I'm taking a break from The Hardest Part to bring you this; something that's been poking me over and over lately after going to the beach and watching an episode of that 'Malibu Vice' or whatever.
Spoilers! for Silent Hill 4's 'Eileen' ending. Just an interpretation of how Henry acted after his 'failure.'
None of this belongs to me but to Konami.
It's a bit rushed, so sorry. I just wanted to get it out of the way. I'll probably edit later.
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Wish You Were Here
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Two weeks… fourteen days… three-hundred and thirty-six hours… his head hurt too much from the constant drinking of alcohol to even estimate seconds…
He had always heard that if time didn't steal the pain away that whiskey and beer would. Well, he despised beer and had already drank all the wine he had bought the minute he got out of that Hell… so whiskey was the next best choice. Three days ago, he guessed, he remembered the large bottled he had stowed away in the bottom cabinet that, for some unknown reason, he hadn't recalled while walking through his apartment and seeing those… things crawl through the walls…
He was still consuming it, having 'carefully' divided it up so that he wouldn't have to venture out of his little room of self-guilt.
But it still hurt… as if just a half a second ago, he felt the mental stab of guilt and anguish thrust into his already troubled heart.
It seemed that no matter how much he drank, nothing could quell the pain of his failure…
Sometimes, when he was half-way sober, he thought of her while slipping his trembling fingers through his sweat-soaked brunet locks. She had had such a perfect smile… it had driven him to fight throughout their time together. Her soft, grateful gaze had been what kept him from jumping from some high place and letting his body crack horribly against the dirtied, rusted floor. And finally, it was her sweet, compassionate words that had whispered away the insanity that threatened to take hold of him. She was the barrier that had kept away the slimy grotesque fingers that wished to seduce him into a bloody world filled with carmine walls and horrid visions of people fluttering across the disgusting floor, crying out for a savior to take the pain away.
Henry felt that he should have at least tried to be one, but eventually, after everything began to cave in upon him… he stopped wanting to save those lost and tried to work on salvaging the sanity of a woman who he had secretly vowed to protect…
But he even failed in that 'small' task.
The cool, still half-full glass tilted slightly in his softening grip, letting a good bit of whiskey fall onto the floor, but it went unnoticed. He didn't care anymore… His drive for life was gone and if Sullivan stomped into the living room right then and shot him, Henry didn't think he would put up with a fight. Maybe a little one, since he was drunk and had no real control over himself, but then he would submit and die just to join her.
The brunet often wondered what life would be like if Ei… Ei… if she had lived. He wouldn't be drinking away the days with as much alcohol as he could find, that was for sure. Maybe he would have mustered up the courage of asking her out on a date… he had greatly desired to do so when they were walking through that living Hell, but at the time, it hadn't seemed quite the time to ask such a casual question. Then, the more his mind thought about it, wasn't there a man-eating corpse of a dog running after them with its long, fleshy tongue…?
Probably… he couldn't bring his mind to remember much after he started drinking so much…
… Maybe they would have gotten married… he almost choked on his swig of whiskey, but that blasted headache panged painfully in his skull when he came close to doing so…
Marriage? Him? … He didn't deserve such a happy ending…
Though… a pure, white wedding dress would seem so perfect on her… her two lithe hands carefully grasping a bouquet of white roses and azaleas as she walked down the aisle with the swishing sound of the dress filling the quiet chapel… Her smile would radiate and make the holy sanctuary seem to glow around him as she slowly approached and then they would stand hand-in-hand before the priest. They would recite their love and say their vows and 'I do's' before briefly kissing one another and leaving for their new happy life together…
…
It just made his heart hurt worse… if that was even possible.
The glass now fell to the carpet with a thump and a stain, but he didn't even glance to see the mess he had made. Tears of sorrow now fell from his exhausted emerald eyes and his throat tightened, which made his head hurt even more. But it didn't matter anymore to him; his heart was in even more pain…
All through his life, Henry figured that he would never find a wife, let alone a girlfriend. Women just seemed to scare him, especially the ones he found affection for. He was afraid of being humiliated and hurt and thus, he never could gulp down his fear and ask one of them to date him. Even Cynthia had scared him at first since she was the first thing he had seen in five days. But even if he had met her in a store or on the street somewhere, he probably would have felt the same feeling that she was one who 'loved for a little while before stomping your affection into the ground and leaving you with nothing.'
Absolutely nothing. She hadn't even left him with anything except nightmares of her bloodied ghost slithering to him before becoming vertical and jerking her limbs to stab his heart with her once-perfect hand…
He wouldn't have minded her coming and doing that… as long as she tore his heart away and kept him from reminiscing about… Ei… Eile-… her…
A sob exited his mouth miserably… He couldn't even think of her name his head hurt so much.
He was pathetic… If she was still alive, he wouldn't even be worth her time… let alone her adoration…
And yet he still would have loved her… and that made him even more pitiful…
-
Three more days passed… and he felt somewhat sober…
But he wasn't supposed feel sober… at all. He had drunk glass after glass, bottle after bottle until his eyes seemed to almost literally float about in his head. For over two weeks, he had immersed himself with only a little bit of food and water and a lot of alcohol… enough alcohol that he was sure that his alcoholicity would be so through the roof, he weould have been presumed to be nothing but the intoxicating liquid.
But no… today he woke with a massive headache and now his last glass of whiskey was not doing what is was supposed to do… The only thing that the drink was doing was washing down the disgusting taste of his own vomit he had thrown up only five minutes before his saddening discovery.
He wouldn't be able to last with out it… The whiskey was the only thing keeping him from tearing the apartment apart board-by-board… from screaming curses and yelling almost insane things to himself…
It was supposed to take away the memories of her death…
But now it wasn't.
Henry growled angrily. He doubt that any other alcoholic drink would affect him like whiskey did… but he couldn't go on with 'life' without some kind of stimulant to keep the major rush of emotional pain away… It would start seeping back through the cracks… slipping into his mind and stabbing him with images of his failure… his broken promise… his loss…
Eileen… Eileen… Eileen…
He began to scream, pounding his fists into the kitchen counter. The harsh motion made his head throb disagreeably, but he didn't pay any heed to his physical pain… He couldn't take it… She was tormenting him… deceiving him… mocking him… laughing at his melancholy and guilt while at the same time keeping that hand on his shoulder to compel him forward… all the while saying…
'Move on.'
But he wouldn't move on… He wasn't going to kowtow to her and let her win. He had cared for her too much to so easily flick his wrist and dispel him from his thoughts and life. No… she had been there with him… walking beside him… standing beside him… talking… smiling… though sadly…
His hands had stopped pounding against the cool, hard surface long enough for him to start rushing from cabinet to cabinet, praying that somewhere there was at least an ounce of alcohol to keep him from remembering… to keep him away from that ensanguined and psychotic reality he had treaded through with her… to keep him from going insane…
But he found none… and he fell to the kitchen floor in a sobbing heap of pity and regret, holding himself to keep what little of himself that was left together…
-
The next day… he was so exhausted he couldn't move… He had taken four Tylenol pills in the past six hours after he had woken up from a disturbed sleep with an agonizing headache and subconscious had gripped him time from time but he never slept enough to fulfill him.
And those locked-away nightmares had escaped and ran rampant in his mind, filling his thoughts with nothing more than death and failure, guilt and torment, and the loss of people he hardly knew but should have tried to save regardless…
He needed a shoulder to lean on, but she was no longer there. He needed someone to pour out everything gruesome detail to, but she laid six feet under the dirt at Ashfield's cemetery.
… Henry needed some alcohol that actually took him away from Room 302… but even there, Eileen could no longer help. He couldn't just start drinking excessively again and hope that after all everything, he could shut away the distressing reminisces that threatened him over and over again. 'Not again,' he would mentally whisper against them, 'Not again…'
But they never stopped… never ceased… never heeded that they were causing more problems than doing good… But that's what the past wanted; to break him into little fragmented pieces of his former, emotionally-controlled self and make him into a senseless sack of blood and flesh.
He could vaguely see her before him with her disgustingly cursed skin with blood-kissed bruises and puss dripping down from the worse of them. Her right arm still up in the makeshift sling and her gorgeous left eye covered by a bandage. She was limping… trying… frustratingly fighting against all formidable odds and yet she left him because he failed…
She had left him… like he had left her from time to time to clear the way of the twin-headed monsters and of the woman he had met in the subway… of the young man burned alive… of the watchman he had never even a chance to talk to… or of the man he once called 'neighbor.'
Now they had another added to their horrific 'collection' of bodies and souls and he was left all alone to sulk and moan over the losses that stacked up over time, overwhelming his down-trodden heart.
She was gone… he would never her again… No more were the soft 'hellos' or nods of acknowledgement in the hallway. No more were the times where they glanced at each other, wondering if there was something after the trauma. And no more were the instances of pain of her bloodied body sluggishly making her way through the metallic purgatory…
He let his hand slip over his chest, lying against the slow-beating heart, pondering if it had broken in half yet. But for all he knew, it was shattered into a million pieces lying across a tile of flesh and crimson… like she had left it. He couldn't blame Walter for his pain… though he did start it. Henry had been given a choice; kill the madman fast enough and save Eileen or kill the madman slow enough and cause Eileen's death…
And it was the latter that he was forced to choose…
He would have washed away the emotional distress with whiskey if he could still, but now he couldn't. If jumping out of the window of Room 302 would rip away his heart so that he was nothing more than an unfeeling doll, he would do so right at that very second. Even if crawling through that hole again and experiencing every single terror again would cause Eileen's memory to run away into oblivion… he would do so. Because all Henry really wished for now was that since nothing else was going to help get rid of his grief was that, somehow, someway, Eileen Galvin would step across the threshold of the door and beam at him with her bittersweet smile that was meant for no one else but him…
For all he wished was that she was there with him…