Silent Hill moves with Leonard. He can feel it stir behind him as he strides into Alchemilla Hospital, snapping claws and grinding metal and the wet slap of flesh against concrete. The angels of this place are agitated today, and with good reason; one of their own has turned against Silent Hill.
Leonard has little patience for lost lambs.
Hush, he thinks, and runs his mind against the souls of his angels, a long slow invisible caress. I will take care of him. The angels hiss and twist, a vicious migraine strumming behind his temples, but his words quiet them somewhat.
the seer has betrayed us our gifts are wasted you must not let this be
I know, Leonard thinks smoothly, even as his head threatens to split with the pain.
do not let this be she is lost she is gone all alone help her she must be found SHEMUSTBEFOUND
Their words come with pain, so thick and splitting it forces his breath out of his lungs. His vision swims, black around the edges, and he can feels his knees about to give way.
I know! he thinks. Hush, hush, I know. I will not fail you.
The angels' voices recede, quieting to an uncomfortable but bearable murmur. (And he would never complain about pain felt in the service of God, not like isome/i members of his congregation.)
"Father Wolf, are you all right?"
Leonard startles and opens his eyes. There's a young nurse hovering in front of him, wringing her hands and staring at him with undisguised worry. He doesn't recognize her, she's not one of the saved, but even the godless of this town recognize him by reputation alone.
"You just walked in and all of a sudden you went really pale and-"
Leonard smiles at her.
"Ah, yes," he says, pushing himself off the wall he hadn't realized he was leaning on. "My deepest apologies for worrying you, child. I'm afraid that despite all my precautions, age has caught up with me."
Truer than he'd let her know.
The woman looks somewhat mollified, though she presses on anyway. "Would you like to lay down, Father? Or do you need me to call an ambulance?"
"No, no." He waves her concerns off with a sweep of his hand. "I'm fine, I promise."
"If you're certain, Father…" She still looks concerned, but Leonard is confident she won't challenge him.
He gives her another smile, the sort that converts lost lambs and charms the donations from the hands of his followers. "I am, thank you. Though there is something you could help me with…"
"Of course! Whatever I can do."
"Do you know where I might find a Stanley Coleman?"
She has to get someone else to help him—his room is aboveh er security clearance, and for good reason. Luckily the doctor she finds is one of the saved (thirty-two years in his church, and loyal like only a man with nothing else to believe in can be) and so it's no problem for Leonard to get himself a solo audience with the boy in question.
"Be careful," the doctor whispers as he closes the door. "He doesn't seem like much, but he causes us more trouble than most anyone else here."
Truer words were never spoken, Leonard thinks, and lets the door latch tight.
"Hello, Father Wolf." Stanley smiles at him from across the room.
"Stanley," Leonard grunts. He doesn't bother with the kindly pastor routine here, knows Stanley wouldn't believe it anyway. Stanley would only find it funny.
"No Mr. Coleman?" Stanley asks, tossing his head in a way that somehow seems mocking. The handcuffs chaining him to the bed keep him from gesturing like he normally would, but the boy still uses every part of his body to speak. His eyes, his mouth, his posture; every bit of Stanley is mocking Leonard. "Here I am, rolling out the red carpet for our esteemed Father, and I don't get even the smallest modicum of respect? Aah, what the world has come to." He fake-pouts at Leonard, looking for all the world like a kicked puppy.
Stanley's mother, back when she was alive, used to joke that her son was born with a knife for a tongue. And it's true. The boy in the bed is thin and effeminate, with gold curls like lamb's wool and arms and legs devoid of any sort of muscle, but Stanley is no less dangerous for any of that.
"Stanley," Leonard says again, and frowns. "You know what I'm here for."
(He was born with a switchblade mouth, she'd say. He's only five and he knows just where to stick it to make you bleed. And she would laugh and laugh like a woman come undone.)
"For the pleasure of my company?" He shrugs, palms up, and grimaces when the chains jerk against the rails of the bed.
That, Leonard doesn't even bother to dignify with a response.
"Or perhaps…" Stanley grins and his tongue darts out from between his teeth, a flash of pink on white. He looks pleased with himself, drunk on the pleasure of his own cleverness, and Leonard knows he isn't going to like what comes next. "That little girl of yours isn't quite so little anymore, eh? Mayhaps you're moving on to greener pastures. Or golder?" He blows absentmindedly at a silky-blond strand of hair hanging in front of his eyes. "They call me girlish, I know. Prettyboy, sissy, etcetera and so on. Who knows what kind of strange thoughts a religious man like yourself might get into his head in absence of a lady? Hmm?"
blasphemer blasphemer he speaks to insult you he wishes to mock you blasphemer
Leonard snarls and lunges forward.
Stanley yelps in pain and fear as Leonard's hands close around his throat, sounding more like an animal than a human being.
he is an animal he does not know us he is less
His hands tighten, and it is so satisfying to see the child's face contort in pain. His face has gone pale, his lips are turning blue. His eyes are wide with fear, and more honest than Leonard has seen them before. He should have tried this long ago.
But he couldn't. Not then and not now. He can't do this. It hits him in a rush of disappointment, strong enough almost to knock him over like an oak in a strong wind: I'll never find her if I do this.
He lets Stanley go. It takes physical effort to release him; his hands feel as though they were meant to wrap around the child's neck. The boy collapses against the bed, gasping, the moment he is free. Leonard retreats to the other end of the room, as far away from Stanley as he can get. It is shameful, he knows, the way he is acting. The boy is bound to the bed, locked in a room that is little more than a cell, and yet Leonard can't shake the feeling that he is the caged one.
(Stanley is weak, but he has a predator's mind. They are fools to think they can control it. And yet they have no other option.)
The boy starts laughing even before he gets his breath back. The sound comes out as a choking, shuddering wheeze, and it is none the less derisive for it.
That is the problem with this child. He cannot be trained. Certainly Stanley feels fear—he is more cowardly than most, in Leonard's opinion—but he lacks the ability to learn from it. They have beaten him before, with words and fists and more than that, but the moment he stops begging he is always back to his prideful self, as though he had never been struck down at all.
"Ha!" Stanley barks between breaths, his voice hoarse. "I wonder... what they will think. When they see the bruises. It will be. A ring, right? All the way around. Like a necklace." His hands jerk against the cuffs as he tries to trace the shape of a circle in the air. "You giving me jewelry, Father?" He pauses for a moment, gasping. Leonard does not speak. "Not the one I would have hoped to receive it from... but I am grateful, nonetheless."
"That's what I'm here to talk to you about."
Stanley looks at him. His face is pale still, but amusement shines in his eyes. "Jewelry?"
"The one you would hope to receive it from."
"Ah." Stanley's gaze goes distant, and he smiles softly at something only he can see. "I wonder what her tastes run toward. A garnet would complement her features nicely, I think."
He has seen this before, of course, this... sick familiarity. But Leonard still cannot help the taste of bile that rises in the back of his throat. For years, he would have sworn that Stanley—little Stanley, who tortured animals for fun and had driven his mother towards her death—was incapable of any sort of fonder emotion at all. That his mind was nothing more than mirrors reflecting ice.
And yet here he is, tied to a bed, murmuring about this girl like he were any other love-struck teenager. Leonard feels as though he has walked in on the lion having congress with the lamb.
"If she returned, you could ask her yourself." He does not think any such reasoning will work, and he hates to even say it. The thought of this worthless thing sullying their chosen one with his filthy imagination is disgusting. Nonetheless, he has to try.
"When I see her next, I will look," Stanley continues, as though he hadn't heard Leonard at all. "Perhaps she will be wearing something I can take a hint from."
"When you see her next," Leonard growls, "You will tell me where she is."
Stanley looks over at him. There is a hint of a cruel smile playing at his lips. His eyes are wide and round and reflect nothing. "I will not," he says. "You would try to break her. She'd be no fun anymore if I let you have her."
And here is the grand irony, the injustice that boils Leonard's blood and sets the angels to roaring within him.
Stanley, with his smile and his clumsily-sharpened kitchen knife and his penchant for cutting things open in the street (worms, frogs, squirrels. A little girl's leg, once, before his mother had heard the screams and come to pull him away) was supposed to be their town's champion. Its prophet.
Stanley can see things, in his dreams and his nightmares and the cobwebbed corners of rooms where the rest of them don't care to gaze too long. True things, mostly, from the past and the future and the far-away present. And, for the price of a new toy(/victim/torn-apart carcass), he had always been more than willing to explain his visions to Leonard and the other town leaders.
It is why they kept him around so long, continued to pamper him even when he proved to be dangerous. And yet, when they need him most—now that their precious mother-of-god has been spirited away by some nobody with a steel pipe and a misguided sense of paternal fondness—he has gone and fallen for the girl he was supposed to help them retrieve.
(For a given value of 'fallen for', of course. Stanley's love is the only thing more vicious than his hatred.)
He is useless to them now. Worse than useless, because he likes to make a game of feeding them obscure hints and bits of information that always, always lead them nowhere. And even so, he is their best chance. Their only chance, because the man they seek has all but disappeared into thin air.
"You can't hide her forever," Leonard snarls.
Stanley looks towards Leonard. "I won't have to," he says simply. "She'll come back. She'll come right to me." He shivers, his teeth bared and his lips pulled back in a parody of joy. "She'll be resplendent, beautiful, better than any misshapen beast you've ever worshipped. She'll return. But, oh, Father, you'll lack the eyes to see it."
Leonard stares openly. As oblique as it is—as useless—it is still the closest he's come to getting a straight answer from the boy. She'll return. The angels hum with the knowledge, passing it among themselves. It is so little to go on, nothing more than crumbs. But to a starving man, even crumbs seem quite the feast.
Abruptly, Stanley sighs and sinks down into his bed. He cracks one eye lazily open and stares over at Leonard. "Would you talk to the doctors about untying my hands, Father? I'd like to make her a present, for when she comes." He pauses for a moment, head cocked to the side. "Perhaps a doll. She does so seem to love them."
Leonard turns to the door without a word. He has gotten all he would get out of the boy, at least for today. He wants to leave this place, now.
"You feel it, Father, don't you?" Stanley calls from behind him.
Leonard pauses, hand on the doorknob. He has no desire to hear the boy's ramblings, and yet he does not move.
"The chains are tightening around you. The cage is begging to be filled. How long before they stop trusting you? How long before your mind finally-"
Leonard sweeps into the hallway and slams the door behind him, cutting off the end of Stanley's sentence. The angels follow, rolling and shaking and shivering with new knowledge and the promise of reunion.
Leonard is not focused on them, not now.
Lies, he thinks angrily, Filthy, stupid lies. He nurtured his congregation and brought it to the glory of God. He is the one who guides his people along the path of righteousness. They would never dream of turning on him.
(They've been whispering, though, he can't help but think. When his back is turned, when they think he isn't listening, they've been whispering.
His people are sentimental. Foolish. They hear the fury in his words when he speaks of nonbelievers and they see the bruises on Claudia's arms when she pushes up her sleeves and they think it gives them the right to whisper-)
He leaves without incident. No one tries to stop him. Everyone he passes looks at him respectfully; some give him a friendly smile or greeting.
In his mind, he sees the chains begin to tighten.
The window in Stanley's cell overlooks Alchemilla's parking lot. He watches Leonard leave, a soft, absentminded smile pulling at the edges of his mouth. Already, the bruises have started to form around his neck, green and black and purple. They look like a necklace, or a collar, or a crown.
He watches the car pull away, out of the parking lot and down the road until it disappears beyond the window frame. Stanley sighs and lays back against the bed. He smiles at the ceiling, looking at someone only he can see.
.
.
.
This fic was inspired partially by my desire to write something about Stanley (one of the most fascinatingly creepy parts of any of the games, in my opinion) and partially by the fact that some of the memos in SH3 hint that Leonard was sent to Brookhaven for being too intense for the rest of the cultists. Which is an amazingly high bar to pass, really.
As always, constructive criticism is welcome!