Flippy Centric Bullshit

Wake Up

//Rewriting this whole thing bc of a friend's suggestions ;0//

Flippy has been at war for a very long time. Before he joined the military, he was at war with his family. Under circumstances he could never grasp,  he soldiered his way through childhood; but being abused from such a  young age breaks you, and so he shattered into one hundred pieces and glued himself back together into some kind of functioning "adult" and moved on to something bigger than him. Much too young to hold himself together, he fractures further, until the part of him that holds it together when he can't takes on the persona of the only thing that can protect him; a killer. It's too late when he finally gets discharged, and he has nowhere to go and no one to go to. He takes what he can get, teaches himself how to manage again, and then moves as far away from any of his memories as he can.

His biggest mistake is moving here.

A lot of people get caught up in the idea of moving to a small town to leave their past behind them that they don't consider everything wrong with small towns. The level of isolation coupled with overfamiliarity leaves you in a state of cognitive dissonance that could let just about anything in. A place on the outskirts of society; never heard of on the news and unaware of the outside world... it's the perfect place to be left to die. He barely noticed it when his symptoms start to become worse a couple of months after moving in. He hadn't fully dissociated since leaving his old life behind, so it shocks him to hear his neighbors tell him how much his behavior has changed. He's not afraid of himself, but he can't help the feeling of dread when he realizes his neighbors aren't telling him the full story.

He lives his life and ignores it. He doubles down on his routine, makes time to socialize, distracts himself with everything he can and keeps his ear out for changes he can't see. Just as he begins to change, everyone else does too. Or, maybe, it's not that they're changing, but that fear has made him more vigilant. Whatever the truth is, he watches his back and hopes the place he's made for himself doesn't fall out from under his feet.

That's when he starts to blackout.

When Flippy begins to blackout more and more, he can't help but find it only a minor inconvenience. Nothing bad is happening, and at most the worst that happens is he can't find something the next morning or has to clean up a mess. Being fractured never made him any less human, it just made it harder to keep track of things sometimes. No one's told him anything out of the ordinary, so he trusts himself to keep his routine going and keep himself safe. Trust is all he has now, so he grasps onto it tightly and doesn't let go.

But it only gets worse from there. Broken glass has to be swept away, his friends flinch away from him at gatherings, and he doesn't know where he's going in the middle of the night. He tells himself he's just stressed from the move. He ignores the odd looks from the neighbors. He ignores the bad news that seems to evaporate by the next day. As long as it's all in his head, it can be managed. Delusions and paranoia can be managed. The truth can't.

It's not until he wakes up with blood on his hands that he really begins to wonder if this town is doing something to him.