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Today is Renfield’s birthday, his first real one in almost a century.
Some time has passed since he broke himself free from the wrath of the monster that controlled his life for the past ninety years – some time being around six months, in fact. It has been a confusing period, and he sometimes forgets the days, but he supposes he’s proud of himself.
Rebecca and Mark keep telling him he should be, so he tries to force this feeling Into his body, though It hardly ever works.
Half a year without Mas– Dracula has left him with so little to do, and so much to ponder, and he frequently finds himself lost in thought for hours. Rebecca is sometimes there to pull him out of his own head, but with such a demanding job she can only be with him a few times per week.
He has a real job of his own now, one where he is paid, which gives him some time away from the tainted apartment he lives in, though it’s strange. His boss is so different from his past one, and getting paid Is a bizarre thing to experience. He finds himself trying to slip up whenever the boss checks in on him In the shop, but his tiny mistakes aren’t met with any sort of reaction, whereas with Dracula he would be left crying for the next few hours.
He hadn’t really needed to find employment so quickly, he still has some savings In the bank account, and he could have sold the dozens of antique pieces Dracula owned, but something had urged him to find a job Instead.
Rebecca was willing to help him organise the warehouse filled with all sorts of items from hundreds of years ago to sell online, but he can’t find himself able to let any of it go. In his home he keeps the cape and cane, much to all of his friends’ dismay. Perhaps Mark is right to think it’s unhealthy, but the thought of losing Dracula completely will leave him more broken than before.
He only found employment as a way to fill the void left In his life, needing something to dig its way into him and shape his body around it, and though the job can’t overtake him completely, at least it fulfills his need to be useful and takes up a few hours of his weeks.
Maybe he should have taken more time to adjust to living again, but maybe not.
Occasionally he finds himself wondering which customer he could snatch from the shop and bring to Master, but then he reminds himself that he’s gone.
Sometimes this upsets him, other times it makes him happy or relieved, but usually he feels nothing. They spent decades together, and yet he finds himself empty when he remembers that things will never be like that again. Maybe he should bring him back, just so he can feel something.
He battles with this thought frequently, but ultimately decides not to, mostly because of the hassle, only partly because of his friends. They probably care about him, but the thing that keeps him from returning to his old ways is the fear of disappointing them – mostly Mark and Rebecca.
They tell him he’s worked hard to reach this point, but has he really?
Six months without Master have gone by In a flash, but simultaneously they have felt like decades. It doesn’t feel like enough. He shouldn’t be praised for living without a monster for six months, so why do they keep telling him he’s doing well?
A mere six months in comparison to ninety years is pathetic. What’s even more pathetic is how hard it’s been.
The emptiness hurts; It feels like a piece of himself has been torn out, then placed back Into him, but the skin won’t form back together and his body keeps trying to reject the organs that were taken. He could probably stitch himself back together and allow his body to heal, but he doesn’t want to. He wants the reminder of pointed claws and shiny fangs that tore him open.
The sadness hurts; there is a yearning within him to be held again, to be kissed with blood smeared lips, to be drained despite the disgusting liquid within him. He wants to be wanted, to be an object that can serve a purpose, to be a fleshy hole that brings pleasure. He often cries himself to sleep while wishing someone would love him like Master did, even if it wasn’t quite love. He wants someone to obsess over him like he obsesses over them. He washes his blood down the drain in the hopes that the fused pieces of concrete and Dracula find him, and will reward him with an eternity of pain.
Master had said it would be them forever until the end of time, and he had gone and ruined it. It’s only fair that he slices his wrists open now and then, though he wishes he could hurt himself more.
His pain tolerance has gotten worse, likely the lack of Dracula blood In his body, and the loss of his familiar powers.
There have been many more changes along with this one, and some changes happened which he hadn’t known were due to the bug eating or vampire blood In his system.
First he had found himself weaker, the slight muscle mass In his arms disappearing – presumably built up much faster because of Dracula’s powers, but now returning to how they were before he started hauling corpses for the vampire. Now he finds it difficult to bring home his shopping, and he is exhausted from even walking up or down the stairs to his apartment.
His skin is also less resistant to sharp objects, and takes longer to heal. When he makes dinner and has to cut vegetables he’s careless when handling the knife, forgetting that he no longer has an easy way to heal the wound. He’s gone through quite a lot of plasters in the past few months because of this, but now he tries to be a bit more wary around sharp objects. He often fails.
He also becomes hungry a lot faster, waking up with a horrible pain in his stomach almost every morning and being forced to make breakfast as quickly as he can. He assumes that before the bugs could supply his body with some sustenance, and maybe Dracula’s blood in his system numbed the pain? It's difficult to know what caused what when Dracula hadn’t exactly explained how being a familiar worked In detail, so he's left to connect the pieces and hope they fit.
His hair, nails, and facial hair grow much faster, too. Granted, he hadn’t grown much facial hair even before he stopped aging, but now he finds light stubble on his chin a lot more often. He doesn't understand why his frozen aging process hadn’t stopped his hair growing, and Instead slowed it down. He knows that he'll never understand It, which frustrates him. There’s so much he won’t understand.
Sometimes he can’t even understand why he fell for Dracula in the first place, or why he killed him.
He can come up with dozens of different reasons for each: Dracula was charming, Dracula was cruel, and so on and so forth, but he’ll never remember the truth. He doesn’t know whether it’s for the best, or if that’s what is keeping him from healing.
His body has begun aging again, leaving him with near constant back pain that he only had when he was carrying corpses. Now he can hardly bend over without feeling a sharp sting in his lower back. His wrists also ache if he writes for too long – Mark had tasked him with journaling, so he can get his thoughts out of his mind apparently – and he had to buy braces for them, along with needing to look up stretches to keep them In shape. Sometimes he wonders why he even bothers to do them.
The most recent addition to his changes, and to his body aging, was the appearance of a grey hair in the poorly managed mess upon his head. He had been good at keeping his hair neat for a few weeks after Dracula was killed, but now he hardly visits the hairdresser or brushes it. The sight of his body visibly aging had made him panic, and for the first time in a while he cried.
The tears had only lasted a few minutes, but they felt like shards of glass slicing down his cheeks, piercing through his hollow shell and finally making him realise what he has done.
For the past six months he could numb himself to the pain, could pretend nothing had happened, but now with evidence right in front of him he doesn’t know how to handle it.
A weight has been placed onto him that he can never take off, a weight that will only get heavier the longer time goes on.
Maybe bringing back Dracula would fix it.
Maybe it will never change.
Maybe he’ll die with this feeling.
But maybe, just maybe, it won’t be so bad.
He has Rebecca, and Mark – and the support group – so maybe it will be okay.
His friends are talking and laughing a few feet away as he sits in Rebecca’s car and thinks, staring at his grey hair in the reflection of the rear-view mirror.
The lighter strand scared him when he first saw it a few days ago, but now he thinks he can make peace with it. Now he’s ready to change.
Despite the fear and guilt and sadness and everything else, he knows that he has to do this. Maybe if not for himself, but to show Dracula that he can live without him. And maybe someday he will be happy for more than a few days, whether it be a week from now or when he’s about to die.
The dread of blowing out his birthday candle had scared him when Rebecca said she wanted to throw him a party, and he’s still a little nervous, but he can’t reverse time, as much as he wants to.
After about thirty minutes of contemplating, he hops out of the car and decides to celebrate.
In a way, Dracula had changed his life for the better; ninety years ago this birthday would have been nothing, but now he’s surrounded by people who care about him and who love him, and it’s everything to him.
Near the end of the evening, he blows out the ‘38’ candle on his cake and makes a wish with everyone else's encouragement, and he feels a burst of joy that he hasn’t felt since Lillian was alive.