i. ignorance is the worst doctor
A candle lit by shaking hands burns just as brightly as one lit by steady ones.
Henry is grateful for that.
The candles are dollar store, no sacred properties attached, but the sight of them burning on a windowsill or bedside table is calming for him. They're a ritual now, even two years after the fact.
The candles stayed; so did the axe, the gun, and even one of the pipes. It would be difficult to explain to his new landlord if she ever found out. The Sword of Obedience, regrettably, had disappeared to whence it came after it was over.
Or immediately over, anyway.
His new place had a walk-in closet; he made creative use of his bedroom space for more storage, so he could turn it into a darkroom. It was calming in its own way to stand there, inhaling development chemicals and watching shapes - buildings, bodies of water - emerge out of the filmy ether. It was a darkness that didn't make him feel exposed, but enveloped, protected, even.
He used the room to catch his breath, sometimes. Just when he woke up in the night from dreams he couldn't remember but knew something awful had happened in them. Not often, anymore. Medication helped - OTC tranquilizers, a white lie about generalized anxiety that provided sertraline that headed off panic.
It happened, it was over, and now he lived in the wake.
He was fine, though.
The new place is so cold, though. He's not complaining - usually - but it makes it harder to sleep and move around when his hands ache from freezing.
He wonders if Eileen is having a similar problem, wherever she lives now. He doesn't think about her, or anything related to South Ashfield Heights often, but it was a part of him at some point, however unwanted, and it tends to crop up in strange places.
(They sit down against a wall of the subway station, whether it's a good idea or not, Eileen insisted she couldn't walk any further and she needed to rest. Henry isn't complaining.
His hands feel cold here, too, where they're surrounded by metal and concrete, and he sets the golf club down for a second, twisting his wrist where it's started to hurt. Eileen rubs her forehead like she has a headache. They don't speak. They can't.)
It was a stark contrast to Silent Hill last weekend. Outside of that situation, she was both similar to who she'd appeared to be in the apartments and different.
He remembered, rather fondly, her tenting her fingers in a touristy tavern and telling him about Mesopotamian burial rites. Once they'd gotten outside of the ominous mood of burdens and ghosts, she was pretty chatty and fun. It made him feel boring and tongue-tied but that was nothing new for him.
She was only vaguely familiar with the area - her father used to come here a lot more, she said. He was the one who gave her Robbie memorabilia, as a gift upon returning home from business trips.
(Henry had decided he'd probably never tell her about the doll in her room. Maybe it was a pleasant memory for her. He wouldn't wanna ruin it.)
When she'd looked at him like she was waiting for him to speak, he'd stir his soup or mumble something about family trips. A lot of them were about his older brother, a terminal jerk who spent most of those trips antagonizing him, or about waxing photography skills on the old grandiose architecture of the place.
He didn't worry about being boring when he made her laugh, just once.
Putting things back in his new home, unpacking boxes, he found a box full of photographs he'd torn off the walls of Room 302 and placed anywhere, not wondering whether he'd still want them in a few months.
They were all of Silent Hill.
He put the box in his closet, before it was a darkroom, and decided he'd worry about it later.
Again, as he started ripping things out of that closet to make it a workspace, he found the box, and this time he was gripped with a nausea so strong and a keen pinch in his temples, and he upended the whole box into a dumpster chute in the lobby.
The sound of breaking glass only worsened his headache.
They were beautiful, but they were tainted with imaginary blood and mold.
Eileen kept her promise to hang out again, calling him while he was still debating whether he should or not.
Where do you go to meet a friend you went with on a self-discovery trip? A coffee house? A bookstore?
Eileen took him to a museum.
"I used to work here in college," she said in the lobby, as they warmed their hands over the tiny heater, November air having crept in under his collar and chilled him down.
"You said you studied archaeology," he said, nodding. He didn't know much about archaeology. Greeks and Romans? What else was there to do?
"Yep! Ancient Near Eastern Areas - specializing in Mesopotamian regions and linguistics."
Oh.
She took him through exhibits of broken pottery, eroded statues, and shades of green, brown, rust and black. He was alone with his thoughts. She mostly spoke to her experiences as a student and worker back here, and could explain intricate myths and the historical relevance of broken jewelry chips and cuneiform.
He wanted to hold her hand, like he had in the water of Lake Toluca a few months ago. He wanted to feel her put her arms around his neck, hugging him like she had before she'd gotten into her car and driven back to the other side of the city, thirty minutes away from him and his tiny room on the second floor of a rental house.
But now that they were outside of Silent Hill, without the common ground of their experience linking them, they were just two people, and he had to relate to her differently.
And that was hard. He was stifled, boring, and didn't know as much as she did here. He listened to her, smiling and nodding at her work.
"It's nice," he said, and tried not to feel inadequate about it.
He said he'd call her when she looked at him expectantly, not saying anything of her own. She was hard to read.
Or maybe he was.
A/n: Incomplete draft of the sequel to "Waters of Lethe." I liked what I had written, and it seemed like a shame to not post it, so here you go.