no_ufo_ending | [Victory Road] Ic Inbox

_{[She nods.]

[Different dogs, then.]

[She can't decide if Henry's sound more or less awful than her own. She'll settle on it being a tie.]}

Gotcha.

What happened then?

There was a girl...I'd seen her from my window before. She thought it was all a dream...and I did too for a minute.

_{[Henry makes a face.]}

She just...couldn't understand the danger we were in. Walter had picked her as part of the Sacraments...I found her again later with numbers carved into her chest.

_{[An unpleasant jolt runs down Heather's spine as she recalls the scattered letters she'd stumbled across down in the sewers-- and the body in the mall.]

[Innocent people who'd had the bad luck to get caught up in the flood of the Otherworld as it came rushing in.]

[It hadn't exactly been the same as Walter's hand-picked victims.]

[But close enough.]}

Is that what would've happened to you?

_{[Henry nods slowly, miserably, as he reaches up to trace numbers into his collarbone.]}

I'm number twenty one, the last part of the ritual.

... We're not gonna let that happen to you.

You might be on your own back there, but here you've got backup.

_{[And not just any backup-- he's got a godslayer. She's not about to say as much out loud, but he'll know what she means.]}

Thanks.

_{[It's really nice to have the house behind him. He wishes that he had this kind of support back home...and the one person he had started to be something like friends with disappeared.]}

It was strange, though. That world was full of holes and every time I crawled through one, I woke up in my bed. I started to think maybe it was a dream...I didn't need to eat or drink. It was like time had stopped. My ceiling fan fell.

I felt like...Walter was leading me through some sort of carnival dark ride, making me look at all these different things. The orphanage in the woods. The prison on the lake. Every time I went somewhere new, someone else died.

_{[She nods.]

[The Otherworld had felt like that, sometimes-- like the town itself had been laying out a path before you. Showing you just what you needed to know.]

[But that had always just been a feeling. For Henry, it might well have been literal.]}

_{[Suddenly, Henry looks up, his brows furrowed with a sudden realization.]}

I think...the only person he wasn't intending to kill...was Mr. Sunderland. Out of the whole building.

_{[--now THAT is a name Heather hasn't heard in a LONG time, and she looks up from the grungy notebook.]}

Sunderland?

Was his first name 'James', by any chance?

_{[He glances over, brows still set in frustration. WHY DID UMBILICAL CORD GEORGE GET SPARED AND NOT THE REST OF THEM?]}

Oh...no, his name was Frank. Frank Sunderland. He was the super. He...found Walter's umbilical cord when his parents abandoned him in my apartment. And kept it.

Frank? Huh...

_{[But any further speculation on whether or not this 'Frank' had any relation to James or his wife is cut off pretty much immediately by what Henry says next.]}

--what? He WHAT?

_[EW?]

It was in this wooden box in his room. It was--cursed, I think. When I looked at it, I felt a piercing pain shoot through my skull.

_{[Now he was wringing his hands as he remembered his adventure. It was impossible to tell the story in order.]}

I met a man in the prison...the guard. I found notes. So many kids, before Walter even, died there. I found their beds...maybe I found them. The monsters, I mean...and he watched them. Eventually I found him drowned.

But the people--the people I met before they died, they all returned as ghosts even worse than the ghosts that followed me in the subway.

_{[Heather lapses back into silence to listen.]

[Even more than the nastiness of hearing about some weird old dude keeping an umbilical cord in a box, hearing about the dead children hits her hard.]

[She'd always known there were other kids in the cult beyond just the ones of the people in Dahlia's immediate circle. There were Order-run orphanages, after all.]

[Ugh.]}

... Ghosts are mean, gnarly fuckers.

_{[Had she told him about the time one pushed her in front of a train? ... Probably.]}

_{[He nods wearily.]}

If I had become a ghost because of Walter...I would have probably been the same. I think Walter was a ghost as well. He had to be--both of him.

_{[Here, Henry drew himself up, suddenly wondering why Walter had manifested here as the scary long-haired man and not the innocent little boy.]}

The ghosts made through the ritual...must have been special. They could reach into my heart, knock me down...that must have been how he dug up his body--how he planted himself in the wall, filled himself with the tubes...but how he became two ghosts, I'm not sure. There was another Walter. A little boy I spoke to...he didn't seem to know me.

_{[Another Walter. A younger one.]

[Not a circumstance that was at all likely for physical beings, even though it was possible (Heather of all people would know that)... but if they were ghosts, that explained it. It had to be easier that way, when the fragments didn't need vessels of their own.]}

Souls can be split apart.

It doesn't happen often, but it can.

Maybe it was the same thing with Walter.

_{[He turns to look at Heather curiously. She seems to know quite a bit about ghosts--and while he knows she went through hell like he did, he didn't expect her to study the place.]}

Why does it happen?

Why?

_{[... Hmn.]

[How to explain it without... derailing Henry's narrative entirely. Because while if she was going to spill those personal details to ANYBODY, it was her big-brother-in-arms, this... wasn't the time.]}

Well... I mean, trauma, for one. It's not easy or pleasant.

But-- okay, for example, some of the... shady occult stuff the Order does-- or did-- it involves the human soul. But for it to work, the whole soul has to be there. You can't do stuff like summon God with like, half a soul. Won't work.

So I mean... at least in the case I know, the soul was... split. To stall them. To make it impossible for them to finish the ritual until the soul had been put back together.

I doubt that's what happened to Walter since it sounds like he was a willing participant, but, I mean, it's an example.

Edited 2016-12-19 11:33 (UTC)

That would explain...why he captured his younger self. If he needed to be whole.

_{[As much as Henry read about the ritual, he felt he still didn't fully grasp how it worked. It was weird to think that something like his heart or his soul could be a part of that.]}

It was such a long day, Heather...

_{[Captured his younger self? GOD, what a weird thought.]

[Her memories of being two separate people at the same time are jumbled and confusing, and mostly scrambled by time and repression. It's all a big, confusing blur-- especially in Silent Hill. When Alessa and Cheryl had come back together. But they'd also been two children... not a grown man and a little boy.]}

... Yeah.

I feel you.

_{[Henry's stomach gave a forlorn growl. He'd spent so much energy trying to kill a man and screaming in jail and vibrating violently and now he was starving.]}

But...you understand why I have to kill him now. Right? I'm not...I'm not crazy. I know what happened to him was terrible, but I can't forgive him. He killed two kids...

_{[Heather takes in a long breath before she answers.]

[Because... well, yeah. She understands.]

[But there are also... a lot of reasons why what Henry's proposing won't do anything. Not here. Hell, here it could just make things worse.]

[Claudia had deserved death for what she'd done too, after all.]

[But Heather had learned the hard way that it just wasn't that simple.]}

... Henry, you know nobody stays dead here.

That's like, one of the first things that everybody found out in this place when someone tried to kill another person.

You black out and get warped to the nearest Center. That's all that happens.

I know!

_{[It comes out as a snap--too fast for Henry to reign in. He instantly looks guilty and averts his eyes.]}

I know but...it's what I'm supposed to do. The man in the ceiling, he told me that I have to kill him. Over and over. He said it like ten times. Eileen was there.

I was supposed to do stuff back home, too.

But it's different here.

Back there, killing Walter would probably... you know, end it.

But here he'd just come back and YOU'D wind up arrested. Potentially over and over if you just kept doing it. And it wouldn't change the fact that he's here.

_{[Henry's breathing quickens. He can't do his job. He can't do his job he's been psyching himself up for for the past six years.]}

How many times has any one person died here? How do we know we don't have a set number of lives? I just can't--I can't just sit and do nothing. I've been doing nothing for ages. I want to keep you all safe. He--his influence-- it seeped into my apartment--the clock, the television, my fridge. There was a dead cat in my fridge. All the running water turned to blood. I can't let that happen.

I-- I don't know.

_{[She can't say anything solid, because truth be told, she's only ever heard of someone actually dying here once. She doesn't even remember who it was-- just who killed them, and the result.]}

But look, you don't have to do nothing.

I'm just saying... unless he's like, actively trying to hurt us, killing him here probably isn't the answer.

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