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disabledplanet · 27 days

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what remains after ruination

Eclipse adjacent // Wordcount: 2,045

A year had passed by. Not a day later and no sooner than that since you stepped foot in this dreaded building.

Only in part due to your own resolution. It’d been all over the news; Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, Gone Up in Flames! A week’s worth of synonyms for accident-destruction-fire-disaster-ruin dribbling out from between reporter’s teeth like crumbs from their stale blueberry muffin breakfast, the story already old news by the time their shirt collar caffeine stains between coffee breaks were well and dry.

After all, there was nothing of value to mourn. “It’s nothing short of a miracle that no one was harmed,” they fed the public scripted lines, little white lies on big tv screens, “a shame the ‘bots are a bust,” another chimed in, “but we’re grateful to have avoided a real tragedy.”

And where were you when the fire broke out? Safely at home, on your couch, shoveling the powdery remnants of dry breakfast cereal into your face, phone in hand, uniform on, and an alarm set to leave in ten minutes. Your favorite generic sitcom played at half-volume across the room having just returned from a commercial break when the news struck, every station within a hundred mile radius offering their briefest condolences to the franchise’s demise. As always, you received your information secondhand, the dry voice of your boss confirming that what you were seeing on the screen was the truth, your phone call interrupted by the jarring ring of your alarm in a gut twisting fit of irony.

“Don’t bother coming in,” they told you, “you’ll receive your final check in the mail by the end of the week.”

“What about the others?” You’d asked on baited breath, hopeful.

“The others… you mean the animatronics?” A beat of silence, and only that, “they’re gone,” management answers, “everything is gone.”

You didn’t want to believe it. For weeks after, you did nothing but fight the information, distancing yourself from the memory of it all together. It was nightmarish, a plague of guilt which circled you like vultures in the night.

You had been there, only a night before the fire. You had been there. Made small talk with the staff bots. Had gossiped with the Glamrocks. And in the Daycare – in the Daycare you had made friendship bracelets. Silly, stupid, trivial, the thought of it makes you want to scream, now knowing what you do and how better you could have spent your last night with them.

Sun had bragged about a new shipment of pony beads and convinced you to sit and help him sort. Sorting them turned into stringing, which turned into knots. You had a pretty pastel lineup by the time he was satisfied, and they had two. One bracelet for each of them, yellow and blue. Your own boasted two stars and a heart, childish additions that you couldn’t bring yourself to argue against at the time, but especially now. It would hurt less to simply throw the gift out or stuff it into a box and stuff that box into a closet, and lock the closet door for the rest of your life. But you don’t do that. You keep the bracelet on your wrist like one keeps a locket against their heart, and you pretend it means nothing.

How impossible it is to find solace in the death of something that leaves no trace behind. You have no grave to visit, no ashes to mourn except the old remnants of a crumbling building they refuse to tear down, no final goodbye.

“See you in the morning,” they’d said, something heavier weighing on their tongue. Ultimately, they decided against the words and offered you a parting smile, instead. Warm, doting, it had felt like home.

It’s the last thing you have of them.

And you try to get past it. You run through every stage of grief like it’s a marathon and you’re late for the next race already, but you have no trophies to show for it, no rewarding fulfillment. The wound is fresh and raw. The gaping cavern of hopelessness no less enormous. You are as bitter and traumatized as the day you received that call.

Maybe that’s why you’ve found yourself here again, on the doorsteps to the plex, three-hundred-and-sixty-five days since you last dared to look in its direction. What you need isn’t medication or a therapist burning through your pockets, it’s closure. You need to see the body.

This suffering will not recede until you’ve convinced yourself there is nothing to return to.

There’s a sixth stage of grief they don’t want you to meet. If you remain a stranger to its siren call then you really, truly, will start to feel better. That’s what they say, time and time again, and it’s what you believed for a long while, but you’re through with fighting this emotion and through with pretending it doesn’t rule your every waking moment. Its name is lunacy, and it tells you to duck beneath old, yellow tape and take a brick to the building’s rotten structure.

The shattering of glass falls on deaf ears. You march through the opening with purpose, giving no thought to the nicks and scrapes and beads of crimson that form along your skin as you make your way further into the depths of this desolate building. No life stirs from its festering core, nor light from the smoldered ceiling, blackened with old soot. Debris crunches beneath a pace that refuses to slow until you find yourself standing before the two doors most familiar to you, and only then, do you stop.

Everything stops.

Sanity winds you with its return, startling you into questioning what the hell you’re doing here. They’re dead. You know that, don’t you? Really, deep down inside, you know it to be true. You know there’s nothing that could evade such devastation as this. You know they are gone. For good. Forever.

Still, that minute, resilient hope continues to pulse with a beat of its own desire, and you haven’t the strength to put an end to it now. After a year of waiting, of wailing, of walking into circles that lead to nothing but more agony, you can’t bring yourself to call it quits. Not after you made it this far. You had to know, once and for all, or the question would drive you over an edge you’ve been skirting beyond recognition.

Your hand outstretches and comes to a halt at the doorknob, fingers twitching a flick of the wrist away, and there it sits, hesitant, terrified, until desperation spurs it forward the remaining way and the rusted knob is turned ever so gently to the right.

The door springs open with a force that drives you backwards, tumbling stumbling fumbling through the air, knees buckling, you land on your ass with a hardy thump and stare, aghast, at the wreckage that stands between the open frame.

A familiar face stares back.

The animatronic bursts from their entrapment like confetti out of a canon, claws drawn and eyes aglow with a menacing half-grin, only reeling themselves back a step upon the sight of you, where they go completely still.

The scream that rips through your throat does not come unbidden; they are not your beloveds but something else entirely, a grotesque assortment of gears and torn fabric, disheveled beyond belief, splayed about with the same obscenity of exposed bone. They are not Sun and they are not Moon and they are not someone or something that you can easily recognize, simply a horrifying by-product of disaster.

Even still, your fear appears to force them back a cautionary second step, and then a third, as if taking on the frail hope that they won’t scare you so terribly in the dark. That if you can’t see them past the shadow, maybe you won’t look at them that way.

“Ffr…rrrr...fri…f...”

You swallow hard around the lump in your throat and attempt to make sense from any of this. The word it– he– they attempt to speak is as familiar as it is foreign, and you can feel an immediate shift in the way your lunacy becomes hysteria, and you laugh. You laugh even as tears well up and begin to river down your cheeks. You laugh as their arm outstretches to meet you—

“Don’t!”

–and then you stop, and they stop, too, and all falls silent.

The expression they make is beyond your understanding. Where before you could reasonably find human emotion in their mechanic smirks and smiles, now all you see is barren metal. Loose gears with sharp edges. It creates a nausea that builds and builds until you want to roll over and relieve yourself of everything you’ve ever consumed.

Rather than try again, their arm recoils ever slowly and instead lifts to point at the wrist of their other, gesturing with great hesitance to the two bracelets found there. One blue, and one yellow.

“Ff...fri…e-end?”

Your stomach lurches and then drops as it comes to a conclusion. Quickly, your gaze snaps toward the pastel beads that sit so neatly on your own wrist, the string keeping them together now old and fraying. Your eyes return to their wrist and see perfect color among the blackened metal. The string beneath it still holds up despite its surroundings having burnt hopelessly. The implications of this – that they protected it to the very end – immediately severs any remaining instance of fear.

You move blindly through the tears, climbing back to your feet with every intention to try again. The creak and screech of crooked metal can be heard as they retrace another step backward in response, flinching from your approach, allowing you greater space between them. It makes your heart plummet to the very pit of your stomach.

“They told me you were dead,” you cry, “they told me there was nothing left to save,” a daring step forward has you that much closer to them, and then another, and another, slow and shaky as it goes, “they told me not to come looking,” your feet stop directly before their own, bare-toed silver against scuffed rubber. You share their shadow and in their sorrow, mourning the short distance still between you and the distance of the days you’ve spent apart. They wait for your lead, paralyzed with anticipation, as you raise a doubtful, trembling hand to cup their ruined cheek. “Is it really you?”

The stillness is suffocating, no less agonizing than the phone call, because any answer beyond the one you seek will feel like death all over again. You can’t imagine yourself content in life with the knowledge that the one you care so deeply for – even without recognition, without ever having said the words – is nothing more than a husk of who they once were. It would ruin you.

And what remains after ruination?

Love remains. Love remains and it is a slow, sure nod. It is a cold hand cupping with meticulous care over your own and refusing to let go. It is them. And they are yours.

A sob breaks from your throat before you can stop it, greater and louder than you've allowed yourself to feel to the day. Relief floods your chest until you think it might burst.

The hand at their cheek pulls back if only to wrap around their waist, fingers bunching desperately into the remaining fabric of their collar and smearing the ash at their back, holding so tight that you hear their frame begin to creak and moan, followed immediately by their own arms cradling your body against them with an equally bone-crushing weight, one you for once don’t fight. Rather, you would be content to stay like this forever.

It isn’t the pins and needles in your arms or the pungent smell of smoke that eventually forces you out of the position, but instead, the sudden forming of a plan and your intention to immediately put it into action. When you pull away it’s to take both of their hands in your own, and only then do you step back from the door, guiding them toward you.

“Come on,” you smile, because at last there is reward for your hope, “…let’s get you home.”

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