pop culture of my heart

Notes:

A thing I noticed that people don't talk much about is SH1 characters' ambiguity. At a first, superficial glance, everybody seems to be good or evil, but there are shades of gray there that we tend to ignore.

Work Text:

"I'm sorry, I-" Lisa took a deep, shaky, stuttering breath, her shoulders slumping forward, inward, head lowered, the ends of her long, blonde hair annoyingly brushing the skin over her cheekbones. "I-I'm," she said, in a now quiet, choked-up voice, "sorry, child, I can't...I couldn't be stronger for you."

Her red-rimmed eyes barely touched the child's scarred face, terribly distorted by skin cooled back wrong, unnaturally before Lisa looked away sharply, sucking in a breath with the proof of her incomprehensible omission lying there, immovable, so damn fragile and vulnerable and small in that thin cot.

It was comprehensible to...Lisa wanted to live; she wanted the pain to end - her own pain.

She did care about Alessa, but not more than Lisa felt like she was hurting herself.

Her body rocked slowly forward and back, back and forth, softly like a broken clock, ticking away one inch just to return to the space before.

Her face distorted as she felt like crying, her lips pressing hard to be quiet, to not wake up her, the poor child.

Every time the child woke up, she would wake up in some amount of pain, even despite all the painkilling medication Lisa gave her when no one was looking.

It was opioids, Lisa's own stash sometimes.

She was addicted to White Claudia, but the methadone kept her cravings at bay for a few hours when it got too bad.

Lisa didn't know about much.

It was absolutely ineffable, absolutely impossible what was happening.

But what she did know was that they wanted to keep her in pain, that they thought it was their God's calling to make them innocent suffer for their own place in heaven.

Lisa thought it was ridiculous and inhuman, but she kept the thoughts to herself.

She was never upfront nor defended Alessa the way she deserved, the way she needed. As strongly as Lisa should!

She was too far into this, this...insanity.

Lisa wanted out. She didn't want to see this child ever again, to hear her weak moans of pain...

To see Alessa thrashing about in her sleep when...

When she seemed to dream, too vividly for comfort.

To have nightmares, that is.

Lisa once tried to wake her up once or twice; it never worked, and in a way, Lisa had hoped it didn't.

She was stuck between Alessa's pain and her own.

She couldn't... choose the child over her own sanity. Not that she was...sane at this point.

She wanted out; she wanted to hit--

No...

No, please, no!

I'm sorry, child. Lisa pressed her hands to her face and started to cry in silence, rocking again, slightly harder.

These days, it was just Lisa and her.

Suffering together.

In "silent companionship."

Lisa huffed softly.

They were going to die.

It would be all over.

It would be.

Some day, some day soon.

She needed to believe that.

No more Alessa.

Henry couldn’t understand that man. The man in his bathroom.

He was just there, staring at him from the hole in the wall.

What did he want?

His hands curled as he tried not to think of it as he stared at the door to said room.

Maybe he wouldn’t be able to use the bathroom ever again.

Would it last forever?

No, it couldn’t be.

He eyed the door with dread, feeling the need to pee out of nowhere.

No! No, no, no, please no.

He will hold it, it’s not that hard…for some time, it cannot be that hard. He had done it before.

Everybody did, didn’t they?

Well, he supposed.

It’s not like half of the globe’s population used diapers…or did old people and babies make half of the planet?

Nah, that’s stupid. That probably didn’t even make any sense.