Helena is the (lionessrises) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-07-13 22:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | !silent hill, *narrative, helena wayne |
Hels narrative
Who: Helena and the Monster Menagerie
What: Helena has a run in with a monster she wasn't expecting.
Where: All over Silent Hill
When: Currentish
Warnings/Rating: Violence, gore, psychological horror, maiming, blood, burning. Here there be psychological and actual monsters, yo.
Cuts healed. Burns blistered and peeled, skin left pink and shiny for weeks before they faded. Some new cuts came over old cuts, some new burns over old cuts, some came on the rare path of her unmarked skin. She bandaged them, wrapped them if they need wrapping, set the fingers she broke fighting with the monsters and splinted them if they need splinting and she went on.
Her left arm was still healing from a cut from a run in with a crab-on-blades. If she had better ways to heal her wounds, she would have used them, but sometimes the old ways were the best ways. A thorough dousing with alcohol, a needle sterilized with alcohol and fire, and she had seven stitches going across her arm to keep her skin held together. It was a simple mistake as she'd come at it, one of those mighty limbs lifting to pin her down like prey before her fist slammed into the opposite elbow and sent the thing down to the floor.
It hurt like a son of a bitch. It didn't stop her from grabbing it by the neck jutting out from its crotch and slamming its head into the metal, rusted grating beneath them until it went still those annoying chirps it made finally went silent.
She closed its eyes before she walked away, took the stairs to the roof.
Between the grating of two stairs was a key, rusted like everything was in this damn town, but she pocketed it all the same, like all the rest she'd found. One hanging in the valet's box in the Motel, one in a soda can, one lingering at the bottom of a toilet, one hanging in a grandfather clock of an abandoned apartment. She was fairly sure she knew what they were, but she hadn't used one yet.
She was too busy.
She'd changed apartments after finding another slurper waiting under her bed. It wasn't as though there were enough people around to take all of them, so she moved between a set of five. One close to the river, one close to the Church, and the other three spread around town for whatever she might need.
The sky above the roof was filled with billowing black, like it always was when the nightmare was active. It smelled of smoke, of dying things burning, but the heat came from below and this high up, there was only a sticky, sooty wind to cool her skin.
Clack-clack-clack. Another one?
She turned to face whatever monster the nightmare had belched forth and inwardly groaned. Dredged up from Shakespeare, the first part of the monster was little more than a blob, faceless and moving against the second part. The beast with two backs. She didn't have to see the face on the second part to know who it was (she'd seen it enough times), didn't have to look closer to know that all its arms and legs were stubs with large, needle like protrusions jutting out from the ends.
It was ungainly. (And they had never been like this. They'd been close, too much room between their bodies anathema and even in the days after when she was more herself than the lusty girl on the roof, she had wanted him close.) And she knew from experience written out in scars on her arms and thighs, that it liked to puncture with those needles, hold its prey down and spit acid. Instead she rushed it, leapt up and kicked out, feet striking in that place where two bodies joined and it went tumbling off the roof with an orgasmic moan, only to burst on the sidewalk.
She watched from the roof as it died and felt nothing, only a shadow of something, like saying goodbye and knowing that there would never be a hello again.
Goodbye. Goodbye to who she was. Goodbye to the past. Goodbye to the future might-bes. All she had was now.
All she needed was now.
The nightmare was still active.
She went back inside.
Down two flights of stairs (and past two lying figures and three dingy purple Screamers) she heard his voice.
"Helena."
She stopped, fingers on the handle of her knife.
"Helena?"
Still his voice. A voice she would know anywhere through time and months away. She rushed out of the stairwell.
"Dad? Dad! Where are you?"
It was the first friendly voice she'd heard in… days? Months? (Fifty-nine cuts healed, 6 burns, three puncture wounds. She'd lost count of how many lying figures she killed, nurses remained steady at 9, burning children at 28, and she couldn't remember the rest because) She slammed her shoulder into the door until it gave and Bruce was there. Bloody, sitting in a room just like his office at home, their real home and she was running to get close to him.
"How could you do this, Helena?"
The words made her slow, stop, a foot away from his desk as he looked at her, one eye hanging on his cheek.
"Dad you need--" Medical attention. What did she know about eyeballs?
"How could you ruin everything?"
A shake of her head. "I don't--"
"Yes, you do. I died for you. And what did you do with my sacrifice? What have you been doing? Nothing. You let me die in vain--"
"No, daddy! No! What are you, why are you saying this?" Because she didn't, did she? She hadn't wanted him to die at all, but he told her to go, told her, and she knew it was the last time she'd ever talk to him. Her eyes burned as her knees gave out.
"Because it's true, Helena. I gave my life to save your worthless skin and what have you done with it? I gave you everything--"
"No, daddy, no!" Why was he saying these things?
"--Your mother wanted to train you, but I always knew that you'd never live up to the family name--"
"Daddy, stop!"
"--And I was right."
"Daddy, no! I didn't, I tried--" Why wasn't he listening? Why? Why? Why? Her arms curled around her, hugging herself as she knew he wouldn't.
"You tried? Helena. You never tried. You ran around with your little blonde friend--"
"Daddy!" She screamed, before the tears started.
"If I'd had a worthy daughter, I wouldn't have had to die. I'd still be alive--"
The grating under her knees hurt. Grating. She looked down and snapped. "You're not my father!" she snarled, rocking back towards her toes, using her momentum to launch herself forward, at him, knives forgotten as she went at him with her hands, the skin over her knuckles splitting as she hit him again, again, again, knees on his shoulders, holding him down as she forced her fingers into his mouth and began to pull. Grip, pull, pull harder, muscles straining in her arms and across her shoulders, pull, Helena, pull, "You're not my fucking father!" She snarled in his face and flesh tore, his tongue came free in her grasp. Over her shoulder it went, limp and lifeless, splat on the ground and she drove her bloody thumbs under his jaw, fingers digging in to cut off his air while blood filled his mouth and throat. "My father would never say those things. Never," she snarled, more animal than woman as the manifestation died under her hands.
Never. And no more. When his blood finally started to congeal around her nails and into the whirls of her fingers, she stopped looking at his face and stood. She knew what she needed to do.
Back to the Valley of the Broken Dolls, ("you're just mad because he didn't do what your real father would have done.") Back to the screaming burning children ("Hels! Hels!"), to the two blades-as-heads beast ("If you're going to kill yourself, hurry up and do it,"), to the screamers and the lying men, to the bladed crabs ("I don't want a sister like you,"), past Pyramid head with his red blade and eternal watch set to rape o'clock, back to the mannequins with bottles of lighter fluid and a BIC. The fluid went down and burn baby burn.
And when it stopped hurting, when those little aches beneath her ribs stopped existing with their every death, she finally went back to her apartment, showered off blood (hers and theirs) and ash and soot, scoured off that weak little girl that she had been, the one that cried, that wanted death and peace and an end to all the pain, that one that carried the harshest words closest to her, let her swirl down the drain with all the other monster bits.
Goodbye.
Hello, as she stepped out of the shower. Hello, as she got dressed in her clothes (black tank top, black cargo pants, black boots) and weapons, even her journal got tucked into the back of her pants. Hello, as she picked up the keys she'd collected over the past two years and went in search of the door.
Hello, as she found it three days later.