[PRP] In the Closet (Will + StoryEnds)

[Baneful]

Will wandered through the winter market, travelling from booth to booth. On the way to the next one on his mental list, he shimmered with another shift in the universe. He took a deep breath, closing his eyes and bracing himself for the change he knew was inevitable.

And when he opened them, he was somewhere else and something else.

It was pitch dark, and Will knew it had been dark for a long time. There was pain, too, so much pain. Typically, Will was in pain, but he'd grown accustomed to the rawness of his perpetually open wounds. This was something else: his body shattered and fractured into splinters with bars through his extremities and mechanisms caught up in his viscera. The more he pulled into consciousness, the less he remembered the swamp, his thoughts altering to fit the situation he found himself in. It was his fault he was here, but at the same time, it wasn't; he'd been trying to fix things. He'd been so close to achieving his goal, and the fact he was still alive proved it.

Maybe it would have been easier if he wasn't alone. Things had worked when he had a partner.

How long would he be here? When he tried to stand, his body couldn't muster the energy beyond a futile twitch that shot agony through his fried nerves. He let out a low groan, but it was hardly a whisper, speech difficult and the angle he was at was awkward. His limbs were damaged, all of him was destroyed, and he wasn't even sure that he was breathing any more.

It was dark, and he couldn't see himself, and he wasn't sure he'd want to if he could.

[Toshiful]

Storyend moved quickly, tailing snatches of dirty yellow fur. He couldn't, under any circumstances, allow himself to be noticed. But he couldn't lose track of the yellow rabbit kin either. He wasn't a deceptive kin by nature, but it wasn't like it was impossible for him to manufacture another creature's demise. If anything, building puzzles, traps, and codes came easily to him. But he was better suited given time to construct the perfect environment, rather than following another kin foolishly into an encounter on unprepared terms.

He had no choice now. He was out of time, there were too many kin here. Too many kids. He was going to be late again. He was always late.

As he took another step, he was clothed and upright, in an unnatural cave- no, building. The word came to him easily. His building. Wracked with decay, filth, and cobwebs, he could hear the distant shriek of rats in the walls. Black mold was scattered over everything.

He remembered. It had been a happy place, once. He hadn't been happy then, not exactly, but he had been hopeful. He had rebuilt his daughter. His wife was dead. His son was not. He should have been afraid. He should have never opened another restaurant. He had been too blinded by the love and trust he had for his partner. The future had only held worse and worse. That had been his fault, for not seeing clearly. For not wanting to see. Now it was all ruined.

The building looked like he felt. And after that, after... his brain felt foggy. There had been more, hadn't there? One more location. One more try. And then...had he seen it finished? He must have, only... There was a sudden sharp pain in his chest, and he clutched his flannel shirt. There was something distant about it. Not the urgency of a heart attack. It was a memory. But when he reached for it, he could not remember. The feeling subsided. It was not important. What he was doing here, now, was what mattered.

Henry shone his flashlight over the shadows of the derelict building. Everything was where he had left it. His creations waited, patient, on the stage. Old birthday hats sat on some of the tables. He and Will had picked out the tablecloths together. A rainbow confetti pattern littered the checkered floor. He wasn't sure what he was looking for. Answers, vengeance, redemption, all of that was gone. Will had disappeared a long time ago. Maybe he had gone somewhere warmer, changed identities. Found some other country to perform unnatural experiments. That would have been the logical thing. Henry had wanted to leave, too. But he couldn't leave, and didn't see how Will could have either.

Slowly, Henry made his way to Foxy's Cove.

He ascended the steps, and gave Foxy's arm a fond pat. The old pirate still standing sentinel after so long.

This was the location of the old backroom, another one of his designs that had gone wrong. He'd felt so clever when he'd made it, a false wall behind the curtains, inaccessible to anyone except the owners. His hand moved to a series of square tiles, not different from any other tiles and marred by dust. He still remembered the numbers. It was the hex code for the shade of purple they had first picked out together to accent Fredbear and Spring Bonnie. William had painted his car that color.

The panel slid back.

Henry wasn't sure what he expected to find. It had been a junk storage room, full of his old rejected designs, half-finished builds and scraps from characters who hadn't made the cut. Something caught the light of his flashlight, a pinprick in the dark, and Henry held his breath. Oh no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

His flashlight swept over him firmly, to make sure, and the light shook in his hand.

"Oh, God," he said.

[Baneful]

The shape was hazy in Will's milky vision, but it was one he could recognise anywhere, used to the shape of it passing by closed curtains in a bedroom at night or half-sighted in the light cast from a streetlight as they locked up in the evenings. It had changed, and yet it was still the same, and if he weren't already in unbearable pain, he would have strangled a gasp at the sight.

Oh god. And god wasn't here. God would turn away from what he'd become.

He tried to lift a heavy gauntlet-laden hand to reach towards the figure.

"Henry." he rasped, and his voice was almost a whisper.

[Toshiful]

Henry did scream then, and dropped his flashlight, the light winking out and bathing them both back into the gloom and darkness.

"You're alive. No. No, you're not. The remnant exposure. Oh, god." There was a mad scramble, with Henry fumbling with the floor, and it took minutes but it felt like hours until he found the flashlight again. It stuttered on, but only barely, damaged and on the brink. He scrambled to William's side anyway, fury and other complicated emotions pressed down by sheer horror.

"Don't...don't move, Will, I'm going to- damn it," and he put the flashlight in his teeth, and put his hands into the familiar complexities of the mask. There was a sickening, wrenching sound, not mechanical, but some muscle rending, and he stopped entirely. Henry knelt for a moment in one place, shivering, then took out the flashlight, catching his breath.

There was another sweep of light.

"Fused. You're fused with it," Henry said, and then he wretched, and coughed, and felt very, very dizzy indeed.

[Baneful]

He didn't know how to answer. Was he alive? Was he not? He was somewhere between; he should be dead, and yet he wasn't. Henry was here, and it made things less intolerable in some small ridiculous way. If this were hell, he wouldn't have been here at all.

He coughed a wispy laugh at the request not to move as if he could, with all his muscles torn to ribbons and his bones wrecked with metal.

He felt the sound dimly, his body hardly able to register tormented flesh any longer, everything a flat level chord of abject agony. It hurt him more to see how disgusting Henry found him and to imagine what he must look like.

He obeyed the request to stay still; it was the only thing that kept him from trying to hold Henry's arm as it moved close enough to touch.

None of this would have happened if he'd helped him if they'd been together, but no matter how Will twisted things, he couldn't find a way to blame Henry for anything. It had been him all along, and on a fundamental level, he knew it.

[Toshiful]

The light was flickering dangerously, and Henry had a tight, foreboding feeling in his chest that threatened tears. He wiped at his face furiously. It wasn't the time for that.

He placed his hands on Will's arms, lightly, so as not to jar him again. Although frankly, he thought he deserved a bit of jostling.

His voice was choked up, in spite of his best efforts to push down the emotion. Henry gritted his teeth. "You can't stay here," Henry decided at last. "How long? Are you yourself?"

[Baneful]

Will had missed Henry, missed him more than he could even begin to explain. He'd been grieving for as long as he could remember.. ever since.

Thoughts were hazy and it was difficult to hold onto them. He remembered though, he remembered the horror of seeing the only person he'd ever felt anything approaching love for in a pool of blood, too much blood for anyone to endure losing.

"Don't know." he rasped. "How long. But I'm me."

He turned his head towards Henry, rolling swollen eyes towards him that glowed like pinpricks in the dark.

"You are dead." he accused.

[Toshiful]

"What?" Henry said, a little distressed, the words emphasising that sharp feeling in his chest again. "No I'm not, I'm- I was..." He tried to assemble his routine the last few days. Everything felt blurred together into a haze of barely eating or sleeping (had he ate or slept?) and the general fog of misery he'd been in since forever.

"Looking for you," he decided.

[Baneful]

Will would have sighed if he could. Why look for him? He'd done everything wrong, he'd wanted to fix all their problems but in doing so had only pulled both their families into a vortex of horrors. He was mostly dead, and something had happened to Henry too, if he was still here. William had seen him dead, the more he allowed himself to think on it, the more the weight of the memory weighed on him. Whatever was left of his humanity had left him that day, whatever reservations he'd had about what needed to be done. All that had mattered was setting things right and bringing back his son and his partner at any cost at all.

Henry had come back on his own, but maybe now the costs had become too great to ever reconcile.

"I saw you." he said, his voice shaky from more than damage and disuse. "You were at your desk. Murdered by what you made. Did you want it to happen?"

He coughed, hacking and painful, his lungs unused to being forced to generate sound. "Maybe it doesn't matter. After that, nothing mattered to me, either."

[Toshiful]

Henry was a practical man. Time had always been slippery for him. Was it possible that he had died, and not noticed? The dead often forgot important details, especially surrounding their last moments. They performed routines, feeling ignored. He lived alone. There was nobody to be ignored by. Perhaps, for him, there had been no real difference.

He had lost track.

He touched his shirt, and for only a moment, the fabric was wet and dark, and then it was whole again.

"Yes," he said, slowly, "I think you may be right. Dead," he laughed incredulously. "I didn't notice." This was typical for Henry. He sighed, readjusting his mindset, and adjusted his reading glasses which he thought he had misplaced, now dotted with blood in the flickering light.

"It wasn't on purpose," he said, still slowly, turning over that moment instead of drawing back from it like touching a hot stove. "I had work to do. But I had realised...something terrible. I realised you had lied to me. I would not have made myself sleep. Not without resolving our business. Yes, dead. That makes sense. I would have come sooner, otherwise."

[Baneful]

Will nodded his head softly. Resolving their business.

"How do we resolve it now?" he asked. Henry being there seemed to rejuvenate him, the fog was clearing, the sluggishness falling away.

Maybe it was Joy.

"What do we do? I think it's the remnant. I don't think we can truly die."

[Toshiful]

"I think we could," Henry said, feeling like he was underwater, in a strong current. "If we tried hard enough."

[Baneful]

Will snorted. "And give up!" And this time he managed to raise his voice to almost its old volume, outraged at the suggestion. "I'm not about to work towards trying to kill ourselves when we've found a way to elude death itself!"

He tried to stand, but couldn't manage it, merely jolting himself instead.

"Can you touch things? There's nothing to say an old ghost and a zombie can't change the world."

[Toshiful]

Henry looked at his hand, grasping and ungrasping it.

"Yes," he decided. "I can. ...I touched you, didn't I? Just then."

[Baneful]

"You did." Will said, pausing a little distantly, as if reprocessing the fact that it had happened.

He reached out. "Can you help me back up?"