Last Thoughts in a Broken Window
Here's a lullabye to close your eyes...
...goodbye.
It was always you that I despised.
I don't feel enough for you to cry.
Here's a lullabye to close your eyes...
...goodbye
...goodbye
...goodbye
- Room of an Angel (Silent Hill 4)
The glare of the lights on the window makes it hard to make anything out. All I see are the incandescent bulbs reflecting a disturbingly flawless glare that slides smoothly along with me as I move across the glass. It makes the hairs prickle on the back of my neck to see the light hiding the darkness behind it, and I feel cold, numb, sick.
Outside everything is happening, while inside I'm stuck in the silence. Locked in the silence with him. He stares at me, now, I know it, although he hides it well. His eyes would frighten me, if I could feel anything. They're an icy, chilling blue that seem empty of everything. He pretends to look through the window, now, but when I turn my eyes to look at him, he's staring at me again.
With him, this office seems a prison. Every wall hides secrets, and I can feel the heartbeat of the room all around me. I should be terrified it's all in my head, but no, I can feel my whole body shaking with it. I can feel the dark creeping away around the edge of the sterile white light, moving away, but always closer. I know they're coming. No matter how many lights I turn on, no matter how many people come and go, never seeing them, they still return. I just wish I could still be afraid.
I feel it coming now, in the frigid crawl down my spine, but I won't turn around. I don't need too. The slick sheen of the glass reflects only the frigid, laughing eyes that tell me everything I need to know. Something is happening outside, but something is happening in here too. I can see it in the way he smiles, standing behind me in the glass. I can't even hear the sound of the guns anymore, and the flashing lights seem far away. Maybe it's ending, they've closed the building off to protect me, or maybe it never happened. I can see it, but I am no part of it. I am only cold.
They wonder why I had the office painted white, they can't hide it, but they don't know about anything. It's hardest for the shadows to get to the white, and it matches me. The white coat on the outside and the bare, white emptiness on the inside. Just like this room I'm standing in. What if everything I see is only a projection of the white? It's been inside of me since my earliest memories of shadows following me down the hall to my mother, dead in her white bed, in her white dress. It's always been there, and it will never go away.
It doesn't matter, I suppose, if it's real or not. If I'm real or not. Because I know he, at least, is real, standing just behind me with the frozen, cutting eyes. He used to move with the shadows too, once, but long ago he began to follow me. Now, even under the dead lights, he stands in the middle of the room and laughs silently. Even the empty white is better than the cold he tells me is coming, the one I know he is bringing every time he smiles his glittering, dagger smile. He has always been the one thing I was afraid of, and tonight, I can feel his frost creeping across the floor and up my body. The beautiful patterns it makes as it crystallizes on the pane, reaching spindles turning something exquisite into something terrible. I can see my breath in the air, now.
I can also see the flash of an explosion, faintly, far away, and some part of me can feel it rip through the building. It's nothing to this, though; it's too far gone. I've been afraid too long, and now, though it makes me want to laugh a laugh that would tear my body in half, the unfeeling whiteness is my last defense.
Every time he's come, I've given in, blacked out my mind rather than see what he did. But now he won't even leave me that peace. Finally, he knows its time he finished what he began in a terrified child's imagination so long ago. I will freeze here, until I am dead, or so much the same as him that we will be one and the same and it will not matter. I can almost feel him, standing just out of reach behind my left shoulder, though I can't hear him breathing. His eyes are even more like shards of broken glass as he comes closer, an image cast in light and shadow on the glass. I want to reach out and touch it, but I have a sick feeling that my hand will not melt the frost.
There is nothing I feel to make me fight this, and nothing I can grasp to make me fear it. The world outside can still touch me, though, and that is my last hope. No matter how much ice he builds between me and them, I although I was never a real part of it, I have been in the world too long to be lost completely. From time to time, things have touched me, changed me slightly. These were what kept the cold blue eyes away for so long, I know. I remember different blue eyes, somehow, though memories seem like they're part of a different person, and I am almost thankful. I almost wish I could see them again.
There, I know it now. For true, through the ice. If I let him win this, he will freeze the whole world until it falls to white ash and star dust around him while he laughs and can not care. I have nothing. I have always had nothing. If there is one thing I regret it is having touched others with this cold white. After tonight, it will never happen again.
On the distant horizon I can see another light coming, although I can't see from where. It seems familiar, though. Like an old friend I never had, long dead and buried and forgotten. It's come to erase what should never have been, and I embrace it. The eyes behind me still aren't scared, they never knew any emotion, but they glitter oddly. Perhaps I will give him the gift of one true emotion before final oblivion comes calling.
There are only seconds left, and there's something I have to do or it will all be for nothing. The light is coming fast now, though time is more or less stopped here. There is no time, and I turn around to face the man with the blue eyes as the room lights up around me. At last the shadows are gone, although where I go it matters nothing. I see something in his eyes that I can find no words for, and we have nothing to say, or to feel, or to live before we exchange one nothingness for another. If this is the only way to end it so be it. I look one last time into the iced eyes, and I turn away from myself to face the end.
My reflection is frightened, but I am not. I am nothing, but I am more than he ever was. Though I have only found empty acceptance in my soul, the shadow of other possibilities, I will not let the ice destroy me, or what I touch. As I look at the night one last time, the window shows me nothing and I will not run. At the end of everything, I can sleep.
The light comes, and I stand. I'll do whatever it takes to put an end to the haunting of the whitewashed halls, and to finally end the cold.
Even this.
A/N - Odd. Poor Rufus. And if you're wondering about the blue eyes he remembers reference, keep wondering.