WRITING: Gravity (Chapter 5)

[phantastus]

Title: GRAVITY
Chapter: 5 (Nine Red Squares)
Author: phantastus
Fandom: Silent Hill
Rating: PG-13 to R
Genre: Horror/Drama/Angst
Main characters: James Sunderland, Mary Shepherd-Sunderland, Laura
Summary: Before James can leave the home he and Mary shared behind for good, there are wrongs to right and memories to unearth. So, so many memories.
Notes: Chapter 5 of my ongoing, obscenely long SH2 fanfic. Set directly after the Leave Ending, but contains heavy implications of In Water. The fic is mirrored over here along with several subsequent chapters, but I will be posting the most up-to-date edits here for the time being.
This story was initially written (and is still in progress) for NaNoWriMo 2009.
Disclaimer/Warnings: In keeping with the source material, this fanfic depicts events and situations that may be considered violent or cruel. If anything in the Silent Hill series triggers you, this story may not be for you. This chapter deals with potentially-upsetting concepts including but not limited to:

-general horror concepts
-intense depictions of PTSD/panic attacks
-mentions of murder via suffocation/smothering
-depictions of child neglect/growing-up experiences with a mentally unstable parent
-medical emergencies related to terminal illness
-mentions of alcoholism, alcohol consumption
-implied domestic emotional abuse
-STRIPPER ACTION sexual situations (non-graphic)
-extreme TL;DR
-the phrase 'Down Syndrome' is mentioned like once
-an umbilical cord in a box

Please read at your own risk.

Recommended Listening:
-All is Well (It's Only Blood)
-Weight of the World
-Fog in the House of Lightbulbs
-Wake
-Recessional
-All is Well (Goodbye, Goodbye)


Chapter 5: Nine Red Squares





The word was still on his tongue. Somehow in the space of those scant few seconds, his mouth had gone parched and dry, as though from the bittersweet taste of the very word itself. He licked chapped lips, wishing he didn't have to open his eyes again. Even if it was nothing more than a memory, he didn't want it to end. It had been so strong, almost like a physical experience more than just a momentary wave of nostalgia. Even now, he was yearning to feel even a ghost of that warm sun on his face, of the dry grass tickling his ankles, of Mary's soft hair against his cheek...

But with a groan, he sat up from the pitifully horizontal position he must have slumped sideways onto the couch in after tying the last bandage. As much as he'd have liked to slip back into the memory, Laura needed something to eat. Frankly, he was surprised that she'd left him more or less alone the whole time he was mopping himself up.

"Hnng..." James brought both hands up to rub gingerly at his eyes. He wasn't making the same mistake he'd made earlier— the panda-rings were still very much still there. He snuffled, relieved to find that his nose no longer felt like it was full of cement, then swallowed while he waited for the fairy-like lights drifting around in the corners of his vision to go away. "Okay, Laura, I'll try'n make something f— ... you..."

The lamp beside the couch was on.

That wasn't a problem. It was a soft, orange light that was easy on his eyes. Not like the bright neon that had seared straight through his eyelids in the bar.

No, the thing that made his words trail off was the fact that the last time his eyes had been open, the light had most definitely not been on.

Nor had the windows looked out onto nothing but pitch blackness.

The first-aid kit went clattering off the table as James stumbled upright on still-sleeping limbs, his bandaged foot knocking it and its contents scattering like bowling pins. There was still a damp patch on the back of his shirt where his body had been pressed firmly against the couch cushions; it clung to his skin moistly as he steadied himself on the edge of the coffee table, heart pounding.

"Luh-lauraaa?"

The doorway to the kitchen was dark. Same with the hall.

A sick chill ran through James's stomach as he turned his head gingerly to look around at the old grandfather clock in the corner. It was an antique— one of the many creaky old inherited things that had looked incredibly out of place in the spare home of Mary's aunt but fit right into this elderly house.

Eight o'clock.

They'd gotten here at six.

Two hours meant that it should have been LIGHT outside, not blacker than the rings around his eyes.

"Laura?!"

There was a dull thud as James's knee met the edge of the coffee table in the process of stumbling towards the kitchen. He didn't notice. His feet were cold and clumsy and his body had yet to catch up with his head in the alertness department.

Grabbing the edge of the doorframe, he leaned in, eyes wide.

There was a distinct absence of any little girls on the table.

With a hoarse cough, he turned away from the dark room and headed instead for the hallway, both his train of thought and heartrate rapidly accelerating.

"Lauraaaaah?"

The Otherworld was not always foggy. Sometimes, he remembered, everything went dark. Stepping out of Brookhaven Hospital had been like stepping into the belly of some colossal beast. Pitch-black and wet. That was one thing that stayed the same no matter what the Otherworld was coated in, white fog or darkness as stifling as a blanket of black velvet. It was always wet.

His feet slapped briefly on hardwood before they met carpet, the dust and grit of vacuumless months sticking to his soles and the crevices between his toes as he padded erratically towards the stairs, reaching for the railing. As he did so, his elbow bumped the flimsy tray of medications and it toppled over, sending pills spilling out across the floor like little white bones.

That was the other thing about that dark variant of the Otherworld. The town had only seemed to turn the lights down right after something terrible had happened.

Like in the elevator.

"Laura!!" His voice took on a high note of panic as he stumbled up the stairs.

The arm stiffening once before going limp, as blood came gurgling through the crack between the closing doors...

About halfway up, his knee remembered that it had taken a rather nasty blow and decided to make up for its delayed response by hurting more than was necessary. James cursed and narrowly avoided meeting the next stair with his face as his body sprawled onto the thankfully-carpeted steps with a thump.

"Laura, are you up there?!"

The rest of the trip to the second floor was made on all fours because he could no longer see where he was going, and there was less of a distance to fall if he tripped that way.

If something had happened to her...

The upstairs hallway was as empty as the kitchen, and so, at least as far as James's panicked eyes could see in the dark, were all of its rooms. Their house had never been horribly cluttered, but just as time could make eyes memorize the order of rooms filled with objects, so too could it force them to memorize bareness. Even after everything that had happened, it took less than a split second for James to recognize that none of the bareness had been disturbed. Besides, it was unlikely that an eight-year-old girl would have ventured upstairs into total darkness. This lonely house was creepy with all the lights out.

The door at the end of the hallway was shut. He passed over it entirely and turned tail to stumble back down the stairs.

"L-Laura?!"

He had forgotten all about the pills on the floor and they rolled under his bare foot as he planted it in the middle of the spill. Pitching forward, it was only through luck and a last-minute grab at the stair-railing that he avoided falling completely. His heart was hammering against his ribs like a mallet to a xylophone, new and horrifying possibilities flooding into his head with each note.

What if she was in the normal world? What if she was just wandering around the house, wondering where he'd gone and what she was supposed to do now? What if he, James, was just trapped here in that awful black-hole brand of Otherworld and everything that had transpired between the roof of Lakeview and here was just that town at it again, teasing him with one last taste of life before dragging him kicking and screaming back into itself?

He burst into the living room, warbling out the girl's name again.

"LAURA??"

What if he hadn't been able to save Laura from that monster in the bar at all? What if he'd just imagined it, like the letter that brought him to Silent Hill and she, like Mary, was dead? What if the police were digging up her body from whatever awful woodland grave that freak had left her in, like those serial killers that populated the late-night crime shows that James sometimes watched bleary, drunken marathons of?

Or even worse, what if she was alive, alive and still in the clutches of— no. No, that couldn't have happened. He'd saved her, he had! ... Right?

Slamming his hands down on the back of the couch, James leaned over it to stare wildly around the back half of the living room.

"LAUR— oh."

Laura frowned up at him from where she had been sitting behind the couch, back against it and legs straight out in front of her. A glossy photo album was open in her lap, its brethren scattered around her like fallen warriors of some kind of book battle. All of the cabinets against the wall had been thrown open, clearly ransacked by her little hands.

"... Oh." James sagged onto the couch with one knee, a relieved sigh rushing out of him. "You're here." You're safe.

"Um, yeah," said Laura, wrinkling her nose and squinting at him as though she hadn't just heard him stagger all over the house, hollering her name like a broken record. "What's your problem?"

"I— n-nothing," James mumbled, lifting a hand to swipe gingerly across his brow. He could feel his heartbeat sputtering as it slowly calmed from the drumlike beat it had been tattooing on the inside of his chest. "Nothing..."

He took a slow, deep breath and felt each bruise along his torso sound off like a night guard during role-call as the pressure of his expanding lungs passed each of them in turn. It hurt, but it was a reassuring kind of hurt. It reminded him that he was still alive. In Silent Hill, the pain had not been absent, but it had eventually started to settle into that same dreamy numbness that he'd felt during the fight with Todd.

James slumped onto the couch further, letting the raspy material catch the fabric of his shirt and rumple it as he let himself ooze exhaustedly into the empty space previously between himself and the cushions. One problem down.

But that still left the other, and the bruises sang more sharply as he took in a quicker breath to croak out, "Laura, u-um, hey. D-does it look... dark outside to you?" The stammer in his voice made whatever was left of his dignity cringe, but he knew there wasn't a whole lot he could do about it, so it was only a cringe.

On the other hand, what made those remnants of dignity shrivel and curl into a self-loathing little ball in the corner of his brain was the way Laura slowly turned her head to look out the window, and then back at him. Her expression said it all, but because she clearly thought he was too dense to figure it out from her limited facial cues, she clarified her question out loud.

"Are you stupid?"

James swallowed hard.

"Uh— ... I... just answer the question, Laura. Please?"

"Yeah. It's dark." She spoke with deliberate slowness, lovingly emphasizing each word with levels of condescension that would put a teenager to shame. Something in the general region of James's stomach crawled away in humiliation before the actual alarm started to set in.

Paling, he gestured broadly to the window.

"S-so, you can see it too this time?" he asked, feeling dread start to creep up his spine, lifting the hairs on the back of his neck.

There was a moment of silence on Laura's part wherein she stared very hard at James's face with her own brows deeply furrowed, as though trying to determine whether or not he was serious. He gazed back at her, the dread slowly starting to dissipate in the face of the very unsettling feeling that he was, once again, missing something very obvious.

When she continued to not say anything, James frowned and let his eyes wander past her to the other clock in the room, a small digital one by the bookshelf. The feeling was confirmed by the tiny, glowing 'PM' sign blinking on and off under the '8:04'.

"... Oh." James slid a little lower as all his panicked reasoning encountered this new information like a car speeding into a brick wall. "Ohhhh..."

His body completed its slow-motion slide downwards and he let out a long, slightly-sheepish (but still relieved) sigh as he rested his chin on the back of the couch where his elbow had been a moment before.

No Otherworld. Just normal nighttime. He was still here. They were safe.

Laura continued to stare at him calculatingly.

"What, are ya scared of the dark or somethin'?"

"No, I just—"

"Then why'd ya look like you were gonna cry?"

"Because— what?" James lifted his head enough that he could frown at her. "I did not, I was just—"

Around this point in time, James's internal survival instincts pointed out that now would be a really good time to change the subject if he wanted his poor, shattered dignity to have any hope of continuing to cling to life, so he did. It was a reassuring sign. Fourteen hours earlier, when he'd first sat down with the first-aid kit to tend to his wounds, he'd never have had the presence of mind to recognize and avoid an argument so sure to result in his loss.

He had needed the rest, even if it hadn't quite been intentional.

"I must've just... fallen asleep. Why didn't you try to wake me up?"

"I did," said Laura, and from the way she said it, James got the distinct impression that she'd tried hard. "But you wouldn't move, you just laid there like a lump."

She stood up and brushed off her dress with one hand, still holding the open album with the other. At about this point in time, something in James's head clicked and he realized that yes, those books scattered all over the floor were NOT figments of his imagination.

"Hey! What're you doing with those? Those are private!" He didn't have the oomph to raise his voice, but he tried to inject a disapproving tone into his words. It wasn't that there was anything particularly secret in the albums... But they were the only evidence he had that there had once been a time that he and Mary were happy, and having someone— especially someone who hated him— look through them without his permission gave him an unpleasant crawling sensation in his stomach. It was like being violated somehow.

"Why?" Laura asked rudely, looking down at the glossy pages and turning one of them, despite a murmured sound of protest from the sorry pile of James on the couch. "It's all just of you and Mary. Bein' all mushy and stuff."

It was a typical childish thing to say about the admittedly shmoopy photographs of the young, then-happy couple, but like everything else Laura said on the subject of Mary, it was accompanied by an underlying hint of bitterness. That just made James's innards squirm even more, so he frowned and made a wimpy swipe for the album, of which Laura stepped out of range easily without even looking up.

"I'm serious, Laura, put that back," he said, fully aware that his voice held about as much authority as a substitute teacher unfortunate enough to be assigned to a middle-school music class.

"Why should I?" she challenged, defiantly turning another page. "Anyway, I've seen most of these already." She looked up in time to catch James's questioning look. "Mary showed me all these photos of Silent Hill, remember? I told you when we were in that creepy ol' burned building."

Burned?

It took James's brain a moment to remember that the Lakeview Hotel he'd seen at first was not quite the same one that had existed in reality.

"Oh... oh yeah."

He wasn't sure if knowing that Laura had seen the photos before made him feel better or worse.

"But some of them I haven't seen," Laura continued, sounding a little brighter as she flipped towards the back of the album she'd been holding, ignoring James's continued protests and pathetic grabs over the back of the couch. "Like these ones. Is this you?"

James blinked at the question before she turned the book around and held it up for him to see.

And there, right before his eyes, was something he'd forgotten was in there and hadn't expected to ever see again.

It was a small photograph, dated 1982, the kind with the white edge on the bottom intended for a Season's Greeting that had never wound up being written. Unlike so many holiday photos, though, the smiles on the faces of the people in it were real. That was probably why Mary had made him keep it, despite his protests.

There were three of them. A man, dressed in a bulky gray sweatshirt that complimented his slowly-graying hair, had his arm wrapped around the shoulder of a woman, whose eyes were mostly-shut as she laughed, face lit up by both the flash of the camera and a moment of joy. Her hair— long, curly, and dark red like maraschino cherry syrup— spilled over the head of the figure in between them, who beamed out of the photo at James so brightly that he felt his own cheeks hurting with the effort. Pudgy-faced and sporting a missing tooth and a mushroom-cut of straw-colored hair, the little boy was held tightly between his two parents, playfully fending off a hug and the embarrassing kisses that would be sure to follow from his mother.

There wasn't any particular reason for the kid to be smiling so genuinely. But then, James didn't remember needing any particular reason to smile back then. There hadn't been any reason not to.

"... Uhmm, yeah, that's me," he mumbled, attempting to take the album from her and close it so that he didn't have to look at his younger self's gap-toothed grin anymore.

Her grip remained firm and he eventually gave up and went back to lolling his head on the back of the couch.

"Wow, you used to look like one of the kids in my orphanage," Laura said, which made him raise his brows slightly.

"Really?"

"Yeah," she said brightly. "He has Down Syndrome."

James frowned.

"... At least your mom was pretty," Laura offered, perhaps as a consolation.

"Give me that," James mumbled, finally succeeding in yanking the book away from her with a little more force than was necessary. She let out an angry little huff but didn't look too bothered. Or at least not bothered enough to cease being nosy.

"Is that your dad?"

"Yes."

"You got his eyes."

James couldn't think of anything to say that would truly convey his bewilderment at Laura's random interest in his childhood, nor his intense desire for the subject to be changed, so he just made a sort of disgruntled noise. Evidently it got the point across, because Laura let out another indignant huff.

"You're lucky you got parents," she said, and he sensed that this was probably more of a ploy to make him feel guilty than any true jealousy on her part. Despite her obvious devotion to Mary, Laura didn't seem to hold any particular fondness for adults— especially not ones who tried to parent her.

So he merely nodded a little in response. His eyes felt stuck on the glossy surface of the photo.

Laura didn't seem to notice, and continued onwards with the tirade, self-righteously.

"All we had at the orphanage were nuns and this old priest guy who came once a week and couldn't remember anybody's name and was always kinda drunk, like a mall Santa."

"What?" said James blankly, most of what she'd said having gone in one ear and right out the other.

She rolled her eyes at his inattention.

"I said, there was just this priest who was always—"

"—drunk," said James, his fists clenched determinedly at his sides and his heart hammering in his throat.

The figure in the armchair in front of him turned to look at the doorway and squinted up at him for a moment as though trying to figure out who he was. And then, as always, sagged back into the chair with an air of disappointment. Like he'd been expecting someone else, someone better.

James stared back through the thick mop of hair that had gotten to hanging in his eyes lately since he'd been too lazy to cut it.

He was eleven and standing in the doorway of the apartment he'd grown up in, feet squared in his tattered shoes (he hadn't gone and gotten himself a new pair in awhile, though he was long since overdue) and jaw set grimly.

".. You're what?" said the figure slowly, his weathered, thick-knuckled hands clutching a square, flattish box that he had once slid out of sight whenever someone else came into the room, but now never bothered to. Now, his only response was to hold onto it tighter, as though suspecting it would be taken from him.

"I'm drunk, Pop," said James again, feeling a thrill that was equal parts excitement and terror run through him from head to toe as he said the scandalous words. He watched those dark eyes apprehensively, dimly aware through the buzz of alcohol that he was shivering.

Later, on nights when he had nothing better to think about (there would be a lot of nights like that), he would dramatize this event in his head. He'd think about what might have happened if he'd been yelled at, or sent to his room, or even slapped across the face and sent sprawling. It wasn't that he did this to feel sorry for himself, or to pretend that it had been worse than it actually was.

The truth was that all of those outcomes were things he wished had happened more than what actually had.

From the worn-out old armchair, the figure who was practically a stranger stared at him a moment longer, before simply shaking its head in silent apathy and looking back down at the box.

"This is why we didn't keep yours," said Frank Sunderland, dismissively.

James shut the book with a loud snap, cutting Laura off mid-sentence. She blinked, startled, and looked at him questioningly. He blinked back. And then sneezed.

"... Aahaoww..." Wincing, he raised a hand gingerly to the bridge of his nose. It didn't feel crooked, so maybe it wasn't broken after all, but it still hurt to do anything with it. Putting the album down on the couch beside him and scooting it partially under a pillow for good measure, he finally stood up, trying to clear his head. It didn't feel like he'd been asleep for fourteen hours... While he was certainly more alert than before, tiredness was still lurking around in the back of his skull and most of his body was begging him to lie back down again and pass out for another fourteen hours. Or maybe forever a week. A week sounded nice.

But he couldn't. As they'd pulled into the driveway that morning, he honestly hadn't thought ahead to what might lay after the obvious task of making himself look like something other than raw hamburger wrapped in green rags. But now, even though he probably could have used more rest, there was a sort of buzz keeping that partially-diminished exhaustion at bay.

It wasn't like the buzz of half-complete thoughts and phantom static that had kept him going on his hike to the overlook, or of the alcohol and adrenaline that had banished his pain during the barfight. It was something else. Something much more powerful, that made him feel like there were things to do. Unfinished business that had to be completed.

Wincing as his weight rolled onto the bad ankle (which had apparently been asleep during his clumsy wild goose chase around the house, but had since woken from its slumber), James breathed out slowly and tried to pinpoint the source of the strange, driven feeling. There was something very obvious, he knew— something he should have done a long time ago—

"Jeez!" he exclaimed loudly as it came to him, and then he repeated himself in a slightly more pained fashion as the act of being loud reminded his head that it had a lump the size of a small egg on the back of it. "Laura— I'm sorry, I didn't get you anything to eat— I, hang on—"

He had already stumbled in a distinctly drunken manner (even though the booze had long since filtered out of his system) towards the kitchen and made it to the doorway, where he stood groping hopelessly for the switch, when Laura thought to pipe up, matter-of-factly: "Oh, I found food in the fridge ages ago."

James blinked over his shoulder at her as the words sunk in. She'd picked up another album and was now thumbing through it.

"... Oh," he said finally.

Now that he thought of it, if she hadn't been able to find anything, chances were he wouldn't have been allowed to remain lying there 'like a lump'.

She seemed to have lost interest in him for the time being, at least— reabsorbed in her snooping through the precious few years of his and Mary's marriage that had been untainted by the disease. Deciding to take advantage of the moment, James finally located the light switch and flicked it on before stepping into the kitchen.

Sure enough, there was an open jar of peanut butter and a half-empty bag of bread that he hadn't noticed were sitting there before in his panic. The missing half of the bread bag was scattered around it in the form of a pile of half-eaten crusts— of course she'd be that kid who only ate the soft parts out of the sandwiches.

It figured that she'd leave the remains of a meal just lying around like a wolf pack might leave a ransacked elk carcass, too.

James felt like he should be more grumpy about this than he actually was, but either he was too tired to muster up that kind of emotion, or he knew in his heart of hearts that he didn't really have a right to be annoyed at anything Laura did. If he was going to be honest with himself, it was probably the latter.

Groaning and rubbing the back of his neck, he stepped blearily over to the table to put the remains away.

Then something happened.

That something was the dry, sticky smell of the jar's contents hitting his nose, quickly followed by the realization that that it had now been days since he'd last eaten.

It hit him like a sledgehammer.

His legs decided to cope with the sudden, jarring sensation that his midsection had been replaced by a yawning, empty void by turning to jell-o and the table tipped slightly as he grabbed onto its edge for support.

After a few seconds, there were no crusts left on the table and James had mostly sagged straight to the ground, holding himself up with one arm and wondering what had happened. His throat was dry and scratchy and he suspected there were crumbs in his windpipe. But on the bright side, his belly didn't feel like a black hole anymore.

Groaning slightly, James hauled himself upright. That had been a little off-putting, but he supposed he'd needed it just like he'd evidently needed those fourteen hours of total unconsciousness. One thing at a time.

Sweeping the remaining crumbs off the table with one hand, he reached for the jar's lid with the other.

By the time his mind registered the fact that there was still peanut butter on the inside of the lid, it was already in his mouth.

Feeling inexplicably guilty, he screwed the licked-clean lid back onto the jar. Something about that felt wrong and unsanitary, but... well. It wasn't as though anyone but him would be eating out of that thing, so...

He set the jar aside and picked up the bag instead. Naturally, Laura hadn't bothered closing it and the bread inside, if it hadn't been stale already, was well on its way to becoming so. Twisting the plastic shut, James looked around blearily for the fastener. Was it one of those bags that was shut with a twisty-tie or... or one of those plastic things that nobody knew the name of? James turned the bag around and stared at its brand for a good five minutes before realizing that this wouldn't help. Oh well. It'd just have to go stale, then. Wasn't like anyone would ever be eating the rest of this, either...

The plastic crinkled under his fingers as he tied the loose portion into a knot, but he couldn't tear his eyes away from the printed logo. It was nothing particularly special or interesting. Just the brightly-colored title of whatever cheap store he'd been at when he'd last gone grocery-shopping... which felt longer ago than he cared to remember.

Mary had never liked white bread.

Or, well, that was a bit of an exaggeration. More accurately, she'd just preferred hose weird ones with all the grains and seeds. James, on the other hand, had always been a white-bread kind of guy. This had been something that had started out as a subject of playful debate between them (mostly when he'd just moved in with her and would sneak his brands of bread into the basket instead of hers, at the store) and had eventually progressed to one that had caused actual sore feelings once the disease progressed and started to eat away at more than just her body.

... She hadn't liked it when he left the bread out and forgot to close the bag with those twisty-ties, either.

A high-pitched noise that most people would think had no business coming from a human male older than five escaped him as his eyes started to burn.

The fact that the human brain can only take so much at once had been fully demonstrated to James by the ordeal he had just returned from. Put a person through enough stress and grief and guilt and shame and eventually they'll just snap. But while everything about the past three years had been punctuated by melancholy and choked-back tears, and everything about the last three days had been punctuated by devastating realizations and harsh truths, there was still something about the mind that could push it all back to tolerable levels. Even when confronted face-to-face with its own sins, it could still hold it at arm's length, close enough to tremble in the face of the truth but far enough away to not be eaten alive. Letting the truth pour out of him to that last, godsent vision of Mary had felt like his chest caving in under the weight of it all, but she'd still been there. She hadn't been gone. Not yet.

But right here, right now, that un-shut bag of bread suddenly brought reality slamming into home.

He sagged against the table, pinching the bridge of his nose so hard that it was almost agonizing, praying that the pain would blot out the burning. The sounds that were squeezing out of his tight throat could only be described as whimpers, but he couldn't stop.

He'd never be able to try and slip Wonderbread into the supermarket basket while she wasn't looking, ever again. Never mind that he hadn't done it in years; now it was impossible. It was gone.

Everything like that was gone.

"Are you crying?"

James inhaled sharply and sent a new yank of pain through his sinuses. Wincing and trying to bite back the sharp whines that had been escaping him, he turned hastily and was confronted with the sight of Laura standing in the doorway, having finished her business with the photo albums and followed him to the kitchen to damage his self-esteem some more.

She didn't wait for a reply before exclaiming, as though the sight of his distraught face was all the evidence she needed, "You are! You're crying. You are scared of the dark. You liar."

James didn't have the composure to come up with a counterargument, so he just turned his head away and raised a hand.

"Laura—just. Please."

'Leave me alone' was the obvious follow-up to the 'Please', but something about the idea of saying that made James feel even worse. So he just trailed off and hoped Laura would get the message.

She didn't.

"Grownups aren't s'pposed to be scared of the dark anymore. You're a real lousy grownup, y'know," she remarked as she stepped further into the kitchen. It didn't really matter that she was right. James just didn't want to hear it right now. Screwing up his face, he backed up and held up his other hand to join the first.

"Laura, I— look, I'm— I'm not in the mood, all right? And I'm not scared of the dark."

What was in it, maybe, but ...

"Well if that's not what you're crying about, then what is it?" Her voice was sharp and even though his headache had dissipated with sleep, the sound sent threatening pangs through his skull. When he didn't answer, she paused suspiciously before prompting further, "... Are you crying 'cause of Mary?"

James's silence provided all answers that Laura needed, and in turn, Laura's ensuing silence said that she still firmly believed he had not loved Mary, and by extension also firmly believed that he didn't have any right to be crying over her. James didn't blame her. She was only eight. She couldn't possibly understand what had existed between him and his wife, why he'd done it, and why he was crying over the person whose life he, personally, had ended. He knew he couldn't have understood it at that age, either.

Laura eventually broke the silence, barely able to disguise the disgust in her voice.

"Are you just gonna pretend like she died 'cause she was sick?"

Swallowing hard, James shook his head. He wasn't sure what he was going to do, but it wasn't that.

"Then why'd you come back here?" Laura continued to prod, finally scooting over to one of the chairs at the table and climbing onto it to reclaim her previous throne on the tabletop. James finally raised his head to meet her gaze and he could tell she was thinking the same thing he was.

The girl might have been young, might not yet be able to put herself in others' shoes too well, but she wasn't stupid, no matter what frustrated descriptive adjectives for her had been running through his head back there in Silent Hill. She'd been able to piece Eddie together with the presence of the police lights. It came as no surprise that she'd worked out that he couldn't exactly go back to living a normal life in the house he'd shared with Mary.

Her parents would come knocking, rightfully demanding to know where their daughter's body had gone, why she'd been allowed to pass on without a call to summon them to her side for her last moments. Neighbors who hadn't spoken a word to him in years would be stopping by with condolences as if they really cared. His boss would be hunting for holes in his excuses. People would be asking questions. And the whole time, he would know that the answers he was giving them were lies.

No, he couldn't stay here.

But there was more to it than just that, and he had a feeling it was those things that Laura wouldn't understand.

Even being in this house at all without Mary felt wrong in a deep, primal way that he couldn't quite put into words.

He couldn't go back to the way he'd been living before. Everything was different now.

Running his tongue over dry lips, James coughed. More undignified sounds were welling up in his throat and the fact that he'd wolfed down a bunch of stale bread didn't help, either.

"I... I just had to. There's still... things."

That did it. Suddenly, as though triggered by the very act of acknowledging that he had unfinished business, the mental fog cleared. It was as though he'd been sluggishly blundering around in the dark room, and those words had been the doorknob. He straightened up, scrubbing hair out of his face.

Now he knew what he had to do.

"Do you need anything else to eat, Laura?" he said, turning and making eye contact with her for the first time without feeling the distinct urge to cringe away. Newfound determination was filling him from head to toe and while it would not last forever, it helped right now.

Looking a little disconcerted by his sudden change in demeanor, Laura shook her head with narrowed eyes. "Nuh uh. What things?"

"Nothing you'd be interested in..." James trailed off, looking around the kitchen.

Like the rest of the house, it was more or less free of excessive clutter, but had nonetheless not been cleaned in a long time. After the doctors had decided Mary's illness was progressing to the point where she needed to stay at the hospital full-time, James had slowly gotten less and less motivated to do anything but sleep and, eventually, drink.

Sighing, James rubbed the sore bridge of his nose tenderly and waved a hand in the direction of the living room.

"There's stuff I have to take care of. You don't need to do anything, um... the... the TV's in there if you want to watch anything."

"It's past eight. There's only boring stuff on now," Laura said, glancing dubiously back into the other room.

"... Well. Um. Still, you can watch stuff if you want," James repeated with a bland shrug. Laura's scorn, while he knew he thoroughly deserved it, was second to the situation at hand. He ignored her derisive little snort and glanced around the kitchen once more. It would need to be taken care of, but not right now. He paused again, then nodded to himself once before wandering back out of the kitchen and into the hall, as though on some sort of autopilot.

"Hey!" Laura cried out after him indignantly, confused and probably a little mad that he was no longer shying away like a kicked dog from her each and every word. She didn't need to worry— James had the distinct feeling that things would be back to normal once he was finished— but for the moment, he saw no need to reassure her of this. "Where're you going?!"

"Upstairs," he replied hoarsely, and his words were followed by muffled thuds as he climbed to the second story and left his pint-sized guest to her own devices, for better or for worse.

The bedroom that he and Mary had once shared was not a place he had spent a lot of time in after her hospitalization, and as he pushed the door open, he could remember why. It was sparse and lonely like the rest of the house— most of Mary's things had been either put away or moved from their original spots to travel with her to the hospital. He wasn't even sure where most of it was now, only that the dresser that had once contained all her silk dresses and soft cardigans was mostly empty, its surface bare.

James flicked on the light, as he had with all the other switches he'd passed. Perhaps there was something to Laura's accusations after all, because a glance out the window on his way up had filled him with shivers, the stifling blackness of the Otherworld intruding into his thoughts once more. The house was still gloomy, but even the faintest glow in each window would turn it into a bastion of light against the nighttime outside, and James felt safer with each dusty bulb coming to life.

He stepped into the room, throat tightening as he trailed a hand over the foot of the unmade bed.

He'd stopped sleeping there eventually. There seemed little point in doing so without Mary there next to him. Not to mention, after the first couple of times he'd woken up at the foot of the stairs in the morning with rugburn on his face and a dim memory of drunkenly trying to climb them after returning from the bar of the week, it had seemed easier to just start sleeping on the couch. There was less heartache there than in curling up on one side of their Queen-sized bed upstairs and feeling the empty space beside him where another warm body was supposed to go.

With a deep sigh, James sank down onto the edge of the mattress, half expecting plumes of dust to come gently swirling upwards like they had from the couch back on that first afternoon in the house.

His side of the room wasn't much messier than Mary's was. James had never had too many personal possessions, even when he could afford them. What ones he did have had mostly been shared with Mary. There hadn't been a 'his', there had been an 'ours', and that was the way James liked it.

This was the reason that there was very little aside from a few stray work ties and one or two uncapped sticks of forgotten deodorant, the moisture long since choked out of them, lying scattered across his of the two dressers.

They would need to be put away. It wasn't that he was a neat freak. The state of the house spoke plainly to the contrary, and even before Mary had gotten sick, he had never really been the sort to keep things obsessively organized. But right now, that little inner piece of him that seemed to know what it was doing was urging him to make this place look like something other than what it had become. Something a little like what it used to be.

Reaching out, James tugged a few of the plain brown ties off of the dresser. As they slid limply over the wood, a gold glint somewhere among their tangles caught his eye. He blinked and dragged it towards him, frowning when its source became apparent.

"My ring?" The mumble escaped him before he even knew it was coming. Had he taken his wedding ring off?

Sure enough, when he felt for his finger there was nothing there but a slight groove of flesh where the ring normally sat to indicate that it was usually there. Had it been missing all this time? Puzzled, he looked down at the little ring of metal— once bright, now slightly tarnished— in his palm.

He couldn't remember taking it off. ... But then, before setting out to Silent Hill, he had somehow achieved a regression so great that three entire years had been blotted from his memory. Maybe, in the blur of whatever melancholy ministrations he'd performed as though forever in the day or so preceding the trip, he had removed the ring and convinced himself, as reasonably as a three-year-old widower could, that after all this time, it was time to let go.

Ironic.

Maybe it had been for the best. If he'd had it on while he was in that horrible town, he'd probably have lost it to some beast or hole or lake eventually.

Feeling the mattress creak as he leaned on one hand, James rolled the ring around between his fingers. The metal felt cool and soothing, but his hand was sweatier than he could ever remember it being, and the most horrific thing he could imagine right now (short of a possible end to this scenario containing a two-letter word) was presenting this precious object to his intended with big greasy fingerprints all over it. So he withdrew his hand from his pocket to avoid the temptation.

"James?" came her questioning voice, making him inhale sharply and fold his arms behind his back, wondering if it looked suspicious how much he'd had his hand in that pocket tonight. On one hand (no pun intended), he supposed it might look casual, and that was kind of okay. Casual was good. It was sort of like 'suave lite', wasn't it? ... But on the other, it might also look like he was continually reassuring himself that, yes, he still had a leg and it had not mysteriously disappeared at any point during the evening. Which wasn't casual or suave. But worst of all, he worried that it looked exactly like what it was, which was that he was hiding something.

So he had looked up and met Mary's brow-furrowed smile with as blank and unassuming an expression as possible.

"Yes?" he asked, in a tone that said he had no idea why she was looking at him like that, and would like to politely inquire as to why her eyebrows were doing that thing they always did when she was suspicious about something.

"You've been awfully quiet since we got back," she said, in a tone that said just as plainly that she knew he was up to something, and by golly, she was going to find out what it was.

"I have?" he asked, trying to look baffled.

"Hardly a word since we got out of the car," she said knowingly, shifting in her seat so that she could catch more of the breeze from the fan, which they had hastily set up on a chair next to the couch upon their return, after throwing all the windows open. It was one of those sticky summer nights and her aunt's spare house, where she had lived for the past year, was one of the few in the neighborhood that did not have air conditioning.

Said neighborhood was not a bad one, really— it was better than South Ashfield Heights, anyway. But the house itself was a tacky, one-story little thing that was packed to the brim with boxes of knickknacks and old photo albums that Mary wasn't allowed to get rid of. Its walls alternated between ugly floral-print wallpaper and an even uglier salmon pink, and the whole place smelled like paint and cat litter, even though there hadn't been cats in the place since her aunt had moved out. The scent did nothing to quell the butterflies in his stomach.

It didn't help that Mary was currently giving him a look over the rim of her wineglass. She didn't drink often, and technically wouldn't even be legal to for another year. But tonight had been a special occasion. ... Though not for reasons she knew of yet. Or so he hoped.

"I guess I'm just a little tired from the dancing," he said with a sheepish smile, from behind his own glass.

"The dancing? We were out on the floor for about ten minutes before our feet started hurting," she pointed out. Then a corner of her mouth curled upwards mischievously. "Did my stuffy old family wear you out with their overwhelming dullness?"

"I— no! Why would they?" James stammered, almost choking on the contents of his glass. "I liked spending the evening with your family just fine!"

"It's okay, you don't have to pretend to me! They're old. And boring. And I saw you dozing off when Mom got started on the story of her and Papa's first anniversary."

"I didn't!" James protested, but the guilty flush crossing his face and the continuing presence of that sheepish grin spoke to the contrary. She just laughed and reach out to give his shoulder a shove, and he relented. "Okay, okay... I— it was stuffy in there, and that wine... and this suit was so itchy. Plus, I guess your folks... aren't really my kinda crowd. Does she tell that story every year?"

"Every. Year. For as long as I can remember. Everyone just tunes it out, she always forgets what she's talking about once the entrees arrive."

James shook his head with a disbelieving laugh. "Man, your parents are weird."

"Weird? What's normal to you, aliens?" Mary laughed. James smiled tightly and waited for her to continue, which she did. "But anyway, sorry for subjecting you to that country club they have the party at every year. But if I'd gone by myself, I'd have been bored silly."

"It's okay, it wasn't so bad," James said, rubbing the back of his neck. "I think that's the fanciest building I've ever been to in my life. ... I felt like all the old people were staring at me."

"Awww, did my parents' scawwy friends at the country club make James all paranoid?" Mary crooned affectionately, drawing out the end of 'paranoid'. She reached over to pinch his cheek, but he snorted and leaned out of the way, flapping his free hand at her.

"Fffhnnh, stop it," he protested, coughing as he tried to take another sip of the wine to drive his nerves down. "They were staring." Leaning back, he plucked at the waist of his suit. "I think they could tell this was a rental..."

"Oh, come on, James," Mary laughed as she set her glass down and started to work her hair out of the French braid it had been pulled tightly into all night. She gave her head a shake as it spilled down over her shoulders. "You looked just fine."

"All right, if you say so," said James, trailing off in favor of just watching her.

She was sitting against the opposite arm of the couch, facing him with her knees up to her chest, stockinged feet bare. The dress shoes they had worn that night hadn't agreed with either of them and those had been the first things tossed upon getting back from the club, lying over by the doorway in a jumble. Her hair hung in lank curls now that it was free from the braid, and her face was flushed from the sticky summer heat. The dress she was in wasn't like the loose, silk ones she usually wore. It was white and ruffly and had a lot of lace around the bottom that was bunched up above her ankles from the way she was sitting. She had pushed the sleeves up carelessly and one was higher than the other.

The word for how she looked, he supposed, was disheveled. It wasn't a word he himself would normally use to describe anything, and in fact had only heard it actually used in conversation once to describe HIMSELF (by her parents, no less— that had been an embarrassing thing to overhear), but it was accurate. She certainly would have gotten some dirty looks if she'd looked like that while still at the club. But something about the shine of sweat on her shoulders and the way some of her dark chestnut hair stuck up in the wrong places made her look, as he gazed at her through the haze of wine and the yellow glow of the light from the kitchen, more beautiful than ever.

On any other night, it would have relaxed him. He'd have just leaned back against the couch and let the worries seep out of his head as the butterflies in his stomach continued their fluttering, which he actually kind of liked, in a weird, lovesick way.

But tonight, all it did was make him hyper-aware of the little circlet of metal in his pocket, and just how out-of-place he felt in that tuxedo.

He hadn't untucked it or loosened his collar, even though he was sweating like a horse underneath it. Seeing the company her parents kept had made him all the more conscious of just how under her league he and the boxless old ring in his pocket were. Unlike her, the moment he made himself look disheveled, he went right back to being James Sunderland from South Ashfield Heights, like Cinderella's coach doorman turning back into a dog once the clock hit midnight.

The key part of that analogy being that even while under the glamorous spell, the dog was still just the coach doorman. Not even the prince.

Noticing his stare, Mary paused in her ministrations.

"... What are you looking at?" she asked after a moment, wearing a slightly embarrassed smile, which James returned.

"Nothing," he said automatically, averting his stare down into the wine in his cup. He'd been drinking it a lot faster than she was— almost half of it was gone. Maybe it was for the best, actually. There was a reason beyond just the special occasion that James had insisted they stop and buy the wine on their way back. Mostly it had been to treat themselves after enduring that long, long dinner, but it was also secretly to boost his confidence enough to actually carry through with what he was planning.

Quite suddenly, he realized that there was an opportunity rapidly slipping past him, and he grabbed for it as he looked back up at her with a sheepish smile.

"Well... you, actually."

Her brows went up and she swallowed the sip of wine she'd just taken a little more jerkily than normal.

"Me?" Then her smile returned and she plucked at the lacy collar of her dress, laughing. "Yeah, I know, the outfit looks ridiculous... it belonged to my grandma and Mom's made me wear it every year on her and Papa's anniversary ever since I could fit into it..."

"It doesn't look ridiculous," James said earnestly. "I think it looks pretty."

"Pretty frumpy!" Mary hummed to herself, looking down at the garment critically. "I guess it's not that bad... I never feel right wearing it, though. It makes me think of cobwebs and it smells like old people."

James had just lifted the glass to his lips to take another drink when what Mary said sank in and he immediately choked on it.

"W-what? Mary, that's awful! Awful!" he spluttered, unable to stop himself from laughing. The first time he'd ever met Mary, she had been shy and demure. Ever since then, he had found himself consistently (though pleasantly) surprised by her silly (and sometimes even immature) sense of humor.

"I can't help it, it's true!"

"That's awful," James repeated, but the grin didn't fade. "Anyway... I think it's pretty. ... And I think you're pretty."

"You do, huh?" Her voice was playful, not entirely serious.

"Prettiest I ever saw," he replied with complete and total frankness, the wine making his words slide together a bit.

She rolled her eyes and looked at him with a quirked smile, as though expecting him to chime 'Just kidding!' and then join her in mocking the lacy white dress. When he did nothing but swallow and sit up a little straighter, her brow furrowed.

"... Are you sure you're all right, James?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah! I'm fine! Just— you know, the dancing—"

"Your hand's shaking," she pointed out with a frown, and when he looked down, sure enough it was. Well, that wouldn't do at all. Swallowing the rest of the glass, he set it down and put his hand in his pocket. It was now or never.

"Mary," he said hesitantly. Even the wine wasn't helping much here. It was as though it had sort of stepped aside and said 'You're on your own for this one, kiddo.'

For as long as he could remember thinking about how this event would actually take place, he had always imagined, or at least hoped, to do it after something incredibly romantic. Taking her out to a fancy restaurant with his own money, just the two of them, and dancing for hours in shoes that didn't pinch their toes and leave blisters on their heels within minutes. And he'd be wearing a suit that was actually his, not a cheap rental. And candles. There were usually candles.

But that stuff, he had learned, was only in the movies.

In the life of James Sunderland, the best he was going to get was a dinner party held for someone other than himself, in a building full of people far older and richer than he was, and then a quiet evening spent on the couch of a hot, ammonia-scented little house, backlit by the kitchen light.

"Will you—um..."

And that was when his mouth went dry, his jaw locked, and his vocal chords decided to take a vacation. So, wordlessly, he pulled his hand from the secret-containing pocket and held it out to her, uncurling his fingers.

Mary gasped sharply.

The sound startled James's throat into working again and he turned his gaze down to the couch cushions, mumbling.

"If you don't, it's okay, I just thought I'd—"

"YES!"

"—ask. ... Wait, really?" He looked back up to her, not quite sure if he believed what he'd just heard.

She had let one knee slide down to lean forward, eyes as wide as his and rooted onto the bright object in his hand as though she had never seen anything like it before. "Yes! I mean— you're not joking, right? You're really asking me—?"

"Yes!" James exclaimed, relief pouring through him as her answer started to sink in, like the low buzz of a far-off train rapidly approaching. "And you really will—?"

"Yes!"

"I— ... oh my god." James ran the non-ringbearing hand through his sweaty hair, a bigger grin than he could ever remember his mouth making starting to spread across his features. "I— wow."

Mary had pressed both hands to her mouth, laughing in disbelief.

"James, I don't even know what to— is THIS what you've been jittery about all night?"

"... Yeah," James admitted feebly.

"Ha! I knew it, I knew there was something up with you," Mary crowed. She was laughing in earnest now, even bouncing giddily in her seat. "You shouldn't have been so nervous— like I'd turn you down!"

"Well," James said, turning his head and running his fingers through his hair once more, sheepishly. "I mean... we're both still awful young, and... your parents probably wouldn't want you to... you know, with someone like me... You could do a lot better."

"Well, it's a good thing you're asking me and not my parents," said Mary officiously. Then, her tone growing softer, she added "... Oh, James, is that why you haven't even loosened your tie? I'm not my father, you know, you don't have to impress me."

"I— ... well." He looked down at himself. It was true. He hadn't even untucked his shirt. Mary's hand reached over to tilt his chin in her direction. Her face was still alight with the flush of the whole evening as she gently took the ring from James's hand.

"James Sunderland, I would love to marry you and I don't care if I could do better. I want you."

Against all odds, the grin on James's face grew even bigger.

"Really?"

"Really."

For the first time that evening, James let out a bark of laughter that wasn't half-choked with nerves. He allowed himself to flop backwards against the couch as he tugged his tie loose with one hand and yanked the dress shirt untucked with the other.

"Pardon me while I strip before I sweat to death," he said apologetically, struggling to one-handedly unbutton his wrist-cuffs.

"Oh wow, you propose and then get right to it, huh?" Mary said cheekily, pressing her hands to her face with a mockingly-scandalized expression that quickly became a grin as a retaliatory cushion was tossed in her direction. She caught it and wrapped her arms around it, resting her chin on top. "Feels better now, doesn't it?"

"Much better. I think if I'd waited any longer, I'dve passed out from heatstroke."

He spread his arms and leaned back again, a sigh of relief escaping him. The butterflies in his stomach hadn't quite left— they were flapping as intently as ever, but now instead of making him feel ill, it had become a strange, ticklish sensation that made him want to laugh long and hard.

Mary beamed and held up the ring. "I'm glad the heat didn't claim you. Will you do the honors?"

"Sure!" James exclaimed, fully aware of how doofy and unromantic a response that was. Normally this would have made him feel self-conscious, but for some reason right now, discomfort was being kept far at bay.

He took her smooth, slender hand into his much-larger one and slid the ring onto her finger.

Once there, the hand wearing it slipped around his back and started to pull him close. He returned the gesture and before either of them were even quite aware of it, they were kissing.

Prior to this, neither of them had been brave or forward enough to take things beyond chaste pecks and kisses goodbye before parting ways. This one was clumsy, had a lot more saliva involved than James had initially expected, and was stunningly obvious that neither of them knew how to do it right.

It was amazing.

Even after the kiss was broken, she stayed pressed against him, squeezing tightly. He could smell her hair. Even disheveled and sweaty from the hot summer night, he could still tell it was hers.

And then, quite spontaneously, James and the wine he'd consumed had a sudden realization that they were positive needed to be shared.

"I'm marrying Mary," he said, plainly at first, but then a childish giggle that had no place coming from a six-foot-something man slipped into his voice. "I'm gonna marry Mary!"

"You big silly," she scolded, but there was amusement in her eyes, so James just grinned hugely and continued.

"No, you don't understand. It's perfect. I'm marrying Mary."

Perhaps it was the alcohol. Perhaps it was the fact that it was late and they were both tired. Or perhaps it was just the fact that they were young and giddy and happier than either of them could remember being. No matter what it was, that combination of words was a lot funnier to them than it probably should have been, and before either of them knew it, they were laughing, so long and hard that their bellies hurt from the effort.

In the movies, the proposal would have been followed by a night of intense, passionate sex. And really, James would have been lying if he tried to claim that his fantasies surrounding this event hadn't usually included something along those lines.

But as he lay there on his back on the cramped little couch, with Mary's head on his chest and her soft hair cushioning his chin, watching through half-shut eyes as the kitchen light seemed to grow dimmer in the wake of the lightening sky outside and feeling the ache in his middle of what had to be hours of laughter over next to nothing, he decided that for the first time he could remember, he liked his own life more than the movies.

In the silence of the bedroom, the soft ringing of metal on skin echoed through James's ears as he slid the ring back onto his finger. He supposed, all things considered, he should leave it off. He had no right to wear it anymore. But there were holes in most of his pockets now, and this was one thing he knew he couldn't bear to lose. So until he found a safe place for it, his hand was its best bet.

Once it was snugly on, James reached up to swipe an arm over his eyes, sniffing. It felt downright pathetic, to be crying now. Outside of a few particularly spectacular breakdowns that had fortunately mostly occurred while he was all alone, he had bottled everything up for years. But some part of that mental dam had broken in Silent Hill and now it seemed like the tears were just coming through any damn time they pleased.

Most of him agreed with Laura. What right did he have, really, to be crying over Mary even if she'd forgiven him?

He didn't know.

Not much more of a right than he had to keep wearing that ring, probably.

The mattress creaked gently as he got to his feet.

"Things to do," he reminded himself hoarsely under his breath.

Not that there was a whole lot left in here.

Clearing off the cluttered surfaces was the first thing. Ties tucked away in drawers— he wouldn't need them anymore. Old deodorant thrown away, curtains shaken out. Then there was the bed. He couldn't even remember the last time he'd slept in it— the sheets had probably been in that rumpled state for weeks.

It had been a long time since he had made any bed but the one intended for Mary to come home from the hospital to.

As he straightened up from fluffing the pillows, relishing the feeling of clean bandages on the wounds that had been agonizing hours ago, his ears caught a sound from down the hall.

Soft footsteps on the stairs, followed by a creak and a silence. Then, after awhile, Laura called out, "What are you doing?"

James looked over his shoulder at the door, a baffled frown tugging on his mouth. Why did she care?

"Cleaning," he called out to the out-of-sight girl in the hallway.

"Why? I thought you weren't gonna stay here."

"It's... nothing. I'm just cleaning. I'll be done in awhile, okay?"

There was another pause, then a huff and a series of thuds as Laura flounced back down the stairs. James let out a sigh and finished straightening the comforter. He wasn't quite sure what she'd ventured up here for, but he couldn't be concerned with it right now.

But she had pointed out something relevant, something that he might as well start taking care of as long as he was in here. Giving the surface of the bed one last pat, he stood straight once more and headed for the closet.

James owned three duffel bags.

Never more, never less.

Luckily, he'd never really needed more.

The last time he'd moved had been... well, when he and Mary had gotten the house, actually. And before that, only once.

The closet door shrieked lowly as he opened it. Just like the rest of the room, there wasn't a whole lot in there. All the same, it took a bit of digging to unearth the bags from underneath the pile of disorganized clothing that he hadn't bothered hanging up anymore after awhile.

James straightened up with one of them held upside-down, giving it a shake to expel the accumulated dust and grit of five years.

A small shower of Dorito crumbs and scraps of plastic from ancient candy-bar wrappers hit the pavement with a delicate patter as James shook the duffel, which had been his faithful companion along with its brothers on the few but necessary nights in high school when he'd just needed to get out of that apartment. Even though he'd usually never gone further than the roof of the building.

"There's only a few things still in there that I need, I can just grab them and come straight back out," he assured Mary as he zipped the bag shut again, having leaned out the window initially just to avoid littering the floor of his beloved car with all the junk that had accumulated in there.

He had already transferred most of his possessions, surreptitiously and over several trips, to Mary's aunt's house without attracting any particular kind of attention. This was good. He didn't particularly want anyone knowing what he was up to until he was already gone.

James had never been much of a planner, but he'd plotted out the move to the best of his ability and had thus far succeeded in working around the schedules of all the people he didn't want to run into.

However, this final trip had run into a bit of a snag, and that snag was Mary. He wasn't sure why she'd begged him so hard to let her come along, and if he'd been physically capable of refusing those pleading eyes, he'd have said no. But instead, he'd wound up in the car a half-hour later than planned, fingers tight around the steering wheel and Mary in the passenger's seat beside him, bright-eyed and chipper as the car moved through a part of town that James had never planned on taking her.

Now they were parked on a street outside the South Ashfield Heights apartment complex, and James was leaning out the window tensely, craning his head to see which other cars were already parked in the lot that was situated in the center of the U-shaped building.

"Is this where you grew up?" said Mary, sounding fascinated— like she was looking at an interesting zoo exhibit. It sent a little stab of embarrassment through James's gut, even though he knew she didn't mean it that way. She'd probably never been to this part of town before. The street of chunky little tight-packed houses that her aunt's was crammed into wasn't exactly Beverly Hills, but it was a lot better than this place.

"Uh... ahuh..." James replied distractedly, straining his neck to see into the lot. Was Mr. Braintree's car there?

"You've never taken me to your place before," Mary commented, leaning over to try and see into the parking lot, too.

"I— ah, well, it's not really worth bringing anyone home to," he said, yanking his eyes away from it. The red Ford belonging to Room 207's temperamental occupant wasn't there that he could see, so that meant there was still time. He opened the door and stepped awkwardly out of the car, bags in hand. "Anyway, I'll just, uh, run in real quick and grab whatever's left, won't take more than ten— what're you doing?"

Mary was unbuckling her seatbelt and getting out, was what she was doing. James clutched the bags to his chest and spluttered.

"You— um, I mean, you don't have to help, I'm—"

"Forgetful," Mary supplied for him, smiling. "You might miss something. Come on, I'll help save you a return trip."

"I— all right," James said weakly, if only because every moment spent trying to talk Mary out of it was precious time wasted. "But we gotta hurry, okay?"

"Why the big rush?" she asked curiously as she grabbed the third duffel bag before shutting the door and following him towards the entrance.

"Uh... nn-no reason in particular," said James, shouldering the door open and stepping into the tiny lobby. "Just— wanna get it over with, you know?"

The complex itself was not necessarily shabby on a horrific level, but it had all the tell-tale signs of a slightly neglected establishment. The carpets stank of mildew in the summer and there was still a hole in the wall next to the mailboxes where one of the supposedly-model shotguns belonging to the resident of Room 101 went off unexpectedly, blasting an ugly hole in the plaster. It had happened five years ago and the most anyone had ever done about it was stick a potted plant in front of it.

He didn't particularly want to include that in the tour, so he marched hastily past it towards the hallway. Mary followed dutifully, still looking as though they were on some sort of field trip.

"Which apartment is yours?" she asked brightly.

"Uh— it's at the end of the hall," James replied, only to backpedal almost instantly. Oh, great. "Uhh— wait, stairs are quicker." Before Mary could protest, he had wrapped an arm around her shoulder and steered them both to the side to enter the stairwell. Behind them, a short, scrawny man with slicked black hair and a perpetual sheen of sweat on his face passed in the hallway on his way to the mailboxes in the lobby. He had more than a few years on James even though he was a lot smaller, and was carrying a slightly-crumpled handful of red envelopes, as always.

Trying not to trip himself on the steps or drop the bags, James shot a glance over his shoulder. The man had stepped backwards curiously to the doorway of the stairwell, adjusting his glasses with a raised brow as he watched the pair— no, actually, it was pretty obvious which one of them he was watching. And, judging by the way his expression turned from curiosity to a leer, James was pretty sure he knew which part of her he was watching, too.

Fighting the urge to bare his teeth protectively, James sent the older man a glare laden with venom and slowed down a little so that Mary would be ahead of him and therefore hidden from view.

Lecherous grin disappearing instantly, the fellow tenant ducked his head and hastily continued on his way.

"Oh— was that one of your neighbors?" Mary asked obliviously as she was marched up the stairs.

"Um— kind of— yes. That's Mike. Don't look back at—just, uh, c'mon."

"Gosh, James, you're acting like we're on a time limit or something," Mary said, a slight pout in her voice, although she hastened her pace as they climbed the stairs. Catching her look, James swallowed meekly, trying to ignore the fact that he was a little out of breath already.

"Sorry... I just really don't wanna stay here long."

"Why?"

You'll see, remarked something in James's head darkly, but he shook it off. If everything went as planned, she wouldn't see.

"Just— um, there's not much time before Pop gets home from work."

"Huh?" Mary sounded baffled. "Why should that be a problem?"

Oops.

"Uh— it's not! Just— never mind, I'm just thinkin' out loud."

He continued to climb, trying to look more preoccupied with carrying the bags than he actually was, fully aware that Mary was staring at him the whole time, now starting to get an idea that there was something wrong.

"... I think it would be nice to meet your father," she said hesitantly after a short silence.

James swallowed.

"Uh... yeah," he lied, his conscience giving a guilty twinge. Luckily, he was saved from being forced into further dishonesty by arriving at the second floor. He nodded, gesturing pointlessly to the door. "It's— uh..." He paused before going into the hall, looking back at Mary with furrowed brows. "Try to stay quiet while we go down this hall, okay? My neighbors are... er, touchy."

"... All right," Mary said, though her expression told him that he'd have some explaining to do after this.

Swallowing again, he stepped through the door and moved down the hallway at a brisk pace, pausing only to tiptoe past the door to Room 207 out of habit, even though he knew there was no one home, and even though Mary was now looking at him like she was concerned for his mental health.

"Almost there," he assured her in a nervous mumble as they reached the end of the hallway and went down another staircase. Throughout his childhood, coming home from school every day had been a test of courage, because no matter which floor's hall he chose to walk down, there was always at least one room he feared having to pass on his way to his own.

Finally, at long last (and James was aware of every precious moment slipping away), they arrived at the door to Room 105. A quick look around the first-floor hall reassured James that Mike was nowhere in sight, and a quick jiggle of the doorknob told him that it was still locked, which was a good sign. Even though he'd known it would be, the little gesture soothed his nerves a little. Looking over his shoulder, James fumbled the keys out of his pocket one-handedly and promptly dropped them. And then dropped one of the bags as he hurriedly bent down to retrieve them.

Mary was silent beside him, but this was a particular brand of silence unique to her alone, that meant she was now Very Concerned.

In a feeble attempt to reassure her that everything was perfectly fine, he shot her a shaky grin.

"It won't take more than a few minutes," he said as he unlocked the door and pushed it open, though he was saying it to himself more than her.

"If you say so," Mary said uncertainly, her doubt having put a damper on her enthusiasm.

James gulped in response and flicked the lights on before stepping inside. The first sign that he was a little too used to this room— and that she wasn't— was that her immediate response was to gag.

"Ugh— what is that smell?"

"Erm— probably something in the fridge expired," he said weakly. "Dad— uh, doesn't go shopping often." He placed a hand on her shoulder and gently ushered her down the narrow little hallway. "C'mon, it doesn't smell as bad in my room."

Once inside, James shut the door behind them and leaned back against it slightly, biting back a sigh of relief. He wouldn't miss this room much once he was gone, but it had been his refuge from the world for years and it was a little easier to relax once he was inside its walls.

"This is your room?" said Mary, sounding disbelieving, and James cringed. She had already known he wasn't from as wealthy a financial background as she was, but he'd never told her exactly how tiny this place was.

"Uh," said James, looking around and only being given further reason as to why he hadn't wanted to bring Mary along in the first place. The room was not only small, but had mostly been gutted during the past couple of trips he'd made, moving his possessions out for good. The bed had been stripped of its sheets and the little bookshelf he'd used mainly as a desk had a clean surface and bare shelves. The floor was covered in crumpled papers and notebooks from high school, anything that he'd unearthed from under the bed during the packing process and tossed carelessly over his shoulder, not really thinking that anyone would be around to see what a slob he was. James turned to look sheepishly at Mary before instantly dropping the bags and shuffling forward to scoop up the scattered chip bags and old high school homework sheets that he'd never bothered throwing away for some reason. "It's— uh, not normally this messy..."

That was a lie.

Cheeks hot, he had started to shovel the whole mess under his bed with one foot when Mary laughed softly behind him and he felt her hands on his shoulders.

"James. Honey. It's all right. Come on, sit down for a moment. You're making me nervous."

Allowing himself to be steered towards the bed, he sat down with her on the bare mattress.

"Yeah, uh... sorry. For— uh. It's just... you know."

"I do?" she asked playfully. James finally lifted his head and tried to offer a genuine smile. There really was not, he told himself, any point in stressing out over this. The apartment's other (and soon-to-be only) occupant wouldn't be back for at least another couple of hours.

"Just... well. Your dad'd probably kill me if he knew I'd taken you to a dump like this," he said sheepishly.

"It's not that bad, honestly," said Mary, and while James knew she was lying through her teeth, he was grateful for the effort. "... But I can see why you want to get out of this place."

James let out a deep whuff of air and nodded emphatically. "Help me pack?"

She nodded and with a general rustling of paper, they started to sift through the small ocean of junk. As they did so, James found that he was actually a little glad he'd brought her with him after all. Having her there was a welcome distraction, although it was not without embarrassing moments.

"Wow, you sure took a LOT of notes in high school," Mary gasped in sarcastic awe. When James looked up from the piles of old socks he'd been busily deciding whether or not were worth taking, she held up one of the ancient notebooks, folding its cover around to the back and displaying a page with 'Pre-Calc— 4/21/95' written at the top.

The rest of the page was covered in poorly-drawn explosions and cars. Or rather, the same explosion and awkward-looking pseudo-realistic car drawn over and over. James hadn't been a very creative kid.

"Give me that!" James yelped, reaching for it. Shaking her head, she leaned back out of range and continued flipping through the pages with a cheeky grin.

"Oh, come on, James, it's been... what, five years since you were last in school? I won't tease you, I promise."

When James responded with a garbled noise and more grabbing, she just laughed and continued. Inwardly, he didn't mind too much. He just liked the way she laughed when he made a fuss over stupid things.

And the drawings that far out-populated the actual work in the notebooks of his bygone school days were indeed stupid. James had never fancied himself as an artist— scribbling had just been something to do to pass the five agonizing hours a day he had to spend in classes he could sometimes barely scrape through. He'd never held any illusions about his own talent, which was, as at least one teacher had described, 'unfortunately and disappointingly absent'.

There was no hidden meaning behind the off-kilter perspective and lop-sided, poorly-rendered faces with weirdly-emphasized noses and eyes that were too far apart, no Picasso-esque reverse psychological genius. They were just bad.

He told Mary this through the mattress, which he was currently hiding his face against.

"I think they're cute. You liked cars, huh?"

"That was around the time I started saving up for one," said James weakly, not even lifting his head as he reached out blindly for the notebook again. "Gimme."

"No! You've hardly told me anything about your dark, mysterious past, so I have to take what I can get." She nudged his hand away playfully and scooted back so that she could lean against the wall as she read. Just when James thought it couldn't get any worse, she let out a small squeal in that universal way girls did when they encountered something awkwardly adorable. "What are these? Poems? You wrote poetry?"

James's disgruntled gurgling escalated into a whine.

"No... songs... that was also around the time when I thought maybe I could start a band. Give that to meeee."

"I didn't know you could play music," Mary said, starting to sound a little less teasing and a little more interested.

"I can't. It was either buy a guitar and learn to play, or buy a car and learn to drive. Since I'd also need friends to start a band, I ruled that out and the car won. Please give that to me?"

"No, I want to read these!" she said squinting at his chickenscratch. Most of the lines were either crossed out or just plain scribbled over.

"Don't, they're awful," he moaned, knowing full well that he was right. Some people had a gift for lyrics, but James, just as with drawing, was not one of them.

"Oh, stop. I bet they're not," Mary said dismissively.

And then she actually tried to read one out loud and was forced to concede, through tearful laughter, that they actually were.

Somehow this resulted in James finally wrestling the notebook away from her and hugging it to his chest protectively, mumbling comforting words to it and shooting Mary a mock-reproachful look. After his tentative forgiveness was obtained via a lot of playfully-concerned clucking and exaggeratedly-heartbroken apologies from Mary, the packing resumed.

At long last, any scraps of life he'd actually wanted to keep from the twenty-three years he'd spent in that room had been crammed into the three bags. It had taken a lot longer the 'few minutes' he'd initially insisted on, but he was glad for it in the end. He couldn't remember laughing more in this room during the last decade than he had in the last hour.

Mary hesitated by the door to his room as they left, perhaps expecting him to pause and take one last, nostalgic look over his shoulder. He didn't.

Instead, he looked at the clock at the far end of the living room as he exited the hall. Good, there was still at least half an hour left until—

James had turned back to face the door and abruptly collided with his father, who had just walked in the door, quite literally with keys still in hand.

"Pop!" James yelped, stumbling backwards and almost backing straight into Mary. "You're home early!"

Fran squinted at his son as though not quite recognizing who he was at first, as he always did. He was a broad-shouldered man who James had inherited most of his features from, particularly the eyes. They were red-rimmed and sore looking almost constantly, giving the distinct impression that their owner had been crying. On James, Mary had (to his embarrassment) coined them 'weeping willow eyes'. On Frank, they just added to the aged nature of his face, which was lined deeply and already crowned with a head of white hair.

"Construction on my route. The line closed early today," Frank mumbled, half to himself. His voice was deep and gravelly, holding a slight wheeze even though he had never smoked to James's knowledge. Still squinting, he looked down at the duffel bag that James had dropped to the floor in his surprise. His eyes glimmered in the dim light suspiciously as they darted back up to his son's face. "... You goin' somewhere?"

James had straightened up out of habit. Physically, he was taller than his father— especially now that Frank was starting to develop a slight stoop— but he always felt about three inches tall in his presence.

"Yes, um— I'm moving out."

Frank stared James in the eye as the words sunk in, as though analyzing every line and feature, looking for a sign of trickery.

"... Oh," he said, finally and somewhat disinterestedly, as though James had said something as mundane as 'I cleaned the bathroom' or 'I checked the weather and apparently there's gonna be rain'. And then, with the slightest of edges in his voice, he added, "About time."

James nodded, throat bobbing, partially expecting further interrogation. None came, so he smiled tightly.

This was awkward.

This was really, really awkward.

"Well— ah, we'll just be— uh, going, then..."

"Who's that?" Frank interrupted sharply, having only just noticed Mary peeking out from behind James.

"This? This is— um—" James wasn't even able to finish his sentence before Frank planted a large hand on his shoulder and unceremoniously pushed him to the side in his haste to stump to the living room, causing Mary to let out a surprised gasp. Arriving at the cabinet, his gnarled hands (which were shaking slightly) grasped a small, undecorated square box and lifted it up, exploring every inch of it, as though searching for incriminating blemishes.

Grumbling under his breath, Frank turned the object in his hands over and over. As he did, he continually looked from the box to Mary and back, frowning deeply and squinting. James swallowed hard and edged in front of Mary instinctively, waiting. Frank was not a violent man, but experience still told his son that if they tried to leave now, there would be trouble. One long-standing rule from his childhood had been 'Let nobody in without my permission'. And he had never broken that rule until now.

At long last, he seemed satisfied that the box had not been touched while he was gone and, nodding his head, he hummed something inaudible to himself and moved stiffly over to sit in the armchair in the middle of the room, having seemingly lost interest in his son and the mysterious young woman accompanying him, now that he knew she'd left things alone.

"Um... Pop, this is Mary," James said tentatively after a time. He wanted nothing more than to leave and never look back, but something was tugging on his conscience. He wasn't sure if it was traditional of him or just plain stupid, but something in him longed to see even just a glimmer of fatherly approval from the man sitting in the armchair, not even looking at him or his 'guest'. Just one little flash of normalcy. "She's— she's my fiancé."

He cleared his throat slightly and reached behind him to wrap an arm around Mary's shoulders, mouth splitting into a wobbly, hesitant grin.

"We're getting married."

Frank did look up at that, ceasing his fondling of the box momentarily to squint at Mary once more.

Bless her soul, she actually smiled and lifted her hand in a small wave.

"It's nice to meet you, Mr. Sunderland."

The silence that followed was so thick enough to cut with a knife, but finally Frank cleared his throat with a rattly, phlegmy cough, mumbled an indistinct "How do you do," and looked back down at the box.

Mary's smile became strained and she shot James an utterly bewildered look. Her unspoken words said clearly that whatever oddities she might have come to expect from James's strange behavior beforehand, she had not expected this.

He winced sympathetically, but then Frank cleared his throat again and James straightened up, heartrate quickening as his nerves sang with futile hope.

"Weren't you leaving?"

James's breath left him in a slight hiss as he deflated, a big fake grin still pasted on his face.

"Yes," he said, falsely cheerful as he reached down for the bag he'd dropped. Then he placed both hands on Mary's shoulders and steered her gently but hurriedly towards the door. She did not resist and he could tell that she was as eager to get out of the place as he was.

It was not until they were both back in the car that either of them said anything, and even then, it was after a long silence during which James closed his fingers around the keys but could not quite bring himself to turn them.

"... James..." Mary finally said in a hushed tone, reaching out to touch his elbow gently.

Flinching involuntarily, James stiffened and shook his head, putting his hands on the wheel as though about to pull out of the parking spot even though the car still wasn't on.

"It's fine."

She didn't remove her hand.

"No, no it's not."

James turned to look at her. There was genuine upset on her face, the components of which he was a little too upset, himself, to identify. There was worry there, though. That was for sure. He swallowed.

"It's okay— really, it is. It's... I'm more embarrassed than— than anything else." Accepting that he wasn't quite ready to drive yet, he sagged and rested his head against the steering wheel. His hand crawled across the seat to take one of hers, perhaps to apologize, perhaps to reassure her, or maybe just to take shelter in her presence. "I'm sorry— I... you weren't supposed to meet him. I wanted to just— take everything and go before— before he got— I'm sorry."

"No, I'm sorry, I should have— has he always been like this?" She didn't take her eyes off his face, clearly not daring to turn back and face the building they had just exited, lest she scare away any explanation she was about to receive.

"No... since I was five. ... Five-ish. ... A real long time."

He rocked his head to one side so that he could look over at Mary. She was pressing one hand to her mouth and looked a lot more shocked than he necessarily would have expected her to be.

"Since you were five?" Her voice was hushed and high. "Oh, James... why didn't you ever say anything?"

"I... I dunno, I just— it didn't seem worth talking about." He leaned back up and stared resolutely at the windshield for a moment, trying to look stoic. This lasted maybe five seconds before he glanced sidelong at his fiance guiltily. "I guess... I guess I thought you'd think it was... well, I don't know. It's embarrassing. Not the kind of thing someone should dwell on to someone real important, that's all."

Mary shook her head.

"James, the whole point of marriage is that you've got someone you can tell anything to. Especially something like that." Then, after a pause, she added hesitantly, "Did you... think I wouldn't believe you?"

James considered this for a moment... then nodded, although that had been a small, nearly-insignificant worry in comparison to the others.

"A little... I guess. I mean..." He spread his fingers, trying to find the right words. "It's also just— I didn't think I'd ever need to mention it. I thought I'd just... you know. Not talk about that." He gestured out the window. "Not talk about here..."

He looked over at her again, expecting her to still be wearing that unsettled expression she'd worn back in the apartment, the sort of slightly-incredulous one that was asking 'Is this normal? Is this SAFE?', but was surprised to see that she looked as though she was physically restraining herself from smothering him in a hug. Her brows were peaked.

"I've always been curious about you... about your life... But I thought you were just quiet, I didn't think you'd..." She trailed off. James swallowed and hoped she wouldn't continue, but she did, in a whisper— as though there might be someone listening in— and the question she asked was unfortunately the one he'd been expecting. "Did he ever... you know, I mean..." After an awkward pause in which she pursed her lips, searching for a less blunt fashion in which to phrase it, she finally gave in. "... beat you?"

"What?! No! I— no." James shook his head. "It was never like that. I mean, he's not— you know, dangerous." Fingers desperately seeking something to do as his mind scrambled for the words to convince Mary that her suspicion had not been the case, they drummed on the steering wheel nervously. "I mean... I guess I got whacked once or twice, but all kids do. It was never like that."

The words were starting to flow a little easier, but it was more in a rush to get rid of that disbelieving look Mary was wearing than it was out of any less discomfort on his part.

"He just got... weird after Mom left. It was never nice but it was just... the way I grew up, you know? I just got used to it. Most of the time, I kept to myself. We just stayed out of each other's way."

Mary's fingers tightened to give his arm a sympathetic squeeze and James nodded to show that he felt and appreciated it.

"What's wrong with him? ... Do you know?" she asked quietly.

"No... I don't. He's totally normal most of the time, you know, when he's talking to the tenants or just people in general. ... I don't even know if it IS anything besides just being a little crazy. Lots of people are a little crazy. Heck," he forced a laugh, "Some of the neighbors back there are even worse than Pop. Every kid in the building was scared of the guy in Room 207, he's a maniac."

Then, sobering slightly, he looked away and rubbed at his face, feeling the start of a five o'clock shadow on his chin and also a creeping sense of dishonesty in his gut.

It wasn't that he was truly lying. He hadn't spent his boyhood days having to constantly fear fists or a belt from Frank like the battered victims-of-the-week in procedural cop shows or Lifetime movies or bad abuse-awareness speeches put on at high school assemblies that nobody, including James, had paid any attention to. He had grown up fearing the tenants of South Ashfield Heights far more than he feared his father, and for all kinds of good reasons. They had been one of the few things he and Frank had actually talked about like normal people, in evenings where the aging superintendent would grumble bitterly to his son about the noise complaints pointing to the family in Room 203 or the way the second-floor hallway always smelled like onions and garlic thanks to the would-be chef next door to them. They had not been close, but James had still often felt like they were in it together against the outside world, even if only by obligation.

But even in the blissful ignorance of childhood when the behavior of the crazy cat lady or the gun enthusiast or the man in Room 207 seemed frightening but not abnormal, there had always been something a little off. Deep down, under the innocent, unassuming layer of this is just how things ARE, some little part of him had always known that his life, when he stepped inside his own apartment and shut the door behind him, was somehow not right.

Living with Frank had been like living with an off-kilter portrait more than living with an actual person. The creepy kind whose eyes seemed to follow you no matter where you moved in the room, but never said a word— until a wrong step was taken and the portrait came crashing down off the wall.

"Pop was just... I learned to do most things for myself. He didn't care much what I did as long as I didn't get in his way or... interrupt him while he was talking."

"But isn't he the superintendent of the building? How does he do his job if he always acts like that?" Mary asked, sounding and looking as though she had just been confronted with a particularly difficult math problem for the first time in her life. He didn't really blame her. This is what he'd been worried about, really. She'd never been in places like this long enough to know that sometimes seemingly-normal people acted very differently behind closed doors. She had nice, normal, boring parents, like the kids at school who had first treated James like normal, but slowly realized over the years— either from their own parents, or maybe from the lingering smell of fleshy, organic rot on all of James's clothes— that there was something wrong with the Sunderland boy's dad, and therefore something wrong with him by association. And, like animals avoiding a rabid peer, they had begun to stay away.

It was on the basis of this hard-learned lesson that James had always avoided telling Mary too much about where he lived or what his family was like, and that he had formulated his flimsy little plan to take what he could carry and leave South Ashfield Heights behind quickly, quietly, and with Mary and Frank both being none the wiser about James Sunderland's past and future, respectively.

But now she knew.

"Well, he's a bus driver during the day. That doesn't usually require much interaction," said James weakly, feeling sick to his stomach as his brain followed the pattern and inevitably arrived at the conclusion that he didn't want to think about it. "And like I said, he's normal with everybody else. Aside from bein' a little grumpy. He's not... senile or anything. He usually only gets... weird when he's in the room." James swallowed and folded his hands in his lap. "... When there's only me around."

He expected her to remove her hand. Probably slowly— Mary was the kindest person he had ever met and of course she wouldn't want to make him feel bad, even if she had suddenly realized that her fiance was a lot less trustworthy than she'd thought— but the grip would loosen and she would withdraw, looking guilty and upset at her own disgust, but there wasn't anything she could do to help it, was there? No more than he could help having gone to school every day for years smelling like he'd rolled in something rotten...

But the fingers took their sweet time. He could hardly even feel them loosening, and just as his brow was furrowing in confusion, something else happened instead.

"Weird? Weird how?"

James looked up and took in Mary's expression, which was wide-eyed— there was still concern there, he'd expected that. But there was something else. Curiosity— morbid, innocent curiosity. Not the kind that hungered for gossip or juicy details— no. He'd seen this curiosity before, back in the short-lived but much more pleasant days before judgment had truly set in. Children were not innocent, not in that saccharinely sweet way that many liked to think of them. But there was a time of life when things were taken in their stride, an today's enemy could be tomorrow's playmate. Weirdness was taken at face value and having a creepy family was material for show and tell, not shame.

The other kids hadn't always thought that James was strange just because his father was.

James swallowed, heart thumping hopefully.

"Well," he said, aware that Mary's attention was fully and completely on him, pining for elaboration. She wasn't staring at him with a wrinkled nose and calculating expression as she tried to eke out whether his father's craziness had rubbed off on him— and she wasn't getting out of the car, stammering something about remembering she had somewhere else to be. No— she was just staring at him with that wide-eyed, earnest look that he hadn't been confronted with over this particular subject in years.

Coughing, he leaned back slightly and thatched his fingers.

"Like I said, he talks to himself... Says all kindsa weird stuff."

"Like what?"

Unused to having a completely captivated audience on the subject of himself, James swallowed agin, but at long last his discomfort was starting to dissipate into something like excitement. And he could no more refuse Mary's wide eyes right now than he'd been able to when she'd been asking him to take her along on this misguided adventure. So, heart in throat, he leaned forward and lowered his voice a little.

"Well, I mean... just weird stuff. It's... kinda religious? I don't know. It never made much sense to me, even when I was little. Stuff about... the bonds between mother and child and how breaking them like... I don't know, makes them both sullied and unworthy or something. Just... crazy stuff, the kind of things you hear hobos with sandwich board signs talk about. ... But the weirdest thing is, he's not even really talking to himself."

"He's not?" echoed Mary, sounding for all the world like a child on a camping trip, being told a spooky story by the fire.

"Nuh uh. He talks to the box."

That was it. James was pretty sure that if hearing that didn't send Mary running for the hills, nothing would. So when Mary suddenly sat up straight, making a loud exclamatin, James couldn't help but jump slightly in his seat.

"That box!" she cried, eyes like saucers. "What is with that thing?" The way he looked at it— so creepy! And he even pushed you out of the way to get to it!" She looked at him breathlessly, earnestly. Expecting nothing but agreement.

James stared back, his throat tight for reasons he didn't entirely understand at first.

For the first time since shortly after Frank's sudden descent into the bizarre, he was faced with the then-taken-for-granted but now-unfamiliar phenomenon of someone who he didn't have to defend or de-emphasize the circumstances of his homelife to— someone who could be thoroughly weirded-out WITH him, not AT him.

Sucking his lips inward, James turned back to the steering wheel and rested his hands on it, peering intently at the dust crease where windshield met rubber and pondering whether to take left or right on the mental fork in the road he'd just encountered. And then he decided to screw direction and just plunge straight onward into the weedy, long-untrodden undergrowth of a subject he hadn't dared broach to another living soul in years.

"You'll never," he said slowly, eyes sliding back over to her, "guess what he has in that box."

"What?" said Mary breathlessly.

He shook his head.

"Guess."

"Um... cigars?"

"Nope."

"Er... candy?"

"Wh— no! ... Well, maybe in some countries..." Some really weird countries.

Mary shrugged broadly. "I give up. What is it?"

James glanced around conspiratorially, and then leaned in to speak in a hushed tone.

"An umbilical cord."

Mary gasped, clapping her hands to her mouth with a little squeal of "Ew!" and James felt a weird, almost impish sense of glee that he hadn't experienced since the elementary school days when he and countless other little boys had, as per tradition, taken it upon themselves to do various stupid little-boy things like try to convince girls that when the cafeteria served spaghetti, it was really earthworms in cat's blood or something equally unpleasant. The reactions had, on average, usually been something similar. Mary continued to make quiet disgusted noises to herself behind her hands before pausing as something occurred to her. "Wait... yours?"

"No!" James exclaimed, relishing the way Mary's eyes managed to get even bigger. There was something in human nature that got a shuddery little sense of joy from smelling something and then going 'Oh, ugh, this is rancid! Here, YOU smell it!'— he supposed this was sort of the same thing. He had long forgotten the feeling that came from having someone to share creepy-crawly stories with— even if they were ones that had the unignorable, unfortunate quality of being real. "It's not even mine!"

"Oh my gosh, it's not—I thought— maybe it's not so weird if it's your own kid's but— oh." She paused again and fell silent for a moment, mouth open as realization dawned on her face. "... Oh my gosh. That— is that what that smell was?!" At James's furious nodding, Mary gasped again and drew her flip-flop-clad feet up onto the seat, covering her mouth again and murmuring a quiet chorus of unsettled noises.

James had brought his hands down forcefully on the steering wheel for emphasis, blowing a stray bit of too-long-uncut hair out of his face and sort of laughing in an incredulous 'If I hadn't lived with it I wouldn't believe it myself!' sort of way. "I'm not even kidding! He's had that thing since I was— since I was... yeah, five! That's eighteen years, Mary! I had to go to school smelling like my dad's rotting piece of baby for eighteen years!"

"Whose is it?!"

"I don't even know! Some— ... kid who was born down the hall. He doesn't even live there! Pop just—LIKED it, I guess! I don't even know!" He looked over at her solemnly, shaking his head and mouthing 'I don't even know' again just in case he hadn't emphasized it enough the first time

She was giggling now, in a wide-eyed, disbelieving way, hands still clamped over her mouth.

"Oh my gosh. I— James, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't be laughing—but—oh my gosh."

"No, it's all right," he assured her, his grin fading in intensity but not in feeling. "I'm just—I'd rather laugh about it than wallow, you know?" Reaching out, he laid a hand on her shoulder. Not more than a few minutes ago, he wouldn't have dared for fear of scaring her off. "And... and I'd rather you laugh than... than get scared..." When she turned to look at him, he withdrew his hand to rake his fingers through his hair. "I didn't have many friends growing up..."

"Kids can be really mean," Mary murmured, putting her own hand on his shoulder.

James nodded. Wasn't that the truth. "I can't really blame them, though... I guess I'd have stayed away from me, too."

Thinking about it all was bringing back memories, ones that he hadn't exactly forgotten so much as stopped thinking about over the years. He leaned back in his seat, rubbing his chin distractedly.

"... Y'know, I can actually kinda remember when it started. When the other kids in the apartment complex sorta realized something was weird." He shot a quick glance at Mary to reassure himself that she was still interested in listening. She met his gaze and squeezed his shoulder again. "It wasn't long after Mom left... I didn't really realize things had changed forever yet, you know? So one day I told some of the other kids that I had something really creepy to show 'em after school. Because... heh, that's what makes you cool when you're five, I guess."

"Only if you're a boy," Mary corrected, which got a snort out of James.

"Fair enough... anyway." He shook his head and waved a hand. "It played out about how you'd expected, I guess... Pop came home, caught us playing around with the box..." Trailing off, he stared out the window for a moment, watching the breeze blow small rivulets of green pollen across the glass. "... Y'know, I think that was the only time Pop ever actually did hit me."

There was a quiet moment, punctuated only by the soft sound of Mary's comforting hand stroking the fabric of his shirt sleeve.

Eventually James broke the silence with an awkward laugh. "Well, the other kids sure never came around again after that. Probably a good thing they didn't, I guess... Kinda surprised they didn't actually tell anyone about the box. Maybe they just forgot about it... it was a long time ago. But it wasn't too long after that that the rumors started about me rolling around in the entire complex's garbage before school every day."

"That's awful," Mary said quietly, wearing a deep frown. "I just don't understand why kids have to act like that towards other kids... It was never like that in MY school."

James seriously doubted that, but he nodded anyway. Because really, the simple knowledge that Mary'd never had to personally deal with that particular unpleasant aspect of childhood was enough to keep him happy.

"Eh, it lasted throughout high school. I mean... everything in the room picked up that... smelly funk after awhile. Even way after it shoulda... I dunno, dried out, it still stunk. Dad never even seemed to notice. ... I mean, I got used to it after awhile... but I could tell it was on me. ... On my clothes..."

Mary clucked. "Aw, James... wait." She tipped her head curiously and leaned over to him. "... You don't smell like that now. Or since I've known you."

Turning to look at her solemnly, James raised a hand, holding up a single finger.

"Showers. Lots of them."

"Oh. Well." Mary took on a pseudo-serious expression that James could tell was at least somewhat forced, but that made it funnier. "I guess now I know why you always took so long to get ready for our dates! I thought you were just prissy." She gave him a jab in the ribs to show she was teasing— although by now he'd known her long enough just to tell by the hidden laughter in her voice. He drew himself up officiously after swatting her hand away.

"Well! If I'd known you thought it was prissy, I'd have just shown up smelling like Pop's rotting baby box."

Mary giggled. "Hee. Try saying that five times fast."

James paused. "... Pop's ro— hey, stop distracting me! Wouldja have liked that if I just showed up smelling bad, huh?"

Mary folded her arms. "Maybe if you'd done that, we could've scared off all the other people in the restaurant that one time when there were no tables left, and then we could've had it all to ourselves.

Sucking his lips in grimly, James furrowed his brows in a determined grimace and made as if to open the door and get out of the car.

"Well, that settles it! I'm going back in there. And rolling in it."

Finally, Mary's serious façade broke and she burst out laughing, reaching for his shirt sleeve to stop him and pleading through her laughter.

"No, no! I take it back! Don't do it!"

"I'm gonna!" James said loudly. "I'm gonna, and if he gives me any trouble about it, I'll just yell 'DEAL WITH IT, DAD!'"

"Nooo!" Leaning across from her seat, Mary wrapped both arms around him, burying her head against his shoulder and effectively stopping him from going anywhere unless he wanted another human being hanging off of his neck the whole way. Not that he'd actually been planning on getting out of the car anyway. "I changed my mind, you smell fine!"

Then she paused and drew her head away slightly.

"... Or you would if you wore a different shirt than the one you've had on for the past couple of days. Yuck."

"I— hey! Hey! I didn't have any clean shirts! We just packed all of them!"

"You could have used one of mine," Mary pointed out cheekily.

"Yeah, if I was into silky blouses with little flowers on them."

"Oh come on, not everything I own has flowers on it."

"Coulda fooled me! Last time you did laundry, I walked into the room and thought you'd planted a garden in the floor."

It wasn't particularly funny, but something about it set Mary off laughing again and he wasn't far behind. That stomach-churning worry he'd felt earlier seemed far-off and unreal now. Why had he been so nervous in the first place? Well, sure, he still felt a little embarrassed at how this whole trip had turned out... but how had he even for one moment really thought that she would leave him? No, he was pretty sure they would always be able to laugh at things like this, no matter how weird it got. It was very easy to make Mary laugh— it was one of the things he loved about her.

"So," he piped up bashfully once they had both calmed down. "D'you see why I didn't tell you before? About the... well, about how things were when I was kid?"

"Yes," said Mary, giving him one of those sympathetic smiles which had confused him earlier but that he thought he understood now. "I mean—I wish you'd... I wish I'd made you feel comfortable enough to tell me things like that before, but—"

"Oh, Mary, believe me, it was nothin' to do with you," James insisted, and even though he supposed it wasn't entirely true, it was true enough. "Besides... how on earth would I ever have been able to bring it up? It's not like that's something you just talk about." An idea striking him, he turned to face Mary, wearing an exaggerated earnest expression and miming holding a fork. "Gosh, Mary! This spaghetti you made sure is good! Hey, speaking of which, this reminds me of something from when I was a kid..."

"Ew!" Mary shrieked and started to laugh again, reaching out and giving him a smack on the arm. "James, that's disgusting! I— no, stop, stop doing the eating-spaghetti thing! That's gross! You're gross."

Suddenly her laughter turned to a coughing fit and she brought her fist to her mouth to muffle it. When James dropped the little act and leaned towards her, looking concerned, she waved a hand dismissively until she could catch her breath long enough to clear her throat.

"Just allergies. It's all the pollen, I get this way a lot."

"Y'sure?"

"Yes, my whole life. It's just annoying. Don't look so worried, honey." She laughed, a little more hoarsely than before, and patted his shoulder. "Come on, let's get out of here. It's hot all cooped up in this car." Then she paused, looking thoughtful, before clapping her hands decisively. "After that whole ordeal, I think we deserve successful-moving-out ice cream. Want to go get ice cream?"

"Jeez, like you even need to ask."

The motor purred to life and at long last, the little blue Oldsmobile pulled out of South Ashfield Heights for the last time.


The thumping of his footsteps preceded him as he picked his way down the stairs, straining to hold all the duffel bags without losing his balance. There wasn't much in them besides clothing and toiletries, but the effort made his arm muscles scream. The pills on the floor scattered as he absentmindedly kicked them to one side of the hallway where they wouldn't be a slipping hazard anymore.

Laura looked up when he plodded into the living room. Given that the room hadn't been trashed and was instead illuminated by a flickering blue-white from the TV screen, she had eventually given in and opted for the boring late-night news rather than harassing James or dismantling all the furniture. Scooting around in her seat, she watched him shrewdly over the arm of the couch as he dumped the bags down by the door with a wheeze. They landed with a delicate, uniform flump that made the fact that he was out of breath from carrying them all the more embarrassing.

"Are we gonna leave now?"

"No," James replied tiredly, looking down at the sorry little pile. "There's still stuff to do..."

"Well, I'm bored," she said, and as usual, there wasn't a pout in her voice so much as keenly-sharpened, deliberate disgust. But the words bounced off of James's temporary little suit of imaginary armor and landed somewhere to wait until later, as James stared dully at the bags. What else? He knew there was more...

Laura watched him with a frown, obviously perturbed by his lack of response.

"... By the way," she tried again, loudly. "You left your coat in the bathroom and it's all gross and bloody."

And like a light going off, her words had the opposite effect of what she'd probably intended, because instead of looking ashamed of his gross and bloody coat, James simply blinked at her. She glared back, waiting for him to cringe and hang his head.

"—and clear skies after this for the rest of the week," beamed the man on the TV screen.

"... I uh..." James mumbled blandly, finally remembering that he had vocal chords. "I'll go take care of that then..."

Ignoring Laura's look of outrage at his lackluster reaction, James turned around and padded down the hall towards the bathroom. His weird pseudo-autopilot was still in effect, and as he stepped into the bathroom and turned the light on, he was met with a mess.

Cleaning up after himself had been the last thing on his mind after he'd dragged himself out of the shower, and as a result, the place was in disarray. The showerhead was still dripping and the contents of the open medicine cabinet, what few hadn't been dragged off into the living room for his half-awake first-aid session, were scattered everywhere. A box of Q-tips had spilled across the wet floor tiles.

A damp towel, stained sticky-red and flaked brown in spots where dirt and scab too stubborn to be washed away under the spray had finally rubbed off, was rumpled in a pile on the floor, along with the clothes that had accompanied him to Silent Hill. Now that they weren't on him, they didn't even look like clothing anymore. Just piles of ragged, filthy cloth that looked like he'd pulled them out of a landfill somewhere. Presumably where they'd been thrown to hide evidence of murder. Unsalvageable.

Not that he cared a whole lot about the loss— it wasn't as though they'd been anything fancy. James had never had a whole lot of variety in his wardrobe and he was fairly sure most of the jeans and polo shirts he'd just spent twenty minutes cramming into those duffel bags were exactly the same.

No, the only item he cared about enough to investigate was his coat.

James muffled a hoarse cough and took hold of the rough fabric, pulling it from where he'd left it, crumpled and mostly-hanging out of the sink. It was heavy with the contents of its pockets, but he ignored his arms' complaints and held it up in front of him to survey the damage.

The main difference was blood. Lots of it. Not exactly a huge surprise. Great patches had already soaked into the fabric over the course of his journey (not all of it his), drying into ugly brown patches that made the coat look more camo than it had ever looked before.

The cuffs and collar were now frayed ridiculously— tangles of green thread came springing from them like thick tufts of grass. And then there were the tears. Most of them were small, or in places that didn't matter, but there were enough that he'd probably still be discovering new ones weeks from now. But it was the one on the left shoulder that made him wheeze a quiet, unintentional sound of dismay as he brushed his thumb into it. It was several inches long and singed around the edges, and remembering how he'd gotten it was enough to send a sharp, imagined sting through the flesh of his shoulder under the bandages.

But aside from being even uglier than before (something which James had never minded), it was fine. After reassuring himself of this several more times by turning the garment around and examining it from every angle, James let out a relieved chuff of breath and folded it lopsidedly over one arm as he turned to make his way out of the bathroom. He'd need to clean that up too, of course, but certain things took priority.

Perhaps it was a little weird, getting this sentimental over a piece of clothing. Goodness knew he wasn't attached to any of the other clothes he owned— he never had been. The ruined shirts and pants lying crumpled on the bathroom floor felt more like dirty, cast-off skins than anything he regretted losing. But the coat was different. It had just gone through hell with him and come out in one piece, more or less— its thick fabric had offered some comfort and protection against the chilly, relentless claws of the Otherworld... Not, you know, a lot, but it was something.

At least that was how he felt as he passed through the living room once again on his way to the back door, only vaguely aware of Laura's eyes on his back as she watched him suspiciously from her spot on the couch.

The laundry room wasn't so much a laundry room but a dusty little alcove next to the screen door that led to the backyard, where they had crammed a washing machine and a dryer. It was nooks like this that had stolen Mary's heart— those crannies and half-rooms that seemed to set this large house apart from the boxy, planned ones that both she and James were used to. Somewhere above, there was a single light bulb with a dangling chain-string, but this time James didn't bother groping for it. The flickering light from the television in the other room was dim but it was enough.

His fingers found the latch for the soap and tugged it open.

It was really stupid, now that it occurred to him, to think of the coat as a fellow survivor. It wasn't. It was cloth. Cloth wasn't alive. But... it was just that out of all the material things James had ever owned, this was perhaps the only one he could remember that had seen him through so much. Not just the town, either.

No, it had been there for those three years, too— lying over his shoulders as a blanket on all those nights spent sleeping fitfully across the seats in the hospital waiting room.

Not that it had done anything. Of course it hadn't done anything.

But there was something about it anyway. Something special. The memories it housed were not good, most of them, but maybe that was just it. A thing didn't see so many months of suffering without changing a little, at least in the mind of those around it. Maybe that was even why the town of Silent Hill itself had that tangible melancholy, a force of its own.

Not that his coat was anything like that town. James found himself suppressing a noise of disgust at the very thought. Whatever had made that place what it was, he didn't even want to know. There wasn't a single thing about that town that he wanted to remember, even though he knew he had to. Knew he would.

Slick ropes of laundry detergent drizzled over the edges of the compartment and onto the floor as he poured it, exhaustion shaking his hand like a cheap electric razor.

Remembering. He'd been doing a lot of that over the past few days. ... Heck, even the past few hours. Screwing the cap back onto the detergent bottle with slippery fingers and putting it down with an echoey thud on top of the machine, James looked down at the coat again, thinking. Then, without quite knowing why, he leaned against the machine and brought the battered jacket up to his nose, burying his face in the lining of the collar and inhaling deeply. Sweat and blood and dirt and everything else he'd wound up covered in or crawling through in that town was what he got in return and he muffled a choked cough at the memories those smells brought back. He hoped they'd go away when the coat was clean.

Still, he stood there for a long few moments, just holding the garment to his face, breathing deeply and seeking that old smell he hoped was still there underneath the grime, a sort of dull musk of cologne and cigarettes, and something salty that James thought might be the ocean, though he hadn't been to the beach since before he could remember. The smell made his nostrils itch but he pulled the coat off of its hanger anyway, holding it up and looking it over with excitement.

"Mary! Mary, I found a coat!"

Her voice floated out from somewhere behind a rack of old T-shirts. "Oh— that's good! Just put it in the cart or something."

"No, you gotta come look at it!" he insisted, holding it up in her direction and giving it a few shakes for emphasis.

With a huff of good-natured exasperation, Mary untangled herself from the jumble of secondhand clothing and poked her head over the top of the rack. James held up his discovery with pride. She didn't look nearly as enthused as he was.

"That?" she asked, eying the olive-green garment with a raised brow. "It's not very pretty, is it?"

"It's not supposed to be pretty, it's an army coat," James said, a little affronted. He adjusted his grip and held it to his chest so he could peer down at its front and point above the left breast pocket. "See the flag patch?"

"I see it," said Mary wryly, folding her arms. The hangers of the two shirts she was holding onto clacked together as she did so. "Why do you need an army coat?"

James stared down at his find for a second or two before, lamely, coming up with "... Because?"

Mary smirked and leaned back against the rack. "Ahuh."

It hadn't been long since James had moved in with her that she'd noticed the fact that his entire wardrobe consisted of a pitiful smattering of shirts and pants, an ugly sweater that had belonged to some dead relative who in addition to being dead had also apparently been colorblind, a few pairs of socks, and an elderly set of shorts that had seen better days. In the spirit of 'not being engaged to someone who's forced to wear the same shirt several weeks in a row', she had put her foot down and dragged him downtown to remedy the situation.

James didn't mind as much as he claimed to, but his stubbornness stopped him from setting foot in any of the pricier places that Mary tried to nudge him towards— he didn't have a whole lot of pride to begin with, but what little of it there was refused to allow Mary to pay for his clothing. He had just turned twenty-four for crying out loud, and he could buy his own damn clothes, thanks. ... Just not if they were above his meager budget.

So they had wound up at a Goodwill.

It wasn't a particularly pleasant building to be in— hot, stuffy, and floored in concrete. It didn't help that the whole place smelled like a gym locker. James was used to it, but Mary had wrinkled her nose and given him a pleading 'just five minutes, okay?' look as they entered.

But it hadn't taken too long for her to get swept up in that odd, innate excitement that came with sifting through old things. The sweaty smell and heat soon forgotten, they spent nearly an hour rummaging through the racks, occasionally making promising finds and giggling far more than they should have at some of the uglier items. Places like this, ones that held old things, unwanted things, forgotten things, had a way of drawing people in. It was what, one day, would cause the both of them to fall hopelessly in love with the mysterious, secret-filled old town of Silent Hill.

James looked down at the coat, then back at Mary. He turned on the pleading eyes. She groaned.

"James."

"Maryyy."

"Jaaaaaaaaames."

"Mary, c'mon. What's wrong with it?" He waggled the sleeves at her pitifully.

She had moved both hangers to one hand so that she could discreetly cover her mouth with the other, determinedly turning her gaze away because if she looked James in the eye, they both knew she'd start laughing.

"Nothing's wrong with it, it's just... an army coat? Really?"

"So?" James challenged.

"Well, for one thing, it doesn't really suit you."

"Hey, I'll have you know that for awhile I was planning on joining the army after high school," James said. "I was gonna go and— why do you always laugh at me?"

Abandoning her attempt to hide it, Mary was giggling openly as she stepped over to him. "You wouldn't get anywhere in the army with that pout. Besides, you're a lover, not a fighter."

James wrinkled his nose, lifting the coat higher as though it were some kind of shield between them. "Your confidence in me is overwhelming. What's the matter with the coat, really?"

"It's sort of ugly, for one thing—"

"It's supposed to be. Ugly is manly. I thought we went over this. Can I have it?"

Rolling her eyes sky-high, Mary scoffed and spread her arms.

"Why are you asking me?"

"Because I love you. This belonged to a real soldier. I bet it's got a history. Like... what if the guy who wore this coat fought in the Revolutionary War?"

"James, they didn't have coats like this back then."

"World War II! What if the guy wore this coat while fighting Hitler?"

"If that were the case, it'd be in a museum somewhere, not in some dumpy Goodwill," Mary pointed out sensibly. James, who hadn't seriously believed even a word of his silly justifications, sniffed and turned away.

"You're no fun. I bet whoever owned this coat wore it while punching Hitler in the face."

Throwing up her hands and narrowly missing James with one of the shirts she'd been holding, Mary let out a loud sigh of mock exasperation. "All right! I give up. You can have it so that you can carry out your fantasies of punching Hitler in the face. The things I do for lo— ew, James, keep that thing away from me. You don't know where it's been."

James ignored her and continued to flap the sleeve cuffs of the coat pointlessly against the back of her head.

"It loves you!"

"Ew, it smells like cigarettes. As soon as we get home, we're washing it." She hung the shirts back up and started to ease her way out of the tight-packed space. "Come on, darling, it's getting late."

James followed and threw an arm around her shoulders as she pushed their cart back towards the counter.

"Thanks, honey."

"Don't thank me, you're the one paying for it, remember?" she reminded him, taking one hand off the cart's handle and wrapping it around him in return.

"I know!"

"Then why's it so important that I like it?"

"'Cause I love you and I care about what you think. And you're letting me live in your house. Maybe you wouldn't want ugly things around."

"Well," she said with a smile. "If I didn't want ugly things, I'd be in a pretty bad spot since my aunt's house is the ugliest thing in existence. And besides, like you said... ugly is manly. And I require my husband to be quite a high level of manly."

James beamed. "Does that mean I get to wear Great Uncle Paul's sweater?"

Mary's smile disappeared in a heartbeat. "NO." She clutched at his arm urgently. "No. You are not allowed to wear that in the house. Or out of it. Especially out of it. We are going to throw that thing away and it will be dumped in a landfill and hopefully have lots of other ugly things piled on top of it so that no one will ever find it. Ever."

"Gosh, Mary, I'm not sure I can keep up with all your double standards," James said reproachfully. "This could be a problem."

"I'm sorry, sweetie. Here, let's see..."

She paused to dig briefly through a nearby bin, pulling something out at random amidst a shuffling of cloth.

It was carrot-orange, had tassels and sequins, and had been made with the proportions of a preteen girl in mind.

Mary beamed at it, pleased with its hideousness, then turned to James and pushed it into his chest. "Here. This is ugly. I'll buy it for you."

"Heh! Thanks!"

The contents of the coat's pockets rattled and shivered where he had emptied them, on top of the machine that was now rumbling to life. At some point he'd lost track of what was even in there, so the veritable stockpile of ruined ammunition boxes and other odds and ends, proof of the sheer holding capacity of the coat, was something that he might have been proud of if he'd discovered it on another occasion. He remembered, in his long-gone youthful enthusiasm, being rather excited about those pockets when he'd first gotten the coat.

'Now I can carry everything with me everywhere!' was more or less what he had excitedly jabbered to Mary over and over for the first week or so with it in his possession. He'd never really wound up needing to do that in his daily life, but it was exciting all the same.

But in Silent Hill, he supposed, the pockets may well have saved his life. Without them, he'd never have been able to carry the meager first-aid kits and looted bullets that had kept him alive.

Little rivulets of foam started to trickle down the inside of the round window into the washing machine and James let out another one of the many long sighs that had been working their way out of him that night.

Still so much he had to do.

Wearily, he glanced over at the hodgepodge collection of water-damaged and bent items. Most of it was nothing he had any reason to keep. Especially not the map— now creased and waterlogged and dried again until the once-smooth stationary was pulpy, soft and brittle like ancient cloth— that lay in the middle of the whole pile.

Or the radio, which had been broken before he'd even found it and would only produce static and garbled voices, things he now heard without the radio's help every time it was quiet enough that his brain felt the need to fill the silence with white noise.

Or the empty bullet boxes, battered flat within the confines of his pockets as he'd been alternately throwncrusheddraggedrolledmauled by the creatures he had encountered in those dark buildings and foggy streets.

Ironically, one of the only things James would have felt worth keeping was gone entirely. Though he supposed he shouldn't be too upset about it— it had gone blank before he'd even reached the end, after all. When he had first picked it up and looked at it, more than two days ago by now (three? Four? How long had he even been gone?), he could have sworn there was writing on it. Mary's writing, with a smoothness and elegance that defied the way her hands shook more and more towards the end of those three years. The message his mind had created, he later learned, had been real (if incomplete), despite the fact that there was no way, no plausible way, he could have known what her final words were. Her real letter had not even been in his possession when he set out, determined to find the truth, come hell or high water.

But then, nothing about what had happened in Silent Hill had been plausible. Yet here he was. So with a weary shake of the head, James reached out dully and picked up the only thing left in the pile that was important enough to keep.

Mary smiled serenely up at him from the photo, alone. He had another one, taken in the same place— the overlook that stared out over the pine-framed lake— that had both of them in it, leaning against the railing in those awkward poses that all vacation photos had. But he liked this one better. Somehow, now, his own presence in a photograph spoiled it, like a nasty stain. If he'd had that other one in front of him right now, he just might have felt compelled to tear himself out of it. But this one was just Mary, her fair skin and creamy pink dress made all the most softly-beautiful by the steely gray-blue landscape behind her.

It made his heart ache just to look at it.

He didn't want to leave this one among the other items. It didn't feel right. He had to find somewhere safe for it— somewhere that he wouldn't forget it.

Turning back towards the living room, an idea occurred to him. Laura had been awfully interested in those photos...

"Laura? I—"

Aaaaand she was gone. Of course.

The couch was empty, leaving the paid-advertisement man on the screen happily extolling the virtues of his special ceramic kitchen knives to a nonexistent audience. This time, James didn't panic. Logic told him that if she'd stuck around the whole time he was face-down on the couch in his own drool, she wouldn't leave the house now. Not in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason.

A quick glance into the kitchen told him that she wasn't in there, so unless she was hiding in a closet somewhere, that meant she had gone upstairs. That sent a bit of a twinge through his guts. He knew, of course, that he'd have to take care of... things up there bfore he left, but he'd been hoping to save that for last.

"Lauraaa?"

Holding the photograph delicately, he headed down the hallway and started up the stairs. He'd left the lights on up there so there was no danger of tripping over his own feet as he made his way up to the second floor. He had a feeling he already knew where Laura was, and as he arrived at the top of the stairs, his suspicions were proven correct.

"Laura!" he barked, far more sharply than he'd done at all that night or the previous day. Startled, she spun around, hand still on the knob of the door to what, until a couple of days ago, had been Mary's room. James climbed the rest of the stairs two at a time, his heart pounding. "Go back downstairs."

The girl pursed her lips slightly, staring back at him with a suspicious expression. She was definitely not a fan of his sudden, out-of-character authority. "Why?"

"Because— because I don't want you to go in there. Go back downstairs and watch TV." Breathing raggedly, he stood at the top of the stairs and pointed down them, the photo still clutched in his hand.

"I don't have to listen to y—"

"Now, Laura!"

Laura's glare smoldered.

But slowly and resentfully, she let go of the doorknob and started to walk back towards the stairs, frown fixated on James the entire time. He stayed there, heart hammering against his ribcage and pointing arm outstretched, until she had started down. The order had forced its way out of his throat quicker than he could stop it, and while he had meant it, he had a feeling that it hadn't been him saying it so much as whatever was at his back, pushing him to move instead of drugging his brain with beer and sinking into a self-medicated haze to stare blankly at Ceramic Knife Guy until dawn, stewing in his own misery. James Sunderland couldn't give orders. James Sunderland was a doormat.

He swallowed self-consciously.

"I— ... Laura." Remembering at the last minute, he held out the photograph in the same manner that someone who was absolutely terrified of losing their fingers might present an apple to a horse.

Face pinched with suspicion and dislike, Laura paused in her descent and took the photo from him slowly, like she expected him to jerk it away at the last minute. When she looked down at it and saw who it was, her expression softened briefly, although the wariness wasn't gone. She shot one last glare at James to get across the fact that she still wasn't happy with him, then turned without a word and continued down the stairs.

Watching her go, James let out a deep breath that he wasn't even aware he'd been holding. It wasn't that there was anything secret in that room... No, Laura already knew all the secrets that mattered.

James swallowed again.

He didn't need to go in there. Not yet. There were still all kinds of other things he had to get done, too, before he would be able to leave. The bathroom still needed to be cleaned. The kitchen was a mess. And everywhere had three years' worth of dust crammed in unholy amounts behind appliances and in the backs of shelves. This room could wait.

The door opened with an unsettling creak as he turned the knob and pulled. It was no older than any of the other doors in the house, but it was opened less. Even while Mary had been alive, needing him, he had not opened it. Not as much as he should have.

It couldn't wait.

As soon as the door was all the way open, the smell hit him like a brick wall.

It wasn't what one might think, knowing what had happened in this room. Knowing that a murder had taken place. They might expect the putrid reek of a corpse— but Mary had not been dead long enough for the process of decay to begin its grisly work on her before he had given her up to the lake. Or maybe they'd expect that heavy, olfactory fog of blood. It was hard to see a murder mystery on TV without the scene being splattered by a bunch of set technicians with red food coloring and cornstarch.

But it was none of that.

Death had a smell and it wasn't the eye-watering, gag-inducing scent of a rotting body.

That sickly-sweet feeling that permeated the whole house became a physical reality in this room.

For three years, Mary's body had eaten away at itself from the inside-out. In the home or in the hospital, it hadn't mattered— there was nothing anyone could do to stop it from slowly breaking itself down. And it was slow. So slow that by the time that deathly smell started to appear on her breath, it was already clinging to everything she touched.

The air here was heavy with it.

James stepped inside.

Pill bottles stood on the windowsill in a neat line, causing what little light came in through the gap in the curtains to cast an eerie pattern across the far wall, like the ramparts of a castle. Or teeth. Like the ones that had fallen from her mouth one by one. The bed was made— the covers had made it too hard for her to get up when she needed to, so she had slept on top of them. He could still see the gentle indent of her body there and had to fight the bile that rose in his throat at the sight of it.

How could he have been so horribly, horribly wrong?

Swallowing hard, James approached the bed. There was a pitcher of tea— its surface probably clouded with settled dust by now— sitting on the bedside table. Beside it, a vase half-empty with water held a single, drooping daffodil. It had withered despite the liquid it sat in, perhaps choked lifeless by the oppressive, cloying air in the room, and a few of its petals crackled under his feet as he passed by the table.

One of the pillows normally gracing the end of the bed was on the floor. He stopped when he reached it, bending down stiffly to pick it up.

It had stayed exactly where he'd dropped it.

Throat tightening, James straightened back up, the corners of the pillow clutched tightly in his hands.

Throughout those three years, her hair had remained as soft as ever— but it had grown so very frail, like the rest of her body. It came out at the slightest pull— so easily that as the years passed, he'd no longer even been able to stroke it to comfort her. He had always been so careful not to touch it too roughly.

Always.

Yet in the end, that hadn't mattered. Because clinging to the silken pillowcase were not just strands, but clumps of that soft brown hair. From when he'd— ... when he'd—

Quite suddenly, James couldn't breathe. The air felt as solid against his nose and mouth as the pillow in his hands— which let it fall to the floor all over again, seconds later. The room blurred— he had turned, was gasping, scrambling for the door again, but his vision was blackening around the edges until the door ahead of him looked like he was seeing it through the wrong end of a telescope. His knees hit carpet— the floor was rolling and pitching under his feet like the deck of a seasick boat. The noises he made as he scrabbled across the floor should have been loud in the quiet atmosphere of the house, but all sounds were disturbingly muffled, as though his ears were stuffed with cotton.

The door had drifted partially shut behind him when he entered the room. He burst out of it like a drowning man through the surface of a lake.

Wheezing and spluttering, James made it only a few feet from the doorway in a gait that was too frantic, too spastic, to really be called a 'crawl', before the world tipped again and he was lying on his side, sides heaving like a snared rabbit as he gulped in the slightly-less-stale air of the hallway.

He remained there, half-curled, for a good fifteen minutes before he was able to fight off that crushing sense of suffocation long enough to roll back onto his knees. There were tears in his eyes and he rubbed at them frantically to clear his vision from the tiny, terrified tunnel it had become in that room. A couple hours ago he'd have thought that was the Otherworld again, but whatever sort of driving clarity had been possessing him since he had walked out of the kitchen earlier told him that it was his head and that it would probably be doing things like that a lot.

It was the same force that compelled him to wobble to his feet and reach for the door once more.

It took him a few tries— each one ending in the same tilt-a-whirl claustrophobia and desperate escape— before he was able to make it far enough to reach for the window at the head of the bed and shove it open, scattering the pill bottles. The heavy, stale air escaped into the night with a rush and James breathed deeply of the cool, rain-scented breeze that flowed into the room in its place until the smothering sensation was gone completely.

The room seemed a little less oppressive once the sickly smell was gone. James took a moment to collect himself before gingerly moving across the room to the little washroom that was attached. This had originally been a guest room— one they'd thought they'd probably never wind up using.

The bathroom had a musty smell of its own, and the light above the mirror buzzed as it came on. It was walled in yellow tile that had once lent the room a bright feeling, but now, in their grunginess, added to the air of neglect that the whole house suffered from. Lank curtains hung around the bathtub, bunched up against the walls like crinkled green cellophane. James had never liked those. They reminded him of the caps surgeons wore to keep their hair contained while they cut people open.

There were only two bathrooms in the house— neither were very big but the rest of the building had made up for them so neither he or Mary ever really minded. The one downstairs was only equipped with a shower stall. This one was the only one that actually had a bathtub. It was one of the reasons he and Mary had decided she would stay in this room instead of their own, as the effects of the disease grew more and more pronounced.

The smell lingered in here more than it did in the other room, and James's stomach clenched but did not threaten to violently introduce himself to the scraps of bread he'd wolfed down earlier like it had when he'd first tried to enter the bedroom.

There was a lot to be done in here.

With a deep and gusty sigh, James knelt. The rubber mat on the floor squeaked under his knees as he did so.

The inside of the tub had not been cleaned well. He had scrubbed it, distractedly and without heart, the day before Mary had come home from the hospital for the last time, but the white porcelain underneath was still coated in a layer of grime, built up from use and disuse alike. It was not dirt— it turned pale as it came away under his fingernails. He didn't want to know for sure what it was. The fact that it looked like dead skin gave him a sour taste in his throat and he scraped more ferociously.

Why hadn't he cleaned this damn thing better before Mary had come home? It was disgusting.

He was disgusting.

James adjusted his position so that he could sit without losing circulation in his feet, leaning further over the edge of the tub so that he could reach his arm in better.

The warm water sluiced around as he tested it with one hand, sleeves rolled up. Then, fingers dripping, he withdrew and twisted the faucet off. Then, looking over his shoulder, he called out.

"Mary! It's ready!"

There was a shuffle of cloth in the room beyond, as she rose from where she had been seated on the bed. It was a late, dreary afternoon, with a drizzling gray sky blooming over the wet greenery.

She stepped into the bathroom, wearing a modest pink bathrobe that concealed most of her. She had always been shy about her body— but then, both of them were. Their first time together in bed had been marked by a lot of stammering and bashful covering-up of the body parts in question while undressing, and, eventually, a lot of hushed, awkward laughter when they simultaneously realized how hilarious the whole situation was.

But now she had more reasons than just shyness to feel self-conscious.

For the first few months, they had tried to forget about the diagnosis. It was easier for James than it was for Mary, of course, but still both of them had made an effort to carry on with their lives as though nothing was wrong. It did not last.

As time passed, signs of the disease began to slip into Mary's every day. First there was soreness. She started to have trouble standing up for long periods of time— when she had always been the one with the patience to stand in grocery store lines while James moaned about aching feet. Then bouts of dizziness had begun to accompany it.

The robe slipped away from her shoulders as she gave James a sad, apologetic smile, and he knew the apology was for the way she was starting to look.

Over the past few weeks, as the doctor had warned them, a mottled, puffy rash had started to creep into her skin like infectious wolves into a flock of sheep. It wasn't that bad yet— most people wouldn't even notice it— but they had seen pictures of what it would become. Mary had started to cry right there in the doctor's office.

And of course, the entire time, her breathing problems just kept getting worse.

"You don't have to stay," Mary whispered, her arms folded gently across her chest and legs clenched at the knees. On another woman— like the one she had been a year ago— it would have looked coy and sent James's heart racing. But right now it just made his heart feel like something with claws was treading on it.

There were goosebumps popping up on her skin, even though the steam rising from the bath made the air inside the tiny room positively tropical.

"No, I'll help," James insisted earnestly, scooting back so that she could get into the tub without having to awkwardly step over him. "You just relax, okay?"

The bath had been his idea— one of the many well-meaning but sort of useless ones he had thought up by the dozen before he had fully settled into the cold, hopeless realization that Mary was truly dying. The past week had been wet and cold and she'd spent most of it on the couch wrapped up in blankets, complaining of the aches and pains. She didn't like showers anymore— standing for so long made her joints hurt worse. So James, trying his best to be the dutiful husband, had suggested the upstairs bathroom instead.

Once settled in the water, Mary let out a deep sigh and drew her knees to her chest. There was a certain stiffness to all her motions now— like every step or bend hurt. James reached for a washcloth.

"Want me to wash your back?"

"That would be nice..." Mary murmured, brushing a lank lock of hair behind one ear. Crouching into a more comfortable position, James soaked the cloth in the bathwater and started to rub it in circles slowly across his wife's back, biting his lip slightly as he did so. The rash had spread since the last time he'd looked. Which was, admittedly, quite some time ago. Mary had not yet moved to the other room to sleep, but they hadn't been intimate in a long time. This hadn't started to bother him yet. He was still clinging to the hope that she would get better, and that they could go back to doing all the things they normally did, for years to come.

He tried to put the growing blemish out of his mind. Mary was relaxing, leaning forward and turning her head to the side so that her hair wouldn't be in his way. Seeing her look content made the knots in his chest loosen. This was sort of relaxing for him too, in a way.

A good ten minutes were spent like this, almost in a trance. But eventually the silence grew too oppressive and James felt the need to break it.

"So for dinner tonight, I was thinking I could try making spaghetti," he piped up, dunking the cloth in the water again before continuing. "If you write down the sauce recipe, I could just follow it and you can sit on the couch."

Mary let out a dry, raspy chuckle, her eyes still shut. She had changed position slightly and was now leaning against the back of the tub, her head sliding forward tiredly, as though she was nodding off.

"No offense, sweetie, but remember what happened the last time I let you help with spaghetti?"

"... Well... maybe it'd be better this time? I promise not to let anything catch on fire," James offered lamely, hoping to get another chuckle. He hadn't been hearing many of those lately. When he got no reply, he let out a sheepish one of his own and reached down to wet the cloth again. "All right, all right, maybe we can just have one of those frozen pizzas then? ... Mary?"

He looked up.

Mary's head had dipped— as though asleep. Her eyes were still shut. One knee had started to slide, limply, from where it had been pressed to her chest.

"Mary?" he tried again, reaching out to take hold of her chin and lift it. "Honey?"

He let go.

Her head flopped limply back into its slumped position.

There are few phrases that do justice to the sensation the human body experiences at the moment of true, blinding terror— not normal fear. The terror that results from the sudden, devastating realization that right at this second, everything might be changing. In fact, there was no accurate description of what James felt at that very moment, and there never would be. He knew because he would remember it forever.

His heart did not sink, his throat did not clench. Those were all unpleasant feelings that came with unpleasant occurrences, but none were there for something like this. As he watched Mary's chin thump listlessly against her collarbone as though she were a marionette with its strings cut, he felt a horrible charge run through him, as though each and every cell in his body was being individually electrocuted for one horrible instant. Handfuls of dreadful, tingling needles prickled at every sensitive nerve ending— where jaw met throat, at his fingertips, in his underarms, ribcage, deep in his gut— as though tangles of innards had just suddenly been yanked out, leaving nothing but a big empty space, occupied only by lingering phantom twangs, but soon to be filled with those awful electric pins and needles.

The only sound that could escape him at first was a low, animal moan.

"No..."

The washcloth dropped with a splash from his hands and into the water, where it sank to the bottom of the tub and drifted there, gently, as he grabbed her shoulders so tightly that she should have cried out in pain. Instead, her head merely lolled around like a ragdoll's as he shook her, too desperate to be gentle but too afraid of hurting her to do it as hard as he possibly should have.

"Mary... Mary, no, please, talk to me, sweetheart... Mary, you gotta— you gotta talk to me, Mary, please say something, please PLEASE SAY SOMETHING!!"

He had only been able to last maybe three seconds before his voice went high and hysterical.

Staggering clumsily to his feet, James plunged both arms into the water and hauled Mary's dripping body upwards, one hand under her knees and the other under her shoulders. He clutched her to his chest, hardly aware that his shirt was soaking up the liquid like a sponge. There was no time to be aware o that. When he grabbed a towel to wrap hurriedly around her, it was less because he cared about getting wet and more because the thought of carrying the limp, naked body of his wife around with nothing to hide her vulnerability was more than he could handle.

His feet moved so quickly that they didn't even seem to be under his control. Or even connected to him. This became unnervingly clear— or would have if he'd even noticed— when his foot slammed into the doorframe of the guest room as he rushed out of it and into the hallway, and the only thing he felt was a dull sting where there should have been agony.

The stairs rushed past in a blur. It was incredible that he didn't trip, sending them both tumbling to their deaths.

Droplets of now-tepid bathwater splattered against their kitchen linoleum as James's panicked flight finally came to a halt. He cradled Mary haphazardly in one arm, bringing his knee up to support the rest of her, as his slippery fingers fumbled numbly at the numbers of the telephone. His hand was shaking so hard that he hit the wrong ones three times, cursing loudly and more desperately each time it happened, until he was finally able to hit the crucial three.

A ringing tone sounded faintly on the other end of the line.

"Come on... come on come on comeoncomeoncomeon..." James muttered urgently, pressing the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he struggled to keep Mary from sliding out of his arms.

After what seemed like an eternity (but was probably only a few seconds), the line picked up and a pleasant female voice came on the air.

"911, what's your emergency?"

For one horrifying second, the words froze on James's throat and he gulped like a fish before some mental pipeline burst and they gushed out of him in a shaky, stuttering torrent.

"I— my wife, she's— she's been ill, and she just— she just—"

"Calm down, sir. Try taking a deep breath."

The suggestion struck James as condescending and somewhere inside, he felt a flare of anger that was almost immediately extinguished again by his panic.

"M-my wife, she passed out and I c-can't wake her back up, she's— she's— please sss-send an ambulance NOW!"

"Sir, please calm down. I need you to tell me some things. Is she breathing?"

Tears came springing to his eyes at the question and he let out a broken moan. "Oh god..." Was she? Oh please let her be breathing...

He angled her around in his arms so that he could see if her chest was rising or falling, gasping something close to sobs the whole time. Was she??

"I— yes, I... I think so. W-what do I do? Is there an ambulance coming?" He turned frantically to stare out the window into the gloomy drizzle, hoping against hope that he'd see flashing lights coming down the street.

"Yes, there's one on the way. Can you give me your address?"

The words gummed up in his mind. How was it that he could write the same set of letters and numbers a thousand times by memory on envelopes and application forms and yet draw a complete blank right when he needed them the most?

Eventually his brain caught up with his mouth and he managed to stammer them out. He had to repeat them three times before the receptionist could understand him. As he breathlessly choked the words out a fourth time, a faint voice drifted upwards from his arms.

"... James...?"

Mary was stirring lightly, her eyelids fluttering.

"Mary!" The phone nearly slipped from its position jammed half underneath his jaw as he looked down at the woman in his arms, her naked form blurred by his tears. "Mary, oh, honey, I'm right here. I'm right here."

She looked disoriented, turning her head vaguely to see where they were. Her eyes slid in and out of focus. "James, what's happening...?"

"Hang on, sweetie—"

"Sir," said the receptionist into his ear for the fifth time, trying to recapture his attention. "Sir, I need you to stay on the phone with me. The ambulance has been dispatched, it should be there any minute now."

No one had ever called James 'sir' in his entire life. It just figured that the first time that happened would be when his wife was dying.

It would bother him later. But for the moment, there were more pressing matters. James sank to the floor, mumbling frenzied reassurances to Mary.

After that, everything was a blur.

The ambulance arrived eventually and Mary was loaded onto it on a stretcher, the damp towel draped over her like a blanket at James's insistence, still looking dazed. James rode in the van next to her as it plunged down darkening wet streets towards St. Jerome's Hospital, keeping her pale hands clutched in his the whole way.

Once inside the hospital, James paced like a tiger in front of the doors Mary had been wheeled through. They had been shut in his face, with muted voices ringing in his ears, forbidding him to follow. He could not— and probably never would— remember how long he paced, gesticulating wildly, ranting and raving like a madman, no matter how many other people from the waiting room approached, using soft voices and tentative, grasping hands to try and encourage him to sit down. At some point, someone far bigger and stronger than him arrived and James was gently but forcibly steered into one of the waiting room seats, where he remained, his mania dissolving instantly into a silent, staring funk.

The next morning's light found James in the exact same seat. Someone had draped a blanket over his shoulders and someone else— or maybe the same person, James couldn't remember— had shoved a paper cup of now-lukewarm tea into his stiff hands.

He stared blankly into it, not even looking up when he heard footsteps approaching him.

Mary's doctor rubbed his wrinkled brow and scratched his stormy gray hair as he sat down next to James. The sound of it was raw and grating on James's ears, like someone sifting through bristly hay. His throbbing headache magnified it even more. The lights here in this room were too bright, and every sound felt like a jackhammer against his temples.

"Well," the doctor said as he pulled off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose with one hand, in what he possibly thought was a rueful or sympathetic gesture. The other hand was placed on James's shoulder. "I suppose this was a bit of a wake-up call for you, wasn't it?"

The tea in the cup rippled slightly as James's hands shook. He wanted to throw the contents of that cup right in the smug son of a bitch's face.

But he did not.

Instead he only nodded, head hanging, and started to sob.

His eyes were puffy and tear-sore as he finally descended the stairs for the last time, feeling dazed and dehydrated. He didn't need to look in a mirror to know they were red.

The room was as clean as he'd been able to make it. Every surface in the bathroom had been scrubbed until it gleamed, and the pill bottles moved discreetly to the drawer where they could draw dust and serve as a morbid reminder of the fragility of life out of sight rather than be on display. Clumps of dust and assorted carpet debris had been inhaled by the vacuum cleaner he'd hauled out of the hall closet for the first time in more than a year. The bed had been made, its mattress pounded until the shape of Mary's body was long gone. The curtains had been shaken and thrown open, the inside of the window cleaned of hidden cobwebs.

The lonely, drooping daffodil had been replaced by a handful of new ones from the garden. They weren't that neat— he only vaguely remembered tromping outside during the middle of the cleaning process and pulling them straight from the backyard, where they had bloomed early— but they would do.

The room had smelled like the garden outside when he'd left it. He had no guarantee that it wouldn't return to that stuffy, dead atmosphere once the window was shut, but there was only so much that James had the knowledge— and time— to do.

The corners of his eyes itched terribly. Forgetting all childhood lessons of 'Leave them alone or you'll make it worse', he rubbed at them, grimacing, before casting another glance at the clock. It was past midnight now. He supposed he'd made good progress— the upper floor was as much like the way it once was as he could make it. He would not need to go back up there.

That left the downstairs.

Laura had pulled out the photo albums again and was on the couch, studiously ignoring James as she flipped through the pages, lit by the television screen. James didn't bother her. Dropping the vacuum cleaner on the floor by the duffel bags— he had a feeling he'd need it down here at some point, too— James slouched into the kitchen for the second time.

Like the rest of the house, it was no disaster area, but it still wasn't a pretty sight.

For the first few months after Mary had been moved permanently to the hospital, he had gone about his normal routines almost robotically, performing them for no other reason than that he always had. Routine could be comforting, temporarily.

But when no urging came when he waited a few extra days to do the dishes, no pointed stares when he left work clothes draped over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, the habit slowly languished and then died completely. It had just gotten worse as the years passed, and what had once been a tidy house had eventually become as dusty and depressing as the old apartment James had sworn he'd never set foot in again.

The sink was full of bowls and water clouded by soap-scum and gluey remnants of the canned soups and frozen dinners that James had been living off of for the past three years, like the bachelor he'd been before he met Mary. As painfully-traditional as it was, she'd usually been the one who did the cooking. It wasn't as though he didn't know how, but there seemed little point in going out of his way to make a meal when he was the only one it was for.

Cupboards hung open— after awhile he just sort of stopped closing them after getting what he needed.

There were charred toast crumbs on the counter in the corner from every time he'd had to upturn the toaster and shake it to get a stuck slice of bread out.

The kitchen table, where he and Mary had once eaten every morning and night— when the weather didn't drag them outside to eat in the sunshine anyway— was now piled high with paperwork, more than he'd ever thought he could accumulate from a low-end clerk job. Very little of it was filled out.

A red light on the phone was blinking ominously on the corner of a broken street, alternating green, red, green, red, even though there wasn't a ghost of traffic to be directed where it hung on the wall next to the table. He didn't have to check it to know what it was— messages from work. Probably angry ones. Shortly prior to Mary's return from the hospital, he had sort of just stopped showing up. While they did know about James's dying wife, sympathy only stretched so far when the manager was a beet-faced corporate pig whose employees— or at least the ones with dirty minds and even dirtier senses of humor— frequently theorized had a sadomasochistic streak in the bedroom.

He didn't go over to the phone. Whatever was in those messages, he didn't want to hear them. Even if there were genuine condolences from concerned neighbors scattered between (there weren't).

Outside the window, a single faint glow from a streetlight somewhere down the road illuminated the dark foliage of the big oak out front.

James just stood in the middle of the kitchen for a few minutes. There was no repeat of the overpowering, claustrophobic panic that had struck in the upstairs guest bedroom. There were no huge obstacles like the dead smell or the hair-covered pillows to overwhelm his senses and compel him to turn around and run. What was there instead was a great weight on his shoulders, and for the first time, he could feel his resolve starting to fade. The kitchen was full of little things, everyday things, that for some reason all added up, seeming more and more impossible to fix with each out-of-place detail that caught his attention.

It didn't make sense for him to feel so fatigued at the thought of straightening some papers and closing the cupboards, not after he'd just spent hours scrubbing the bathroom walls until his hands were raw.

But he did, and for a few seconds all he wanted was to sink down to the floor and stay like that for awhile. He'd already worked so hard.

... But he couldn't rest now. He'd had his chance to recuperate.

Now he had to see this through to the end.

Baby steps, James.

Mary used to say that to him sometimes when she could tell he was getting frustrated with something— which admittedly was quite often. She wasn't here to say it to him now, but he could call up her voice in his head so easily that it was almost as though she was beside him.

The fact that it was 'almost' and not 'actually' was almost enough to make him need to choke back a despairing sound once more, but instead he moved over to the cupboards.

He reached a hand for the hanging-open cabinet door to shut it.

Then to the corner to sweep up the toast crumbs, which were so burnt that not even ants were attracted to them.

Then to the table to put the paper in semi-organized stacks (he did not fill any out, but because he did not plan on ever returning to the job of their origin, he felt that hardly mattered).

Then to the sink.

The hot, soapy water made the tender skin on his hands burn, but something about it felt... better. Maybe it was the routine. Maybe it was the smell of the dish soap, or maybe it was just that standing at the sink and cleaning the dishes one last time was a little bit better than hunching over the bathtub and scraping away at its filthy sides while his eyes poured.

With every dish he put away, the pile of weight on his shoulders got a little bit lighter. The simple routine of plunge wipe dry set away was almost hypnotic, and it sent him into a daze so complete that it wasn't until he saw a streak of soapy, diluted blood seeping from the pad of his index finger that he realized he'd cut himself on something.

Surprised, he shoved it under the jet of hot water pouring from the faucet to take the bite out of the sting, and bewilderedly dipped his other hand beneath the blanket of suds to investigate.

His fingers brushed over some sunken silverware before they gingerly encountered the culprit. Amid a gentle clinking of glass and ceramic, he drew roughly a third of a mug, its broken edges sharp as freshly-filed teeth, from the water. For a moment, he stared at it in bewilderment. Had it broken at some point while he was washing the dishes and he hadn't noticed? ... No, he was pretty sure the sound of breaking glass would have snapped him out of his little trance.

Carefully, he drew out the other pieces of the mug and set them on the counter, where he continued to look at them with furrowed brows.

And then he remembered.

Wincing deeply, James poked the bleeding finger into his mouth.

The tart taste of his own blood, in a display of deep irony, tasted more remarkable than anything else James had eaten in the past month.

Monotony took on many forms, and though it had happened so gradually that James hadn't noticed it right away, his life had slowly crept into monochrome. The days were gloomy, his mental state overcast, and food was like ashes in his mouth no matter what he was eating.

Sucking the coppery flavor from his finger morosely, James shifted in his seat, the plastic covering the bouquet he'd bought a couple hours earlier crinkling as he did so. A hidden thorn somewhere in it was the culprit behind the pricked finger. He didn't know what sorts of flowers were in it— just that it was colorful and that Mary liked flowers. Or she used to, anyway. To be honest, even though they were a splash of color in an increasingly grey world, this place seemed to suck the brightness out of everything.

He was sitting in the by-now familiar waiting room of St. Jerome's Hospital, waiting for the doors down the hall to open. Aside from the occasional muffled cough or rustle of newspapers, it was quiet in here today. He was one of the only people waiting— maybe he should have been happy on behalf of everyone else that he was one of the few people who had reason to be sitting here in a wing for the terminally ill but, perhaps selfishly, it only made him feel worse.

He had spent so much time in this waiting room over the past two years that it almost felt more familiar than his own house, the one that he now lived in alone. Even before Mary had been admitted to the hospital full-time, he had spent many sleepless nights here as attacks like the one that had happened on that cold, wet evening increased in number and severity. Hours spent past midnight with Mary in his lap— sleeping soundly with her face against his chest as more immediate cases were rushed past them, the urgent motion set to a visual soundtrack of red and white reflections from outside bouncing across the walls, as though they were in an airport, waiting on a red-eye flight— were gradually replaced by hours spent in those same uncomfortable seats, alone. Wondering what was going on behind those closed doors, and if this time would be the one where Mary didn't walk out again.

By the time Mary's doctor— and her family— insisted that she be moved to the hospital permanently, James was ashamed to admit that his first feeling was of relief. No more dark ambulance trips, no more midnights awakening to that jolt of terror when he saw Mary in bed next to him, coughing blood into her hands or worse, dead limp like a corpse and running a fever so hot that he could feel it radiating off of her skin a foot away. No more being terrified that one wrong move on his part would send Mary too far past the brink to be brought back.

Relief or no, however, having to finally accept that Mary was beyond his ability to protect, to care for, was a terrible, bitter pill to swallow. The lifting of that crushing burden left only room for despair, and in the past-a-year-now that James had spent alone, he had sunk to lows that would have shamed Mary if she knew. Sometimes he wondered if she did.

He'd been waiting for a couple hours now. He'd arrived a little after lunchtime, having taken the afternoon off work. He'd probably wind up paying for it later, as he was slowly but surely building up a steep time debt, but for the moment, he just didn't have room in his head for anything other than his own emotional fatigue. Upon arrival, he'd been told that Mary had other visitors at the moment, and would he be okay with waiting for awhile?

James was unsure when, exactly, he had become enough of a stranger that he had to wait to see his own wife during visiting hours, but he didn't like it at all. She did have others apart from himself that came to see her, he knew— friends and family. He'd been introduced to all of them at the very least, back when he and Mary were a normal couple— but in the end, they'd always been Mary's friends, not his.

At long last, though, his ears picked up a murmur of voices down the hall. He sat up a little straighter, preparing to rise. But as the voices grew louder, he realized that it might be awhile yet before he'd get to walk into that room. The owners of the voices rounded the corner and James bit his lip in anticipation.

"I don't care if he's only got a blue-collar job, he should be doing more."

"John, please. It's not like he hasn't been trying. And I wish you'd stay calmer around our daughter, she could tell you were upset..."

If Jonathan Shepherd could be described in two words, they would be 'stiff' and 'efficient'. He dressed sharply, even when he was sitting in his own living room, and his glasses gave him an austere, intellectual appearance that was not skin-deep at all. Although Mary's family was on the upper side of middle-class and had been for generations, John had never allowed that comfortable level of wealth to stop him from working long hours to provide for his family. He was not an unkind man, and had certainly never treated the disappointingly-dressed young man his daughter had brought to meet him badly. But although he was too polite to ever say it to his face, it had been obvious to James from the start that John would have vastly preferred that his daughter fall in love with someone else. Someone who hadn't scraped through high school by the skin of his teeth. Someone whose most prestigious job hadn't been a brief stint as a mailman. Someone who had a little more to his name than three duffel bags of ugly clothing and a beat-up blue Oldsmobile. Someone better.

His smile had always taken on a slightly strained quality when James was around. And in the past year, the smile had disappeared in James's presence completely.

The man was gesturing emphatically as he emerged from the hall, followed by his wife, who was hurrying along behind him, trying tirelessly to bring his temper down. Her name was Martha and she was a bit warmer than her husband— though James had always gotten that faint sense of polite disappointment from her as well.

Swallowing hard, James shrank back in his seat slightly, hoping against hope that they wouldn't see him sitting there. No such luck.

They say that dogs can sense fear, and James had always gotten that impression from Mary's father. If it was true, it was true in spades today because as soon as he had entered the waiting room, John's head whipped around and homed in on James like a bird of prey. James froze.

For the first time, the cold enmity he had felt radiating off of his father-in-law the past few times they'd seen each other was coming to the surface. Explosively. Seeing where her husband was looking, Martha caught sight of James too, and cupped a hand over her mouth, flushing slightly. She could tell that he'd heard the tail end of their conversation.

Wearing a grim expression, John started forward with a growl.

"Speak of the devil—"

"Oh, John, don't..."

Ignoring his wife's feeble protest, John approached James with a swiftness that belied his middle-age. Tensing, James began to rise, an apology already on his tongue. He didn't get a chance to utter it.

"We need to talk." Even in anger, John was too poised, too controlled, to be leaning into James's face and screaming. But he might as well have been. His eyes were cold behind his glasses and his knuckles were clenched tightly. His voice trembled. "Is this what you call being a good husband? Sending checks and sitting here in the waiting room every now and then looking like you'd rather be somewhere else?"

When James found the breath to speak, it could only come out in a stammer. "M-mister Shepherd, I—"

"DON'T—!" John barked, a sharp, guttural sound that he clearly had not intended to come out as loud as it had. The few heads in the rest of the room turned and, noticing this, John closed his eyes and took a deep breath before finishing, slightly more composed. "... 'mister' Shepherd me."

James winced. Tongue-tied, he tried to search for something to say that wouldn't offend further. Finally, he settled on his old standby. "Sir, I—"

"You what, Sunderland? You have more excuses for why you can't foot more of the cost for your own wife's medicine? What happened to that raise you promised her you'd ask for, hm?"

"I— ... raise?" ... Yes. Yes, he had promised that, hadn't he. When Mary had found out he was struggling to make ends meet, she had begged him to ask for a raise, more for his sake than her own. "I— t-there's been a lot of cuts at work, the... the economy..."

"The economy?" John's face was so close to James that he could see himself reflected in the older man's glasses. "Don't talk to me about the economy. I spend ten hours a day dealing with the economy. Sometimes more. Don't give me that excuse. It's always excuses with you." He gestured emphatically, face having grown red and sweat-sheened. "If it's not time, it's money. And if it's not money, you just aren't there at all. Is this what you call fulfilling your vows?"

Mouthing wordlessly, James drew his shoulders up and leaned back, feeling like his eyes couldn't get any wider. He wanted to stare down at the floor— it was the only thing he felt would look back at him right now with something other than anger and disappointment— but he couldn't look away from his father-in-law. There was a vein in the corner of John's temple pulsing in and out and for some reason, even though there wasn't a molecule of James that wasn't feeling horrific shame, he couldn't take his eyes off that spot.

Shoulders quaking, John took a handful of James's coat— not forcefully. Even in his rage, he still had his elegance. It was more like a parent grabbing hold of a horrendously misbehaving child, except that James was doing nothing more than standing there, petrified, and for the total lack of parental affection underneath. "If you've been having so much financial trouble, where are you getting the money for your... booze, James? That's what your sort of people call it, right? Huh?"

Owl-eyed, James drew back. "I— I don't know what you're talking abou—"

"Oh, just don't even try!" John barked, once again hushing the vague murmuring of the other waiting room patrons trying to pretend that they weren't witnessing a brutal meltdown of father/son-in-law relations. "Everyone knows! I can— I can even—" He drew a handful of green coat-collar towards his face. "... Yes! I can smell it on you! Here you are, mewling to me about the economy while you blow all your money on some lousy— what were you drinking before you came here? Do you get drunk before you come to visit my daughter, you miserable, overgrown rat?!"

James winced. He hadn't been blowing money on alcohol. No, Mary's care had been and always would be his first priority when it came to money. A few beers didn't make or break his paycheck. But saying so wouldn't change a thing, nor would it help to explain why he got drunk before his visits to Mary, because John didn't care.

And he was right not to care.

It didn't matter what the reasons were.

James's silence spoke for itself and his stare finally broke as he assumed his default stance, turning his head down and to the side to stare down at the floor. His initial hypothesis wound up being wrong, because the first thing he encountered was his own reflection in the glossy tiles, looking back at him judgmentally. It looked angrier than he felt on the inside, and he wasn't sure if his own face really looked like that right now, or if the floor had distorted his expression. Looking down at it made his fingers curl into tight, self-loathing fists, but it was better than looking into John's eyes.

"Is this what you call fulfilling your vows?" John repeated harshly, his teeth gritted. "In sickness and in health? Till death do us part? Huh? Is this what you call taking care of your wife?"

"John, he can't help that she's in the hospital—" Martha started, but John shut his eyes and shook his head, which was his way of telling her that he didn't want to hear it. James knew that John knew that nobody could help Mary being in the hospital just as well as he did. But he also knew that this didn't matter. John blamed him. And so did he.

"In sickness... and in health," John said haltingly once he was sure that Martha wasn't going to interject again. He hadn't released James's coat, and the much-younger man just stood stock-still, eyes pointed straight at the floor, where he could see both of their reflections anyway. The older man's face looked dangerously red. He was struggling, very hard, to compose himself. His expression was twitching in frustration, as he tried to take all the angry words and eloquent reasoning that had built up in his head on the subject of his son-in-law, and put them n an order that would most fully employ their strength. And it wasn't working.

In that moment, it was obvious that he was just as angry at himself for not being able to fully articulate his feelings as he was angry at James. So instead of busting forth with a lecture, like the ones he gave to students of law on a weekly basis, of all the reasons that James should feel ashamed in a concise but eloquent speech designed to pound the point home with no mercy, all he could do was repeat the words that had probably been intended to be the thesis statement of his verbal-assault essay. "In sickness and in health!"

Flinching back even further, James managed to produce a timid "I'm so sorry, Mr. Shepherd—"

"MY DAUGHTER IS DYING!"

It had become a scream and James finally jerked his head up from its meek, defeated post to stare at his father-in-law, as shocked by the sudden noise as he was at the fact that John had blown up at all. The sight that met his eyes shocked him even more.

The normally stone-faced Jonathan Shepherd had tears glimmering in the corners of his eyes behind the glasses, and his teeth were gritted so had that James could see the tendons by his temples popping out like strained ropes.

The utter silence that followed the howl was broken by Martha's desperate, mortified hiss of "John, not here!"

John Shepherd drew himself upright and pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand, closing his eyes and sucking in a deep breath. Then, without a further word to either of them, he let go of James's coat and took off at a brisk walk for the exit.

James could feel every eye in the room on his back, and suddenly became aware that the thorn-pricked finger had been leaking bloody smears onto the plastic of the bouquet the entire time.

If anything, Martha looked even more embarrassed than he felt. Her face was flushed and she had put him between herself and the understandably-curious onlookers, who reminded him forcefully of pedestrians ogling a car wreck. But at the same time, he could tell that she was embarrassed because the exchange had taken place here, in front of a group of witnesses that seemed a lot bigger than the five or so people it was actually composed of. Not embarrassed because she disagreed with her husband.

"James, just— I'll talk to him, and we'll talk later. Just— ... go and see Mary. She wants to see you. Go," she whispered, giving him a gentle push in the direction of the hallway before turning and hurrying away herself, head bowed.

Feeling oddly hollow, like his shame and embarrassment was so heavy that it had leaked down to his feet and across the floor, James walked numbly out of the waiting room and down the hall of closed doors, feeling several pairs of eyes boring into his back as he did so.

They couldn't know.

They didn't know the real reason why he didn't come to visit Mary as often anymore.

Pushing the heavy door open just far enough to slip through, James entered her room. A few of the petals from the bouquet broke off and littered the doorway.

"... Mary?"

She was sitting in the bed, back to the door, her face turned towards the window. She didn't look at him, even as she spoke a few seconds later, her voice quiet and bitter. "What do you want, James."

Swallowing, James held up his offering.

"I... I brought you some flowers..."

When he had arrived home that afternoon, he had trudged into the house in silence, not bothering to turn on any lights save for the ones in the kitchen. Thinking coffee would calm his nerves, he had tried to make a cup but dropped the mug on the floor. Normally it would have been nothing but another mess to not clean up, something to sigh at and maybe nudge out of the way but not get bent out of shape over.

He had spent the next two hours hunched over on the floor making sounds like he was dying.

It was something he'd forgotten about entirely before now, and he almost wished he could forget it again. But, placing the now-clean shards of the mug on a dry dish-cloth, he knew that it was just as important as everything else he had remembered. And after losing his memory in a way he had never thought was possible, more than anything, he never wanted to forget again. Even if some of the things he was regaining hurt.

In the living room, the TV had been shut off and Laura had devoted her full attention to the photo albums, having turned the lamp back on.

"Something dirty came on the TV," she informed him bluntly when he re-entered from the kitchen, as though it was his fault.

"Oh... sorry," he mumbled, a twinge of guilt sneaking through a gap in his armor and making itself at home in his chest as a flush settled on his face. That's right, he did usually leave the TV on the channel with those questionable late-night programs... But, she didn't need to know that. She was eight. "I can... um, try and find the remote so you can change the channel if you still wanna watch TV and that happens again..."

"You only have boring channels, anyway," Laura said dismissively, turning her back on him.

James just sighed. Leaving her to the photo albums, he moved past the couch to take a closer look at what lay in store for him to clean in here. More than anything else, there was dust. It choked the heating vents and piled up like gray velvet on the shelves of untouched books and knick-knacks that lined the edges of the room.

It was a job for the vacuum cleaner. James dragged it morosely across the room, ignoring the dirty looks Laura was sending his way for the noise she knew would be coming shortly. She had scooted around in her seat and was now kneeling, glaring at him over the back of the couch.

"Do you gotta do that now—"

James cut her off by turning the vacuum on.

Its whirring hum drowned out all sound, including whatever angry vocalizations Laura was making (judging by the way her mouth was moving and the rudeness of the gestures she was making, it was nothing pleasant), and that was what James needed right now. It was hard on the ears, but he didn't want any distractions. This had been waiting to be done for a long time, and taking care of it made him feel less... unclean, somehow.

The machine snapped and crackled as it merrily sucked up god-knows-what had been stamped into the carpet since the last time he'd taken care of it. With the mechanical humming in his ears, James allowed his mind to go blank for a little while. It wasn't like the task required a whole lot of brainpower— which, he had a feeling, was part of why it made him feel better.

But nothing lasted forever, and the rattling increased as he passed over an invisible trail of filth he knew he'd walked multiple times over the past year. It was with a dim, growing feeling of unpleasantness that he followed it to its end. The vacuum cleaner thunked to a halt against the hard wood of the cabinet next to the clock and he let go of the handle after pushing it aside, where it sat and vibrated by itself, waiting patiently to continue its task— which James was delaying in favor of the cabinet doors, which came open smoother than any other door in the house.

His eyes couldn't penetrate the interior of the cabinet, which the lamp's light didn't quite reach, but the rich, dusky smell told him what he needed to know even better than the dull glinting in the darkness and the gentle clink of glass on glass did. It was something he already knew good and well, anyway.

The neck of the bottle felt perfect in the center of his clenched fingers, like the two were meant to go together. He pulled it out into the light, squinting at its label. The contents sloshed around noisily when he shook it— it was mostly empty. And judging by the way the dark stains at the base of where it had been standing were mostly-dry but still sticky, the missing portion had been drunk not too many days before.

James swallowed hard.

Had... had he been drunk when he'd driven to Silent Hill?

... Yes. Yes, he probably had.

The thought that he'd almost set himself up to die (and potentially claim even MORE lives than he'd already taken) before even reaching his destination somehow did not comfort him in the slightest. Maybe the wine was part of the reason everything in between Mary's death and the overlook's parking lot was nothing more than a blur.

In hindsight, keeping alcohol in the house had been a bad idea for many reasons. He hadn't at first, not in the beginning. It was perhaps a year and a half before Mary had come home for the last time that James had first started bringing the drinks home instead of sniffing out bars and pubs like some sort of booze-seeking bloodhound. It had been something he'd promised himself he would never do, but when things had started going really bad, it had wound up the lesser of two evils. Or at least he'd seen it that way.

That wasn't to say that the incident leading up to that groundbreaking change hadn't been his own fault. It had. If he hadn't screwed up, hadn't backslid, he'd never have felt the need to stop feeding his craving for numbness in a cheerful, crowded setting that protected him from himself and do it instead in his empty living room, alone. Maybe everything would have been different.

James rocked backward to sit down on the floor, still holding the bottle in one hand. Beside him, the still-running vacuum cleaner continued to whine. It was a high-pitched, droning hum, and hidden inside the dry buzz was a piercing, ringing tone that dug deep into the tiny bones of his inner ears like a fine drill. Aside from this, very little of the music could actually be heard over the pounding baseline.

"Pretty great in here, huh?!" shouted one of his companions over the din, somewhere by his ear.

Even though it had been yelled, James could barely even tell what had been said, so he nodded because he had no idea what else to do.

It had all been a big mistake.

That was all, really.

It had only been a few months since he had implemented the new rule where he wasn't supposed to talk or make eye-contact with others in the bar. It had just started scaring him too much, the feelings of connection. The simple fact of the matter was that he hadn't just been to a pub a few times on the more difficult nights to help cope with the pain until Mary was better, like he'd been treating it. He'd been going to these places for over a year now and she was only getting worse. So he'd started trying to avoid repeats of the ragtag friendships from well-meaning old boozehounds who inexplicably felt sorry for him— who called him things like buddy or kiddo or Jimmy— who, no matter what they said or what deep hurts and suffering their own lives contained, did not understand.

But he'd finally slipped up.

Slipped up, and before he even knew it, within a few visits he'd found himself being tipsily shepherded into a car. He did not know its destination, but he'd been promised it was just what he needed.

"I—I uh, don't really know if this is a good idea, guys," he had objected in his usual not-assertive-enough way.

"No, no, man, you'll like this," they had insisted.

So he had sat there in the back, squeezed in the middle with raucous laughter on either side of him, arms around his shoulders and a beer in his hands.

The people in the car with him were a far cry from the sad old men he usually found himself conversing with, if he conversed with anyone at all. It was almost the first time he could remember anyone his own age wanting to interact with him at all, much less drag him places. Perhaps if he'd grown up normal and hadn't married so young, these were the sorts of people he'd have wound up surrounded by. They were boisterous and overbearing, and had squeezed his pitiful story out of him somehow and, touched, had decided amongst themselves in an act of misplaced charity to help him out in the best way they knew how. Their good intentions James feel a little bad for resenting it, but he didn't want friends. Not these kinds of friends. He didn't even know their names— and he was pretty sure they didn't know his, either.

When they arrived at their loud, strobe-lit destination, James was laughing and playing along. As far as he could tell (not that he'd looked too closely), it was just another place for a guy to get a drink. He didn't like the music, and he didn't like the epileptic pink lights that flashed on and off almost too fast for his eye to register— he far preferred the dim, steady glow and quiet mumble of his bars. But he could live with it for one night. He'd grin and bear it, make it home, and then he'd fall off the face of their world and go find a new bar to drown his sorrows in, never seeing these stooges again.

And then the show started.

Alluring names that almost certainly hadn't been bestowed upon their owners by a parent were announced by microphone and the music took on a zippy pace, like a fluttering heartbeat (or was that just what was happening in his chest...?). Skimpy outfits with women squeezed into them were moving on the previously-empty stage in ways that would have upped a movie rating from PG-13 to a good, solid R. Leopard-print and sequins and bare, sweat-soaked skin flashed before the hungry crowd, which roared approvingly. James's own throat tightened all by itself in preparation to do the same, but his speechlessness won out over the will of the mob.

Something cold spilled on his shirt and his elbow was jostled jovially as one of his companions laughed next to him. He must have dropped his drink. But he didn't look down to investigate. His eyes were stuck on what was happening onstage so thoroughly that they might as well have been anchored there by the very hooks that dangled from some of their costumes.

The strobelight was no longer a random annoyance. Each flash was like a snapshot of their bodies, painted so starkly in the colored lights and black shadows that they were like living Warhol prints, so vividly that in the dark spaces in between, the afterimage remained scorched into his retinas, painting the stage in bright ghosts that cavorted like frames from a reel of film. A line of perfectly-still images in endless motion. The intensity of the flashes had made him blink incessantly before the strip— no, the dancing had started, but now he wasn't even sure if he was blinking at all, or if he was just staring straight ahead with his eyes wide open and watering, mouth hanging gently slack.

He almost wasn't even sure what he was seeing. It didn't feel real— it felt like he had just stepped out of the waking world and directly into a daydream. He had never done drugs in his life but something in his head offhandedly wondered if this was what an acid trip felt like.

He didn't know.

What he did know was that he should not be here.

Dry-tongued, he tried to say something about needing fresh air. But he couldn't even hear his own voice over the deafening blare of the music and the rattle-clack of the lights rotating, so whether the words even made it up out of his throat would forever remain a mystery. Either way, he started to turn, to squeeze backwards through the crowd that was pressing in towards the stages, pressing against him in a fashion that he would have found terribly uncomfortable under normal circumstances but just felt blankly, disconcertingly normal for this place.

His elbows nudged his way backwards between someone in a business suit who was waving a fat wad of dollar bills aloft, trying to get close enough to the stage to tuck them into somewhere that he couldn't hope to touch with the other thing he wanted to put in there, so this was probably the best he could ever hope for, the pathetic sleazebag and someone in a stained flannel shirt who was doing something else that James didn't want to look at, something that disgusted him and that he was inwardly terrified of feeling the urge to do, himself. He wanted out, he needed out. This place was intoxicating, but he wasn't supposed to be here, so he tried to ignore the aching tingle in his hips that begged him to keep looking and continued edging backwards.

And then the neon woman came onto the stage and the world slowed to a crawl.

Pink light ebbed and flowed across her skin like a dawnlit ocean, pooling brilliantly on every curve and pouring into every valley until it tapered into shadow. There were no more blinding snapshots, no more frozen, starkly-lit bodies blaring in front of him like visual guitar riffs. No— the woman he was watching now, the woman who was, rhythmically, tantalizingly undoing the knots on the length of glossy, coin-spangled cloth that bound her breasts, whose body did not blind in the flashes of light but instead allowed the color to splash over her with the ripe, bursting intensity of biting into an orange... was alive.

And for the first time in a long, long time, he felt alive, too.

The clamor of the crowd and the pulse of the music had faded to a dull hum all around him, and all that he could hear was the unending sound of his own breathing as his chest heaved in and out, harder and fuller than he'd inhaled in a long time— like he'd been out of breath for months and only just now caught it again.

Breathe in.

When she threw her arms out behind her (to the delight of the crowd, as it was more or less just an excuse to make the whole area she'd just exposed bounce), the cloth billowed behind her and caught the colored lights like butterfly wings before it fluttered to the ground.

Breathe out.

The high-heeled boots she wore came crashing down to the stage in rhythm with the music, and the shininess of the black leather that stretched up to her knees only made the utter nakedness of her body above that all the more alien and appealing.

Breathe in.

As her hips and thighs swayed, the lines of ink and dye that ran down the sides of her stomach danced hypnotically, making James realize suddenly that while he'd never really liked tattoos much before now, he'd been missing out.

Breathe out.

His palms were sweaty, his knees felt weak, and his mouth had run dry. He hadn't felt this way in a long, long time and he'd missed it.

It filled him head to toe with shame.

When the neon dimmed and the normal lights came back on between the acts, James had pulled his coat off and was holding it to his chest in a way that he really hoped would look like it was casual and not a cover-up. One of his companions turned to him with a hearty grin and said, "Some show, huh? Told you this'd be good for you!"

"Uh— ahuh," James said weakly, wearing a big fake grin and shrugging his shoulders in a gesture that he hoped would make it look like he enjoyed it, but not too much. "It's too bad we can't stay longer, hah."

He expected them all to laugh ruefully and nod as they made their way back to the exit, exchanging back-pats and shoulder-punches and other brotherly signs of friendship, which James would take temporary reprieve in before he got out in the parking lot of the original bar and told them the lie, 'See you later'. Instead, all four of his companions grinned, and his heart sank.

They weren't malicious grins, or even teasing ones. They were the kinds of grins people wore when they were about to jump out from behind a chair and yell 'Surprise!' to a family member. James could remember this clearly because— well, to be honest, those grins were the only things he could really remember about any of their faces.

Before he knew it, he was being marched down the hall, his companions laughing rowdily and giving him encouraging shoves all the way, despite his stammered protests. At one point, they passed a sign that said 'Employees Only' and James remembered blurting out, "You guys, we're not allowed to be back here!"

One of the men— he didn't even remember which one it was, his drunken memories melded all their facial features into the same grinning, unrecognizable blob— laughed heartily and assured him, "Nah, buddy, she's my ex, I come visit her after the show every time she's in town, she won't mind," which made no sense to James at all.

He couldn't remember if, beforehand, he'd gotten a chance to ask who 'she' was or even ask cluelessly why anybody would want to visit their ex. The next thing he remembered, a door marked 'Do Not Disturb' was being opened and they were inside a room he knew a lot of men probably only dreamed about having the nerve (or sleaze) to visit.

From behind a curtain of plastic beads— round, flat golden ones that looked like the coins that had decorated her costume— the neon woman looked up from her dressing table at them with a bottle of makeup remover in her hands and a frown on her face.

"Joe, after all these years, do you seriously not have any idea how to knock?" she asked, capping the bottle with an irritated click. Her voice was deep— deeper than James would have expected, and held the barest hint of an exotic accent. He didn't know what kind— he'd never been out of New England, much less the United States, and was fully aware that he had all the cultural awareness of a brick. He was surprised to find that here, away from the overwhelming visual perfume of color, she looked very different. Her long, dark hair, which had shimmered and rippled under the strobelights like water, he now saw was slightly bushy. There were bags under her eyes, and her makeup, which had been almost unnoticeable on the stage, was thickly-applied and looked very strange under the fluorescent lights. There were the very beginnings of crows' feet at the corners of her eyes and she looked tired. Even a little frumpy.

She was so beautiful that James's skin turned lobster-hot at the thought that he had seen her naked and twined around a pole not ten minutes before.

She nodded to the group— not so much to James, but to the others— and added, in a lazy tone, "Hello there, boys. Long time, no see." Eyes that James couldn't remember the look of met and exchanged friendly nods. Joe— whichever one of them was Joe— stepped forward, his grin genuinely amiable in that way only years of familiarity can manufacture. They knew each other.

"Aw, c'mon baby, I told you I was coming to see the show tonight."

"Honey? Sweetheart? We broke up." She had risen from her seat, tying the cord of the powder-blue bathrobe she was wearing into a loose knot and brushing the beads aside to get a better look at them, her mouth creeping into a half-irritated, half-amused 'You've gotta be kidding me' smirk. "The rule of exes dictates that you're not allowed to call me 'baby' anymore. Now take your gaggle of chowderhead friends and shoo."

She fluttered her hands at them in a playful but not totally unserious gesture, rolling her heavily-shadowed eyes.

"You got so little faith, babe," said Joe, the face that James couldn't remember crinkling into a pouty frown that, for some reason, he could. And then, at the look on her face, he hastily added, "Sorry, sorry... Lady M. I still think I should at least get the privilege of not having to use the honorary like I'm some kinda peasant... and you get to use the pet names!"

"You get privilege aplenty just by abbreviating. Don't push your luck. And I'm allowed to. It's part of the personality. Same with the catchphrase." She lifted her hands and did some jazzy spirit-fingers and a hip-waggle, pulling a nasal, self-mocking tone. "Do I turn you on, boys?" This got a whistle from one of the men. She responded by flicking some of the makeup-remover at him as she turned her back to the table. "So are you boys just here to ogle or is there actually a chance I'm in for some actual conversation, I ask, heart in my throat?"

"I wouldn't be busting back here if I didn't have a good reason!" protested Faceless Joe, which prompted a knowing snicker from the other three.

Putting her hands (which bore at least one ring on each finger) on her hips, the neon woman chuckled and looked to them with a raised brow. "Boys, is he telling the truth or is this just another incredibly misguided attempt to win me back?"

One of the men let out a deliberate, forced cough and another just grinned even wider and added, "Well, he WAS talkin' about buying flowers on the way here, Lady M, ma'am!"

The neon woman broke into a smile at that, hands on hips and head shaking.

"How many times do I have to tell you, dearest ex of mine? If you even had a chance after we split, you sure don't now. I meet a lot of men in this business who make you look— ah..." She bit her scarlet lip, still grinning, and made a gesture with her thumb and forefinger, the meaning of which was unmistakable. James's companions burst into good-natured guffaws of "Daaaaamn, she sure told you!"

There were shoves and amiable middle-fingers exchanged. While this went on, James swallowed hard and inched backwards. Maybe, if he just ducked back out the door and walked swiftly and quietly out of the backstage area, no one would notice he was gone.

But around that point, she had turned around to walk back over to her table and James's eyes turned traitor, instantly fixating themselves on her swaying hips and refusing to budge. She spoke as she did so, though the words had to make their way around his mind a couple of times for them to really register.

"Anyway, I've got enough nasty oils and gels in my hair without you unwashed bums hanging around in it too, so how about you either tell me what's up or let me get back to what I was doing?"

"Well, actually," said Faceless Joe pointedly, trying to recover his dignity. "I brought a new buddy. He needs a favor."

James sent a horrified stare at the back of Joe's head, hoping to dear god that those words didn't mean what he thought they did.

The Lady M rolled her eyes and tugged the stool she'd been sitting on back out from under the table again. "Then lend him some of your own money and get outta my hair like I told you. Do I seriously have to play babysitter to every loser you feel bad for in a bar? Jesus, this is why I broke up with you in the first place. I know my job looks glamorous, but believe it or not, my paycheck doesn't stretch nearly as far as you think it does."

"Not that kind of favor! I mean..." He paused a moment before jerking his head in a meaningful fashion. "Your kind of favor."

That made her whip her head around again, and this time the amusement had vanished without a trace.

"For the last time, Joe, I'm a stripper, not a hooker. It was funny at first, but now I'm kind of sick of you bringing needy men to my room every time I tour in the area like you're the world's most confused pizza boy!"

"Wh— Emm, don't be like tha—"

Brushing the strung coins aside again, Lady M leaned over and pressed an accusing finger into Faceless Joe's chest, her eyes narrowed. "Jesus, why couldn't I have a had a NORMAL ex who reacts to the thought of me sleeping with other men by frothing at the mouth and going into outraged stalker mode? Whatever desperate old bag you've found this time, I don't want him, he can go wander the street corners like everyone el—"

Around this point, perhaps hoping to save his friend from the onslaught, one of the other men planted a hand directly into the small of James's back and pushed him forward to the front of the group. Startled, James— who had been self-consciously inching backwards, wondering desperately if he could get out of the room, down the hall, through the crowd, and outside into the comforting darkness of the parking lot, stumbled forward and froze, drawing his shoulders up awkwardly like a frightened bird.

The neon woman turned to look at him sharply, her eyes still narrowed and her long, painted nail still digging into the object of her aggravation. But once her eyes made contact with James's, they changed intensity like a filter being swapped out on one of the stage-lights back out there, and her features softened. Stepping back from Faceless Joe, she straightened up, her stance suddenly going from casual to something more reminiscent of what it had been on the stage.

"Well," she said, as though what she was seeing changed everything. "You didn't tell me you'd brought me a cutie."

Rubbing his chest and frowning, Faceless Joe muttered something about mood swings.

She ignored him, stepping towards James. "What's your name, handsome?"

There was no hesitation in her stride, and that somehow rendered him even more frozen than before. He opened his mouth to say that he needed to leave, that he was a married man, that he really didn't know this guys and that he was here more my accidentmistakeslipup than anything else, that the collar of her robe was starting to creep dangerously low over her shoulders and she might want to see to that, anything but the answer to her question.

Instead, all that escaped him was a warbly squeak of "James..."

It trailed upward at the end, a question mark having crept in and lodged itself there without his permission, like he was asking her for his own name instead of giving it.

Far from deterring her, this response made her brows quirk upward and an amused but sympathetic smile curve across her bright lips. "Aw, look, he's petrified! Joe, what have you been telling the poor thing?" She turned her head as she spoke, but never took her eyes off of James.

There were a couple of muffled coughs and one fake-whisper of "Vagina dentata." James wasn't sure what that was, but it was the first he'd heard of it. They hadn't told him anything.

"Oh, mature," remarked Lady M before turning all the way back to James. "Don't listen to these deadbeats— James, was it? I don't bite." Then, fluidly starting to close the distance between them, she added as an afterthought, "Unless I'm asked nicely."

In his head, he was stepping back and telling her— telling all of them— brusquely that he couldn't stay. This was like a nightmare. The men turned faceless by memory all around him while a woman who was drop-dead gorgeous and full of life but Not Mary came up to him, turning his skin red and making him wish desperately that he'd worn much looser pants. But instead of being able to wake himself up, all he did was stiffen like a kid in trouble and stammer out, "I don't— uh— ... miss, I kind of should really—!"

She cut him off with one finger pressed gently to his lips, the very tip of her long nail just barely scratching the tip of his nose— and immediately the featureless men melted away from his memory and there was absolutely nothing but her. He could not even remember if they had stayed there the whole time or not, whether or not they'd been watching the whole thing— in those moments there was just her, her, her.

"Shhh, you don't need to be shy. You can call me Emm. It's not like your friends over there stick to formalities, either."

James swallowed hard and tried to ignore the fact that his body was extremely aware of how close she was to him. Trying to untie his tongue, he banked on what he fuzzily remembered her saying to the ringleader of his 'friends', about needy men and babysitting. Maybe if she remembered how disgruntled she'd been a moment ago, she would back away from him in disgust. Inching backwards a little, he grinned nervously, a slightly-hysterical laugh creeping into his voice. "AHAH— I— no, it's just— um. You seem busy and I don't want to— y'know—...!"

The finger left his lips and moved south, the nail hovering bare millimeters above the sensitive skin of his throat. "Don't worry about all that stuff I said— that Joe is a softie, he sees an ugly guy who's down on his luck and thinks 'Gee, I know what'd cheer HIM up!' Then brings them by and expects me to be happy about it. Like a cat with dead moles from the yard. But you, on the other hand, aren't hard on the eyes at all, are you, cutie? I don't know where he dug you up, but I just might have to book myself a vacation there."

He swallowed hard, hands gripping the coat like a shield. She noticed this, and then burst out laughing. Her tone was playful and encouraging, not at all unkind. Like a swim instructor coaxing a phobic student towards the diving board.

"God, you're shaking like a leaf, you poor thing! Is this your first time, sweetie?"

The question made James blink incredulously, indignantly. No, he wanted to say— he was twenty-seven years old for crying out loud, of course it wasn't his first time—but as the same shameful force that had rendered him unable to pull his eyes from the girls onstage reminded him, it had been so long, and this woman so different from the only one he'd ever been with, that it might as well have been.

All possible responses, however, died in his throat as quickly as a bug against a windshield when, with uncanny accuracy, Emm's hand found the curve of his hipbone where it jutted up above the waistband of his jeans and traced it upwards gently through the fabric of his shirt, sending tingles up James's spine. He shivered visibly, which made her smile slyly, knowingly.

"Does that feel good?"

"Ah... ahuh," said James lamely, fairly certain he had never uttered anything stupider in his entire life. She repeated the motion, this time on both sides, which made his knees turn abruptly to gelatin and a low, desperate noise he'd been certain no one but Mary could even come close to being able to get out of him escape his throat. He wasn't sure if she was actually pulling him towards her, or if his knees were just buckling all by themselves as he melted like ice cream in her hands.

There was a thump as the coat fell from his fingers and hit the floor.

Mary never would have done this. She was too reserved, too shy, and that was something he had loved about her. She'd never been this forward, this confident. This utterly able to deliberately reduce him to a stammering, yearning wreck with just a few deft touches and a sly, experienced smile.

It made him feel sick to realize how much he actually liked it this way.

"You don't need to be nervous, James," the Lady M told him in a low whisper that was as comforting as it was deliberately exhilarating. "I'm no hooker but I know what I like. Been in the business a long time and when guys like you come along, I take good care of them. I could take care of you."

"You're— incredible," James found himself murmuring, his eyes half-shut as her hands slid under his shirt, making his whole body jerk and shudder. "But this— this is— I can't—"

"Shhh," she returned, leaning inwards to press against him. She wasn't wearing anything under that bathrobe.

"You don't understand," he mumbled desperately, even as he automatically arched his back under her touch. "There's— I'm not—"

"Try me." The whispered challenge was right next to his ear, and suddenly the hands that had been playing his torso like an instrument were reaching down, starting to undo the buckle of his belt—

"WAIT!" The sound burst from James like the yelp of a dog with its tail caught in a door and he jerked backwards away from her, eyes wide. When she looked up at him, confusion replacing seduction in her eyes, he threw his hand up in front of him like a barrier, showing the ring on his finger and blurting out, "I'm married!"

The metaphorical rug swept out from under the legs of her routine (because, after all, that was what it had been— a routine), she stared at the ring for a moment, silently mouthing his last word as it sank in. Then, as swiftly as an incensed tiger, she turned on Faceless Joe, who was suddenly back again despite his entire existence being blotted clean out of James's memory for those few fleeting moments, and slapped him across his empty face with a resounding crack.

"You fucking dick. Did you know he was married? Did you even tell him where you were bringing him?!"

Flabbergasted, he clapped a hand to his face and stumbled backwards. "I— Emm, you don't understand, his wife's—!"

"I don't care what his wife is! And you all— don't stand there looking shocked! You're guilty too! You little rats had better get out of my sight and take his poor man home, and I don't want to see any of your faces around here for a good long while, you hear me?"

Mumbling a sullen "Yes, ma'am," Faceless Joe withdrew, rubbing his cheek sulkily. The others shuffled their feet in shame. Shooting the whole group a smoldering glare, Lady M turned back to James. The woman from the stage was gone one more, and when she placed her hands on his shoulders, it was in a manner completely different than the way she had been touching him just seconds earlier— almost motherly. Her smile was warm and apologetic.

"I'm sorry, honey, I had no idea. I didn't see the ring."

"M'sorry, I should've—" James stammered miserably, only to once again find a finger on his lips— but this time, it didn't feel anything like it had moments before. It was a different woman now, one who was no longer interested at all in 'taking care of him', and that only made him feel even more ashamed to have buckled so thoroughly at her slightest glance.

"Shhh, you have nothing to apologize for, all right? You're a good boy. I'm sorry these assholes brought you to a place like this. You go home to your wife now." She drew back and smiled, her expression that of a caring matriarch sending a lost child back over to the right side of the tracks. One who thought she knew the whole story. "She's very lucky to have a man like you."

He knew what she meant.

Knew that she thought he must have been so loyal, so devoted to have not given in to her attentions, and was proud of him for that, even if he was a total stranger.

The words were far from a comfort.

"T-thanks," was all he could manage to mumble in return as he sheepishly ducked down to snatch up his coat and then made his way to the door, his head bowed.

The ride home was tense and silent, with his companions avoiding his eyes, fully aware that their best-laid plans had gone horribly awry. James remained hunkered in the backseat miserably, not looking at any of them— and he could tell that they felt bad. But that didn't change anything. When they arrived at the parking lot they'd departed from, James got in his car and drove home without saying goodbye.

It was past midnight when he arrived at his empty house, far away from where the wife he'd been told to go home to actually was, where instead all he had waiting for him was sickening shame.

Not directly because of what happened— no. He'd slipped up, made a mistake, yes, but mistakes were mistakes. He hadn't known they were going to take him there when he'd gotten in that car. No, what filled him from head to toe with boiling, white-hot guilt was the fact that, as he laid there and stared at the ceiling, the face that floated in his mind's eye was not that of his beloved wife, but the face of the woman who had told him that Mary was lucky to have him. Hers were the imaginary hands that pressed and stroked, and her voice that, as she smiled silkily and carried on with the task he'd stopped her from doing in reality, leaned in close to his ear and whispered, "Now tell me the truth, James... do I turn you on? Do I turn you

"OFF!" screamed Laura, so close to his ear that the primal lizard-brain in the back of his head ignited in instinctive fear that she was about to dig her teeth into the back of his neck like a mountain lion and just SNAP it.

Shocked out of his trance, he looked over his shoulder with eyes like frisbees, only to see her pointing angrily at the still-running vacuum, face red from the effort of shouting over its grating mechanical whine.

"Hah?!" he asked, disoriented.

"Turn it OFF!! You're not even DOING anything with it, you big stupid LOSER!"

Stammering an apology that Laura probably wouldn't even hear, James grabbed for the vacuum cleaner and sort of fumbled with it frantically until the off switch was hit and the mechanism wound down with a dying whine. Then, leaning on it tiredly like the very action had worn him out, he turned to look sheepishly back at Laura. The wine bottle was laying on it side on the carpet— he must have dropped it. He was just grateful it was still corked.

With a stance like a threatened puffer-fish, Laura huffed at him.

"What were you doing?! You were just staring off into space!" she barked, unknowingly answering her own question, since that was pretty much all he had been doing.

"Sorry," mumbled James, dropping his gaze back to the carpet. His armor was starting to disappear and the furious energy that had been pushing him onwards was beginning its rapid decline. This worried him. He had a ways to go yet before he could allow himself to rest again. Laura's disproportionately-enormous frown was not helping things.

"It was loud," she told him reproachfully. "I could've gone deaf."

James highly doubted that, but he held up his hands apologetically anyway. "M'sorry... I won't use the vacuum anymore."

The carpet wasn't spotless, but it was good enough and he was getting a dizzy, shaky feeling deep in his bones that made him reluctant to get to his feet again. No, maybe he'd just.. stay down here for a little while.

He leaned his head against the handle of the vacuum cleaner for a moment, shutting his eyes. What time was it now? Two? Maybe three? He wasn't sure and he didn't feel like craning his head to look. His resolve was starting to fade and for the first time, he was starting to feel a little worried that he wouldn't be able to finish.

After a moment or two, he looked back up at Laura, who had been watching him hawkishly, waiting for an excuse to tear into him again. Fully aware that he might be about to give her one, he licked his lips and spoke up. "Uh... did you already put away those albums that were on the floor?"

Laura didn't even dignify that with a response— just turned her head and huffed back over to the couch. ... He'd take that as a 'no', then. Sighing, he shoved the vacuum cleaner out of the way with a grunt and headed back over to the cabinets where the abandoned albums had been scattered across the floor on his hands and knees. Laura watched him darkly over the back of the couch.

He knew it looked stupid, but standing up and tipping right over again would look even stupider, so it was a matter of picking the lesser of two indignities. Unsurprisingly, Laura hadn't so much as even stacked the albums, so James let out another quiet sigh as he started to push them back into their spots on the shelves, tired fingers having an embarrassingly hard time keeping hold of the glossy covers. It was with some dismay that he noticed the photo albums weren't the only things Laura had yanked out.

A few weeks ago, he'd have just grumbled and groused about it, but now he just bit his lip and resigned himself to picking them all up, even the ones that weren't albums— they were heavy things Mary had brought with her when they'd moved in, ones that James couldn't even remember having ever cracked open— ... wait.

Frowning, James brushed the dust off of a large volume that was lying on its face apart from the rest of the pile, bent-paged and probably just tossed aside by Laura when she'd been rootling through the cupboard in search of sensitive material. This one, he remembered. Its dog-eared pages and cover that was splitting into thin, fibrous layers at the corners was as familiar to his hands by now as the buttons on his coat. He wished he could say the same thing about the words within, but no matter how many times he had stared at these pages, he had never been able to retain even a single letter before the sentences ran out of his head like water.

Rocking sideways to sit down once more, James rested the book on his knew and cracked it open.

The first thing that he saw was the flaky, yellowed old envelope decorated in blue and black ink from many hands— the same kind that was glued onto the inside cover of every old library book he'd ever seen, even though most had moved away from such a cumbersome system by now.

Howie Fitch had neat, loopy handwriting that stuck to the line like a child to its mother in an unfamiliar place. It looked warped and sprawled out in front of his eyes when he opened them— probably because the side of his face was pressed flat against it, and his vision blurry.

"Hey Mister?"

There was a hand on his shoulder, and the voice talking to him was unpleasantly nasal and Bostonian, turning the 'mister' into more of a 'mistah'. To James's ears right at that moment, it was like nails on a chalkboard.

Grimacing, James lifted his head. The old paper had grown sticky against his face and came up with it briefly before peeling off and flopping back down to rest on the table, the tang of ballpoint ink still lingering in his nostrils. The round-faced man leaning over him withdrew slightly, expression brightening.

"Oh hey, sorry to disturb you but—" He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "We're closing in about twenty minutes."

Disoriented, James blinked up at him before reaching up to rub the gunk from his eyes and look around. Above, a long line of soft but bright lights glowed from the high ceiling, illuminating the tall shelves and book-strewn tables all around. This place was never crowded, but the few people he remembered glimpsing between the shelves were gone. That... was weird. He'd only been resting his eyes for a moment— to spare them from 'Diagnosis is suggested by familiar clustering of autoimmune disorders and is confirmed by measuring serum Ig and antibody titers to protein and polysaccharide vaccine antigens. If either measurement is low, B-cell quantification by flow cytometry is indicated to...', which they had been reading over and over like a skipping record without him even realizing it, since he understood it less and less with each consecutive try. All the words on the page were equally incomprehensible to him, and they all started to look the same after awhile...

But how could it be closing time already?

Pursing his lips, he sent a brow-furrowed look up at the librarian before turning to look out the window— and wilted.

The sky had turned that deep ocean-blue of a winter evening and the streetlights had been lit— lighting up the salt-crusted streets and ice-glazed buildings beyond the spindly, leafless branches that criss-crossed in front of the window like protective fingers. James's heart sank.

"Oh..." Running his fingers through his hair sheepishly, James stood up from his seat, hastily trying to grapple the haphazard pile of books in front of him into a form he could actually carry. "I'm— ah, I'm sorry, I must've... I must've lost track of time..."

"Sure you did," said the library worker in tone that was too cheerful and obliging to be real. He was drumming his fingers on the edge of the table and his knee was bouncing up and down like a fidgeting child in a cat-seat who'd just been told to sit still back there but couldn't manage it completely. Little signs like that made it obvious to anyone who was paying attention that he was impatient. And despite the patronizing tone, he didn't seem too concerned about hiding this. "Didja find everything you need?"

Shutting the book he'd been using as a pillow, James swallowed and held it to his chest almost protectively.

'No' was the immediate word that sprung to mind.

He'd been looking for answers.

It was a stupid habit he'd taken up shortly after they had received the diagnosis. In fits of foolish, naive optimism, he had started trying to read medical textbooks and diagnostic journals in hopes of somehow finding a bit of information, a little forgotten blurb that the doctors had somehow looked over or not known about, that would help Mary. Never mind that he was a blue-collar twenty-something whose closest step to an education beyond 12th grade had been a potential custodial job on a community college campus— he'd been young and stupid and had honestly thought that if he stared at the pages upon pages of impenetrable medical jargon long enough, a light would go off in his head and all the words that were so foreign to him that they might as well have been a different language would come together and spell out in great big letters, How to cure your wife's terminal disease in 8 easy steps!

Instead, he'd just spent many nights growing increasingly frustrated with himself and his inability to manifest answers that weren't there, and once that unstoppable grayness had begun to creep over him and everything else in his life, he had given up.

Until now, three years later, in the dead of winter. The barhopping was over. He drank alone now, in an empty house. And every time he visited Mary, both the prognosis and her reactions to his presence were worse and worse.

There was no optimism in his visit to the library as he tried once more to slam his head against the walls of text this time around.

It just seemed like something he should be doing one last time before it was all over.

Futile or not, it was the only thing he could think of to do.

"Yeah," he finally answered, with a watery smile. "I'll just—uh—" He grabbed his coat from the back of the chair and started to pull it on one-handedly. "I'll just put these back where I found them and—"

"No, you can just leave them on the table there," said the librarian quickly, his smile a little too wide. The tapping of his fingers increased from a slow roll to a sharp staccato.

James paused, looking down at the book he was holding. It had years of wear and tear on it and was probably even older than he was. It might even have been one of the same books he'd tried to read time and again three years ago, but he didn't know for sure because after awhile, they all looked the same to him.

"... Tell you what, I'll check that one out for you on your way out," offered the librarian hastily when he saw that the last obstacle between him and a nice early closing was opening his mouth to say something.

Swallowing, James shut it and turned to look out the frosty window once more. It was cold out there— he new because it had been cold even hours before in broad daylight. In here, although he'd never much been one for reading, there was a certain sense of safety. Here, he was doing something. Even if he was failing, he was still doing it. The moment he stepped outside again... it would be so cold. "It won't take too long, I'll just—"

"Wouldn't you much rather read it in comfort at home than here on these hard chairs?" interrupted the librarian tersely. After a moment, he added, pointedly, "I would."

"... Yeah, all right," James sighed finally, handing the book over even though he knew with a sinking stomach that he wouldn't even touch it after this. The librarian's eyes said plainly that he was looking forward to the cold just as little as James was, and that was why he wanted to close early. So that he could get home to the wife and maybe kids, have a hot dinner, and forget about his colorful array of everyday problems for the night. And they stated even more plainly that they didn't give a shit what James was here for or why he was holding onto that book like a lifeline even though he looked about as capable of reading it as a kindergartener is of reading Shakespeare.

As such, the fakeness of the conversational tone he took on was all the more obvious hen he turned and started heading for the counter, glancing down at the coer of what he'd just been handed. "The Merck Manual, huh? You a med student?"

"Uh," said James, stiffly pulling his coat on the rest of the way as he followed. "No, not really..."

"Yeah, I guess you do look a little too old for college," responded the librarian, jovially. James had a distinct feeling it was only because he was looking forward to getting rid of him. "You just read the stuff for fun, then, huh?"

James swallowed, shoving his hands deep into his pockets do that the fists he was clenching them into wouldn't be visible as he mumbled a reply. "Yeah... something like that..."

The card he passed over the counter had a signature from far more than a decade ago, because the last time James had even wanted to use a public library card for anything had been a far more innocent period in life.

As the book was scanned, James bit his lip and looked out the door. There, glittering flurries of dry snow were rushing through the air. It was hard to tell if they were being blown from the rooftops by bitter breezes or if they were actually falling from the clouds. He turned back to the counter, frowning.

"... Listen, I really just wanted ten more minu—"

The librarian handed the book over and gave James a candid, slightly-exasperated state. His voice held a barely-concealed irritable snap. "Look, guy, it's getting late. I'm tired, news says there's a snowstorm coming, and I want to close up shop as soon as possible and get home, all right? You probably got a lot more to look forward to than I do at home anyway, so what're you hanging around here all night for? Just to make my job harder?"

Taken aback, James just stared for a moment, absolutely flabbergasted. His furrowed brows said Please let me stay.

The librarian's eyes simply said Get out.

James gaped a second longer, then shut his mouth, nodded, and headed for the exit.

When he stepped through the big double-door and out onto the stone steps, the cold rushed through him like he was made of tissue paper. Shoving the book under one arm, he shuddered and drew the coat more tightly around himself.

It wasn't a long walk to the parking lot, but he had a hunch that it would feel like one.

Jamming the cap back onto the pen, James lifted the book with both hands and blew on the still-glistening James Sunderland he had scrawled loopily into the last available space on the tiny little envelope. Then he closed the book, listening to the miniature symphony of crackles and creaks as the ancient glue snapped and paper rubbed on itself.

He'd never told Mary about his continued perusal of the books. Not since the first time he'd done it— she'd gotten upset with him, and in hindsight, he could see exactly why. But at the time, he'd been hurt and bewildered at the fact that his bright-eyed plan had been met with tears and a cold shoulder. After that, he'd kept his mouth shut about his little library trips, growing less and less hopeful every time. Nudging the cabinet door shut with one foot, James rose at last, book still in hand. It was overdue by at least two or three months by this point, and he didn't plan on returning it. Meandering back over to the couch, he placed it cover-side-up on the little table that housed the lamp. Maybe if someone eventually came in here to investigate the disappearance of the ailing Mary Shepherd-Sunderland and her nobody husband, they'd find this and take it back, themselves.

He glanced at the clock.

It was three-thirty now. There were still things to do, but the force that had been driving him like an invisible jockey told him that it was all downhill from here. The semi-frenzied energy that had been keeping his tired mind from just giving up was starting to trickle instead of flow, and he sensed that he'd need every last bit of it to make it to the finish line.

As if on cue, Laura, seemingly bored once more with pretending he didn't exist, looked up from the couch and asked, "How much longer?"

"Soon," replied James absently, his legs carrying him towards the bathroom without a whole lot of thought on his part.

When he returned to the living room after an hour of cleaning elsewhere, he found Laura curled up against the armrest of the couch, her determined eight-year-old tenacity finally having given in to the need for sleep. He was sort of relieved— if she was asleep, she wouldn't be able to chip away any more of what was left of his armor. There wasn't much.

She didn't even stir when he put a blanket over her.

The remaining hours of darkness before dawn passed without much in the way of incident.

One by one, the extraneous rooms were cleaned, the little odds and ends were tied up— loosely, admittedly, but they would hold— and the house slowly became something like what it once had been, before the diagnosis. He would never be able to get rid of that feeling of spoiled treacle that clung to every precious inch, and it was of course far too late for what he was doing here to truly matter, but it was still important, and he was finally doing it.

When the sky outside began to turn from deep blue to the soft, velvety gray of dryer lint, James's eyes were itching with tiredness once more. But it came now with a steely sense of certainty. It was almost over.

"Laura."

Before his hand even touched her blanket-covered shoulder, her eyes had snapped open and she'd sat up so abruptly that he shied back, expecting a barbed criticism, or maybe a bite. Rubbing her eyes discreetly, Laura kicked the blanket off and made a show of having been awake the whole time.

"Is it time now?" She spoke with that sort of alarming clarity that some people had right after waking up, while others had to spend hours mumbling and moving with all the grace of Frankenstein's monster on a balance beam. And naturally, even directly out of sleep, she still managed to have an attitude.

"Not yet," James told her quietly, which struck him as stupid even as the hushed words made their way out of him. It wasn't as though there was anyone else in the house to disturb. Yet, like a strict library, it somehow felt wrong to speak loudly in here. "But almost. I— I just have one thing left to do. But if you want to... uhm. Y'know, get ready..."

Laura was already hopping off the couch, exclaiming "I thought we were never gonna leave!"

"Well, we're not leaving yet," James reiterated, but Laura was already trotting down the hall, neatly hopping over the packed duffel bags he'd dropped on the floor earlier. Sighing, he called out after her, "You can wait in the car if you want!" even though he was pretty sure she was going to do just that whether he told her it was okay or not.

Shaking his head slightly, James turned in the other direction and made for the laundry nook.

When he pulled his coat from the dryer, he was relieved and comforted to see that its journey through the town had not left it irreparably marred. It was still warm to the touch as he pulled it on, tucking the collar high around his neck to stave off the powerful chill that had settled into his bones even more deeply than before, aided by the frosty morning and his sleepless night.

After bringing his hands up to his mouth briefly to blow into them and warm them up, he reached down into the gap between the dryer and the wall, pulling out a large, crinkly plastic bag. It was fairly new, but he'd opened it before. Just the previous week, actually. Some of the contents slid waxily from the hole in the bag and pattered onto the floor. He ignored it— the time for sweeping up was past and what did a few sunflower seeds matter?

Fog— not the thick kind that cloaked that town like a death shroud, just normal morning fog— greeted him as he pushed his way out through the screen door. The backyard was a far cry from what it had once been. The lawn, always patchy but mostly green, was overgrown with burry weeds, and choking vines had crept in and obtained strangleholds on the fence and tree branches. Blossoms still bloomed all around the edges, but they competed with the other brush. The only ones that still towered over the rest were the long-stalked sunflowers, pale and premature, protruding from the tangle of creepers and weedy bushes that now dominated the fence-side gardens. One of them was facing the wrong way— like a child in the time-out corner.

Even before his efforts at taking care of the house had started to reach a rolling halt, the yard had suffered horrible neglect. But it was too late to do anything about it now. There were some things that he had to resign himself to not being able to fix.

This was all right, though. Somehow.

It had been overgrown sort of like this when they'd first gotten here.

Slick with the morning condensation, the wooden steps were slippery under his feet.

Despite himself, James found a small smile creeping across his face at the thought of those first few weeks in the house, fixing it up and making it theirs. No matter how many hammer mishaps resulting in bandaged thumbs occurred, or how many delicate sliver-extractions had to take place, or how many grass stains were received in the process of yanking up stubborn weeds, each long day always ended with them sitting in that porch swing together, relishing the color all around and laughing at how the cheap grape popsicles (then kept in an ice-filled cooler because they didn't have a freezer yet) turned their mouths purple.

He missed eating grape popsicles on that swing.

The grass, stiff with frost, crunched under his feet as he crossed it, lowering the bag from his shoulders. The birdfeeder hadn't been cleaned in a long time, not even when he had filled it a week ago.

It had been an overcast day then, too.

Stone-colored clouds billowed overhead, threatening rain with wet breezes and the occasional drop. It was too early in the year for thunder, but every so often James almost thought he could hear an ominous, far-off rumble. He was carrying the bag of seed towards the now moss-covered birdfeeder like a body, and the morbid comparison had not been lost on him, even then.

Mary had arrived home that morning.

The car ride had been spent mostly in silence. Attempts at murmured conversation had occasionally broken out, but petered out after a few sentences and lapsed into all-enveloping silence once more. They had nothing to talk about.

A cold breeze swept through the budding branches over the driveway as he helped her out of the car, both of them expressionless and silent, unable to make eye-contact with each other. At one time, silences between them had been warm and content, neither of them needing to say anything for the other to know they were happy. Back then, he'd thought that would never change.

When it had, it had been like having half of himself ripped away.

Now, at the very end, there was nothing but a flat, numb ache— the kind one got if they held their fingers under icy water for too long.

He didn't know when he and Mary had become strangers... but they were now.

Before he'd even been allowed to see her that morning, he'd been given a no-nonsense lecture on what to expect, and he sat through it dimly, his face blank, nodding every so often. It hadn't been anything he didn't already know. None of them stated it explicitly, but James knew by this point that Mary was not being allowed to leave the hospital because she was getting any better. It was because it might be her last chance to come home at all.

After helping her up to the dark little guest room, he had realized that he'd forgotten to fill the birdfeeder. She'd always loved that birdfeeder. One of the only things she'd liked about that cramped, depressing room she'd moved into was the fact that she had a better view of it out that window. Of course, that small pleasure, just like everything else, had eventually lost its healing touch.

And it sort of had on James's part, too.

Just like with the futile library sessions spent poring over texts so far above his level of comprehension that it was like trying to decrypt alien messages, something that had once filled him with stupid, naive hope now just left shame sitting in the pit of his stomach like a leaden weight. It was something to do while slinking around like a thief now.

Nothing he could, would, or should do now would prevent the inevitable.

Waxy-shelled seeds spilled over the dead leaves, brittle-winged maple seeds, and hardened old bird droppings that coated the inside of the basin, pouring out of the bag with a dry rush. He watched them dully. Not long before he'd left the house for the hospital that morning, he'd caught himself staring blankly at the kitchen drain for god knows how long.

Awhile ago, that would have scared hm.

He didn't feel any which way about it now.

That was what scared him.

As the cascade of seeds began to peter out, he hefted the bag to stop the flow and looked up at last, running his fingers through his hair. It hadn't been washed in awhile. As he did so, he caught sight of movement above— a pale shape, looking down at him from the dark window.

James swallowed.

He felt as though he was being caught in the act of something he wasn't supposed to be doing— felt, somehow, like he was even more ashamed of this than he would have been if Mary had found out he was still trying to read those textbooks, or discovered those videos he sometimes watched late at night.

Letting the half-empty bag fall to his side, he raised a hand sheepishly and offered a tiny wave to the figure in the window.

Mary withdrew from sight, and a few seconds later, the curtains were yanked shut.

James let his hand fall again.

Laura was already in the car. As he went out the front door, he'd had a brief flare of irrational fear that she might have run off again for real, but then he caught sight of her bright blond ponytail bobbing around in the passenger seat and relaxed. She was playing with something that apparently caught her interest enough that she didn't even look at him when he shoved the duffel bags in the backseat.

She did, however, feel the need to say, "Took you long enough."

"Sorry." Opening the driver's seat door, he slid in, fumbling his keys out of his pocket and hunching his shoulders to shield his neck from the chill until he could get the car's heat going.

The imaginary armor was gone now, utterly disintegrated. But surprisingly, in its wake, it had left something other than the overwhelming fatigue he'd been expecting. It was a sort of warm purr, deep in his chest. Not self-congratulatory, or proud, or even plain old accomplished— but something. Something like contentment.

It, too, was temporary.

But it was still nice.

He looked over to Laura.

"What's that you've got th—" The sentence died in his throat as she saw what was in her hands, and after a moment of incredulous staring, the question changed tracks and became a soft but slightly squawky "You're playing with that?"

"I like all the knobs and buttons," replied Laura absently, sliding the station dial of the broken radio up and down, with no apparent results. That means there's no monsters around yet, was James's first thought, but he shook it out of his head. There wouldn't be any more monsters. The radio had served its purpose— it was just a silent block of junk now, as far as he was concerned.

"It's broken," he said, almost a little sulkily. He'd wanted to leave that— and all the other striking reminders of that town— behind.

"Your face is broken."

James opened his mouth to say something to the contrary, then remembered that in his current physical state it was pretty much true, and shut it again. Okay. Okay, fine, she could keep it. Not like it could do any harm now.

Swallowing, he drummed his fingers against the steering wheel a little, giving Laura sidelong glances. Aside from the obvious, which was easily dismissed, he couldn't figure out why the radio's presence bothered him so. It had been an ally in that town, after all. Hell, it was probably one of the only reasons he was still alive. And even now, it wasn't that it made him too uncomfortable, or even annoyed him that much outside of the fact that he'd wanted to leave it BEHIND and not where it could remind him of everything he'd gone through every single time he looked at it.

It was that the sight of it just shot an itchy little worm of doubt straight into that warm feeling, and he just couldn't figure out why—

Why did you kill me, James?

Her voice, through that radio, had asked him that question. It now rang in his head again— not accusing or pleading— but reminding.

... A reminder.

Quicker than his brain could even finish fully comprehending the world, James was shoving the keys back in his pocket and hurriedly opening the door. Laura finally looked up in surprise.

"Huh?! I thought we were going!"

"Just one more thing!" James called without even looking over his shoulder as he jogged up the little path and back into the house. It seemed that phantom energy had one last burst to give after all, because he was taking the stairs two at a time.

Only hours— or perhaps even moments— after committing that final, heinous act that had sent him on a journey to hell and back, James had forgotten every bit of it. Whether he'd actually tried to or whether the horror of what he'd done had simply sent him reeling into such a state of shock that his mind had clawed out all memory of it and left a sick, oozing hole with a flimsy blanket of false ones in its place was something he would never know. The point was that he had forgotten. And he had no guarantee that it wouldn't happen again.

Everything he had overcome in that town, gone.

Everything he had worked for in the past ten hours, so painfully and vividly, gone.

He couldn't let that happen.

He wanted to remember.

He had to remember.

Even after all these years, his hands knew where to find what he needed. Scissors from a jar in the kitchen, and Mary's old, too-long-untouched sewing box from a drawer in the living room.

A red scarf in the closet that he'd put away earlier had belonged to Mary. She'd used it sometimes to cover her hair. He tugged open the drawer in the bedroom that he'd gently folded it into and tugged it out.

There was no way, not now, not after everything, that he would allow himself to forget. Not again. The true last thing he had to do before he left was to ensure that nothing else he'd done, good or bad, would be lost.

And that was what he was planning to do.

The mattress creaked once more as he sat down upon the end of the bed, coat in his lap, sewing box open next to him, and fingers threading a needle so hastily that he pricked them more than once. Sewing had never been a strong suit of his, but he did know how to do it. Not neatly or elegantly; just enough to get the job done. And that was all that mattered right now.

With the help of a seam-ripper, he tore the patch away from the coat's left shoulder, leaving behind only a few frayed black threads and stiff patches of fabric glue. Those didn't matter. This didn't need to be neat.

His lips needed something to do as well, so he sucked compulsively on the ends of the bright thread he'd chosen— which was from a spool of the most eye-catching red he could find— as the scissor blades ate through the bandanna's fabric with hungry, metallic grinds.

That was what those strange squares had been for, in that tow.

The ones that littered the streets and tables and walls of Silent Hill like dropped flyers, the ones that gave him that strange feeling that something was feeling around inside his skull, hunting something out with deft fingertips. It had scared him, made him feel weird and weak-kneed and even a little violated, but now he knew what they'd been for.

To make him remember.

As he worked, the thread stretched from mouth to needle to sleeve to square like a tiny little vein, connecting it all in a brief, imperfect web. The way it was supposed to be.

There had been nine of them right before the end— after he had learned the truth and followed that broken path straight to its final destination, sore and self-loathing and educated. Stuck to the wall like some ominous, abstract art piece, they had screamed out at his eyes, their redness so bloody and unreal against the water-rotted wood and peeling paper they hung upon.

Nine was an important number.

One, for dark, cramped spaces, the sour taste of cheap beer, and calloused, white-knuckled hands that clutched a cuckoo's egg box, and for the bloated, chirruping cockroaches that scurried between his boots like grisly little wind-up toys.

The needle punched in and out of the olive-colored fabric more quickly and rhythmically than it ever had while repairing busted jean knees or popped seams.

Two, for sultry, sweltering nights, glints of gold, and the dirty yellow buzz of old lights paling against an ever-brightening skyline, and for eroded grooves of skin where rings once rested.

He could feel the thread-end's fibers coming apart and pressing back together over and over against his tongue.

Three, for spiral-bound notebooks filled with crossed-out rhymes and green pollen that made his eyes water, and for dark apartment hallways where the drip-drip-dripping echoed in his ears like the pipes in the ceiling over his head had every night as a child.

His foot came alive with pins and needles from being tucked under his other leg for so long, so he adjusted position and continued.

Four, for tobacco and seasalt, muffed laughter and her hand in his, and for the sharp glow from the pocket of her dress on its stand, the only point of light in a pitch-dark room.

Under normal circumstances, hesitation would have plagued his movements, but there was none of that now. His hands were not graceful but they were working like he'd never seen them work before.

Five, for red and white lights, broken marionettes, and a splotch of rapidly-cooling water soaking into the front of his shirt, and for distant, familiar voices, garbled and rendered foreign by radio static.

The spaces between the squares were occasionally criss-crossed by the thread, but that was all right. Somehow, it worked.

Six, for thorny, unwanted bouquets and angry reflections, and for dark pits in front of his feet leading to depths that never, ever seemed to end.

He could hear, dimly, a voice outside that sounded impatient and probably belonged to Laura, but he ignored it.

Seven, for neon women, shiny coins, and butterfly wings, and for ruby-red lips that whispered unseemly words to him from behind iron bars.

The needle sipped and poked a neat hole in his fingertip, from which a bright globule of red inflated like a tiny bubble. But he paid it no heed. Blood wouldn't hurt what he was making. If anything, perhaps it would seal its purpose for good.

Eight, for alien languages and old paper and dark, icy branches that held him close like skeletal hands, and for dismal rooms where the only human voice to visit the silence in eons belonged to a spool of cassette tape.

Worn thin between his teeth, the final thread parted easily and he tied the last knot.

Nine, for zebra-colored seeds that would one day become lions and for two little eggs, one bright scarlet like an open wound, the other dull and mottled brown like dried-blood rust.




When James ducked back into the driver's seat and shut the door behind him, Laura flopped back down and glared, not even pretending that she hadn't been standing up on the seat and about to lean onto the horn with all her might.

"What took you so long?! I thought you said we were going!"

James threw an arm over the back of the seat so that he could look over his shoulder and check the driveway out of habit.

"Sorry. I had to make sure of something."

Folding her arms grumpily, Laura wrinkled her nose.

"Well, did you?"

Out of the corner of his eye, James could see the nine little bright-red patches now gracing the left shoulder of his coat. He nodded.

"Yeah."

Turning his gaze back to the front, James turned the keys in the ignition.

"Let's go."