Work Text:
“Why me?”
“Because that's your job, boy! And it's sir, you little runt.” The master sweep aims a kick at a stocky little boy of six years old, a boy with blond hair bleached almost white by the sun. He misses, and the boy dances away towards the chimney he's due to clean, muttering darkly.
“I hate this job.”
With very good reason, boys like him perish in droves in the black funnels they climb, their bodies discarded, their lives forgotten. Poor children, orphans, the neglected, the unloved, the abducted, they mean nothing to the oh-so-moral Victorian world which they inhabit. He is one of the unloved, sold into slavery for a few pounds, by his own parents.
The flue is narrow, of course it is, that is partly why boys, malnourished boys, are used. But not only boys, but girls too sometimes. The soot that meets his gaze immediately makes his breath turn shallow, just as the walls of the chimney close in upon his chest. He must climb, or be beaten, and there's only so much beating a little boy can take. To make sure he keeps climbing up the still hot flue, another boy jabs pins into the soles of his bare feet.
So up he goes, moaning without realising it, the sores on his elbows and knees breaking open from the pressure he is obliged to apply if he's to wriggle upwards. But move he must, his struggling body the thing doing the actual cleaning, the actual removing of the soot off the walls of the death trap, his coughs growing increasingly severe as his work progresses. His brush is only used for cleaning the defects and turns in the flue.
At first it seems as if this will be another job he manages to survive with only burns and bruises, until the flue turns and narrows suddenly, too narrow for even him. His shoulders become stuck, and that's bad, but they can still move a little, until his chest becomes stuck too.
Panic sets upon him immediately, for becoming stuck is every sweep's worst nightmare, and little Colin Moriarty has gotten stuck before, but another boy managed to dislodge him by pulling on his legs, the same boy whose job it was to needle him. It takes little time to suffocate in a chimney, and he has little breath enough to call for help, but someone does hear him. He's valuable, despite the way he's treated, valuable enough to attempt to save. Another boy follows him up the flue, moving fast thanks to the callouses he's developed. As soon as he encounters his fellow apprentice, he begins yanking on him.
“Help, help!” Colin gasps, the tugging on his legs being an agony all its own. “I can't breathe!”
But thanks to a turn in the chimney, there is nothing the would-be rescuer can do to dislodge the sufferer, all efforts achieving nothing but compressing his chest further, breaking several ribs, and hastening his death.
“...Colin?”