Chapter Text
I woke up warm.
Not sweaty — warm. A forgotten feeling. And not because I’d died, or landed in hell, or some other poetic bullshit. No. It was the sun. Real sun. Not the murky glare of a crooked lamp or the jaundiced flicker of some rotten hallway, but actual, full, clean daylight.
I got up.
Emma was gone.
The couch was empty.
The Radiohead vinyl had stopped spinning, and for a moment, I thought I’d dreamed the whole thing.
I walked to the window.
The house sat high, perched on a hill that looked down over the town — or what was left of it. Down below, Silent Hill had vanished. Nothing but fog. Thick, unmoving. A milky slab sealing everything beneath it.
But up here, on this hill, the sun was shining.
The sky was blue. The air, crisp. The silence, almost sweet. Unreal.
Then — the smell of coffee, from the kitchen.
A mirage, maybe. Or a dream engineered to soothe me, sedate me, make me forget.
And it was working.
I thought back to last night.
Henry’s call.
Reagan.
His death.
Pure evil, devoured by itself.
And me? Hero or butcher?
Maybe Emma was right. Maybe a gas leak had fried my brain.
Maybe even Love and Henry, the way they appeared in that dream… were just rotting scraps of my guilt.
And now, this.
Sun. Warmth.
Emma.
Your voice, your smile.
What if you really were… “you”?
Maybe it was love at first sight.
Maybe, for the first time, I didn’t need to watch, or own, or control.
Maybe.
Or maybe it was all part of the punishment.
⸻
Reyes didn’t believe in fate.
He believed in numbers. In prints. In phone records and cold bodies stuffed in trunks. He was a good cop. One of the few left. But even good cops screw up, sometimes.
The motel was called the Norman. A rat trap, stinking of mold, with crusty sheets and carpet that clung to your shoes. Reyes paid in cash and left early, dropping twenty bucks on the empty reception desk. Outside: snow. Silence. The town was watching him, without being seen.
Ten years ago, he’d been stationed in Silent Hill. Hunting a monster — a serial killer obsessed with Walter Sullivan. He found symbols. Rituals. Letters scrawled in blood. But the real horror came after.
There was a cult. Supposedly modern. Religion 4.0, his colleagues said: money in exchange for power, bliss, and pseudo-spiritual garbage. But Reyes saw something else.
There was rot.
Something older. Hungrier.
He found things. He wanted to go deeper.
Then came the offer: a bag full of cash.
A choice — cover it all up and pay off his junkie brother’s debts, or keep digging.
Reyes hesitated. Then said yes.
Michael and Consuelo, his partners, said no. They kept digging into the filth.
And the bottom swallowed them whole.
They were never found.
Now, Reyes was coming back for Joe Goldberg. Or whoever he’d become.
Maybe he wanted justice.
Maybe redemption.
Or maybe he was just looking for a place to die an honest man.