Henry’s voice cut out, his monologue concluded by the sharp and almost sympathetic beep of the speakers, a mechanical acknowledgement of his final words. The silence which trailed after his speech was a heavy thing, thick and tense – as if aware of its fleeting continuance; aware that it would soon give way to the dull roar of an inferno.
William Afton had listened to Henry’s spiel, rage tense in his shoulders and jaw. The injustice of his situation was enough to make a man weep – not that he would, of course. No, he would find a way out of this; he would find his retribution yet.
First, however, he would need to extricate himself from this particular mess which Henry had so neatly placed him in. He was quite familiar with fire, unfortunate though that was. It brought with it an agony unmatched, a pain which went hand-in-hand with a very mortal terror. See, pain did not scare him; on the contrary, actually – he and pain were like old friends. Or, perhaps more aptly, reluctant – though intimate – companions.
He was familiar with most every sort you might name: acute pain (being springlocked and surviving can have this effect), chronic pain (his back had been the bane of his existence since an accident in his mid-twenties), nociceptive pain (both visceral and somatic – though he would not claim anything special for this), neuropathic pain (recovering from a springlock accident is not a tidy affair), and emotional pain; throughout his life, he had experienced his share of all of it – and then some.
No, he had a much better reason to fear fire.
There were few things that could threaten William Afton’s continued existence – and as he could tell, fire was one of those few things. Extraordinary heat could destabilize the Remnant which held him together – last time he had been lucky; he had returned, clawed his way from the charred remains of that blasted haunt to find his vengeance.
Now he was trapped in a blasted labyrinth of heat and violence, left to die like a common man among the wretched beasts he had created. His children, in some cases figurative, and in others, an unfortunate accuracy. Horrible little things, all of them.
Very briefly, William felt the faintest tinge of irritation at his predicament. Of course he had planned this – of course he would come to spoil what remained of his life. Was it not enough that he had spent countless years alone, locked in a back room with naught for company but his own suffering? No. Of course it wasn’t. Henry was a petty man – and William should have known to account for it. But in truth, he had not expected him to be capable of actually trapping him.
And yet.
Henry’s arrogance was almost laudable; it must have been the most self-aggrandizing, solipsistic, daft speech he had heard in his life. Prattling endlessly to take the piss out of William, taunting him in one breath and gloating his wit in the next. The only useful thing in that diatribe had been that he had planned a way out for Michael – a way out which he had not offered the boy, but which William would exploit nevertheless.
He was almost surprised Henry had mentioned it at all. He would have thought that by now his old friend would know better than to give him an inch – but then, he always had failed to see William’s superb potential. Even now, he was unfamiliar with the power he had wrested from the weary hands of God himself – he had devised this trap for him, certain that it would conclude their history like the ribbon on a lousy gift. His confidence in its success, however, would be misplaced.
William had returned from the grave once – had emerged scathed, but alive from a blaze meant to bury him before.
He would come back from this as well.
“Right where I want to be?” A rasping, familiar voice carried disbelief through the ventilation and interrupted William’s scheming. He turned his attention to the modest opening through which he could, if he so chose, crawl. He was familiar with the source of that voice, of course. How could he forget the voice of his son? Of his firstborn child? Of the most damnable monster he had borne into this world? Michael had haunted him since his return, and he was the most convincing proof of a God William had ever had. He alone could explain how it was his boy could have fallen so rotten from the tree.
His son’s failings aside, however, a more pressing matter was at hand; the temperature was still rising, and the familiar, low roar had begun. He would need to move quickly.
He knelt at the opening of the vent, listening as his son’s voice warbled from desperate to furious, coherent to nonsense expletives. He worked his boney fingers between the metal grates, pulling and detaching the mesh with a satisfyingly heavy sound.
“I don’t want to die here!”
Did he think he was special for that feeling? William almost expected the speakers to crackle to life again; he almost expected Henry’s cold voice to explain in perfect detail how he (and William, however inadvertent) would make their way out of this. But Michael’s plea was met by silence – a cruelty William noted bitterly. Did he think he would find some poetic justice in this? That he would wound him in turn for what he had done to Charlotte? Did he think it would be equivalent? A foolish thought: William had already lost the children he loved.
He listened with half an ear as he pulled himself into the vent and slowly began to shimmy through it. He knew Henry’s mind near as well as he knew his own. So, he had planned a way out for the volunteer? Then It would be simple. Henry was a straightforward man – logical, calculating; he would have wanted it to be inaccessible to William, so it would be either physically challenging for him to access, quick to shut, or locked up in some manner. Perhaps he would play psychologically too (they had been close once; it wasn’t entirely unthinkable) – but he doubted it.
The exit would be in the office; too obvious an answer for a clever man, but Henry was not clever. Smart, certainly – but not clever. If he had a modicum of cunning, perhaps William would not have been so quick to place his life on this bet.
As it stood, however, there was no risk – and he had no time to waste besides. The heat was growing increasingly challenging to ignore, seeping into the fiber of his being; setting his nerves ablaze as the metal which kissed his flesh now blistered the same fruit-soft pulp. As he neared the exit, Michael’s ravings had grown hushed, as if worn. Good, that would make his escape easier – although it did beg the question of why his son had quieted; had the temperature already grown beyond that which a human body could tolerate? Curious – he would have put it somewhere near a hundred degrees; water would be wont to boil, but he suspected a human could accept this temperature – albeit briefly.
Ah, but it was painful. Perhaps he hadn’t the stomach for it.
He slowed as he reached the end of the vent, focusing his decrepit optics on the scene inside before moving to push through. The office was plain, cramped, and dreary at its core. Decoration was droll, the only marks of human interest being several crude drawings pinned up behind a desktop monitor – and a small, brightly-colored teddy figurine propped beside it. The only remarkable thing outside of the desk itself was the other vent – and that was only interesting in that his son had attempted to climb into it before losing consciousness, leaving his legs stuck half-out of the exit.
As far as remarkable went, William supposed it was remarkably pathetic.
Wasting no further time on this nonsense, he extricated himself from the ventilation shaft with a heavy clunk before beginning his search for the way out. As much as he loathed the man, he wouldn’t deny Henry had a passable intellect – there would be an exit here, and it would be inaccessible to him.
In theory, of course. In practice, William was quite confident in his ability to outwit his old colleague. The increasingly oppressive heat served as a reminder, however, that he was timed. The pain in his body was growing sharper, and sparks at the edge of his vision warned that failure to meet this timer would have spectacularly negative effects.
He set to work.
The escape wouldn’t be upwards; that was where the blaze had been set, and there would be no sanctuary to be found there. No, they would most certainly be descending towards safety. Which meant there would need to be access somewhere in the floor tiling. An excellent start.
With a grunt, he pushed the desk to the furthest wall, the stuttering sound of metal feet catching on the floor providing a grating foreground of sound as he worked. He shifted, looking briefly to Michael to ensure his son was, in fact, still out. He was. Excellent.
William returned his attention to the spot where the desk had been, moving to his knees and running his skeletal fingers across the paneling with no luck— Ah! Aha! Yes, never mind that, the opening was here. William’s fingers froze at an almost imperceptibly larger gap between tiles, pleased with his masterful assessment of the situation. He slipped his fingers under it, working and prying at the panel. It came up with a satisfying, sticky give, revealing what must have been a modified fire-door. Delicately, William ran his fingers over it, searching for some form of exterior lock which could be triggered to open it. There was a smaller panel near the corner of it, but it was stuck fast – a later part in whatever puzzle Henry had come up with to stop him.
Very well, it would not be challenging to overcome this.
He rose to his feet again, looking more closely this time for any oddities within the room. Several small sections of the back wall were covered by children’s drawings – that seemed a likely place to start. He lurched towards them, ripping the first haphazardly from the wall to reveal…more wall. He tore the rest off in rapid succession, frustration mounting as they revealed more and more droll metal walling behind them. “You must think yourself clever, Henry,” He sneered, tracing his fingers over the wall carefully as he spoke – searching for anything which might offer some answer.
To no avail.
“Do you believe you can stop me? How…optimistic.” It would be here. Henry was predictable; he would have hidden it just behind the desk – he would have taken great joy in ordering Michael to check behind the desk for whatever latch or other form of trigger was there. Yes, it would be here, and he would find it.
His fingers were beginning to produce a dry, cracking noise as he scraped them delicately across the metallic surface of the wall. He carried on his careful hunt a few moments longer before his fine veneer of calm slipped and he let out a furious roar, slamming his fist into the wall. “Damn you, Henry! Damn you to the darkest reaches- “
As he impacted it, a part of the wall gave way in a very particular fashion – a fashion reminiscent of calculator keypads. William stared at this dimpling of the wall, pulled his fist away, then laughed riotously. “How deceptively simple,” he all but purred now, reverence lacing his words as he traced his skeletal fingers over it delicately, inputting each button once as he counted them. “To think you imagined this might stop me.”
Once he had all of the placements for the inputs, it was easy to guess what this was: a password entry. Eleven buttons, placed, as he had previously inferred, similarly to that of a calculator. Which meant it would be a numeric password – which left one answer.
It took William several tries to get it right, much to his chagrin. The layout hadn’t been as clear-cut as he had imagined, but he got it by the third try – which was good; if time had been of the essence before, it had now become a luxury he could no longer afford. A metallic click sounded from the floor behind him, and he turned to retrieve his prize – only to be interrupted by a mechanical warbling which clumsily warped itself into an intelligible voice: “Thank you for your www-work, EGGS BENEDICT. Please scan your finger at the pad to verify your identity, and have a FAZ-tastic rest of your life!”
William’s optics narrowed to pinpricks before he caught the source of the voice: the same, poorly designed teddy figurine which now lay askew on the desk. His derision at the figurine’s design, however, fell into the pit of his stomach as he processed what it had said. It needed a fingerprint. The name was ludicrous, but the intention clear nevertheless. He turned his attention unwillingly to his son’s motionless body, aware of the tension building in his jaw as he lurched towards Michael, the once-plush fur of his animatronic form crinkling alarmingly. Grabbing his son’s ankle roughly, he hauled him from the vent and towards the trapdoor; his body hit the floor with a heavy thud, but William gave no pause. The smaller panel that was laid into his escape had popped open now, displaying a simplistic pad which must have been the fingerprint device.
Kneeling, he grasped at his son’s arm, pulling it roughly towards the scanner and then pausing – Michael had done himself up in bandages. Frustrated, he tore the wrapped linen from his soon-to-be departed son’s hand – only to find another detail which gave him pause.
He was already dead. Long dead, by the looks of it – sunken eyes and cheeks; bruised, purplish flesh; wounds over his face which looked as if they would never quite heal. William was quite familiar with death – one may, if they were so inclined, call him an expert. His son was dead.
This realization – much to his surprise and discomfort, stirred old, conflicting emotions in his ragged chest. Something like regret. Something like felicity. There was beauty, in this rotten symmetry – beauty and grief.
As quickly as the regret had reared its ugly head, William dismissed it. There was no salvaging this boy; he had been born rotten, and that he lived rotten now was poetry reflected in reality.
This beauty, however, did not resolve the question of how it had come to be. Michael had hidden it well – William hadn’t noticed during the ‘interview’ he had conducted. His face had been well covered, and at the time, he had simply dismissed it as a poor attempt to hide his identity. Though, admittedly he had, at that time, also been preoccupied with deciding whether or not to kill his son.
Perhaps he should have. It would have made this easier, now – perhaps it would have wrenched Henry’s plans more thoroughly. Again, a snaking sensation of regret wound its way into his chest – and again, he tamped it down. They were not family; they had not been family for a very, very long time. Never again would they converse in standard affairs; their interactions would be limited to violent conflicts through which the only end would be the extinction of one (or both) of them.
As unfortunate as it was, he would find no answers as to ‘how’ his son had come to bear the mark of remnant. Not from him, at least. It would be cleaner like this, besides; cleaner to let him burn out and fade as the faulty mark he was in his family line.
He pressed his son’s index finger to the pad, and listened as the door unlatched.
***
William tugged his daughter’s small red raincoat on tightly. It was a nice day out – very light rain, but still warm. April had fussed at him, attempting (in vain, of course) to dissuade his decision to take their young child to the park on a day like this.
“It’s the lightest spot of rain you’ve ever seen,” he assured her as he handed Michelle a pair of red boots to match her coat. April huffed. “Lightest spot- William, she’s going to catch a cold!”
“That’s rubbish. Besides, if she does it will only strengthen her little immune system. Won’t it, Mickey?” Michelle, by response, swayed back and forth on her feet, smiling shyly. “Momma doesn’t want us to go out and have fun and go in the rain?” She queried, prompting William to grin devilishly at his wife. “She thinks the rain can scare us off, what do you think, Mickey?” April folded her arms now, shaking her head – though William was certain he caught fondness in her eyes. Michelle responded by looking up at her mother with big, round eyes. “’M not afraid of rain ever since you showed me uhm, when you showed me the water cycle. Because I was going to sleep and you wanted to uhm, because you were showing me the mountains too, and the water goes from the mountains to the oceans and the pools again, and it can’t suck you up.”
William beamed at her. Oh, she was his alright – four years old and already (somewhat) aware of precipitation and evaporation! She’d be a right little genius, between him and April. And, icing on the cake, she’d warmed April to going out in the rain. “She makes a compelling argument, you know.” He added, prompting her to sigh. “Just be sure to keep her warm and dry, William. And don’t stay out too long, okay?” He rose to his feet, brushing the dust from his pants and flashing a smile. “Of course not, April. Henry’s coming over tonight, besides; I invited him for a game of bast-“ He cleared his throat, somewhere between amused and embarrassed by his near slip. “A game of stop the bus.” He corrected quickly, grinning at April’s appalled look. He’d tried to convince her it was a colloquialistic difference – but she was pretty well convinced he was just a vulgar brute. She’d been much more forgiving when it had been just the two of them (and Henry).
Nevertheless, he sighed contentedly, reaching his hand out to take his daughter’s with a grin. “You think you can manage the umbrella, Mickey?” He asked, lifting a brow comically. She nodded once, brows furrowed as she stuck her pudgy hand in her father’s while at the same time lunging gracelessly for the polka-dotted umbrella leaned at the shoe-stand. He laughed when she nearly fell, catching her easily and lifting her into his arms and prompting her to scream-laugh. “Tell you what,” he started, shifting her so she was sat neatly in one arm against his shoulder and grabbing the umbrella with the other. He handed it to her. “I’ll carry you like this, and you keep the rain from hitting either of our heads. Fair deal?” To which Michelle responded by clumsily opening the umbrella indoors.
Taking that as his sign to move onwards, William laughed riotously and opened the door, stepping out into the warm, grey morning. It smelled like Spring in Gloucester – wet, but not cold; alive, but not sweltering. Like home. He exhaled the comfortable air, and stepped off his porch—
And missed the first step spectacularly, of course.
Anyway reblog to make sure all the investors know that, according to u/spez AKA Steve Huffman, the CEO of the fucking company, Reddit is, and I quote, "not profitable." Their IPO is supposedly planned for later this year. Have fun with that, Steve!
I tried to blaze this and Tumblr gave me an error code and refused to do it (after charging my CC) y'all better fuckin gimme an Organic All Natural Blaze lmao
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