Rabbid Guy

Redwood Colonnade

Guy sat on the beach with Tie, watching the black water crash ashore and retreat. Both rabbids beaten, one brushed while the other burned.
The rain had lessened into more of a mist. The wind still wild, tossing their ears around when a particularly strong gust hit them.

The two of them only a couple of rabbids on the beach.
In the past Guy never thought twice about the thoughts and experiences of a rabbid. He used to think they were simple, unbothered, maybe even animals, pests to avoid. That two rabbids sitting on the beach could only ever be what he could plainly see.
He used to be the exact type of person Tie, or Jerry, used to find so painful to be around. Tie had been around Guy's human self only yesterday. He felt the scowl he directed at Tie burning him with shame now.

To give himself a little credit, his human half's paranoia wasn't completely unfounded. Tie had appeared in his room with a syringe, and had strange intentions with it. He used it to steal Guy's blood so that he could be human too. Not even just any human. If what Tie planned had worked, he'd be Guy's genetic clone. Would it make Tie transform back and forth like Guy did? Or would it make him human only? Tie didn't seem to care as long as he was human in some way. He didn't even care if being human cut his life short. His potentially eternal life ending at nineteen.

And Guy used to think rabbids were simple.
As if they couldn't feel, or understand an experience like Tie had. Now Guy needed to understand it as best he could. If there was a chance he could say or do something that made Tie feel more real, he needed to know what it might be. If he could ease the young rabbid's bottled up pain somehow. Yet, Guy was no guru or psychologist, not even a hypnotist. Even if he was an expert, there might not be an easy answer that could fully heal Tie like he deserved.

Everything that had ever harmed Tie was still around in abundance. Verminators still used rabbids as translators against their will, freezing and torturing any rabbid they wanted. A majority of humans still saw rabbids as less than human, living on instinct, moment to moment in a duller mind. That they were pests, monsters, indifferent to the idea that they could suffer. To many humans, rabbids simply weren't people, didn't deserve respect, didn't matter, didn't feel it, didn't belong on Earth anyway. It was a part of modern culture to think of rabbids as silly stupid scum, if humans even thought about them at all.

Before the accident rabbids were hardly on Guy's radar, and yet while he was busy thinking about when to go buy groceries or what to wear for work, rabbids had been invisibly suffering in a world next door to his own. Now a part of that world, he had fallen in love with the freedom, the people and the mystery, but there were also horrible things he was coming to realize too.
Rabbids were in danger. Tie was still in danger. At any time another rabbid could be experiencing something like Tie had or worse.

He wondered how many rabbids thought of themselves as monsters better off dead.
He wondered how many rabbids thought of their pain as fake, unimportant.
He wondered how many rabbids thought of themselves as less than people.
All because of the way humans treated them.

He wished he knew how to recover from believing something like that. To have something to say that would loosen the grip a pain like that held.

He wished he knew a way to tell humans the horrors their culture was creating. That they should care about happy go lucky alien bunnies, but he knew there was no easy way to make stubborn humans believe that complicated people were behind the mischievous eyes of a rabbid. As terrible as what happened to Tie was, the idea of changing anything in order to prevent it was probably laughable to a majority of humans. It was too much work to get humans to believe in something they couldn't see with their eyes, let alone care enough to change how they acted around rabbids.
Even worse, not every rabbid would be willing to warm up to humans if given the chance. How could humans ever accept rabbids as people if there was always the occasional killer bunny giving them a bad name? He supposed it couldn't be helped, but if a person like him could still love rabbids after what he had experienced, maybe one day the majority of humans could too. If only there were more people like the Speakers.