RvB Drabble: Frank Dufresne Is Dead

I know without opening my eyes I’m awake again. I can feel it. I can feel myself in every cell of my body, again – the rise and fall of my chest, the softness of my sheets – and the warm blood dripping from my fingers. Beneath that, I can feel the dried caked, days-old blood underneath my nails. Nails I’d once kept clean and trimmed and perfect – Donut would have loved them. Now I can hardly call them mine.

It takes me a moment to realize that he – that my body – must have killed something again. Something because it wasn’t always human. The first time I’d awoken to a dead animal, I’d retched for hours, running and running from the place. I was good at running – I’d even ran track in high school. But now I couldn’t run. I was trapped, forced to face the consequences of actions both mine and not.

It’s not fair.

Wearily, I force myself to open my eyes. To deal with my new reality. Soon it will be routine. My hands are black with blood; it’s not even that old. He must have left not long ago. Maybe he’ll stay away this time. I say it each time I wake. I believe it less with each repetition – not that I ever believed it in the first place.

There’s something in the blood. It’s sticky and holds bits of fluff in it. I’m not even repulsed by it anymore. It is blood and gore and it is not even repulsive anymore. This is the sickest perversion of the life I’d once chosen. I’d wanted to be a doctor, a medic; I’d wanted to help people. I’d never even fired a gun in my life. Now my bare hands were fine tuned instruments of murder. Oh god, why had he chosen me?

The fluff is actually bits of feather. I look to the floor and see a pair of dead crows, and can only sigh. There’s no point in wondering why he’d done it – he’d probably gotten angry – he always was – and lashed out at the first available thing. Things, I correct myself as I gingerly scoop them up and throw them out the open window. It’s all I can bear to do. They ought to be buried properly, but how do I muster the strength? How many bodies have I buried since he first took over? The worst were human ones. They took the longest. Sometimes he would come back and I’d be in the middle of digging still. That made him angry. I would wake up with long scratches down my face, messages written in my own blood – all too remind me just who was in control. As if I needed reminding.

I was just numb to it all now. My body committed these horrendous acts of murder and unspeakable violence. Because, oh, I remembered. My body remembered his actions, so so did I. I remembered their screams, their pleas, they way their skin split and their bones cracked, and through it all, his twisted, perverted pleasure at it all. I used to shake to remember it, to hear it ringing in my ears. Now I regard them the same as I do the birds – my new reality.

I’m not Frank Dufresne anymore. Certainly not Doc – that implied I helped people, not tore them to shreds. Frank Dufresne carried bandages and Neosporin in case somebody got a paper-cut. Frank Dufresne tried (and okay, maybe failed) to help people. But he tried. Frank Dufresne is dead. Now I look in the mirror and don’t know who I see. My glasses are askew, my hair looks like a birds’ nest, covered in feathers (and blood), and my hands are covered in black blood. Unthinkingly I fix my glasses and stare at this stranger. If I’m not Frank Dufresne, am I him? Have I finally become Omega? But no, that’s not true either. My eyes are hollow, dead, devoid of feeling or life; not the rage and hatred for anything that lived that resides in him.

No I am not Frank Dufresne.

No I am not Omega.

But I have become O’Malley.