Gasp

Rating: PG-13/T

Genre: Angst/Tragedy

Summary: For the angst_bingo challenge, prompt "Asphyxiation". The last few minutes of Nora's life as she suffocates.

Author's Note: I've always been partial to shedding some light on the other victims of the ritual in Shepherd's Glen. They seemed like fun places to explore.

Disclaimer: I don't own Silent Hill. It belongs to Konami/Vatra.

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"I'm sorry, Nora."

Nora awoke to breathlessness.

She'd had dreams before, the nasty kind where you woke up and for a split second felt like you couldn't breathe. The kind of sensation that felt like impending death, the ones that made your brain scream and your heart pound. The confusion was overwhelming as you tried to piece things together, desperate to fix whatever's wrong before you aren't able to anymore. And then, just like that, your lungs took in air and the nightmare was over. You were fine.

It took her maybe half a minute to realize that this wasn't a dream.

There was something tight, tight like a vice, closing around her neck. Something was pressing directly over the center of her throat, shutting her windpipe, no air could get in or out and wow, there was something light and buzzing inside her head as her brain began to starve from the lack of oxygen-

"This hurts me more than it hurts you."

Nora's eyes opened, but her room was dark and with the lack of air getting to the necessary facilities and the fact that it had to be pretty late at night, she couldn't tell immediately what was going on. If her brain had had the necessary oxygen, she would have immediately realized that objects don't just randomly clamp themselves over people's throats to choke them- It had to be a person.

Nora's eyes darted around furiously, trying to adjust to the dark whilst also starting to see colored dots dancing through the air. Her eyes landed on the Alice in Wonderland Disney movie poster hanging right above her bed, to her left, and wondered Is this the kind of thing that Alice saw when she fell down the hole? Could she catch her breath then?

Her thoughts were growing abstract, disjointed. She didn't know how long she'd been choked for or how long it took someone to black out from being choked. Or by what. Who. Who was doing this?

"It's for the good of the town."

That voice. Nora knew that voice. She'd known that voice all of her life, but she couldn't pin it down as her brain was spinning wildly left and right and up and down. Dimly, as darkness began to creep into the edges of her vision, she could feel her hands shooting out, feeling, grasping, weakly knocking at the very flesh-covered human thing that was on top of her. How could she not have felt that weight on her hips before? Someone was sitting on her, keeping her still.

But Nora's hands fell away easily, because there was no strength to keep them in place or focus to get a grip. Her eyes tried to fix on the face of the person above her, maybe she could figure out what was going on if she could connect that voice to a face. They were heavy. An adult. Their hands were large and squeezed so, so tightly, they were so strong, so, so…

The darkness crept further, and eventually there were only tunnels she could look down and see the scene in her room. Nora was slipping, falling down the rabbit hole as Dinah looked down at her from above…

"Goodbye, Nora."

In the last few seconds before the darkness swallowed her and she fell into the nightmarish hell of her Wonderland, Nora realized:

It's mom.

And I'm dead.

-End