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The last thing he decides to do is to pick up his room a bit, make his mom proud—Before her flight’s loose engine crushes him in the most freakish accident that Middlesex will ever see.
He starts tossing out plastics and cans, throwing dirty sweaters into the bin. Laughing to himself. He imagines the rumours and ghost stories he’d become. It’s the only legacy he’d ever ask for.
The dopey smile on Donnie’s face doesn’t fade when he turns and sees the six-foot zombie rabbit lying on his bed. He laughs again when he tries to be all creepy by turning his skull at him all slow. He lumbers over to have his final Coke, still chilly from the cool October sky outside. Left his window open—He can’t remember the last time the air was this crisp.
He stretches out before crashing down next to Frank, letting the hiss of the can kill the silence before he offers the rabbit the first sip. Frank turns to him, the way the shadows play on the curves and angles of the mask making him look so incredulous, his brow no longer knitted in malice. Donnie just snorts and takes the sip for himself.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the mask rise and fall the slightest bit, and hears what could have been a quiet laugh. He turns back to see him facing ahead again.
Frank’s voice cleaves through the silence hanging in the room, “You aren’t afraid?”
Donnie blinks, staring straight ahead—No thoughts, like a blood-sniffing shark. He isn’t really sure how to answer him. If he wants to answer him. He’d finally reached the point where he didn’t mind dying. If he starts to think about it too much, he’s sure the cracks will start to show.
The rabbit whispers, “It’s okay to be scared.”
Donnie’s brow tightens, his smile having evaporated. He looks over to Frank, eyes searching across the rabbit’s face. Its unflinching, cold surface refuses to give him any answers. Finally, he scoffs, “What?”
And again, “It’s okay to be scared, Donnie.”
The younger man looks completely baffled. He laughs, a short and choppy thing that drops into a gulp before he replies, “M’not scared, dumbass..”
He startles at the sound of Frank’s fur ruffling against the pillowcase and sheets. The rabbit's sitting up now and staring straight at Donnie. He does this for a long time, like he's studying him. Just when it really starts to freak Donnie out, when his lips part like he's about to tell him to knock it off, he moves again. Both his leathery paws rise, grabbing hold of the scruff of his own neck, lifting to slide the mask up and off his head.
Donnie almost forgot there was a person under all that fur, and seeing his face again makes him laugh in this breathless kind of way. He tries to say something, but Frank cuts him short again.
"Does this help?"
"..Huh? What d'you-"
"Being with somebody else. When it happens. Will it help you?"
The younger man’s quiet again. His eyes have lost their iciness, stare far beyond a thousand yards. Frank’s good eye scours across his face, realizing he’s getting lost and needs to be pulled out. He slides one of his paws over Donnie’s hand, chuffing through his nose when the younger winces at the cold feeling.
Frank watches his eyes again, watching them refocus on him. Only him.
“..Yeah, I guess it might."
Donnie almost forgot how pretty he was, too. Remembers his glossy, undead skin shimmering in pale light from the projector in the theatre. Jet black locks swirling every which way until they met his shoulders. A halo of frizz apparent from being tucked inside the mask.
Frank’s eye looked dead, back there - His good eye, he means. It was like he’d seen too much to really be present, to feel human anymore. Donnie would know what that looked like. At least Frank had an excuse.
But, when Donnie looks at him now, that greyish gloss is gone, his iris like a shimmering slab of wet charcoal. The moonlight pierces through, and he can see Frank’s pupil fixated right on him, unwavering. It sends a chill up his spine that sees a little smile working back into the corners of his mouth.
Frank shuffles closer, his fuzzy leg right up against Donnie’s. He stares out the window with him, his paw closing around the other’s hand.
It’s surely natural, the pull he feels towards the rabbit. He saved Donnie’s life, after all. His eyes are fixated on the faint chap and fray of Frank’s lips, his smile lines exaggerated in the moonlight. His gaze flutters up to meet his eyes again, laughing in a huff when he sees Frank’s staring right back at him now.
The corners of Frank’s lips rise, and the corners of Donnie’s drop.
He remembers him; the real Frank, the Frank before all this happened. It’d been like seeing someone he knew in a dream, always trying to figure out who they were supposed to be, their features never lining up quite right. But he knew that smile. He would see it on his living room couch every other weekend, see it sneaking back into the driver’s seat of a red Trans Am in the driveway. Once or twice, that smile offered him a puff of his cigarette. He only came over when their parents weren’t home, anyways.
The pull makes sense all of a sudden. Donnie knew it could never be real, not before all this. But he’d always think about it anyways, about the only guy he’d ever wanted to kiss.
And none of this was real, so why should he care anymore?
He reaches out and pulls Frank in by the jaw. His lips are icy against his own, but his breath quickly warms to match Donnie’s. Donnie laughs into it, thinking about how everyone he knew would wake up tomorrow morning, with no memory of any of this. How he was the only one who’d get to live in this moment forever. He feels pretty lucky.
Their lips stay together until the roof caves in.
The sleepy county of Middlesex seems to wake up around the same time that morning. His family and neighbours, by the deafening crash and the debris flung into the streets. Everyone else is shaken awake within the next couple of hours, told in panicked voices that “something happened”. A crowd quickly encircles the wreckage, the family’s only privacy found in the yellow tape strung around the perimeter of the yard.
Frank wakes up the second his dream ends, and stays in his room all morning. He sits at the foot of his bed, combing a trembling hand through damp strands of hair.
He finds it hard to remember what that dream was even about.