Work Text:
You close your eyes and pray to god that the fire will be quick.
Warmth licks at your arms. You open an eye to see the cuff of your suit alight and aflame. Its heat travels into your bone, into your wires, a warmer heat than you’ve ever felt before. But there is no pain where the flaming fabric sits against your decaying flesh.
The cheap fabric melts, and you watch the molten fibers liquify on your skin, like you’re watching an inanimate object. Your blood-pooled flesh is numb to the hot materials. Nothing is felt as the molten threads run across your arm. Nothing as the flames lick into your fingers.
The room is covered in fire now. The heat is all around you. The back of your uniform liquifies between your spine and the chair.
Your legs are safe, the fibers not affected by the heat, but still trapping it against you.
You have a sinking feeling that once the flames scorch down to your wires, they will hurt.
Was it painful for the animatronics in the halls around you?
What parts of you were even you anymore? What parts needed to burn before you were gone. Was your soul going anywhere? Or would you be bound to the ashes.
Your eyes close again, your arms hugging over your knees. Melting fibers soak into the thick fabric of the work-pants. The rough material presses and indents into the bare flesh of your arms.
Your ribs push into your legs, cracked and warped structure giving their surface an irregular and bumpy feeling.
The fan in your office is still running. You can feel it blowing feverishly on your body.
It stops once its cord melts and snaps.
You can hear the fire licking all around you, but you bury your face into your knees. Careful not to touch your arms and your head together. Not to look at them.
You don’t want to see what’s going on.
Despite your heart being long gone, you feel fear nonetheless.
You locked yourself in a box. This room is a coffin, no, a horrible pyre. You’re resigned to die here with everyone else. That choice was long made.
There is no way out. If there was one, you didn’t know anything about how to access it.
The crackling of flames sounds like it has reached your desk. Close, like a gaping, prowling machine. Every instinct tells you that it's too close to you.
Your nerves are primed to fire at a moment's notice to do anything to keep yourself alive. That’s how you made it here. But your hands were empty.
You were supposed to die here.
You try to still the shaking of your fingers. The anxious twitching.
You extend your hand in a moment of impulsive resignation towards the flames, and once you think they feel them licking around your fingers, you hold them there. Flames don’t really feel like anything at this close. The sharp sting you expected isn’t there.
You gingerly set your arm back down on the armrest of the chair.
The fire is pressing all around you. It’s probably all around you on the floor. Your legs feel numb, like they’ve fallen asleep. So you do not know if the fire has touched them.
Your body is wrapped in heat.
It’s right behind you. The pieces of your chair, the fabric pieces, have caught alight.
You feel the flesh of your back cave in first, melting and falling inside of the hollow, wired chasm within your chest. Your mutilated ribs do little to hold them up. Your broken spine, knit together by metal strands, tingles.
Your arms lighten. You feel the sloughing of disintegrating flesh. You hear pieces hit the ground.
The moment is here, the point of no return. You’re letting yourself be destroyed beyond salvation.
It’s eating down to the wires. Are those you? Will it hurt when you burn? When they burn? Will you stop feeling? Will you still be here when everything is dust? Are you letting yourself crumble when you’ll still be alive?
You have no choice anymore. You pray you’ll be with your sister and brother in moments. You pray if you aren’t, you’ll at least be dead, forever. If there’s nothing waiting for the souls bound to rotting bodies, you pray the same for your siblings too.
Your prayers extend to the other victims of William. You didn’t know them when they were alive, but you saw what had become of them while you worked. Finally, you pray for Henry and Charlie. Whatever fate they meet, please let them meet it together.
For some, separation was worse than death.
Not for you though. Nobody needs you.
The fire sizzles into your wires in your arms. But it doesn’t hurt. Thank whatever god exists, that it doesn’t hurt.
You shift your leg, but you can’t feel anything. If your leg is even still there. You’re not aware of how much of you is left anymore. You peek your eye open the slightest bit, but the room is filled with so much smoke, all you can see is filtered red and orange, like a cloud of flickering light.
You plunge yourself back into the dark. Sounds all blend together now. You move your hand, but the emptiness you feel in response tells you it probably isn’t there anymore. Your other arm responds with no more promise.
The flesh on your abdomen melts away, exposing the rotted husk of your ruined ribs, broken pelvis and spine, all held gently together by metal coils.
Numbly, you shift your head over to rest on your own shoulder, like a bird. You almost feel like you could sleep again.
Your head is hollowing from the inside out. Your jaw dislocates once again, loosening from its position and dropping gradually, dangling from your skull.
Though your eyelids are gone, your spiritual eyes do not open. You see nothing.
The bones making up your shoulders fall apart, collapsing into pieces as the ligaments sear apart.
Your ribes insides are blackening. You can feel the spongy insides of the broken bones shrinking and hollowing.
Your spine twists and bends. Your head is no longer resting against your shoulder, rather against the back of the chair as your ribs break, allowing your spine to coil up in your own lap.
Your pelvis breaks apart, and your skull, on a bent spine, breaks away several vertebrae down.
The world is enveloped in monotone crackling.
The bone between your eye sockets collapses. Your nasal bone caves inwards into the empty cavity where your decaying brain used to be.
Your skull splits in half at the upper mandible, collapsing under its own weight.
Your parts scatter, and your thoughts do too. A heavy weight settles over your mind, and you’re calm.
Your thoughts become smaller and more distant. Until they stop.