A/N: Okay, so this is my first Silent Hill fiction. There's definitely not enough of them out there that I like to read, so I thought maybe I'd write one of my own, for those of you like moi. I've never played the games, only seen the movie—and now I know that I'm not the only one who thought there was something…odd…about Rose and Cybil's relationship—so everything will be based off of stuff I gathered from the movie, and whatever I can find on Google. Oh yeah, and if F/F pairings ruffle your feathers…don't read it. It could contain some spoilers—I'm not sure just yet. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Plot is mine, relevance to the game and movie is not.
Chapter One
The silence wasn't anything she hadn't become used to over the past few days. In fact, it had been one of the few—the very few—things she had actually liked about that horrific place. Back at home, in the dead of society, the sound of the cars passing on the highway and the television blaring in the living room had long since succeeded in driving Rose Da Silva half to insanity. Of course, now that she was back from that place, insanity didn't seem such a far off concept. Anyone she talked to would have narrowed their eyes and whispered amongst themselves, spreading rumors that she wasn't right in the head, and that the stress of parenting that girl had finally gotten to her.
Maybe it had.
It wasn't any secret that Sharon wasn't the…easiest…child to care for. With her sleepwalking, and nightmares, and constant cries for the place she had undeniably been conceived and birthed in. Even after the ordeal there, and the transcendence into a world of less than cheerful knowledge, the girl still had her fits, and her mother was still forced to sleep with her back against the girl's bedroom door, with only the comfort that the window was locked and barred present to soothe her aching mind. As one might expect, however, neither Rose or her daughter slept peacefully these days. The misty silence of that forgotten and Hell-spawn town had filled the rooms of the Da Silva household, and prevented the mother and child from reaching the world they had known for all their lives.
Rose still hadn't quite worked out the details of their predicament. They were home, yes, and the town was far behind them—but still, they were not home. Chris was nowhere to be found, and more than once the broken woman's more intelligent half demanded that she return to that cruel place and remain there; that she would never see her husband again; that the deathly silence she had once been so soothed and comforted by had at last become a screaming siren, unendingly unbearable in its volume; that she had not yet experienced the hell that was Silent Hill.
Dreams had plagued her since those nights there, and for the moment at least, they showed no signs of ceasing. They consisted of images, mostly, sound was not present it seemed, but the images blared millions of words. Those creatures she had met in the subway—those tiny, grey, reaching arms and the wailing of inhuman children, and the manner in which they had swarmed her body, overtaken her, and very nearly killed her. The sirens of the church steeple rang in her ears—the only sound ever heard in such dreams. The sirens that were both her savior and her punisher; a warning and a chance to escape should she be near the church; a curse upon knowing they were too far away to reach. Yet the image that haunted her most of all—that one collaboration of color and shapes created via signals from the confused brain—was the memory of that charred and smoldering mass which hung upon a ladder nearly twenty feet above her head.
Cybil Bennett.
Her only friend in her time of utmost need; her only sanctuary when all hope seemed to have been lost; her savior and her captor; her protector and her foe. All these opposites in the exact same moment. Driven to follow the broken woman and child by way of suspicion, and compelled to keep Rose alive throughout a journey likely thought pointless, the young officer had more of a connection with the woman who lay on the hardwood floor now than either of them would have liked. And though Rose had seen the scorched remains of what had once been that lively young woman whose duty by oath was to protect and serve, there lingered in the back of her mind a thought that she could not truly be gone. No. The horror wasn't over yet. With the resourceful Silent Hill on her side—or against, depending on how one might examine the matter—Cybil Bennett could never die.
Clapping her hands over her ears upon waking from another violent dream of sirens and nurses, the exhausted Rose shook her head from side to side, willing the pain and guilt away, and the memory that seemed perfectly comfortable retaining its place on the interior of her eyelids, so that whenever she might try to shut out the fear, it would be replaced by sheer terror. The blood pounded and throbbed in her head, and she felt her skull would burst and spew the memories forth, and they would become real once more, and she shook her head even harder, sobbing into her knees and trembling so severely, she feared she was having a seizure. How the thought of one particular individual's death could so destroy her as had Cybil Bennett's, Rose was unable to comprehend, and though she wished not to will away the memory of her protector entirely, 'twas times like these during which she longed for the ability to simply fall into death, and know no more.
