xx4.
I finally got around to finishing that AU-ish Angela Orosco story I mentioned a thousand years ago. I spent all day slaving over it instead of eating ham and properly celebrating Easter like a good little heathen.
Title: TBA.
Author: Me, lawl.
Fandom: Silent Hill 2.
Characters: Angela Orosco and James Sunderland (gen).
Rating: R.
Notes: Spoilers regarding Angela's fate; violence; allusions to sensitive subject matter; looots of in-game dialogue.
Angela awoke on a sloping hill drizzled with dew, her arm pillowing her head and a blade of brown grass tickling her nose. It was just after dawn, rosy and riveting; the sunlight was stenciled by the dark leaves of the trees it climbed behind. She would have been cold had it not been for her sweater.
Yanking the offending bit of grass from the earth, Angela petulantly threw it away and rolled onto her back. Dark, world-weary eyes screwed up in puzzlement at the pinkish sky and she wondered if she was still stuck in that mystical place between awake and asleep, where hotels burned to the warbling tune of old music boxes and slack-jawed shadows of men stalked her own in a town that she was beginning to doubt existed.
Suddenly overcome with nausea, she pressed her hands to her face and breathed in, nearly choking on the fetor of charred wood and sizzling varnish. Her clothes, while damp from the morning dew, positively reeked of it.
Somehow she was alive, unmarred. And bizarrely grateful. For what, she wasn't entirely sure. To have survived was a fine start. But had it been through her own force of will? No. Angela had very little will, but she had the will to sit up, and so she did. She had the will to hug her trembling legs to her chest, so she did, and ducked her head down against her knees, rubbing her forehead on the harsh corduroy.
“My knife,” she murmured and searched her pockets for the weapon. But it was nowhere to be found. Had she dropped it? Or had there been no knife at all?
There had been, of course, because she could still feel the weight of it in her palm. She remembered thinking that the hilt was a little too heavy for a normal kitchen knife and she remembered how mesmerized she was by her own reflection in the blade. Glinting and dangerous, not a woman to be trifled with. Haloed by metal and sharp edges. No one would dare touch her.
Her father had and look where it got him.
On instinct, she clapped her hands over her ears to drown out the cacophony of her own reedy screaming in her head, but nothing came. Not a sob, not a whimper. Slowly she pulled her hands away and was met by the early morning twitter of birds.
What was going on? How come there was no gnawing at the pit of her stomach? How come her feet didn't feel like lead? Where was the tension in her shoulders and the lump of sorrow in her throat? These things had been seized from her and she felt if she didn't anchor herself with something soon, she'd float away.
Angela tried to recall her final moments in Silent Hill. She had been at that fancy hotel, right? The one overlooking the lake. She remembered numbly admiring it from the outside. The upstanding architecture and the flicker of fire within, giving the impression of enticing orange-red eyes beckoning her from the second-story windows. Common sense warned her to stay away, that her mama wouldn't be waiting for her in a place like that, but Angela knew it was the final test to prove how much she loved her mother; that she would do anything to have that affection reciprocated. She'd be a big, brave girl and press on. Mama would be so impressed.
Inside it was dim and cavernous and like a fairy tale castle, with winding staircases and pretty, slightly tattered murals. She wandered from door to door, though many of them were locked and the front desk was bereft of keys. The rooms that would open to her did so while expelling a cloud of black smoke and the unmistakable stink of something burning.
She tested three doors in total before the corridor was filled with billowing, toxic soot, triggering the fire alarms. Angela pinched her nose and darted through the nearest hatch into a carpeted stairwell already ablaze. Startled, she flattened herself against the wall and blindly sought out the door that would lead her back to the first hallway. Once her hand found the knob, it was red-hot to the touch, a sure sign that fire was awaiting her on the other side.
Utterly boxed in, she wondered if she could make it to the second floor before the stairs were completely consumed until there was nothing left but embers and ashes. The flames paralleled the steps like lethal banisters and Angela cautiously moved forward, testing the stability of the raised wood with her feet. It didn't crumble beneath her weight and she felt a twinge of reassurance. She made it up a dozen or so steps when a large, unusual painting caught her attention.
It was hung low on the wall in a heavy oak frame and it seemed the canvas, blank and carelessly stitched wherever it had torn, had been stretched over a prone man-sized figure already pinned to the wall. Like a fly trapped in a spider's web. Perhaps it wasn't a painting, but a sculpture. The image sent a violent tremor through her and she stroked her arms to ward off the chill.
From the corner of her eye, she noticed somebody approaching, ascending. Someone crowned with her same dead-straight black hair. A woman. A woman she knew all too well, that she had been agonizing over.
“Mama!” Angela cried, “Mama, I was looking for you! You're the only one left.”
Oddly, her mother regarded her with an uneasy glare and backed down a few steps.
“Maybe then... maybe then I can rest,” she said, looking back at the jarring sculpture over her shoulder.
Yes. Rest. Cocooned, constricted and unmovable, like the man in the canvas. She was so tired and couldn't wait to be held by her mother and rocked to sleep, just like when she was a child.
But her mother didn't come to her with outstretched arms, nor did she tearfully regale Angela with stories about how she, too, had been journeying up and down Silent Hill for her daughter. Instead, she shied away further.
“Mama, why are you running away?”
She framed the woman's face in her thin hands, anxiously studying her: the regal nose and soft, round chin; serious black eyes and that ever-present disapproving frown. Why wasn't she smiling? Wasn't she happy to see her little girl? After all Angela had endured to come this far, didn't that deserve some kind of recognition?
As these thoughts tainted her excitement, her mother's face came apart in thick, meaty strips. Her mane singed and fell out, replaced by a crop of short, blond hair. Horrified, Angela shook off the ribbons of flesh and found herself staring into the somber blue eyes of James Sunderland.
“You're not my mama!” she wailed, stumbling back up the stairs. “It's - it's you!”
He tricked her somehow, fooled her into believing she had found her dear mother at long last. He was so cruel. How could he do something like that? Even now he was probably sneering at her, at the way she threw herself at him, like he was entitled to that kind of attention from women.
Awful, terrible, disgusting man.
Regardless, she found herself apologizing and defensively patted the air when he held out a hand to her. She half-turned away from him and crossed her arms, unsure of what to say or do next, but feeling a surge of bitterness. Whether or not he knew it, he dashed her last vestige of hope and she could never forgive him.
“Angela, no.”
And his voice grated her. He tried too hard to sound sincere. She could see right through his attempts to console her.
“Thank you for saving me, but I wish you hadn't” she admitted woefully, brushing her bangs out of her face. “Even Mama said it. I deserved what happened --”
“No, Angela, that's wrong!”
She shook her head and turned her palms outward as despair coursed through her like sludge through a pipe; she felt filthy. “No. Don't pity me. I'm not worth it.” She angled her face toward the fire and perspiration beaded on her upper lip. Then she turned back to James, her expression warped in mock-supplication. Was he trying to help her out of genuine concern for her welfare or for the sake of his own interests?
“Or maybe you think you can save me.”
'You can't.'
“Will you love me?”
'You know nothing of love.'
“Take care of me?”
'Can you even take care of yourself?'
“Heal all my pain?”
James averted his eyes, arms hanging limply at his sides, and effectively answered her queries without saying a word.
“That's what I thought,” she muttered, gazing into the fire steadily growing behind her. “James. Give me back that knife.”
He shifted his weight from foot to foot and, for a moment, looked like he was going to oblige her. “No, I... I won't.”
Angela planted her hands on her hips, a caustic lilt in her voice. “Saving it for yourself?”
“Me?” James pressed a hand incredulously to his chest. “N-no, I'd never kill myself.”
Was he bragging? He wasn't so much better than her. They were both drawn to the town on the slim chance that they'd find someone important to them. Her mother wasn't here, she was sure of that now. She wasn't here anymore than his wife was, though he was determined to cling to the lie while urging her to go home, like he was doing her a favor in saying so.
Go home to what? Police tape, her hysterical family and the unsightly splatter on the living room rug in the shape of her father along with her own agitated footprints. No doubt she'd be arrested and they'd coo and soothe and tell her they understood why she did it, but that didn't absolve the fact that there'd be consequences.
Though she put an end to the beatings and the hurtful words and the visits to her room in the middle of the night, Angela would still be at his mercy; suffering in the long, bleak shadow cast by his memory.
It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair at all.
Wordlessly, she pivoted on the stairs and slowly climbed them, the blaze lapping at her heels. There was an ominous crackle as a curtain of fire suddenly sprouted between she and James. Her fate had been sealed and there was nowhere to go but up.
“It's hot as hell in here,” he said quietly, making no move to stop her.
But stop she did, although it wasn't to try and worm her way through or around the burning veil. A path had been laid out for her and she intended to follow it.
“You see it, too? For me it's always like this.” And she walked on in earnest.
Angela was enclosed in heat and smog and had no illusions about salvation. She could feel layer upon layer of skin peeling like old paint. Soon it would scorch the bone and she would diminish. But if she made it as far as the landing, what could she expect? That brilliant, welcoming light one sees at the end of their existence, or Hell where her father would be waiting with a revolting grin? Angela prayed to merely vanish, blink out, and not have to go on being aware of problems she couldn't amend and relationships she couldn't save. If there was a speck of goodness in Silent Hill, it would grant her that much.
When she arrived at the second floor, there was nothing but an impenetrable blackness. She ran her hands over the rippling surface, closed her eyes and dove through.
And now she found herself reclining on a grassy bluff, taking comfort in the rasping caw of the birds and chirping of the various woodland animals. It seemed the town fulfilled her wish and dumped her, unharmed, someplace she could recuperate. But Silent Hill did not give without taking away and she didn't dare move for fear that something would befall her before she had the opportunity to bask in her good fortune.
Strange that she had no burns to speak of. The inferno had definitely been very real. The air was stifling and sweat pooled on the back of her knees. Even the cuffs on her sweater had been nibbled on by the blaze.
By all accounts she should have some injury due to the tight space, but her skin was the smoothest it had ever been.
No callouses or blemishes other than the mole on her left wrist.
Gone were the bruises on her hips and shoulders, the gash in her leg from where he clawed at her from the floor.
Inexplicably, she was pure, unsullied; like the fire whipped away any evidence of his hands on her.
Angela rolled up her sleeves to inspect the lily white of her arms. She even kicked off her shoes and socks to marvel at her feet. He had stamped on them a few days ago, but there was nothing to suggest it had happened at all.
She sat in awe of her flawless skin, paying little heed to the shrill, all too familiar whine that was drawing nearer and nearer.
Sirens.
Police sirens.
Wheels on gravel and the resolute slam of car doors. The officers loped up the hill toward her, wheezing with the effort, and crowded around her in bewilderment. They passed a photo between one another and nodded in mute agreement at whatever was captured in the picture. The youngest deputy, his face unlined and friendly, crouched in front of her.
“Excuse me, Miss. Are you Angela Orosco?”
Through her tears, she summoned a smile that didn't at once break her heart.
“Not anymore.”
This was reeeally hard to write. I can't tell you how many times I've gone over it and nitpicked everything.
Cross-posted to sh_het.
Title: TBA.
Author: Me, lawl.
Fandom: Silent Hill 2.
Characters: Angela Orosco and James Sunderland (gen).
Rating: R.
Notes: Spoilers regarding Angela's fate; violence; allusions to sensitive subject matter; looots of in-game dialogue.
Angela awoke on a sloping hill drizzled with dew, her arm pillowing her head and a blade of brown grass tickling her nose. It was just after dawn, rosy and riveting; the sunlight was stenciled by the dark leaves of the trees it climbed behind. She would have been cold had it not been for her sweater.
Yanking the offending bit of grass from the earth, Angela petulantly threw it away and rolled onto her back. Dark, world-weary eyes screwed up in puzzlement at the pinkish sky and she wondered if she was still stuck in that mystical place between awake and asleep, where hotels burned to the warbling tune of old music boxes and slack-jawed shadows of men stalked her own in a town that she was beginning to doubt existed.
Suddenly overcome with nausea, she pressed her hands to her face and breathed in, nearly choking on the fetor of charred wood and sizzling varnish. Her clothes, while damp from the morning dew, positively reeked of it.
Somehow she was alive, unmarred. And bizarrely grateful. For what, she wasn't entirely sure. To have survived was a fine start. But had it been through her own force of will? No. Angela had very little will, but she had the will to sit up, and so she did. She had the will to hug her trembling legs to her chest, so she did, and ducked her head down against her knees, rubbing her forehead on the harsh corduroy.
“My knife,” she murmured and searched her pockets for the weapon. But it was nowhere to be found. Had she dropped it? Or had there been no knife at all?
There had been, of course, because she could still feel the weight of it in her palm. She remembered thinking that the hilt was a little too heavy for a normal kitchen knife and she remembered how mesmerized she was by her own reflection in the blade. Glinting and dangerous, not a woman to be trifled with. Haloed by metal and sharp edges. No one would dare touch her.
Her father had and look where it got him.
On instinct, she clapped her hands over her ears to drown out the cacophony of her own reedy screaming in her head, but nothing came. Not a sob, not a whimper. Slowly she pulled her hands away and was met by the early morning twitter of birds.
What was going on? How come there was no gnawing at the pit of her stomach? How come her feet didn't feel like lead? Where was the tension in her shoulders and the lump of sorrow in her throat? These things had been seized from her and she felt if she didn't anchor herself with something soon, she'd float away.
Angela tried to recall her final moments in Silent Hill. She had been at that fancy hotel, right? The one overlooking the lake. She remembered numbly admiring it from the outside. The upstanding architecture and the flicker of fire within, giving the impression of enticing orange-red eyes beckoning her from the second-story windows. Common sense warned her to stay away, that her mama wouldn't be waiting for her in a place like that, but Angela knew it was the final test to prove how much she loved her mother; that she would do anything to have that affection reciprocated. She'd be a big, brave girl and press on. Mama would be so impressed.
Inside it was dim and cavernous and like a fairy tale castle, with winding staircases and pretty, slightly tattered murals. She wandered from door to door, though many of them were locked and the front desk was bereft of keys. The rooms that would open to her did so while expelling a cloud of black smoke and the unmistakable stink of something burning.
She tested three doors in total before the corridor was filled with billowing, toxic soot, triggering the fire alarms. Angela pinched her nose and darted through the nearest hatch into a carpeted stairwell already ablaze. Startled, she flattened herself against the wall and blindly sought out the door that would lead her back to the first hallway. Once her hand found the knob, it was red-hot to the touch, a sure sign that fire was awaiting her on the other side.
Utterly boxed in, she wondered if she could make it to the second floor before the stairs were completely consumed until there was nothing left but embers and ashes. The flames paralleled the steps like lethal banisters and Angela cautiously moved forward, testing the stability of the raised wood with her feet. It didn't crumble beneath her weight and she felt a twinge of reassurance. She made it up a dozen or so steps when a large, unusual painting caught her attention.
It was hung low on the wall in a heavy oak frame and it seemed the canvas, blank and carelessly stitched wherever it had torn, had been stretched over a prone man-sized figure already pinned to the wall. Like a fly trapped in a spider's web. Perhaps it wasn't a painting, but a sculpture. The image sent a violent tremor through her and she stroked her arms to ward off the chill.
From the corner of her eye, she noticed somebody approaching, ascending. Someone crowned with her same dead-straight black hair. A woman. A woman she knew all too well, that she had been agonizing over.
“Mama!” Angela cried, “Mama, I was looking for you! You're the only one left.”
Oddly, her mother regarded her with an uneasy glare and backed down a few steps.
“Maybe then... maybe then I can rest,” she said, looking back at the jarring sculpture over her shoulder.
Yes. Rest. Cocooned, constricted and unmovable, like the man in the canvas. She was so tired and couldn't wait to be held by her mother and rocked to sleep, just like when she was a child.
But her mother didn't come to her with outstretched arms, nor did she tearfully regale Angela with stories about how she, too, had been journeying up and down Silent Hill for her daughter. Instead, she shied away further.
“Mama, why are you running away?”
She framed the woman's face in her thin hands, anxiously studying her: the regal nose and soft, round chin; serious black eyes and that ever-present disapproving frown. Why wasn't she smiling? Wasn't she happy to see her little girl? After all Angela had endured to come this far, didn't that deserve some kind of recognition?
As these thoughts tainted her excitement, her mother's face came apart in thick, meaty strips. Her mane singed and fell out, replaced by a crop of short, blond hair. Horrified, Angela shook off the ribbons of flesh and found herself staring into the somber blue eyes of James Sunderland.
“You're not my mama!” she wailed, stumbling back up the stairs. “It's - it's you!”
He tricked her somehow, fooled her into believing she had found her dear mother at long last. He was so cruel. How could he do something like that? Even now he was probably sneering at her, at the way she threw herself at him, like he was entitled to that kind of attention from women.
Awful, terrible, disgusting man.
Regardless, she found herself apologizing and defensively patted the air when he held out a hand to her. She half-turned away from him and crossed her arms, unsure of what to say or do next, but feeling a surge of bitterness. Whether or not he knew it, he dashed her last vestige of hope and she could never forgive him.
“Angela, no.”
And his voice grated her. He tried too hard to sound sincere. She could see right through his attempts to console her.
“Thank you for saving me, but I wish you hadn't” she admitted woefully, brushing her bangs out of her face. “Even Mama said it. I deserved what happened --”
“No, Angela, that's wrong!”
She shook her head and turned her palms outward as despair coursed through her like sludge through a pipe; she felt filthy. “No. Don't pity me. I'm not worth it.” She angled her face toward the fire and perspiration beaded on her upper lip. Then she turned back to James, her expression warped in mock-supplication. Was he trying to help her out of genuine concern for her welfare or for the sake of his own interests?
“Or maybe you think you can save me.”
'You can't.'
“Will you love me?”
'You know nothing of love.'
“Take care of me?”
'Can you even take care of yourself?'
“Heal all my pain?”
James averted his eyes, arms hanging limply at his sides, and effectively answered her queries without saying a word.
“That's what I thought,” she muttered, gazing into the fire steadily growing behind her. “James. Give me back that knife.”
He shifted his weight from foot to foot and, for a moment, looked like he was going to oblige her. “No, I... I won't.”
Angela planted her hands on her hips, a caustic lilt in her voice. “Saving it for yourself?”
“Me?” James pressed a hand incredulously to his chest. “N-no, I'd never kill myself.”
Was he bragging? He wasn't so much better than her. They were both drawn to the town on the slim chance that they'd find someone important to them. Her mother wasn't here, she was sure of that now. She wasn't here anymore than his wife was, though he was determined to cling to the lie while urging her to go home, like he was doing her a favor in saying so.
Go home to what? Police tape, her hysterical family and the unsightly splatter on the living room rug in the shape of her father along with her own agitated footprints. No doubt she'd be arrested and they'd coo and soothe and tell her they understood why she did it, but that didn't absolve the fact that there'd be consequences.
Though she put an end to the beatings and the hurtful words and the visits to her room in the middle of the night, Angela would still be at his mercy; suffering in the long, bleak shadow cast by his memory.
It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair at all.
Wordlessly, she pivoted on the stairs and slowly climbed them, the blaze lapping at her heels. There was an ominous crackle as a curtain of fire suddenly sprouted between she and James. Her fate had been sealed and there was nowhere to go but up.
“It's hot as hell in here,” he said quietly, making no move to stop her.
But stop she did, although it wasn't to try and worm her way through or around the burning veil. A path had been laid out for her and she intended to follow it.
“You see it, too? For me it's always like this.” And she walked on in earnest.
Angela was enclosed in heat and smog and had no illusions about salvation. She could feel layer upon layer of skin peeling like old paint. Soon it would scorch the bone and she would diminish. But if she made it as far as the landing, what could she expect? That brilliant, welcoming light one sees at the end of their existence, or Hell where her father would be waiting with a revolting grin? Angela prayed to merely vanish, blink out, and not have to go on being aware of problems she couldn't amend and relationships she couldn't save. If there was a speck of goodness in Silent Hill, it would grant her that much.
When she arrived at the second floor, there was nothing but an impenetrable blackness. She ran her hands over the rippling surface, closed her eyes and dove through.
And now she found herself reclining on a grassy bluff, taking comfort in the rasping caw of the birds and chirping of the various woodland animals. It seemed the town fulfilled her wish and dumped her, unharmed, someplace she could recuperate. But Silent Hill did not give without taking away and she didn't dare move for fear that something would befall her before she had the opportunity to bask in her good fortune.
Strange that she had no burns to speak of. The inferno had definitely been very real. The air was stifling and sweat pooled on the back of her knees. Even the cuffs on her sweater had been nibbled on by the blaze.
By all accounts she should have some injury due to the tight space, but her skin was the smoothest it had ever been.
No callouses or blemishes other than the mole on her left wrist.
Gone were the bruises on her hips and shoulders, the gash in her leg from where he clawed at her from the floor.
Inexplicably, she was pure, unsullied; like the fire whipped away any evidence of his hands on her.
Angela rolled up her sleeves to inspect the lily white of her arms. She even kicked off her shoes and socks to marvel at her feet. He had stamped on them a few days ago, but there was nothing to suggest it had happened at all.
She sat in awe of her flawless skin, paying little heed to the shrill, all too familiar whine that was drawing nearer and nearer.
Sirens.
Police sirens.
Wheels on gravel and the resolute slam of car doors. The officers loped up the hill toward her, wheezing with the effort, and crowded around her in bewilderment. They passed a photo between one another and nodded in mute agreement at whatever was captured in the picture. The youngest deputy, his face unlined and friendly, crouched in front of her.
“Excuse me, Miss. Are you Angela Orosco?”
Through her tears, she summoned a smile that didn't at once break her heart.
“Not anymore.”
This was reeeally hard to write. I can't tell you how many times I've gone over it and nitpicked everything.
Cross-posted to sh_het.