speaking of winterbunny… im curious about how you interpret henry’s guilt towards bunny’s death. he’s so stoic, it seems like the only time (that i can remember) that he seems truly affected by the guilt is at bunny’s funeral. and then him going and trying to kill ANOTHER person in their group later (though his and charles’ dynamic was much different). and in terms of a henry survives au… would he be haunted by bunny decades later? would he hear a song that bunny used to like and ache? does he think about where bunny could’ve gone in life? or does he prefer to just… leave the past in the past. i can’t stop thinking about them lol
Henry wanted to be free from modern society and free from the body that he felt betrayed him. Clearly he felt he got somewhere with that during the bacchanal. I don't think he felt that with Bunny, I feel as if that was more him getting what he felt needed to be done done than anything. Basically, I don't think he felt much, if any, guilt for the farmer, and I don't think he felt much guilt for killing Bunny either. At the beginning anyway. This is not to say I don't think he was deeply affected at the funeral (also for health reasons), and I do think he grieved him, missed him, and was happy he was gone. Both at different times and all at once.
During the time with the Corcorans before the funeral I feel like he was reminded of how much other people felt for Bunny, and was also reminded of Bunny with every step through that house. I imagine, while in a daze, half passed out in the middle of the night, he somehow wandered to Bunny's old room, looked around and saw the trophy's from high school on his dresser, the small book of children's poetry on his bookshelf, and the old pair of glasses Bunny had worn before he switched to the same frames as Henry, laid forgotten on his nightstand. Did he forgive Bunny over and over again as Richard said he did? I don't know about that. Did he regret what he had done? ...He did what he felt he had to do as the next step. But I do think he missed Bunny and mourned not the person he'd been the past few months/year, but the friend he had made at the beginning when he started at Hampden (and the more than friend if we go the winterbuuny route). Before the more distasteful behavior began to show up. If time had gone on, if he had lived, I do think that guilt would've started to show up, but as we know him I felt it was more missing what had been than feeling like he shouldn't have done what he did. He wanted to live without thinking, but did he want the consequences that came with that? He wanted to live without thinking, but he wanted Julian, and the class as it had been. He wanted to live without thinking, meaning he wanted to live without having to be responsible, having to deal with pain that was regular for him. If that makes sense. That's how I see it, mostly anyway.
As for attempting to kill Charles, welll… I know there's been debate on it (in both the online fandom sphere and when I've personally had the rare chance to talk to someone else who knows this book haha), but I honestly think that he was trying to hurt him a bit more passively than anything? Camilla would've been upset if she knew he tried anything that could harm Charles. Charles was clearly very paranoid, but Henry giving him the pills WAS pretty odd. He did give Richard money when Charles was in the hospital if anything, and honestly that was pretty damn nice to do for the guy you know was abusing a person you love. I like looking at it in both ways, and my current stance is that if the pills had killed Charles Henry wouldn't have been TOO surprised, but he wasn't making as large of an effort as he was when gearing up to off the rabbit. Anyway, yeah, the dynamic is different.
If Henry had lived, Bunny definitely would've been over his shoulder and in his head for the rest of his days. Whispering horrid things in his ear as he lay awake, drifting in and out of sleep, in too much pain for the meds to properly work. Henry would hear a poor joke from a father at the grocery store and his head would transcribe it into Bunny's voice, reminding him of their first year when the more bad sides of Bunny hadn't begun to show yet, and it was just the beginning of an unlikely friendship. He would hear children in the park singing 'The Farmer in the Dell' as he walked with the help of a cane he had finally grown to accept (old issues joined together with ones that had arose from somehow surviving two gunshot wounds to the head and growing to old age, he had to make better accommodations at some point), and ridiculously, would feel a tremor of fear along with an odd mix of grief go through him. Bunny also had a favorite song Henry would play when they found themselves the last two awake at the country house, and Henry couldn't help but look back at those times in fondness when he played it again twenty years later. The fact that Bunny was dead let him ignore the more cruel parts of him when he, on rare occasion, found himself reminiscing. Somehow, a Corcoran family Christmas card would end up at his door, each year showing the growth of Marion's children, which Henry knew Bunny had once thought would've been his. Even with the picture in his head supplied by Bunny's talk of children and a big family over the little time (though long it had seemed when decades hadn't yet passed) he had known him, he'd never been able to imagine that being Bunny when he got older. Bunny would be there in his head as time passed, sometimes causing Henry to wake up in a cold sweat, sometimes causing a tear to slip out. If anything, he missed what it had been like at that point in his life (before everything went truly downhill), and Bunny stuck with him over the years, frustrating, scaring, and making Henry miss him terribly even at forty, at fifty, at sixty.
