James surged back to life, his clammy as they reached for a gun that was no longer there, and if the world had drifted before, now it spun, swinging wildly on an axis he couldn't discern. This wasn't where he should've been - this wasn't where he'd been when he'd shut his eyes. That place had been hot and sweat-smelling, the air thick with someone else's breath and the cloying smell of pine sap soaked into unwashed clothes. The walls had pulsed, throbbed, shuddered like skin, and Angela...she'd been so quiet there. She'd been so quick, streaking past him like a shadow, always close enough to grab but never catch.

Now, he watched her tear into the sad, slick thing on the ground, the television she'd thrown first canted at a strange angle atop the creature's broken head. (What he'd taken for a head, anyway. What his mind had insisted was a head for the sake of his sanity.) She kicked its bedframe bones and stomped at the masses quivering beneath its skin; she fell to her knees and clawed through it, ripping and shredding each miserable membrane with her fingernails, her fingertips, resorting to using her teeth when still it wasn't enough.

Taken aback, he leaned further into the safety of his corner, relying on the walls to hold him steady. It had all happened so fast - too fast - and caught in the swirling haze between her newfound brutality and his confusion, there wasn't anything he could bring himself to do but stand and watch.

When had they switched places? When had the places switched?

Why was he suddenly the one so afraid of her?

When she was satisfied with its destruction, Angela sat back on her haunches and screamed once more - a horrendous sound, a howl of agony and rage that caught in his own chest before it shuddered, shattered, gave way to a child's wail of terror. She lurched forward, supported only by her hands, and as she retched and heaved and forced herself to sick up whatever bits of the beast were still caught between her teeth, James came back to himself enough to understand he was witnessing a moment not meant for him.

And yet...there he was.

The discomfort of the moment crept in like a fever. He'd never been good at this, never known what to say or do to make things hurt less. Mary was proof-positive of that, he thought; if he'd had any doubts about that, Laura had stomped them flat beneath her shoe. Still, he had to do something, because if he listened to her screaming like that for any longer, he thought his skin might separate from his bones. His brain might swell, busting through his skull like a rotten eggshell. He might lose what was left of his mind. He might grab her, shake her, scream right back in her face to stop, stop, for the love of God, just fucking shut up already!

"I think it's dead," he forced himself to say. "Are you o - "

He hadn't taken a step towards her - not a single one - but she recoiled anyway, wrenching her whole body away from him. "Don't touch me," she spat, her eyes black fire in the dim light of the abandoned bedroom, "don't even look at me! I know what you're doing! I know what you want!"

A familiar refrain. So familiar, in fact, that he reeled away in much the same way she had, the crown of his head bumping the walls in his effort to escape. "I-I don't...I don't know what you think's going on, but I...I just want to help, Angela. Look at - "

"Help," she sneered, baring her teeth as she glared at him (a conscious effort, if the heaving of her shoulders was any sign). "Do you think I'm that dumb? You think I'm that stupid?! You think I'm going to believe anything that comes out of your mouth?"

Stunned, it was all he could do to stare, to jaw at the air. "I killed that...that thing!" he managed, holding a shaking hand out to the wilted form on the ground. "It...it was after you! I stopped it! I...I..."

"Saw him," Angela finished for him, her own jaw working strangely, as if some muscle had come loose in all her retching. She didn't move for a while, didn't budge from that spot on the floor where bile and blood clotted and sank into her clothes as her legs, no doubt, numbed and pricked with pins and needles. No, she stayed there, motionless, her eyes boring holes through every bit of him, and just before the weight of it became too much for him to handle, she eased herself onto her feet.

"You saw him," she said again, speaking slowly, each syllable a stab. "You saw Daddy. You didn't see anything else, not one other thing...but you saw Daddy. You saw my daddy."

"I - "

“…so lemme see if I’m understanding you correctly. You boys think the reason I was raised by my granddad and never knew my parents wasn’t on account of them getting killed and ate in a place where lots of people got killed and ate, but because my mother was secretly a fortune teller in a traveling circus show who preferred the company of werewolves to her only begotten son. This would be the same traveling circus show that you turned into fireworks some nearly sixty years later, of course. And you came to this earth-shaking revelation after realizin’ that me and this fortune teller both got grey hair. And wear necklaces.” He set his hands against the check-in desk, settling his weight there. “That about the gist of it?”

Bobby frowned belatedly, turning to his brothers. “It sounded way worse when Chris was sayin’ it.”

He could see Chris and Travis both preparing to pop, so before that could happen, Jack smacked the counter and stood. “I’m gonna go out on a limb here,” he said, suspicions confirmed when he hit the table and not one, not two, but all three Hacketts jumped like startled cats. “None of you’ve been sleepin’ lately, huh? Bad dreams, I take it?”

“Fuck you, Jack! Fuck you! This is about you bringing this shit down on our heads, not—”

Ignoring him wholesale, Jack turned to the wall of key pegs, considering the rooms for a second before grabbing three of the rings. “Here’s what I think. Whatever’s going on in that house? In that camp? That shit ain’t good for you. Ain’t healthy. So you boys’re gonna take these here keys, you’re gonna go unlock the rooms they belong to, and you’re gonna catch yourselves some shuteye. How’s that sound?”

With a flick of his wrist, he sent the first set of keys flying. It’d been an easy throw and an easier catch, but Travis didn’t so much as unfold his arms, so they just sorta smacked his chest before clattering to the floor.

“Point taken, Sheriff. But I’m not kidding around. I know better than anyone that when this kinda unnatural shit starts up, your brain gets to going too. It can make you nervous. Paranoid. You start seeing connections where there ain’t any, and everything looks like a puzzle piece you just gotta jam into the right spot to make it all go away.” He caught Chris’s eye and tossed him a set of keys same as he had Travis.

Only for them to be batted to the ground. Chris smacked them out of the air like he was waving a fly away, still fixing him with a stinging look.

Jack soldiered on. They weren’t the only stubborn ones in the family, after all. “That kinda panic’ll get you dead. It kills your reaction time, kills your thought process, kills your immune system, kills everything. I can see you three’re riled up, but you’re gonna go sleep, all right? You’re gonna sleep and let that fever break, and when you wake up fresh as daisies, we can all have us a good laugh about this fortune teller bullshit. How’s that?” He tossed the third set of keys and Bobby, God bless him, caught them one-handed. Jack allowed himself a moment of relief.

But that moment was short-lived. As one, Travis and Chris shot him a look, and Bobby dropped the keys to the floor same as them.

There was a feeling that grabbed him deep in his guts then, but he chose not to put a name to it. He didn’t have time to waste on that. More to the point, he didn’t want to admit how much of a fool he’d been for letting it slip in unannounced like that.

He wished he could say that did it, that the sound of her voice was enough to flip some magic switch inside of him, but...well. Maybe it had been, once. Things had changed, though, life was different now, and while there would always be a part of him soothed and comforted by the shape of her words, the bourbon had beaten her to it tonight. Today. This morning? Hell, he wasn't even sure.

James rubbed his eyes, but the thought of opening them was still too much. He pinched the phone between his ear and shoulder, pressing the heels of his hands hard against his eyelids until his vision seemed to sparkle. "I'm fine," he said, and he'd give himself this much at least - he'd managed to sound halfway convincing while saying it. "How are you? It's early for you to be up, isn't it?" Maybe not as convincing as he'd hoped, on second thought. "Is everything all right?"

The line was quiet. Not perfectly so, but quiet enough for him to notice the absence of the usual sounds, the beeps of the monitors, the hiss of oxygen from her cannula, the low, distant chattering of the nurses and doctors as they went about their lives acting as though hers wasn't ending.

"...Mary?" he tried, his head far too heavy to even attempt sitting up. "Hey, talk to me. What's going on over there? Is everything - "

"Why?"

His stomach dropped. The shame, the guilt, it all came creeping back to him, slithering through the fog of his grogginess. It was the conversation he'd spent all of last night avoiding, the conversation he'd drowned himself in shitty whiskey to escape. They'd had it so many times, of late, replayed it in an endless, unwinnable loop, and there they were again, taking up their parts, same as ever: Her, the victim; him, the monster. He wondered how many times they could rewind this tape before the celluloid snapped from the heat.

"Mary, I - " he began, then realized he hadn't been able to come up with a good excuse when sober, much less hungover and half-asleep, feeling like something dredged up out of a lake. So he pivoted. Deflected. Bought himself a little more time, despite knowing full well it might be more than she had to give. "I'm coming to see you, all right? I am. Work's just been crazy, and my dad's been calling, and - "

"That's not what I meant." Something about the way she said it sent a chill through him, starting at the notch of his collarbone and moving down, down, down until it bisected him like a lover's caress.

Despite himself, he shivered. Why had he let himself drink so much last night?

"I don't...um..." He wracked his brain for what she'd meant, what she might've been referring to, but everything behind his eyes felt rusted over and sharp. He squeezed his eyes shut tighter against the light coming in from the drapes, the bright red splash of his eyelids, and after a moment, it came to him. "We've been over this. The doctor said you can't travel. I'm sorry - you know I am - but the drive to Silent Hill is bad enough on its own. To get to the hotel, there's a boat ride on top of that, and you're in no condition to - "

"No, James," Mary interrupted him, and suddenly her voice went flat. Robotic. It seemed to blend into the ambient static of the line, an electrical hum only mimicking his wife. It distorted, shattered, tore like old bedclothes being fed into an industrial grinder, "Why did you kill - "

He sat up with a gasp, a sudden jolt startling him back into the land of the living. His eyes snapped open. The events of the day slotted neatly back into place.

In the darkness of what had once been their bedroom, on the stripped and soiled mattress that had once been their bed, James sat back against the headboard and remembered why he'd started drinking that night. He looked to the window (the lacy drapes shut tight the way Mary had always liked), looked to the bedside table (her glass of water still beaded with condensation beside her pill caddy), and, after a brief moment of contemplation, yanked the phone cord out of the wall.

WHAT I LEARNED IN BOATING SCHOOL IS...

so i'm sure it's a story i've told before, but when i was writing t(a), there was sort of a perfect storm of terrible going on in my life. iiiiiiii had just realized i was capital-s Sick and life was changing because of that; i was considering leaving grad school because i was Sick (this later became 'i dropped out of grad school mid-phd dissertation' lmao); and i was dealing with a pretty, uh, let's say volatile end to a longterm friendship.

things were, in a word, rough.

and then something happened. i was in the middle of a presentation one of my labmates was giving, and i just started writing. "i just have a really good feeling about this year," hannah said, and sam snorts and asks, "oh yeah?" and that was, like...it. suddenly i was CONSUMED, and the moment i got home from work, i was outlining like there was no tomorrow. by the time t(a) was done, my life was...very different from where it started. very, very, very different.

so. what did i learn from/during/while/because of writing this fic?

1. major life changes are fucking scary. sometimes they are fucking scary every step of the way. but. BUT. someone else has had that experience before. and if you're willing to be open and honest about what you're going through, you're eventually going to find someone who's walked that path before, and it's going to make you feel a little less lonely, if absolutely nothing else.

2. things that hurt are not ALWAYS the end of the world. as part of one of the things i listed above, suddenly i had to move ao3 accounts, and at the time this felt...very much like the end of the world, i will admit lmaoooooooo obviously it wasn't, and i was SO lucky that there were people out there who enjoyed the first few chapters of t(a) enough that they LOOKED FOR IT once i moved and started posting again, but god i was gutted for a hot second.

3. everyone is going through it somehow. everyone. period. end of sentence. i think it's easy for us to look at other people - especially when we're experiencing hardships of our own - and think 'man they've got it all together.' but everyone has their thing, yknow? everyone is dealing with something, and, again, if you're open and honest about what YOU'RE going through, other people WILL come and help you get through it. you'll help them too ;)

4. if you tell a story/create something that means something to YOU, it will resonate with other people. it's so easy to get caught up in stats. in hits/faves/kudos/views/bookmarks/whatthefuckevers. it is SO easy to fall down that hole. but. at the end of the day. if you put your heart into a project - if you put YOURSELF into it - and you don't shy away from putting that much of your heart on display, the right people will find it. and they will be moved by it. and you will be moved by their responses to it, in turn. every single time someone tells me t(a) affected them in some way, i am genuinely moved beyond words, because it was a project i wrote for ME. to get ME through some shit. the idea it could help anyone else even a LITTLE bit is just...idk man it's a lot. :')