[Silent Hill] Ten of Wands
"LYNN! DR. ABERNATHY! ARE YOU THERE?!" She limps more dramatically after bouts of running. Even with the extra magazine she found, ammunition is just about as limited as time, and she flees deadly confrontations despite her body's best protests. Down alleys that are hallways, hallways that are boardwalks, catwalks, crawlspaces, follows trails of string dripping along peels of white flowered wallpaper. Windows crack perilously beneath her feet, mirrors smell like dancers, she smells like a corpse. She finds little dolls melded to the wall, a little toddler of a boy with plastic eyes rolled back white in his head and drooping woman with a hand melted down his throat, she feels wounded and insulted and knows why. She steps through battered colored doors, black, white, yellow, red, Troy's nightmares are hers, Lynn's are hers, hers are theirs. It's not her fault, nobody's fault, it just is. As the pictures of Julianna's thousand deaths start peeking out of crevices and slipping from between wall boards, more and more often, the back of her shirt is bloodsoaked.
She feels a dizzying numb space accumulate in the back of her skull. Like a hole without an exit wound, a bubble growing like a world. Maybe she's worse off than she thought, maybe the break was worse, and that's the feeling of blood draining away from where it's supposed to be to internal wounds. But she doesn't think that's correct. Like a countdown to midnight, she feels its presence, absence, most keenly at crossroads, the consequences for poor choices unbearably dire.
So many poor choices already, so many risks. Trips here to see friends, mourn at graves, read newspapers, bottle water. I can do it, she'd reassured Henry as blithely as possible, and sparked with laughter or the feeling of insult when he'd suggested that she shouldn't. Pouting and grumbling, he thinks I won't come back. Thinks I'm like some child, stupidly innocently sticking her fingers into sockets. Thinks the capability got beat out of me. Thinks I'm still in there, dying.
And now, the piper comes to collect. For those illusions of control, for her ego and peaceful defiance, like panes of glass shattering and falling away, she sees herself more and more clearly. She knows what's happening to her, sees the security that she'd bartered away, knows that even if they survive and escape, consequences are at this very moment being poured into her hands and she'll never be rid of them. She feels herself sicken with the passage of time and passage through space. And in his devotion, Henry will suffer them too, because he always has and always would shoulder every single thing that she does. Through every one of her lashings, no matter how far away he was, she watched him wince from the burn of it, every time.
Blood actively drips and drools from the crack to the right of the door, but not from the one to the left. If her memory had jumpstarted earlier, she wouldn't have grabbed the piece of paper from the goreless crack to the left, would've left his battered admission alone. She only remembers after she's unfolded it and reads. I'm tired of defending myself when I haven't done anything wrong. I want to stop. The ends of words are pulled and sharp as his pencil veered off from his shaking. She still knows his handwriting, tucks it away next to the glossy print of hers.
She remembers the contents of her own admission, and taken next to his, her bones ache with the desire to unwrite it. He must have meant her, didn't he? All the battles waged and distances kept in her obsession with making him proud of her. Her desperate bid for absolute control, living in terror of the time when she'd had none. Hearing so many of his words as though they'd been her own, rounding on him like a wounded attack dog for his 'you're not saved enough for my liking.' In her self-loathing, accusing him beneath her breath of pity, delusion, of taking advantage, of desire based on need and manipulation rather than admiration. Accusing him of not loving her so sincerely after all. Whole months break and crash over her like waves. God, she is guilty. No wonder it was so easy to get her back here. It would probably be that easy to keep her here.
Of all the things she wanted to say to him out in the street, there is something Henry may not already know after all. And she swears that whichever of the lost pair she's able to find, the shrink or the student, she will take that chance to tell Walter something he's never heard from her before. Just let there be enough time left for me, she prays, and I will use it.
She feels a dizzying numb space accumulate in the back of her skull. Like a hole without an exit wound, a bubble growing like a world. Maybe she's worse off than she thought, maybe the break was worse, and that's the feeling of blood draining away from where it's supposed to be to internal wounds. But she doesn't think that's correct. Like a countdown to midnight, she feels its presence, absence, most keenly at crossroads, the consequences for poor choices unbearably dire.
So many poor choices already, so many risks. Trips here to see friends, mourn at graves, read newspapers, bottle water. I can do it, she'd reassured Henry as blithely as possible, and sparked with laughter or the feeling of insult when he'd suggested that she shouldn't. Pouting and grumbling, he thinks I won't come back. Thinks I'm like some child, stupidly innocently sticking her fingers into sockets. Thinks the capability got beat out of me. Thinks I'm still in there, dying.
And now, the piper comes to collect. For those illusions of control, for her ego and peaceful defiance, like panes of glass shattering and falling away, she sees herself more and more clearly. She knows what's happening to her, sees the security that she'd bartered away, knows that even if they survive and escape, consequences are at this very moment being poured into her hands and she'll never be rid of them. She feels herself sicken with the passage of time and passage through space. And in his devotion, Henry will suffer them too, because he always has and always would shoulder every single thing that she does. Through every one of her lashings, no matter how far away he was, she watched him wince from the burn of it, every time.
Blood actively drips and drools from the crack to the right of the door, but not from the one to the left. If her memory had jumpstarted earlier, she wouldn't have grabbed the piece of paper from the goreless crack to the left, would've left his battered admission alone. She only remembers after she's unfolded it and reads. I'm tired of defending myself when I haven't done anything wrong. I want to stop. The ends of words are pulled and sharp as his pencil veered off from his shaking. She still knows his handwriting, tucks it away next to the glossy print of hers.
She remembers the contents of her own admission, and taken next to his, her bones ache with the desire to unwrite it. He must have meant her, didn't he? All the battles waged and distances kept in her obsession with making him proud of her. Her desperate bid for absolute control, living in terror of the time when she'd had none. Hearing so many of his words as though they'd been her own, rounding on him like a wounded attack dog for his 'you're not saved enough for my liking.' In her self-loathing, accusing him beneath her breath of pity, delusion, of taking advantage, of desire based on need and manipulation rather than admiration. Accusing him of not loving her so sincerely after all. Whole months break and crash over her like waves. God, she is guilty. No wonder it was so easy to get her back here. It would probably be that easy to keep her here.
Of all the things she wanted to say to him out in the street, there is something Henry may not already know after all. And she swears that whichever of the lost pair she's able to find, the shrink or the student, she will take that chance to tell Walter something he's never heard from her before. Just let there be enough time left for me, she prays, and I will use it.