Chapter Text
There is silence, thick as fog, to which Rose poses her question.
She asks for too much, and the devil answers.
# # # #
Rose doesn’t know what it means when she returns home to an empty house. The fog rolls in and back out again, and Sharon spends the night in the big bed with her, not sleeping. Neither of them sleeping.
When she hears the door opening at 3am, then, Rose is already out of the tangle of covers and poised with the baseball bat she’d stood by her nightstand, anticipating an intruder. She makes her way onto the landing, hears keys being thrown on a counter and footsteps in the hall.
“Stay in bed, sweetie, it’s alright,” she tells Sharon over her shoulder, and the girl burrows further beneath the blankets.
She comes to the top of the stairs, to the half-wall that allows her to see into the open plan of the lower floor. She sees nothing, at first. A coat over the sofa that wasn’t there before. Then she looks closer, realises whose coat it is, and tucks the bat against her chest as she comes around to the stairs.
Slowly, she descends, holds her breath. The carpet absorbs her footsteps like the fog had her presence, and for a moment Rose can’t quite believe that this can be real. She takes a deep breath in and holds it there, burns it inside her lungs, and feels no more alive than she had when she’d first stepped foot outside of Silent Hill.
Chris is the turning point – Chris who was not in Silent Hill, who did not die there, who is here, in their kitchen, making coffee at 3am like he doesn’t expect he’ll sleep again. She drops her bat when she sees him, and Chris startles and drops his coffee mug, and the pair of them stand between the wreckage for a moment before Chris launches himself forward.
“You’re alive!” He takes her into his arms, squeezes uncomfortably, stuffs his nose in her hair and takes the stink of ash and blood and loss into his lungs. “You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive.”
Rose can hardly believe it herself.
When Chris thrusts her back at arm’s length, Rose almost falls over again – has to grip his elbows to keep herself upright.
“Sharon?” he asks her, and his entire face changes; elation to agony. “Sharon? Is she—?”
“Daddy!”
Rose is cast off again, deserted, and she stuffs her knuckles against her mouth to keep from crying as she watches father and daughter reunite. Sharon misses the last three steps in the stairs, jumps like all those times Rose has warned her not to, straight into Chris’ chest. He receives her tiny body into a hug and turns back to Rose, a look on his face that tells her he’s never going to let them go again, that they’re going to make it work, this time, that they can be happy now.
And they try.
God, she tries.
And for two years it’s almost working, almost worth it, and then the nightmares ease away, and the monsters beneath the bed abate, and Rose feels like she’s emerging from water only to see the world as it really is.
“Chris,” she tells him over their anniversary dinner, “I need a divorce.”
# # # #
It is late October and the world as Rose knows it is dying, like it does every year, and will every year for years to come.
Rose receives the change with open lungs and closed eyes – a moment of silence in the walk from her house to her parked car. She lives on the outskirts of the city, still, had thought of chasing a road South after Chris left, but hasn’t managed to bare it proper thought. Sharon sees her father, still, and Rose has roots at work, in the community, like she never had before.
Silent Hill lingers in the distance, that name on a map that Rose’s eyes track to subconsciously, and then skirt away from. She takes the road, sometimes. Pauses at the fork that veers off to chain-locked fences and traffic cones. The fog lures her in, a meter or two, and then she’ll stop.
She’ll stop and look out at the fog and wait to see someone – wait for something to come.
When it doesn’t, she starts her car and turns around again, and Silent Hill closes itself to her once more.
# # # #
In her dreams, Cybil Bennett is burning. Rose knows that her version of events cannot be what happened exactly; she did not witness Cybil’s death, only the evidence of it.
She wakes with the smell of burnt hair in her nose, showers in water so cold she comes out shivering into a towel.
Sharon asks about her, once, and Rose’s stomach twists itself into a knot.
She doesn’t ask again.
# # # #
For her birthday, Sharon treats her mother to home baked goods and cartoons before bedtime.
“It’s my birthday,” Sharon tells her, “I get to choose.”
So they stay up late watching movies that Rose has seen so many times she could probably recite them, and Sharon falls asleep on the sofa, drooling into a cushion. Rose could probably still carry Sharon up the stairs, but she wakes her, nudges her in the direction of the bathroom with a, “brush your teeth,” and a promise of a story before bed.
She doubts Sharon will last through it, but it’s her birthday, and Rose will treat her to the world if she asks for it, before she has to leave for her father’s house come weekend.
The last thing Rose expects as she’s cleaning up the living area is a knock at the door. It makes her stop, wonder. There’s a doorbell out front, in perfect view of any visitors, and yet the knock had come timid and light. It’s as if whoever is on the other side doesn’t want an answer.
Rose finds the baseball bat before she answers it.
She stops behind the door, contemplates calling out to her visitor, but Sharon is upstairs and she doesn’t want to panic her. She can hear a tap running in the bathroom and figures she probably won’t hear anyway.
Holding her breath, Rose unlocks the door.
Who she finds on the other side of it almost has her dropping her baseball bat again – does have her gasping out, “You’re alive,” like Chris had. Her heart feels double its size, a pain in her chest that she struggles to breathe around.
“Yeah,” Cybil looks pleased to see her, but antsy; her smile is fake or forced and Rose isn’t sure she likes the look of it, “it’s good to see you, too.”