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The room is only getting hotter and hotter. Michael can’t see the flames, not yet, but he knows that they’re getting closer to him, knows that he only has minutes, at most, before they arrive to engulf him along with everyone else in this place.
In the other room nearby, a man is going to die with him. A man who wanted to bring joy to kids everywhere. To his own beloved daughter, especially.
She’s in the maze of vents, close to the father that her long-tortured soul may not even recognize anymore.
Michael’s father is here, too. So is his sister. Both long dead, both out to kill him, both trapped here with him, doomed to burn alive so that their souls can finally know peace. Well, Elizabeth’s might, anyway. If there’s a Hell, it doesn’t have any punishments severe enough for William Afton.
One Hell of a family reunion. The only person missing is…
Michael doesn’t think he ever would’ve escaped it, even if he’d lived a perfectly normal life afterwards, but here he is, what…forty years later? Sounds close enough. Four decades later, he’s stuck in a long-decayed body that has somehow managed not to fall apart, locked in a room with an old man and three deranged robots possessed by the souls of two children who didn’t deserve to die and one man who most certainly did, all of them moments away from being burned to ashes…and all Michael can think about is Evan. If he wasn’t thinking about Evan, he was thinking about his old friends, even though he made sure to check and double check and triple check that they had finally found peace. Once he no longer worried about them, he thought about Evan again. Not a day went by that didn’t.
Maybe because it was all his fault. Because he thinks back on his little brother’s face, red from screaming and blotchy with tears, and wonders how he had ever found it funny to see him that way.
Fredbear was haunted, but Michael confirmed pretty quickly that it wasn’t Evan in there.
Part of him had hoped it was Evan in there. That he’d finally find a way to truly make up for what he did. But he knew that was selfish. The only thing worse than dying in pain and full of fear was continuing to feel that way for God-knows-how-long until someone finally managed to free you.
Besides, Michael had been there when Evan…went. They all had. His friends, whom he would never speak with again after that day, were just outside, their expressions varying between shellshocked and remorseful. His sister, who had only about two years left to live herself, was crying her little heart out. Michael didn’t cry until Evan finally flatlined.
Their father didn’t cry at all.
Michael wonders if Elizabeth was angry with him, or if she had even understood how it had all happened.
He didn’t have to wonder if William blamed him. When they got home, his father had stared at him with blank eyes, and only said one thing.
“I hope it was worth it.”
They never talked any more than was absolutely necessary after that. At least, not until years later, after Elizabeth was dead, when he gave Michael a job to do. A job that led Michael to where he is now.
Michael had always hoped there was a loving God up there somewhere, or at least some kind of happy afterlife, if only because it meant Evan’s last moment of existence weren’t being crushed by something he feared, all because his own brother put him there as some kind of sick joke.
He wonders, as he always has, if Evan hates him. If he forgives him. If he ‘feels’ anything at all, wherever he is.
He doesn’t deserve his little brother’s forgiveness. But, at this moment, he wants to think that Evan does forgive him. He wants whatever comfort he can get right now.
Does he want to die? That’s a tough question to answer. What he wants is to go back and fix what he broke. He wants to have been part of a happy, loving family that didn’t bully one another, that didn’t try to kill each other.
He wants to go back and be a better brother to Evan, to be the one to help him make friends, and tell him that his nightmares can’t hurt him, and protect him from anything that might hurt him.
He wants to go back and pay more attention to Elizabeth, to help her learn how to braid her hair since Mom wasn’t around to teach her, to let her paint his nails whatever disgustingly bright shade of pink she wants, to be the playmate she’d been looking for in the robot she was now trapped within.
He wants to think that, if all of these ‘wants’ were possible, that his father wouldn’t have become a monster. Because, God help him, despite everything, a part of Michael still can’t believe that his father had done everything that he had.
Michael can’t cry; his body had long-since rotted past the point of being able to do such a thing.
But as the light of the flames finally reaches him, he lets out a single, dry sob, and closes his eyes.
Michael Afton’s last words before death finally reaches him are simple. Two little words that could never come anywhere near close to encompassing all that he feels, all that he wishes he could say. But it’s all he has time for.
“I’m sorry…”