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Dying is a bit shit, really. He hadn’t expected it to be fun. He wasn’t stupid.
It hurt more than he expected.
He could hear chaos around him. The explosion did not kill him immediately. He hoped his friends, his colleagues, the others, he hoped that they had gotten out. First he was very hot, he was burning, he was screaming. Then there was a great weight on him, all over. Holding him down.
He had never really been afraid of being buried alive. He knew it was a thing that people were afraid of, but it had never bothered him. But it hurt. It was heavy. He couldn’t see anything except darkness. He could feel the debris, the bricks, the other bodies? Pressing him down into the dirt.
He isn’t too hot anymore. He can vaguely feel the heat of flames licking around him, but he isn’t hot. He is cold, and getting colder. His legs aren’t really there anymore. Well, they’re still there. They’re still attached, but he can’t quite locate them.
He can hear the fire crackling away, and he thinks good. He thinks burn them all down.
He can’t catch his breath. His chest is wrong. It’s the wrong shape. It’s not… he tries to cough and can’t do that either.
Is fire a Fear? Burning to death is a horrific thing. It’s got to be something that people are afraid of, right? What makes the difference between a fear and a Fear?
All of this happens quickly. It can’t be more than a few minutes before his life bleeds out into the dirt floor. But his head is all over the place. He goes from worrying about Martin to thinking about death, to theorizing and philosophising. It’s weird.
He’s going to be a mystery. Well, Martin and Jon and Daisy and Basira, they would know what happened. But no one else would. His parents would have another lost son, disappearing with no reason or rhyme to it. Someone would joke about Tim Spooky who vanished. Or maybe the Archives would make some excuse, tell people he had been off on a research job and that he had been caught in the ‘gas explosion’. That kind of made sense.
He’s not sure why he was worrying about it. It wasn’t his problem. Not anymore.
He blinks the dirt away from his eyes. His face is covered in brick dust. Well, it’s covered with bricks too. He’s covered in bricks. He feels like laughing and he isn’t sure why.
Slowly, everything fades. The pain goes first. The pressure next.
He isn’t afraid.
He’d have to tell Martin…. He would have to…
He was… There was something he was going to say…
He just couldn’t quite think of what it was.