sophie because she meant the whole world to Jack. His heart, his sun in the sky and stars around the moon and whatever else, and Felix did not want to lose his best friend. Rose liked him well enough, but not enough for him to feel assured in his friendship when the Waltens had their own happy family unit going on. Four years and he was still scared as hell that Jack just did not have the time for him anymore. Those first years? A newborn baby took a lot of time. But what would happen now, what would happen when Sophie started going to school and Felix was still left outside? And Sophie would never know about the rabbit he had run over two nights before halloween, was too young to even be affected by it if she did know, but the world’s best family friend slash pseudo-uncle- they hadn’t picked anyone out to be Sophie’s godfather, but that little title he could’ve but couldn’t affix there still stung- would not walk away from the rabbit. He would check on it, because it didn’t matter what people knew , it mattered how you acted because of the people that you knew. So he trotted out into the middle of the road and hoped that nobody would run him over.) The rabbit was not okay. Dead as dead could get, really. Felix stopped two feet away, stood there, and stared. Watched as blood dribbled out from the body (if it could even be called that anymore- he’d hit it real good. Its hindlegs a smear of red, white, and viscous black, its stomach a distended balloon popped, its insides a line drawn straight. Pale intestines, something small and wet nuzzled between them. Ears lopsided, front paws scrabbled into the road. Mouth open, teeth shining in the setting sun), looked back to trace the short path it’d been dragged through by the front left tire. The thing had been practically ground into a paste stomach-down. Felix blinked (a blue vein visible in an organ he could not identify, the shine of split bone in a rear paw), forced out a rough huff (something reaching up from the ground to choke him, a red reek he could not acknowledge), and closed his eyes in a hard blink. Looked at it again a single dark moment later and saw the same exact thing. The rabbit was still dead, still splayed out with its back-and-bones twisted. Worse, it still bled. The pool crept closer to him, every single centimeter won through grim sacrifice. Worse, it still watched him. Eyes pebble-small and glossy already, a blank stare up into his own. He shifted his weight back and away and felt a chunk of gravel caught in the sole of his left shoe grind on the asphalt. Felix tried for a steadying breath and jerked his head to the side when meat, marrow, and blood stuck to the walls of his throat. Watched it from the corner of his eye, hope without cause, for some sign of a miracle. No rabbit could live like that, but he still waited. A twitch of an ear, a blink of an eye. Maybe it would be alright? It wouldn’t. Nothing would, Felix thought with a bubble of absurd humor, not ever again. It hadn’t tried to run. Just sat there and watched and died. Couldn’t have understood what those great and looming lights had in store for it, what the growl of the engine and the grind of rubber on asphalt meant, but Felix kept getting stuck on the fact that it hadn’t run. It had to have seen the car- hell, he’d seen the headlights shining in those little eyes. Something great, terrible, and loud had come screaming towards it and the rabbit still stood its ground. And it died for that. Why hadn’t it run? Simple animal stupidity, an inability to recognize the danger, terror? He edged closer to the rabbit with little baby-steps, then crouched down and rocked all his weight back onto his heels to get a better look at the body while still retaining some distance. He didn’t know why he did it. The thing was a splayed mess, a splatter with no sense to the bits and no dignity to the pose, and there was more to the eyes than just white, the wet pink of its waterline, and blown out black. He leaned close enough to see that there was a ring at the very edges of the pupil- a circling of warm brown the exact shade of Linda’s own- then pulled back quick enough that he had to stand up to keep his balance. Two steps back, a breath sucked in between clenched teeth, and one more look at the rabbit’s body before he burst into tears. Felix had to sit in his car for a good while before he calmed down. Just sat there, hunched over far enough that his head rested against the steering wheel and the arms wrapped around himself touched his knees, and cried. Cried harder than he had for a while, and long enough that he had to squint against the brightness of the headlights against the nighttime dark when he finally composed himself enough to sit up, wipe off his glasses, and start up the car again. Grimaced through the embarrassment which crashed down on him- it was just a rabbit, for Christ’s sake, something too stupid to avoid what was coming right at it- and took special care to drive a bit ahead before turning around, and even more care to avoid the little body sprawled out in the middle of the road when he passed by. Drove back home without a single incident. Felix didn’t know how deep in the bottle he was when he started crying again. A couple shots in the evening, a little something to smooth out the edges of the day and relax in the evening- that was normal. He drank to wind down. Didn’t usually shoot for vodka- rum and gin his preferred haunts, something mellow enough that he wouldn’t be gagging but still strong- but he didn’t usually run over rabbits in the evening. It was fine and he was fine up until the moment his thoughts pingponged back to the rabbit’s stare. It’d been just an animal, just a little thing, and he’d killed it because he was too slow to notice it, too stupid to jerk the wheel to the side the moment his hindbrain recognized what it saw. His course stayed, his driving as steady as a pulse, but for what? Goddamn nothing. It was difficult to keep his thoughts on a single thread. Stupid rabbit. Drink. The bones laid bare, the fur washed in its own blood. Drink. Did it leave chunks of itself on his wheel, the grill of his car? Christ, was he going to have to wash blood off of it? Drink. He did not abandon the shot glass, but he did not keep track of how much he drank. Every thought followed by a swig, an imperfect circle, a spiral headed toward a terminal point- the more drunk he was, the easier it was to drink more. He should’ve done something with the body. Wasn’t right to leave it out like that, wasn’t right to leave it to get run over again and again by people just as stupid as him. Someone would find it, put together the picture, and pin that petty crime on Felix. They’d know what he’d done, who he’d hurt. Drink, shiver through the crest of nausea and swallow a sick burn back down. They’d know who he was. The thought struck him halfway off the couch he’d slumped down on, headed toward the kitchen to get a glass of water with hope that it’d do something for the acid reflux. Why hadn’t the rabbit run? It couldn’t be simple ignorance, couldn’t be something as small and nothing as that which was wrecking him so badly- what if it understood? Sat there in the middle of the road and watching each car that whipped by with full knowledge of what would happen if it was caught underneath the tires. Then what? He’d played the detached third, the executor to the misery and the victim, to rabbit-suicide? That didn’t feel right. Drink, wipe away the water that splashed out of his mouth. It hadn’t been pain in those eyes, living or dead (it hadn’t been anything , but it couldn’t have been nothing). Acceptance, then. The rabbit was always going to die, and he’d just been unlucky enough to get caught in the middle of that, saddled with all the guilt of something which, really, was not his fault at all. A bystander pulled into the tragedy, the sole survivor to an accident. (Felix did not think of what it meant if the rabbit had little rabbit-parents, a rabbit-family waiting for it in the warm dark of a burrow throughout the night. It was barely a structured train of thought, more a desperate attempt to assuage the guilt over something which wasn’t really about the rabbit in any way he could. He’d killed something, and he was sure that nobody he knew had done that before. Not Charles, not Jack or Rose, and definitely not Sophie. A guilt unshakeable borne alone, one which nobody could find out about. It would be fine. He’d just keep it under wraps and everything would be fine.) Linda looked scared when she finally opened the door and saw who was pounding at it in the middle of the night. Felix was sure he looked a mess- rumpled from his stumble from his home to her’s, hours of idle crying and drinking cut into his face- and it didn’t help that he started crying again the moment he saw the rabbit’s eyes staring out at him from her skull. Every single step toward her had the gravel still stuck in his sole scraping on the ground. He couldn’t shake the image of the little body, couldn’t shake the guilt for even a single moment stood in front of the woman he was going to marry one day. She let him in, got him sat down on a couch he’d always thought was too plush, and pushed a cup of water in his hands before he could get anything sensical out. A lot of I’m sorrys and I didn’t want to be alones that she didn’t respond to- each one another degree of anxiety that she couldn’t fully hide away. She sat with him on the couch. Put a hand on his shoulder, gave him long enough to gulp down the water and try to catch his breath, then let out a high yelp when Felix suddenly stumbled off of the couch. A hand to his mouth and a bee-line to the bathroom, a groan of disgusted distress from Linda when he threw up in the sink. She was going to throw him out as soon as he stopped puking up vodka, was going to grab him by the arm and haul him back out into the night and tell him to never come back again. (Linda was not going to do that. She just had a weak stomach and had cleaned that sink two days ago. Why couldn’t he have gone for the toilet? Still, she hovered in the doorway and waited until the shivers were mostly run through and the gagging had stopped to put a comforting hand on his back.) Linda took the glasses that Felix passed up to her, and she adjusted to lean against the bathroom counter when he keeled over and set his forehead upon it. Obstinately ignored the mess in her sink and took shallow breaths to avoid the alcohol-tang in the air. She didn’t know a single thing, didn’t know anything at all- Felix spat into the sink, then adjusted his grip upon the rim of it to hide his face away in one hand. Jesus Christ. He shouldn’t have come here, Linda was just going to ask questions and he wouldn’t be able to lie to her, look into those rabbit-eyes and do anything but crumple under the weight of his aggrieved guilt. He had to say something before she could, had to explain without giving away a single detail, do something beyond sitting there with his nose inches away from his own vomit because he was too scared to move. A hesitation, a question that he answered with a grunt before he could process it, and Linda left him. When he’d straightened up and turned on the sink to splash water around the bowl, face affixed in a grimace and eyes deliberately unfocused, she returned with another glass of water. Waved him away from the sink after he took a sip, swizzled it around his mouth, then spat it out, and started doing the exact same thing he’d been. The dullness of being awake for less than fifteen minutes after getting suddenly jostled from sleep rendered her attempt at cleaning as useless as his own drunken one, and Felix sat down on the toilet to watch. Offered the cup over when he’d drained it and bit back a sudden sob when he saw Linda’s eyes again. A moment of concerned staring, then she turned back to fill the cup up and use that instead to splash the rest of the vomit down the drain. Behind her, the ratcheting of breath as Felix struggled to get a grip on himself. She couldn’t know anything, nobody could. He would be completely fucked if a single word got out. But he couldn’t think of a single explanation for his state beyond the truth. When Linda sat down on the rim of the bathtub, she asked. “Felix, what happened?” More words after that- are you okay, is Jack okay, because she couldn’t imagine what could be getting such a response from him except for some personal tragedy, because he didn’t drink that much around her- but all he could focus on was that first question. If only the rabbit had run. If only, if only, then he wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be feeling these things, wouldn’t be relying on a lie he couldn’t even begin to summon up to keep from ruining his own life. Everything would be fine if the goddamn rabbit had just hopped out of the way, if it’d chosen somewhere else to die so he wouldn’t have to sit and watch as his entire life collapsed over being the simple blade which chopped its throat- Felix woke up on the too-plush couch with a blanket draped over him and a hell-headache clanging away in his head. From between the striped living room curtains, a streak of midday sun across his face. Down the hallway, the quiet murmur of a life unseen. If he listened close enough, the crackle of a radio and tuneless humming along with it. Linda, then. His shoes at the base of the couch and his glasses set on the coffee table beside his winter coat. Next to them, a lukewarm cup of water and a bottle of aspirin. He remembered the rabbit (the dark of a bone split and the marrow within, the glossy nothing as it stared up at him from the puddle its own meat had been rendered into), the grief over the part he had played in its death, and the drink. Flashes of his walk to Linda’s, the shame biting at him as he tried to wash vomit out of the bathroom sink. A gray wash, a haze which brought nothing but a hot bubble of pain in the back of his throat. Like looking out to the horizon and seeing nothing but the sky where there should be mountains. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, terrifying. What had he thought, what had he done? Had it just been Linda he went to (a fiction: Jack turning him away at the front door because Sophie was asleep, a disdain in his expression which Felix hadn’t ever seen him express in real life before)? The coach groaned as he sat up, and it took only a moment for Linda to appear in the living room. Quick to sit down next to him, hand on his knee and a confusion mixed in with all the concern on her face, a good morning and a how are you feeling? which he could not concentrate on. There’d been a rabbit. He remembered that clearly enough. He felt, more than he remembered, the ache of prolonged crying. Sure, it was a terrible accident, but what about that thing’s death had pushed him this far? The water tasted like rotten leaf litter going down, and Felix got the vaguest sense of guilt as he slowly woke up and started responding to Linda. Deeper than what should come from barging into her home in the middle of the night drunk out of his mind- a guilt, and an anxiety. As if she wasn’t supposed to find something out. But all she had for him was concern, and seemed satisfied enough with Felix’s evasive response: he was sorry, and nothing had happened. Just had too much to drink and got a little too emotional over nothing because of it. Nothing more. Everything was fine. He was alright. The rabbit’s eyes stared back at him, and Linda nodded with apparent acceptance.