Heavy Downpour 8U

[keyrack]

WHO Murphy Pendleton (keyrack) and Agent Norman Jayden (nahmanjayden)
WHAT While closing the files for the Origami Killer case, Norman Jayden begins to suspect that a boy named Charlie Pendleton was the Origami Killer's first victim, and goes to Maine to speak to his father about his son's technically unsolved murder.
WHEN Some time after the Origami Killer case is closed, and after Murphy escapes from Silent Hill and Sewell goes to prison.
WHERE Murphy's garage


Murphy loved working with his hands. The feeling of the tangible things like metal and tools under his fingers reminded him that he was alive, that the world was still concrete and that he had not faded into nothingness in that horrible town. And so, it made perfect sense to him to rent a small garage after he was able to come out of hiding, after Sewell was convicted for what happened to Frank. The thought of going back to Boston was tempting, but there were too many memories. It was really on a whim that he ended up settling down in Maine, where his only real friend was. Officer Cunningham was the only person he interacted with much on a steady basis, and he was expecting her to come by today, so when he heard footsteps, he tightened a bolt a bit more and craned his neck so his voice would carry better from under the Impala he was working on.

"Just a second!" he called out, and then went back to the stubborn vehicle. "Under the car back here. Just be a minute." Today was a sunny day, and the light carried under the car from the open garage door; he'd wanted to let in a little light and take advantage of the good spring weather. Though occasionally the pollen made him sneeze, it was still nice to get some fresh air. It also made it easier to work with all the light that came in, and he was able to finish up with the muffler quicker than normal. Which made it so he was able to slide out on the creeper only moments after his visitor arrived.

"Sorry about that," he muttered, grabbing for a rag and wiping some of the grease from his hands. There was still some on his face and on his neck, but he had no way of knowing. "Glad you could make it. Figured maybe we could--" and that was when he looked up and saw an unfamiliar face rather than Officer Cunningham's.

Well, shit.

"Shit. I thought you were someone else. Here to pick up a car?" he was still sitting down on the creeper and he stood, tucking the grease stained rag into his pocket. For a moment he thought the man was the owner of the Chevy he'd just finished last night, but he was pretty sure the man had come in in overalls every other time he'd met him. This guy... didn't look like someone who'd bring a car to a dumpy little one-man auto shop. He was wearing a nice suit.

Comments

[keyrack]

While Murphy was nahmally not prone to staring, he kept his eyes on Norman as he wiped away the blood and then continued to focus on the road. There was something off about him, in his smile that was so forced it was painful and the way he gripped the wheel. Not only was Murphy curious, he was concerned. They were driving buddies at the moment, and if Norman was going to have some sort of seizure on the road he didn't want it to be a surprise.

"You feelin' okay?" he asked, glancing around the car. "Need to pull over? You don't look so good." More accurately, he looked like shit, but Murphy was prone to being polite to law enforcement. To anyone who didn't know the circumstances of his imprisonment, it would probably seem ironic.

[nahmanjayden]

Norman nodded, bringing his hand back up to catch another drip. This was bad. This was very, very bad. He gripped the steering wheel tightly with one hand, the other clenched on the seat next to him. His knuckles were white and he could see that his skin was becoming a sickly pale shade. Why the hell did he have to start taking it in the first place? He looked like a walking corpse half the time and he felt like one, too.

"Yeah, I'm.. .I'm fine." He wasn't sure if he believed that himself, but maybe Murphy would. "It's nothin'."

[keyrack]

Still watching the agent rather suspiciously, Murphy noticed the white of his knuckles, heard the shaking of his voice and saw it in his hands. And there it was, his nose bleeding even more. Shit, what was even going on with this guy. Murphy gave him a look that didn't appear completely convinced.

"Okay," he responded, a bit skeptical. "If you need to stop..." letting the words trail off, he looked back out the windshield. The road was hard to see with the driving rain, and it made him nervous.

[nahmanjayden]

Hitting the brakes a bit harder than was necessary, Norman let the car ease to a stop, pulling over to the side of the road. There was no way he could drive like this - they'd both be smeared across the pavement before they ever made it to the airport. Staring at the steering wheel, he tried to think of some excuse; some way to get a moment alone. Just a moment, that's all he needed.

"Um, Mistah Pendleton, you know about cars, right? Would you mind, um, checking the back tire? It feels... low." It was a poor excuse but if Murphy agreed, it would give him enough time to take care of this. He would resist it someday, for long enough to actually make a lasting difference. But right now they were on the side of the road in a rain storm and they really needed to get to Boston. There was no time for that now.

He turned off the car, looking at Murphy in anticipation.

[keyrack]

Yes, Murphy knew plenty about cars. He did run a garage, after all. But that didn't mean he was happy about the notion of going out into the pouring rain to check the tire which felt fine, mind you. Norman wasn't an idiot, but he was no mechanic, and as reluctant as he would normally be to think so, he was sure he was better off trusting his own instincts and knowledge than Norman's. Especially if it would save him from having to go out there in that rain needlessly.

"Yeah, I do. It feels fine to me," glancing out at the rain and then back at Norman, he gave the man a long and concerned look. "You sure you're okay? You look like you're gonna pass out."

[nahmanjayden]

"Oh, uh, yeah. I'm fine." He lied, feeling the tachycardia begin. It brought a pain to his chest and he swallowed at nothing in an attempt to relieve the pain. His throat was dry as the Sahara and he only succeeded in letting out a rasping cough. "Are you sure, 'cause... it feels a little low over heah." This wasn't working, god damn it, but he couldn't think of anything else.

"Hey, I'll just go check on it myself. No problem." Going out in the rain for a few minutes was better than this. He could barely see the road with this rain and now his vision was starting to blur. They weren't going anywhere if he didn't take some. Just a little bit.

[keyrack]

Murphy wasn't entirely sure he believed him, and he raised an eyebrow at the other man and eyed him rather suspiciously before he granted him amnesty in the form of looking away. Murphy's stare wasn't a good one to be on the other end of.

"I'll check it," he said quickly with a shake of his head and a wave of his hand, reaching for the door handle. Norman was already driving and he'd also had to wait outside for Murphy in the rain. He could at least set his mind at ease by checking out the tire. "Two seconds. I'll take a look."

Out in the rain, Murphy didn't even bother wrapping his arms around himself to keep warm, just walked to the back of Norman's side of the vehicle and knelt beside the tire, trying not to get mud on his shoes. No, the tire looked fine. A frown, and he rose back to his feet and headed back for the car.

[nahmanjayden]

Moving quickly in the minuscule amount of time he had, Norman pulled the small phial from his pocket. Inhaling the life-giving blue powder through the perforated lid, he quickly replaced it in his pocket.

Swiping underneath his nose with the back of his hand, he looked in the rearview mirror to ensure that no traces of the substance remained on his skin. He really didn't look good. White as a sheet and red-eyed, he looked more dead than alive.

Sighing out, he leaned his head back on the seat as the tingling euphoria started to course through his veins. The shaking in his hands was already dying down when he heard the passenger's side door open.

[keyrack]

Shutting the door behind him, Murphy came into the car shivering and smelling like a wet dog, evidence of the weather outside clinging to his shirt and hair. "Looked fine," he told Norman, putting his seat belt back on and leaning his back against the seat. "Seemed like it was riding okay. Maybe you were imagining it."

And then he gave Norman another suspicious look. Because there was definitely something off about this guy.

[nahmanjayden]

He gave a nervous laugh, worried that Murphy somehow knew what he'd done while he was gone. "Yeah, maybe. I guess so." He turned back toward the steering wheel, inhaling hard through his nose to ease the discomfort the drug always brought. But it was nothing compared with the deep euphoria and warmth it brought inside. He could deal with the nosebleeds.

"Sorry I made ya go out there, Mistah Pendleton. I shoulda just gone myself."

[keyrack]

Murphy waved a hand dismissively. "Forget it," he responded, shaking his head. "You offered, I said I'd go. You were already out in the rain earlier, I wasn't." It was his way of extending a bit of friendliness even as he watched Norman out of the corner of his eye, heard him sniff heavily.

Cocaine?

Murphy had never used drugs, but he wasn't naive, either.

[nahmanjayden]

There was an undeniable tension in the car as he started up the engine again, not even looking Murphy's way. Even if he'd wanted to look at him, shame and the edge from the drug kept his eyes to himself. Well, to the road.

"Well, thanks anyway." He tried to keep his voice upbeat.

He eased the vehicle back into the street, signalling but doing it a bit too late to make a difference. What's it matter. There was no one on the road anyway.

He drove in silence for a while, not bothering to glance at the green signs indicating their location as he turned onto the stretch of highway between this city and the next.

[keyrack]

There was something heavy to the air Murphy didn't understand, didn't want to think about. He definitely wasn't going to ask about it. Norman deserved his privacy just as much as Murphy deserved his own, and he certainly wouldn't take kindly to have it threatened. He would bristle and lash out and be angrier than he had any right to be, and while he was sure Norman's reaction would be much less embarrassing than his own, he didn't have any place at all seeing what it would be in the first place.

He noticed Norman wasn't obeying traffic laws, but Murphy was the last person in the world justified in giving any sort of auto-related law advice. And besides, he'd done worse just last week, he was sure. Silently, he sat and enjoyed the ride as best he could, glancing at Norman every now and then and otherwise enjoying the scenery.

"Long ride," he commented. "Hope you're good at staying entertained."

[nahmanjayden]

No, no, no. The last thing Norman was good at was staying entertained. He gave a small, condensed laugh and continued staring ahead. He drummed incessantly on the steering wheel with his driving hand as his mind wandered off on its own again. Like a child at the mall, he could rarely control where his thoughts went, or keep them focused on one thing. If it wasn't work related, that is.

Triptocaine barely affected him anymore. True, he still needed it. Still felt its euphoric effect. But now when he took it he could still function like a normal person. In fact, it was the only way he could do that.

It felt like an accomplishment to be able to take such a powerful drug and be able to act as if he was completely sober but he knew that was only because it was a part of him now. And that was definitely not an accomplishment. That meant that it was only a matter of time before the overuse took its toll on him. Norman would be surprised if he made it to forty.

His thoughts were broken by the sight of a figure lying in the road ahead of them. He slammed down on the breaks but the rain made the road too slick to stop in time. Seeing that it was a boy lying there in the road, he veered the car off the road to avoid hitting it.

"Shit!"

As the car swerved toward the highway shoulder, the headlights fell on white petals.

[keyrack]

There was something to be said for long silences. Murphy could learn a lot about someone from them. It was clear to him, even without having the profiling skills Norman had, that the other man was impatient as all hell. Well, shit. Another Cunningham. Not that she wasn't good company, but still...

Out of his thoughts, Murphy crashed into reality when he heard Norman's cry, and he shouted himself, arms coming up over his head and gripping the back of the seat behind him uselessly as they flew toward the shoulder, hyroplaning on the warm and wet asphalt. The last thing he was aware of before his head smacked the widow was the sight of something white. A flower. On the chest of the small body lying in the middle of the road.

[nahmanjayden]

The car didn't stop at the shoulder. Rather, it slid down the thirty or forty degree incline that lied beyond it. There was no railing on this part of the road, god only knew why, and the vehicle tumbled down until it slammed into a thick tree trunk about half way down.

Norman felt a sharp pain in his left arm and the left side of his rib cage as he was slammed against the side of the car. The window broke, spewing a few pieces of glass wasn't this supposed to be safety glass and then there was blood. Not an alarming amount but still blood. It trickled from his face and from a separate little gash on his arm.

Dazed but still functioning, he looked at Murphy. Was he dead? No, just out cold probably. Or even just in shock. He shook him, looking for some response as his eyes moved to the bloodied windshield where Murphy's head must have struck it. "Mistah Pendleton?"

Calm down, head wounds always bleed a lot. It might not be that bad. He shook him again, starting to panic even more. "Mistah Pendleton!"

Oh god, and what about that kid? In the road. He looked like... no, that was impossible. He must have been seeing it wrong. But he needed to help him. That kid could be alive but not for long if another car came by.

Giving up on waking the man, who he'd determined was alive, he tried the door handle, then gave a hard kick to the windowpane and broke through. Then he was out. Out in the rain.

He winced as he felt an unexpected pain in his left leg but then steadied himself. He stood in the rain and looked up the incline.

[keyrack]

It was quite a few moments before Murphy could really function. He was perfectly aware of Norman shaking him, of him shouting his name, but he simply couldn't react. He couldn't even move. All he could do was lie there and bleed, try to ignore the throbbing in his head before he finally managed to come to completely, opening his eyes.

There was broken glass and blood everywhere. In a daze, Murphy moved, feebly unbuckling his seat belt. His door had been ripped off in the crash, and as soon as the belt was undone he was deposited into the mud, face first. Groaning and covered in blood, Murphy looked around in the rain and caught sight of Norman up ahead of him and limped in his direction, noting the throbbing pain in his side and head.

"Agent Jayden!" he called over the sound of the rain. "I'm okay! I'm coming! What about the boy! Is he--"

[nahmanjayden]

Norman turned, relieved to see that Murphy was alright and able to stand up. He felt blood trickle down his temple from somewhere underneath his hair, or maybe it was rain. He couldn't tell and right now it didn't matter.

"Mistah Pendleton, thank god." He sighed out a bit of relief. But there was still the boy to worry about. He looked backup the hill in response to Murphy's question. "I'm not sure, but I'm gonna go have a look. You just stay here." He took a step, wincing at the pain in his leg. This was not good. Nothing about this was good and he could feel panic starting to set in as he painstakingly made his way up the incline.

Steep inclines were not Norman's area of expertise (the rain making it even worse) and he stumbled a shameful amount of times before he was even halfway to the top. Thankfully, the car hadn't slid all the way down the hill so the distance wasn't as great as it could have been. It seemed like an eternity before he reached the top and he was out of breath by the time he did.

Breathing heavily, he scanned the drenched pavement for the body. He looked it over nearly ten times but was only met by an empty stretch of road. No body, no flower, no anything. Then he noticed something odd about twenty yards away. Forcing himself to move forward, he stepped over to the spot and, when he reached it, could only stand in silent shock. The road simply ended, leaving a jagged drop off that seemed to go on forever. What the hell was going on here?

[keyrack]

Despite Norman's insistence that Murphy stay at the car, he followed the agent up the incline anyway, slipping several times, but nowhere near as many times as Norman. The other man did not seem capable to climbing an even partially vertical surface, and if the situation wasn't quite so dire, he probably would have found it funny. But at the moment, they were in pain and bleeding, and there was possibly a child in danger. This was enough for Murphy to move faster than his sore bones wanted to let him, scrambling through the mud and using tree branches as leverage.

By the time he reached the top with Norman, he was covered in mud and blood had soaked through his shirt, mixing with mud and rain and generally just making him look like a horrible mess all around. Out in the rainy street, there were no cars passing. No sounds. Just eerie emptiness. Murphy scanned the area around them, and saw nothing. No child, no anything.

"Where the hell did--" he began to himself, and that's when he noticed the road. No. FUCK, no.

The road was simply broken off, ending in a deep and bottomless void near them. A sick feeling of dread and a sudden understanding of their situation sunk in, and Murphy's feelings were colder than the rain. "SHIT."

[nahmanjayden]

Norman still couldn't speak, staring down at the bottomless pit before him with so much shock and confusion that his expression remained blank. They'd just been driving where the road was broken off. Just moments ago. What the hell was going on?

Pulling his eyes away from the drop, he looked at Murphy. The man looked just as horrified as Norman felt but there was a look of pained recognition in his eyes that the profiler noticed almost immediately. He could always tell when someone was familiar with something; it came in handy when dealing with reluctant witnesses.

"Mistah Pendleton... What's going on here?" His voice shook but came out calm despite his pounding heart and overwhelming confusion.

[keyrack]

Murphy was staring hard down into the chasm before them, and when Norman called out his name, spoke to him, his blood ran cold. He knows. Murphy wasn't entirely sure how the hell he could know... maybe because of his profiling skills and his ability to read people's reactions. He hated that, but there was nothing he could do about it. Casting Norman quick glance through the driving rain, he quickly looked away and back at the road.

"I don't... why d'you think I've got a better idea of what's going on than you do?" he asked, dodging the question effectively and starting to pace, just as he had back in the garage when they'd first met.

[nahmanjayden]

Norman shook his head, glancing back down into the void before looking again at Murphy. "I'm not accusing you of ehnethin. I just wanna know... I just needa know what the hell this is." The volume of his voice was slightly elevated to compensate for the sounds of heavy rain on pavement.

He was already drenched almost completely and he felt a shiver run through his body. He hadn't previously noticed how cold he was, or how much his ribs ached when he breathed. How the bone in his shoulder seemed to grind against its socket with throbbing protest when he moved his arm. But now that the initial horror had died down he felt it all at once and he nearly vomited.

[keyrack]

For a moment, Murphy just shifted his weight from one foot to the other and glanced between Norman and the void. He knew the man deserved to know, and having any idea might help quite a bit when it came to their survival. But he didn't want Norman to know his connections to this place, didn't want to have to explain to him how he'd been here before. The things he'd seen, the horrible creatures, that boy dying holy christ he can't go back to that time can't talk about that time.

But he had to.

"This is... Silent Hill," he said the town's name with a cold kind of distrust, and he finally turned his eyes to Norman and stared at him in earnest. Ignoring the pain in his body, the throbbing of his head and the sting of blood as it ran into one of his eyes from the wound on his head, he focused on the things he needed to say.

"It's a town. Not sure what the hell's wrong with it. But last time I came through here, I was on a bus to prison, and we crashed. Wouldn't let us leave, Cunningham and I. The roads broke off, any way we could possibly get out of the town was blocked off." He didn't go into any sort of explanation of anything else that happened, just in case it didn't end up being relevant.

He didn't want to talk about that time any more than he had to.

[nahmanjayden]

Norman just stared at him for a moment, trying to make sense of what he'd just told him.

"Who wouldn't let you leave?" He was so confused and god damn it this hurts. His shoulder must be out of its socket but that's not what's important right now.

"Mistah Pendleton, you're not making any sense at all." There was mild accusation in his voice but that was just because he was so freaked out about all of this. This didn't make any sense. This wasn't logical. This didn't fit. Didn't add up. Didn't work with Norman's way of thinking.

[keyrack]

And that was when it started getting hard, and awkward and messy. Because this was where it also started to sound like Murphy had gone crazy, and he liked Norman well enough. He didn't want him to think he was some sort of loon, or the kind of guy who deserved to be locked up. But he'd asked, and there was no way he could really get away with telling him.

"Well..." he began, still pacing. "This is gonna sound crazy. But it was the town. It trapped us there, somehow. Almost like it was alive. Like it knew about our demons and the things we'd done, like it wanted to make us face ourselves." A shake of his head, and he met Norman's gaze."I know it sounds insane. I don't expect you to believe me. But we're here now. You'll see the truth soon enough."