Ghost Man (by timydamonkey)
Disclaimer: I do not own Heavy Rain. I am a fan who enjoys messing around with game events to hopefully add to the narrative!
Author's Note: Well, I did say I had other Heavy Rain ideas! It has been a while though. I think my inner angst fan loves Heavy Rain since it has so much angst potential.
In the case of this story: it's set during the events of "Father and Son", after Ethan has his black out but before he 'awakens' from it for the most part. I was wondering about Shaun being late and started playing around with ideas, and this is what we got. I hope I got a good read on Shaun given how little of the game we get to see him in. Reviews appreciated.
Shaun awoke to an empty house.
It was eerily silent. He could hear the telltale sound of rain from outside, but that was about all. He couldn't hear his father bustling around any more. Sometimes, he wondered if his father ever slept: he always seemed to be pacing the house or trying to hide away.
Deciding to see if his father had actually fallen off to sleep, Shaun inched out of his room. The house was dark and seemed miserable even when he switched the light on. It wasn't really a nice place, not like the other house, with all its sprawling space and his brother –
He tried not to think of how things used to be, because it always came down to that.
He got to his father's room and pushed the door open gently, so he wouldn't wake up, but it turned out that he needn't have bothered since he wasn't there. The bed hadn't been slept in at all.
The eerie glow of the alarm clock told him it was almost two in the morning. Looked like he wasn't going to be alert for school in the morning, but it didn't matter, looking after his dad was more important. He was scared when he looked at the man, sometimes, for some reason. He'd never quite figured out why.
Teachers had already run out of sympathy time, past the stage of "be kind, his brother died", and seemed to expect him to be a normal student again, as if Jason's death had been the sum of any family problems. It was barely the start.
Pursing his lips, he decided to go downstairs and drag his father upstairs into his bedroom is necessary, but the plan fell apart slightly when he made it over to the stairs and noticed, for the first time, that the front door was open, the rain pounding on the ground.
He rubbed his eyes. He shouldn't have been able to miss that, but he'd have heard the door opening… He practically bounced down the stairs. He knew it was stupid, it could have been a burglar, but he wasn't thinking.
"Dad?" he called as quietly as he dared. With no answer forthcoming, he shouted, "Dad!" in a considerably louder voice. There still wasn't a response.
At least the house was empty of unwanted visitors.
Shaun didn't know what to do. Nobody had ever prepared him for some eventuality where his father might leave him, it seemed so out of character – and he had left the front door open. Maybe something bad had happened.
He'd rather hoped their family had already had their share of the bad luck quota.
He took some calming breaths. What could he do? He eyed the phone and considered phoning his mother. He dismissed it almost immediately. She was already having issues with their father, and he didn't understand that at all, but she'd march right over there and rant about his father for weeks for being reckless if he called her. He'd probably never see him again. He couldn't do that to dad, not on top of everything else.
He thought of ringing the police and laughed quietly. What would he say? And, of course, it'd get right back to his mother.
Well, he thought rationally, I can close the door. He did so, noting the mess the rain had been trying to make to the floor that he'd never thought of before and grimacing, but he felt considerably better now that he had some kind of barrier between him and the outside world. Not that anybody with any sense would enter their house: they had nothing worth stealing.
He considered keeping an eye out through the window to see if he could see his father anywhere, but it felt a little inconspicuous. Besides, he was freezing – and it was funny that he'd only just started to feel the cold, having been too tied up with everything else. He ran upstairs to grab a blanket, but ended up sitting in his bed instead, duvet wrapped around him and staring at the wall. His feet ached, a throb of temperature at an unwelcome low.
At least he'd found his teddy. He hugged it so hard he thought it might burst. He sat there and listened to the noises of the night. They seemed to be reawakening again. He had no idea if that was good or bad, but it was all there was.
He was dragged into full wakefulness from his droopy-eyed state about an hour later by a bang on the door. He jumped, and barely managed to avoid jerking back into the wall. He could barely breathe.
The thumping noise came again.
Shaun ran downstairs, abandoning the teddy, and to the front window. He didn't know what he expected to find, but he shifted the curtain aside slightly for a quick look. His father stood outside, drenched in rain and without his coat. He practically flew to the door.
"Dad!" Shaun was wide-eyed, and his father wasn't that much better. His eyes made Shaun shiver: they looked dead.
His father blinked at him. "Shaun…?" he asked in obvious confusion.
Biting his lip, Shaun grabbed him and dragged him into the house, practically slamming the door shut behind him. Water dripped from his father onto the floor, but the man didn't seem to notice. He looked a mess.
"What were you doing?" he demanded.
His father didn't say anything and Shaun felt in despair. That was one emotion he was used to, these days.
He wondered, sometimes, that if Jason were still around, would he be able to cheer dad up. He probably would. Jason had been good at everything. Shaun just felt useless.
His father hadn't seemed to be quite there for a while now. He felt like he was expected to parent his father, and it made him angry. He was supposed to be a child, but he hadn't felt like a child since he was eight years old.
A traitorous part of him couldn't wait to go back to his mother's house. She mourned, too, but not like dad.
He didn't know how to get his father to speak, so he dragged him upstairs by the hand instead. It was, at least, something he'd planned to do earlier, albeit for a different reason. His hand was getting wet as his father had been out in the rain for so long, but he didn't care.
"You have to put your pyjamas on. You'll get ill." His father had told him that, once, so there was nothing wrong with returning the advice.
He didn't think his father would do it, but when Shaun grabbed a fistful of soaking wet top (it wrung out on the floor a little), he suddenly paused, realising he had no idea what to do. Fortunately, it seemed to have spurred his father on, who went to get dressed without complaint.
At least the pyjamas were on the bed. Shaun left the room until the bustle of changing had disappeared, then peeked through the door as he had before. He felt so old, but so young at the same time. It left him confused.
His father was moving now, by himself. He wasn't acting like Shaun's dad, though: he wasn't playing or giving calm lectures or smiling at all. It scared him, sometimes, that maybe the man wearing his father's face wasn't his father at all, just some other man. A ghost man, barely there at all. He could barely recognise him, staring through that door.
His father no longer seemed to realise that he was there, so Shaun crept off to bed. He felt inexplicably like a coward.
The next morning, Shaun was late for school. He pursed his lips and didn't cry.