Work Text:
Maria is no more. The demons have been expunged, the gun released from his fingers, and the entirety of Mary’s letter sits in the breast pocket of his wet and bloodied jacket. He walks from room to room, moving further away from what might have been her, from where they had their final conversation, and each step is a permanent kiss goodbye. The halls of the hotel are beyond recognition, and every wall drips with age and neglect and grime from an ancient fire that devoured the hotel from roof to floor. Shutting the entrance door behind him, he takes his slow march out of the premises, although he quickly finds himself stopping, taken aback at the sight of the little girl seated on the front steps, hunched all over. He hears faint sniffling. The little girl is crying.
Heartbroken. Alone. Mourning the fate of one dear person—a fate which he alone had inflicted.
James Sunderland balls up his fists, glaring away for a second. He keeps Mary’s last words in mind—if that was even Mary at all that he’d talked to, from three floors up, telling him to move on with his life because he’d already suffered enough for his sins.
A part of him is in doubt as to whether or not that had been her, but… that had to be her.
Right?
He walks down the steps; slow, careful, guarded in a way the guilty usually are. Laura hears his footsteps, and she looks up, not with anger in her eyes, but sorrow—pure, sharp, unbridled sorrow—something James feels she’s earned more than he did. He stands at the last step looking down at her and she can only look back, sore-eyed and tear-stained.
Nobody talks.
This is the part where James should apologize. But apologies are not going to eradicate Laura’s sorrow. Apologies are not going to bring back her beloved Mary.
So he sits on the other end of the same step instead, careful not to get too close.
It is cold. It perhaps has to do with the wetness of his clothes, long since soaked in the dripping water from the hotel and splashed with the blood of Maria and those other monsters that have swarmed him. Where are they now? he wonders. The fog remains thick, tangible, dreamlike. It’s astounding to James how Laura made it all the way here without a scratch. Did she come here to the hotel through the lake? How? How did she get here all by herself?
Laura speaks, in a small, feeble voice; one that has lost all its spice and flame.
“Did you… really kill her?”
The sound of it is heartbreaking. The hope that he’d confessed such a thing by mistake drills into his very core, diminishing his innards. He breathes in more air than Mary ever did. Remorse clogs his throat.
Laura turns away when James holds his silence.
“Did you really love her?”
His fingers slacken. He didn’t realize it before, but he’d been holding them together so tightly that now it has started to feel numb. There’s an answer to her question somewhere. But his actions have already spoken long before he could answer, and there is no more courage to speak his truth. It’s only going to sound like a lie.
“She loved you,” Laura says instead. “She really loved you and I don’t know why. I’ll never know why you.”
I’ll never know why you.
I don’t know why me, either, James wishes to say. “I’m… I’m sorry.”
“Why are you saying sorry?” Laura says, almost a little too sharply for his comfort. “She’s gone.”
James winces.
It’s done. It’s all they have now, this conversation: the truth lingering around them like catechism.
Laura rises from the front steps and glides like a specter through the fog. James moves away from the steps as well and he says, “Where are you going now?”
She pauses. James thinks for a wild second that she’s going to scream at him, for he had spoken without thinking, but instead she turns all the way back to him with such wretched eyes.
“I-I don’t know,” she replies. “I don’t know where I’m going.”
What little remains of James’s shattered heart is crushed. He didn’t think it possible with the state it was already in, but to see Laura, a strong, stubborn child go all this way for Mary and gain nothing in the end destroys every cell, every bone, and every tissue in his badly beaten body. Of course she planned to leave with Mary; she’d come in here to reunite with her and she probably planned to never go back to the sisters—the nuns—to that orphanage she’d come from. Mary was all she had.
But then…
“I… don’t know where to go, either,” James says.
Laura says nothing.
“Do you know the way out?” he asks. She shakes her head.
He doesn’t quite know what else to say. His gaze falls over to the fountain beyond the entrance, where he collected one of those out-of-tune music boxes, then past the front gates where the dock should be, where the lake lays in slumber, shrouded in mist. They shouldn’t linger for much longer. He doesn’t feel anything sinister about the fog anymore, and yet, the longer he stays, the more it feels like he too will fall asleep and fail to escape the town altogether. He’d failed to remember what he had planned to do when he arrived in town, but now he knows for certain that it involved staying and never leaving this hell on earth. He’d been ready to live in penance. But with Laura here all alone and not knowing where to go…
“We should leave,” he says simply.
Laura, understandably, frowns and takes a step back away from him. He almost moves to follow her, but he holds still, watching the tension in her shoulders, the cloud of fear in her eyes. This person here killed Mary. Why would I want to go anywhere near him?
“You don’t have to go with me,” James says, carefully. “But you can’t stay here, either. This place is dangerous.”
“Dangerous like you?” Laura blurts out. But then her eyes widen, and James immediately realizes that that wasn’t what she probably meant to say.
It stings. Once, she only looked at him as some jerk who didn’t care about his wife. Now, he’s the only monster in town.
“Why do you care?” she quickly says. Some of her defiance has returned. In the fog, James swears he sees her small fists clenching up into tiny balls. “You don’t know me. Mary knows—knew me. Not you.”
“I don’t,” James agrees. “But I do know she wouldn’t want you to stay here.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she’s— She’s not here anymore, Laura. I’m not gonna find her. You’re not gonna find her.”
“Because you took her away.”
James inhales, sharp. “I know. I-I know.”
Laura’s face crumples once more in her grief. She turns her back to him, the world heavy on her skinny shoulders. James is awfully reminded of the fact that she is only eight years old, with no parent or guardian in sight. How she arrived in Silent Hill will perhaps be a mystery to him forever, but even with all that, there is no denying that she is only a child—an orphan at that.
“I just wanted to see Mary,” she sobs.
There is another wince from James’s body, some awkward twist of the limbs that feels as if he had been punched right in the gut. He wants to be hurt, again. He wants Laura to hurt him until her pain goes away; he wants Laura to hurt him until he is forgiven. He doesn’t think it is possible, but if it helps her feel better even for just two seconds…
“I want to leave,” Laura says. James is confused when she wheels around to look up at him, but her stare never wavers. Expectation is high in the air, and it takes him moments to respond.
“Leave?” he echoes. He points to himself. “With… with me?”
“I just want to get out of here.” Without another word, Laura makes her way out of the hotel premises and into the dock. James follows after her, into the fog, back to that little boat floating sadly on the lake.
~
The inside of the car smells like forty-days-old sweat and cheap whiskey. Laura makes no comments and instead curls in on the passenger seat staring out the window. Much of the fog has cleared, and a little bit of sunlight at least peers in over the town, driving the coldness and death away, and in the distance James thinks he hears a noise—people. Tourists perhaps, but ones he and Laura cannot see.
There had been no words exchanged between them as they trekked all the way back to the observation deck where James’s car is still parked. Laura had hopped in without a word, and James, still doused in the awkward silence, starts the vehicle wondering whether or not to ask her where she wants to go. For long, solid seconds the both of them stare out at the lake, which glimmers softly under the sun. James is painfully reminded of that one time with Mary, where the two of them spent most of the day staring into such crystal clear water. The future then had been so… distant.
“Where do you want to go?” James asks.
Laura shrugs. “I dunno.”
“What about… what about the sisters?”
“I don’t wanna go back to the sisters. I don’t want to go back to the orphanage.”
“But they’re going to be looking for you, you know. They’re probably worried sick.”
“They don’t care about me,” Laura hisses. “They never cared about me.”
“Where am I supposed to take you then?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Just far away from here.”
“I can’t just leave you anywhere.”
“You don’t have to leave me anywhere,” Laura snaps. “I just… I want to be away.”
James frowns. One hand on the wheel and the other on the gearshift, he throws another glance at the lake and thinks. There’s nowhere else to go for him. He can’t go back home, where the cops would potentially be waiting. He also can’t go anywhere with a child he doesn’t even have any idea how to take care of. They will be like fugitives. They’ll be on the run—unless they manage to find some faraway place where the past will never reach them.
The idea then gives him pause; makes him reflect.
What would Mary want me to do?
“Laura…,” James starts, softly. “After this, you know you can’t go with me.”
Laura refuses to speak.
“I’m not going to leave you in the middle of the road. But after what I’ve done… There has to be somewhere you can go to. What about that nurse that took care of you?”
Laura shakes her head. “There’s no place anymore. If you want to leave me, then just leave me.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“What’re you waiting for then?”
James says nothing.
“There’s no point in going back,” Laura says. “For me. They don’t like me there. I’m always sick. They always complain about me. They never listen. Mary’s the only one who ever listened. I don’t wanna be there anymore.”
“But there’s also no place for me anymore,” James mutters. “If you come with me… I can’t promise you anything. I don’t know how to take care of a kid.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“But you still hate me.”
“I do.”
“Why me?”
Laura hesitates. “I just want Mary.”
You’re all I have of Mary.
James looks away. The car still rumbles. The sun still shines. He still has to make a decision.
This is not going to be easy. He is fine with living alone, it’s what he deserves. He’s ready to leave everything behind. He’s perfectly content with staying in the town, even. There’s nowhere else for him to go, and he doubts he’ll be able to function like a normal human being again when he returns to society. He’s been out of it long before he returned to Silent Hill, barely operating like a person during the worst and last days of Mary’s time here on earth. But to have someone else—a kid—isn’t part of the plan. Mary had always wanted a daughter, but as they couldn’t have children at the time, James had given up and ultimately lost interest in learning how to be a father because he was never really good around kids in the first place. And now…
Is this his sign? Is this his second chance? But Laura despises him, and he can’t blame her. He is guilty; he is ashamed; there is no face for him to show. But there’s nowhere else for her to go and she doesn’t have anyone. James no longer has anyone, either; after everything, he wouldn’t dare show up on his father’s doorstep again. The last time they talked had been terrible. He’d been drunk and suicidal, and his father… Dad kind of left it up to God, if he remembers correctly, and James doesn’t believe in God. Dad’s pretty much given up on him. God’s probably given up on him, too.
But Laura still doesn’t have anyone, and for now she hasn’t given up on him yet.
She has nobody but him. For now.
There’s no way this is going to work.
But if I try…
Can I?
“Are we going?” Laura demands in her seat. She’s so small, so young, and already her life is filled to the brim with heartache at only eight years old. James’s hand tightens around the wheel. He can’t leave her. Not now.
If I can just make this work…
“Get some sleep,” he says at last. “It’s going to be a long drive.”