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When William awoke, he was burning.
He lunged forward, tearing at his clothes, struggling to remove the blazing, melting plastic from where it had already fused with his skin. It was only when he saw his pale, shaking hands that he realized the springlock suit was gone.
He should have been happy. Three fucking decades in that suit, and he was free at last.
Free, William knew, but finally dead.
There was no other explanation. The last thing he remembered was flames, the heat of them charring his suit and smoke choking any air the flames left open. Henry, he realized with sudden clarity, had not survived, either. And if William were now dead, that meant Michael, Elizabeth, Charlotte… every remnant of William's work was gone. All according to Henry's damned plan.
As the adrenaline drained from William's system, he registered his surroundings. He had woken— appeared?— in a desk chair; he had hit the table when he threw himself forward. Monitors had been set up around the table, half-obscuring an empty office.
If he were dead, why was the afterlife so similar to fucking Fazbear's?
“What the hell…?” William rasped. It hurt to speak; his vocal chords pulled uncomfortably at the lining of his throat when he talked.
“Yours.”
William whipped around with a painful shout of surprise. A child, a young child, was standing behind him, her face blank and eyes cold. William was fairly certain she had not been there when he first woke up. “My what?” he demanded, swallowing in a futile attempt to curb the rough cracking in his voice.
“You said ‘what the hell’,” the child explained matter-of-factly. “It's yours. Your Hell.”
William laughed dryly despite the pricks of pain that ran up his throat at the action. “Right,” he growled. “And you're the Devil, I suppose?”
“Not the Devil,” the child said, still unnervingly calm. “You don't remember me.”
William blinked, caught slightly off-guard by the change in topic. “Should I?” he asked flatly.
The child stared at him, unmoving. “The abandoned restaurant,” she said. “Out in the middle of nowhere. You should remember the restaurant.”
—“Fredbear's Family Diner, where fantasy and shit do things. We'll workshop it, Henry, we'll workshop it”—
William shook his head as if it would shake away the memory. “Yeah, I remember the bloody restaurant,” he said. “Why are you— why are you talking about Fredbear's?”
“I had run away,” the child continued. “I was alone. You were alone, too.”
“I don't understa—” William broke off sharply, coughing as his throat caught. “I don't understand,” he snarled, “what you're talking about.”
The child cocked her head, studying him in a way that made William feel trapped. Like prey. “You killed me.”
“Don't take it too personally; I've killed a lot of fucking children, all right?” William snapped.
The child took a sudden step forward, making William jerk back. He hissed a curse as he hit the table again, jostling the computer monitors. A slash of bloody red tore down her arm.
—His knife was heavy in his hand, but the weight made him feel more alive than he had in months—
“You didn't kill me like the others,” the child said, the first hint of a fracture in her composure. “There was no one around for miles. You couldn't get caught.”
Another gash split her other arm.
—There was blood on the knife and blood on his hands and blood on the body in front of him, but it was not dead yet—
“There was no one to intervene; there was no one to hear me,” the child went on. She took another step forward, more wounds slicing through her skin. “You didn't care what happened. You just wanted to see me die.”
—The child was unconscious; it had lost too much blood, but it was still breathing, and that meant it was still alive—
“You weren't any different from the rest,” William said, his voice hoarse and scraping like gravel against his throat. “You're not any different. You lot are all the fucking same!”
—He knew what to do, something he had always contemplated but never had the time—
“You know what you did,” the child said. “I can see it. You remember.”
William started laughing again, this time a broken, nervous laugh. “I d— I don't— what are you doing, girl? Why— why are you talking about this?”
“Because I need you to know,” the child said. Blood was flowing freely from the wounds all around her, dripping down to the floor. Her eyes were dark, blacker than anything William had ever seen, empty cavities filled only by tiny pinpoints of white light. “I need you to know what happened to me. What you did to me.”
The springlock suit had been empty.
It was not the suit he usually used— no, that one was hidden away back at Fazbear's Pizza, in a storage room that no one else would know about. No one else would look, except for Henry, and to him it would just be another animatronic hidden in the back. Henry would not look too hard.
The child was still unconscious. She was bleeding heavily. Her blood was on his hands, his clothes.
He had used springlocks before. In the animatronics, both of his and Henry's devising, he had used them for something they were never originally meant for. And now the diner was empty, alone. No one would think to investigate an abandoned, dilapidated building. No one would find him. The Fredbear suit Henry had worn was lying propped against the wall. He had removed the chestpiece, carefully, so that all the springlocks were set in place but exposed.
“Oi.” He clicked his fingers in front of the unconscious child's face. “Little girl. Time to wake up.”
The child roused slowly, struggling vaguely as she realized her limbs were locked in place.
“No, don't do that,” he said. He tapped one of the thick metal spikes gently. “Very old springlocks. They go off very easily. You wouldn't want anything to happen… now would you?”
“You didn't just kill me, William,” the child said, her voice seething, a thin anger hiding beneath her words that seemed so much worse than rage. “You tortured me. Cut me to bits. Then you put me in that suit.” She advanced on him, each step bringing forth another part of the Fredbear suit, torn from under her skin to case her body like dark, deadly armor.
William pressed himself against the table in a vain attempt to back away. He said nothing; whatever he could have said, he knew it would do nothing. He had nowhere to run.
“You took off the front of that suit,” the child said quietly. “So you could see the springlocks when they went off. You wanted to watch me die, and you wanted it to last.” She was right in front of him, entirely concealed within the Fredbear suit. All that remained was her eyes, soulless black pits with bright white sparks of vengeance.
“And what,” William finally forced out in a desperate facade of mockery, “can you possibly do about it?”
The child— the bear— the demon— stopped, and contemplated him. “I will make you suffer,” she said. “I will make you feel what I did.”
William let out another broken laugh despite the fear now curdling in his chest. “You can't do anything to me,” he spat. He knew she could see his lie.
“No.” The ghost did not move. “But they can.”
William heard them. The clicks and groans of metal, the hissing of servos, the scraping of thick plastic dragging across the tiles in the halls and the panels of the vents. And the voices, all the voices, the singing and humming and screaming and crying, the voices of all the children he killed and then some. He could hear Clara. He could hear Elizabeth. He could hear the voices of his own animatronics, the ones without souls, given new life now that he was dead. He could hear his own voice, snarling and cracked from the damage the springlock suit had wrought. They were coming for him, all of them— they were coming for revenge, and William could not stop them. He was trapped.
“They will kill you,” the child inside the Fredbear suit said. “Just like you killed them. And when they do, you will come back, and you will hide. But they will find you. And they'll kill you again. And it will keep going, over and over and over, because you can't kill what's already dead, William. You will feel the pain of death again and again, but you will never die, not fully.”
The sounds were growing louder, a cacophony of torment and anguish bent solely on bringing that torment and anguish down on William. He was, for the first time in his life, very, very afraid of immortality.
“I will never let you leave,” the child said. “I will never let you rest. And you will never know peace.”
With those words, the child retreated into the darkness and disappeared, leaving William alone to face his monsters.