AN: I just really love Francis
At night he dreamt of Hampden, of Sunday dinners and Homer and the house in the country. He dreamt of Charles and alcohol and want. He dreamt of Camilla and afternoons spent lying in the rowboat, lazily dragging his fingertips through the water. He dreamt of glasses and gunshots and Henry. He dreamt of Richard as well, though not as often, and when he did appear he stayed in the background, simply a witness to events.
But most of all he dreamt of Bunny. He dreamt of snow, and the ravine, and a stillness and quiet that seemed worse somehow, than a scream. No moans, no cries of pain, just the finality of silence.
It was the permanence that got to him, the idea that he would be plagued with that moment for the rest of his life. There would be no escaping, no repenting, no leaving that afternoon behind.
He woke from these dreams covered with a faint sheen of sweat and unable to fall back asleep. So he found his pack of cigarettes and quietly got up, shrugging on a tattered robe as he slipped out of the bedroom. He would sit in the window of the guest room, letting his bare feet dangle in the brisk night air and feeling the cold envelop him like a familiar lover.
Sometimes in those early hours his thoughts would turn to the night it all started, the night he gave himself over to the wild and ran alongside beasts. The euphoria was a whisper-thin memory, but the horror was still crisp. Blood, blood everywhere and heart-pounding fear (of the night, of Henry, of himself), that's what he remembered most. Blood and fear and yellow plaid.
The pills his doctor gave him didn't help, only made the world a bit fuzzier for a time and gave his mouth a dry, papery feeling. But Francis didn't need a world with sharp edges to understand that the problem lay with him. Part of him wondered if he was never destined for contentment, if it simply wasn't in his nature to be whole. Because he certainly wasn't, he was fractured and cracked and chipped and every now and then another little bit fell away. He was eroding. He found that there was no outrunning your own mind; there was no escaping that all-consuming pit.
Eventually Francis decides to stop running. He decides this on a humid Tuesday when he lays a razor blade on the clean, white counter top next to the row of psychotropic medications; small green bottles in a line too long for any pretense of normality to withstand.
He watches the light glint off the metal as he waits for the porcelain tub to fill.
There is a note on his bedside table, just four words: "Looking for new ferns."