Life and death were so closely entwined. On one hand, life could last for what seemed like an eternity, but alternately, that same life could end in the most painful way imaginable.
He was keenly aware of the latter.
William remembered the telltale sound of metal snapping, the damp of the room triggering the spring locks from his haste to get into the suit.
Dead.
He should have been dead, and yet there he was, in the same darkened room he had expired inside of.
There would be no escape for William from a second spring lock failure. The first time it had happened to him, William had been lucky that not all of the spring locks had been triggered. Equally lucky was the fact that Henry happened to have been around to painstakingly wind back each piece of metal that had pierced his flesh.
The second time it happened, all of the spring locks had failed, and William had no one to help him get out of Spring Bonnie's suit. His flesh had been completely run through with metal and plastic, and he'd been left to die.
Alone.
Even now, William's body was rotting away as he remained crumpled in a corner, while Spring Bonnie's exterior broke down around him.
William was positive that he had had these same thoughts before, but it was hard to keep track of things. At times, he could look at his surroundings and what little was there. Other times, William felt that he may have dreamed of the past. Of what he had done, and may have continued to do, had he not been spring locked to death in a costume.
Dead, but not gone.
Unless, of course, William had gone to hell. But would hell really be spent in a damp, boarded off room where he was eternally trapped within the Spring Bonnie suit? It seemed unlikely, especially considering how aware he still was most of the time. But seeing as it was always the same place, and William knew that he had drawn his last breath, and breathed no longer, it didn't seem as though he had been allowed to move on.
It was intriguing, yet incredibly frustrating, being unable to even move or know how much time had gone by.
Today, something new happened.
Today, the room was not as quiet as William was used to it being. No, the silence had finally been broken after so long, as a thumping sound came from a short distance away.
Visitors?
Ignorant, or aware of this room's purpose?
The eyes of the animatronic rabbit briefly flickered on, and fixed on the wooden boards. Someone was speaking just outside, and yet William could do nothing but sit there and wait. Spring Bonnie was dormant, as if some programming had been keyed into it, to prevent its movement in the dark room.
William forced the glow to become brighter, able to manipulate some mechanics of the suit. The dead man did not think too deeply over how that was even possible, as he was more concerned with his unexpected visitors. The darkness had lessened this time around, and changed the way William had become accustomed to seeing his surroundings when he bothered to open his eyes.
In a sense.
Williwm didn't have any actual eyeballs any longer. He hadn't for what seemed like a long time, but the world was still there before his eyes. Just animatronic ones, and what William assumed was some glowing that came from within his own skull. Or perhaps it was just reflected from the suit itself, to give off a mockery of a gaze within empty sockets.
Sometimes the idea of such a sight unnerved him greatly.
It would never not hurt William's mind to think of how he could possibly still function. He wasn't even entirely sure what he owed his survival to, if it could even be called that. If anything, William tended to allow the animatronic suit he was within to put him in a kind of animated, powered-off state.
Light suddenly flooded his prison.
William Afton was many things, but he wasn't about to complain about some foolish visitors finding him. Perhaps he would be able to get the suit to function if it was in some light and-me coming into the sealed off room, and getting far too excited over seeing an animatronic.
"Holy shit! Look at that!"
Had William been able to, he would have cringed over the piercingly loud voice. Additionally, Spring Bonnie's eats may have drooped to indicate the volume being too loud.
"What animatronic is this?" Another man edged closer to William, staring at Spring Bonnie with what appeared to be awe.
William's narrow, sunken chest puffed up a little with pride within the suit. Someone being impressed with his and Henry's hard work would never not be well-taken.
"Dunno. Looks like it might have been a rabbit at some point."
William's posture deflated at that, a little flash of irritation trickling in. How could someone not instantly recognize Spring Bonnie, with the suits' golden fur?
"You sure? It's hard to tell under all of that...uh...is that mold? How long has this been here?"
Mold?
William supposed that would explain why the recognition wasn't so easy. But just how bad was the mold that the men in the room couldn't tell the color of Spring Bonnie's exterior?
"Do you actually want to take that with you? That animatronic looks like it'll far apart if we try to move it."
William dimmed Spring Bonnie's eyes as the men came closer, so as to not draw unnecessary attention to himself apart from being something new to these men. If William wanted the chance to get out of this place when he was unable to move on his own, William needed to pretend that he really was an animatronic.
Not a dead man trapped inside one.
The mold must have masked the scent of death, because there was no way a dead body wouldn't...smell.
"It does look in pretty rough shape, but the place opens in less than a week. This is better than nothing."
"If you say so, man. It's your choice, but if I were you, I'd leave this guy deteriorating I didn't realize the room would be so damp."
William bristled within the suit, his own hand twitching uselessly within Spring Bonnie. Alway...he always forgot that his hand was speared through with metal that held it in place within Spring Bonnie's hand. William clenched his own jaw. If only he could move...if only he had made a serious attempt to override Spring Bonnie's programming.
"You got some gloves, man? I am not touching this moldy rabbit without them."
"Got some in the van. I don't want to think how bad this is gonna be for my lungs. Look how green this animatronic is. Is that the mold or the color it was before?"
Green?
William knew for damn sure that Spring Bonnie was golden. How long had he been locked away that the suit had turned green? Had it really been that damp in this room?
"Not sure. Let's go get those gloves and get this thing in the van. We can come back and see if anything else is salvageable."
Footsteps retreated until they were nothing but a faint echo.
William set about attempting to override Spring Bonnie's programming but he could t even make a dent in all of the code before the men were back, and there were more people than before.
There was a cart, presumably with which to move Spring Bonnie.
None of the men appeared thrilled by the idea of getting any closer to the molding animatronic.
It was amusing to William to see this uncertainty, because to someone who had nothing to stare at but the dark, this was the most activity that had happened in a long time. It really was a shame that William was unable to get the animatronic to move. At most, he could manage a finger-twitch, which no one in the room noticed as two of the braver men stepped forward.
When the men maneuvered the animatronic up and off the dirty floor, William was given an inkling to just how poorly Spring Bonnie had fared.
The head of the animatronic lolled to the side, momentarily giving the men a scare, before they resumed struggling to move the surprisingly heavy, bulky suit. But the weight should have given someone more familiar with the animatronic a pause, because it was painfully obvious that there was someone inside of the suit.
Of course, these men didn't notice the listing of the suit or the servos clicking on and off briefly as the animatronic's AI noticed a change.
Spring Bonnie's AI briefly came to before it blinked back out.
The reaction got William thinking, as he was apt to do ever since he was sealed away. Could he manage to override the animatronic's AI? That one brief flare to life showed that Spring Bonnie wasn't as broken as it seemed. William felt he knew enough of the code to break through but if he did, would the AI overpower his own wants when it finally kicked back in and remained on?
It wouldn't do to be controlled by a friendly animatronic rabbit that would be attempting to go find a crowd to entertain.
"Finally." One of the men sighed as he stepped back from Spring Bonnie, now awkwardly seated in a cart. "Go take it to the van and get it to the attraction. Just stick it on the floor in the nearest empty room. I'll figure out where to go from there."
"Sure thing."
William tuned the men out as he discreetly checked out his surroundings as he cart he was seated in was wheeled out of the room he had been inside for so long.
Very familiar surroundings.
And those surroundings made William's undead skin crawl with unease. But there was nothing in the building that wasn't rotting away and there weren't any...any...
What was it William thought he might find in this place? He couldn't recall, but William knew that the recollection that had sparked had been there before it was gone in an instant. The thought must have not been too terribly important if he had been unable to grasp it. Another question, however, did not elude him as he was brought into the back of the van, and left there, the doors left ajar. The moment alone allowed William to try and get a better look at himself, to see if he could gauge how difficult a repair job to the suit would be, and if he could do it himself or not.
From the angle of Spring Bonnie's head, the animatronic had seen better days. No wonder none of the men recognized the suit. It was filthy and molding, with some pieces of the suit gouged or worn away by time.
How long had William been sealed within this room?
More importantly, what was the state of his own body, skewered and pinned by the metal and plastic within this suit of Spring Bonnie?From the lack of breathing, by all rights William knew that he should be dead. Why hadn't he moved on after he had died within this animatronic?
William held still, despite being unable to move, until he was certain the men loading a few more items into the van were not paying any attention to him. Not that the wariness mattered because none of them gave him a second look as the vans doors were closed, and the vehicle began to move.
The ride was uneventful.
It honestly did not matter to William where he was being taken, so long as it wasn't back to be sealed within that room. William didn't even notice the passage of time within the van, lost in his thoughts as he was. By the time the vehicle slowed, William was more than ready to be left alone for a time, as he figured out what to do with this unexpected rescue.
Being brought into a building and left in a corner of a dim room didn't overly bother William. There were no doors with which to lock him in, and therefore, he was not as trapped as he was before. What William didn't particularly care for was that he had been left in a room with Freddy Fazbear paraphernalia. Dead lips twitched up into an amused quirk nonetheless beneath Spring Bonnie's head.
It seemed like William would never be free of that place, even in death.
With nothing else to occupy his attention, William set about attempting to get his body, and in turn, Spring Bonnie, to move. William had not bothered overly much in the past, since he had been in such a dark place for so long.
Why bother forcing a supposedly broken down animatronic if there was nothing to be gained for such an effort?
But now?
After William has heard, felt, and seen the AI run a brief diagnostic before shutting back down?
Now, he had reason to try to move.
William was no longer confined, he was in a new place, ahd he was very...curious. Dead though he may be, it made him wonder if…
If...
There will be no escape for you.
Darkness and silence followed the announcement.
William's sight flickered back into focus.
Ah, it had happened again. That split second of being forced into whatever unconsciousness a dead body could be whist fused with an animatronic.
William frowned.
But the loss of awareness did not explain that voice it had sounded...sounded almost familiar. But before that...there had been something he had been wondering.
Ah, yes.
Were they still around, like William was, or had they moved on? He didn't see or hear anything since he had been locked away in that room.
Perhaps he was damned to remain in this world until the animatronic and his own dead body ceased to be.
William stopped that particular train of thought to stare down at himself, without really taking in anything. His mind, despite trying to not think about the past, was continually twisting back to just that. William felt that there was something really wrong, particularly with what he could and couldn't remember. But the loss of memory, or rather, missing the pieces, was because he hadn't thought much about the past after he had been spring locked.
A click and a whirl drew William's attention to the suit he was trapped within, and groaned, actually groaned, over the way the suit began to twitch and spasm.
What now?
A glitch?
Was it because he had been moved, after staying in one place for so long?
William would have stopped the movement if he was able to get the Spring Bonnie suit to obey his commands. It appeared, however, that the animatronic was trying to go through a routine, before remaining idle until nighttime.
Spring Bonnie wouldn't stop twitching.
Why did it hurt so much?
William knew he was dead, from what little he could see of the suit he was pinioned inside of.
So why?
Why did each twitch and spasm the animatronic made drive a fresh wave of agony throughout his entire dead body?
William attempted to try to over override the programming that limited his movements, as well as the twitching that drove the metal and plastic into his already destroyed body with each motion. It proved futile to do much of anything until the animatronic finished with its attempts to get up. And by the time it did, William held both himself and the suit still anyway, wheezing unnecessarily from the pain that still swirled throughout his body. William felt one final apart twitch, just as someone entered the room he was in.
A security guard?
How nostalgic.
What were they doing there? The guard didn't seem to be very concerned with appearances, what with the tie lopsided and the dress shirt buttoned up haphazardly.
William wasn't prepared for the guard to leave and then come back with a bucket of water and a scrub brush.
Oh no.
They wouldn't dare.
That was not how one cleaned an animatronic like Spring Bonnie.
But as William couldn't find any words through the burn of agony still somehow wracking his body. He was forced to endure the guard attempting to scrub the animatronic clean with a series of uttered curses. William twitched the animatronics' fingers, to see if he could possibly stop the further deterioration of the suit, but William but could do nothing more than that little wiggle. William had to therefore silently endure a shoddy cleaning that no doubt removed some of the fur on the Spring Bonnie suit.
The next part of the guard's plan was tortuous.
William clenched his dead jaw, unable to grind the remaining teeth that were there.
Why in the hell was this guard haphazardly sewing the wrong golden color in patches over the suit?
This was horrible, watching this foolish guard ruin a piece of art that was Spring Bonnie.
William almost found the will to move, when some feet had been found to be slipped over the metal endoskeleton's. William couldn't believe that the guard had the audacity to sew the obviously mismatched colored feet to his ankles. Or rather, to the ankles of the suit. William watched with a critical eye as his jaw clenched down harder. He would have fired this person on the spot for doing such a horrendous job of trying to 'fix' the animatronic suit.
William would have made repairs to the suit himself, as he had always wanted Spring Bonnie to look just so.
This?
What the guard had done?
Unforgivable.
It would take William hours and hours to repair the terrible patchwork job. And he knew there was more to it, but William couldn't even move Spring Bonnie's head yet to see just how bad the rest of the suit looked.
At the very least, the guard had finally ended up leaving, but only after they had deemed William less shitty-looking.
To this, the dead man had glared at the guard, despite the look going unseen.
A shame.
William waited until he was certain that the guard was gone, before he went back to trying to get the suit to move. He had to inspect the guard's laughable repair work, because William had yet to see all of what had been done. Right now, the best William could manage with what he had gotten done with the coding was jerk the animatronic head to the left side.
"Shoddy." William rasped aloud after a moment of tracing the stitching with Spring Bonnie's eyes. William stopped what he was doing, as he had surprised himself by hearing his own voice for the first time in a long while.
A short silence followed.
"Intriguing..." William let out a wheeze of breathless laughter, mind turning over how he could possibly speak as a dead man. Spring Bonnie's voice box was broken, so William knew it was his own voice that he heard. It seemed he did not need his body in working order to still speak.
Interesting.
William went back to eyeing the suit from the angle he'd tipped Spring Bonnie's head.
The sewing and rough scrubbing the animatronic suit had been given wasn't as bad as he thought it might have been. At the very least, the new faux fur that had been haphazardly sewn to old fur hid the dead body within the suit a little better. It was just to bad that the fur was of varying thickness meant for different animatronics, giving the animatronic a patchwork-like fur appearance.
William supposed that it was lucky, for the guard, at least, to not have attempted to clean the teeth of the Spring Bonnie head. That would have given the guard an unpleasant surprise had the animatronic jaw been opened up even a tad bit.
"Lucky for them…that I cannot…move…yet..." Words were rough and difficult to get out, but get them out William did. The renewed quiet helped him turn over his options, before William resumed his attempts to override the animatronics suit's programming that had been switched to keep him still until it was nighttime.
"Tampered with…" William muttered to himself, as he attempted to clench a hand into a fist.
But when?
When could someone have possibly have tampered with a spring lock suit?
Had it been before he had put on the Spring Bonnie suit for the last time? Or after, before he had been sealed off in that room?
Another question William had no answer to.
Some hours passed by without notice, as William made progress with Spring Bonnie's AI, despite how slow it was going. William figured that the guard would return until late in the evening. When that guard showers again, William would…observe them, before deciding what he would do with the guard's presence.
"One step…at a time…" William reminded himself hoarsely, as he idly played with the codes before his eyes, adjusting the programming as he saw fit. Easy, yet time consuming, when he only partially knew what he was doing.
"Finally…" William let out an unnecessary sigh of satisfaction as he found that he could finally move the animatronic of his own volition.
Good.
William wanted to be able to create some doubt in the guard about this whole venture in this dilapidated building. Wherever this place was. William had partially overheard the men from before about what was planned for him. Or what was planned for Spring Bonnie, in this place. William didn't particularly care where he was, since it was no longer that boarded up room. One thing was blatantly clear, though.
William was not in a real Freddy Fazbear's Pizzaria. It was a sham, from what little William could see of the room he was inside of. A facsimile of what had once been, and from the look of it, this building appeared like it was going to be used to scare people in some way.
William's own lips twitched even as Spring Bonnie's reflected an eternal, cheerful grin.
How very…interesting this all was.
William would go explore his new surroundings, but not straight away, as he had to spend the next few hours testing out the way the animatronic suit responded to his motion while pinioned within it.
"Little…steps." William reminded himself. He had been shut away for so long in the dark that everything was a little discombobulating. Not to mention that it was a little tricky to figure out how to move such a bulky costume while fused with it.
"Damned…spring locks…" William wheezed out. The dead man was pleased to find that despite the oddness of his body pierced by the animatronic parts and held in place, he could still move. In fact, William could move as he had before, when the metal and plastic were held back by the spring locks.
The only difference was that it hurt to move.
Every motion William made sent stabs of sharp pain throughout his destroyed body. The stiffness of the animatronic's motions after the suit not moving for so long was not hard to understand. It was the pain and agony that made no sense.
Why was he in pain if he was already dead?
William could sense, as before, that he was obviously very dead within the suit. William gave his head a little shake, regretting it instantly as the spring locks pressed sharply into his neck with the motion. William let out a hiss and clapped a hand over his neck, only to cause himself more agony as he hit the back of the suit too hard.
"Wh...why...?" William choked out, even as he forced the suit into stillness while he waited for the stab of agony that had gone from the base of his neck to the rest of his body, before becoming a full body ache.
William heaved in several useless breaths.
Was he being punished? Probably, since he was still…alive, in a way.
Existing, anyhow.
William held as still as was possible until the ache became bearable. Once it was, he was able to rise stiffly to animatronic feet, hearing the gears and servos whining at the sudden movement. Once William was certain that he was balanced and would not fall over, he decided to explore this place.
"See if there's…any familiarity in this place." William told himself, as he shuffled Spring Bonnie out of the room and down a hall. He didn't get very far before he halted in the entryway of what appeared to be a storage room.
"I see…they were salvaging…in that place I was locked away in…" William lurched into the room, ducking his head as best he could. But he misjudged how far to duck, and felt the way one of the ears of the suit brushed the top of the door-frame. William cocked his head to the side, winced over the spring locks digging in again, and righted his head.
"Have to get...used to that…" William rasped aloud. Why he wasn't keeping his thoughts internal was likely because it had been so long since he had heard his own voice. Not that it was pleasant to listen to now. William stopped before a few stacked boxed, and began to rummage through one, not entirely certain what it was he was looking for.
Clues, maybe.
Nothing piqued William's attention in the first or second box, but in the third box that was rummaged around in with stiff animatronic fingers over human ones that didn't quite work wielded a result. William held up the small prize he had claimed, held between occasionally-twitching animatronic fingers.
A tattered purple bow-tie.
With a little effort and fumbling fingers, William managed to secure the bow-tie to the upper chest plate. It went beneath the collar of the suit, where a hole for the bow tie remained. William found a crooked mirror hung up in the room, and took in the sight of the Spring Bonnie animatronic.
He was in terrible condition, or the suit was, anyway, as William had no idea what he looked like apart from the sensation of what his own body felt like. William's jaw clenched beneath the mask.
He was dead.
It infuriated William to not know why. A rough wheezing laugh suddenly emitted from William's trapped body, shaking his thin frame, and in turn, making the animatronic body shake as well, and make it appear more terrifying than it was ever mean to be.
"Dead men...tell no tales." William murmured, twitching a hand up. "Why then, am I still here?"
A hand reached out to rest on the mirror briefly as William studied his reflection, before he let the limb drop and reached up with both hands. They shook, as William took hold of either side of the animatronic jaw, jamming fingers into place. William took another useless breath before he braced himself and wrenched Spring Bonnie's jaw open to see what he looked like.
It hurt, forcing the animatronic mouth open like this when metal was fused to his body. But William ignores the pain and stared at himself in the mirror. What he saw wasn't as much of a surprise as he thought it would be. A gaunt, discolored face stared back at William, the skin stretched taut around eyeless sockets that seemed to have a faint pinprick of a white glow in them. A gaping mouth completed the look, with what little teeth remained within it.
A monster.
How fitting.
William recalled the last time he had heard that term thrown at him, though it seemed like it had been so very long ago. William studied his reflection for a moment longer, noting the way that the spring locks and other metals dug into his skin, fusing him with Spring Bonnie's suit over the time that had passed.
Suffer as we have suffered.
William cocked his head to the side, wincing as it jostled the animatronic head he still held open. Had he…imagined that quiet voice?
You can't hide from what you've done.
What were these…voices? They sounded…familiar. Very familiar. But why? Where has he heard them before?
We found you. Soon, she will find you.
William cast a glance to one side and then another, before looking at himself in the mirror. There was no one there but him.
She won't let you escape. We won't let you.
William offered his reflection a near-toothless grin over the sound of the echoed voices, uncaring whether he was imagining the distinctly different voices or not.
He was dead.
What more could possibly be done to him to make it worse?
There is no rest for monsters.
William caught a glimpse of something as large as Spring Bonnie in the mirror behind him. It was that sight in the mirror that had William letting go of the mask to let it snap back into place as he forced the animatronic to turn around.
He could have sworn he had seen a flash of gold.
William completed turning around, but found that there was nothing there. Only boxes of old Freddy Fazbear Pizzaria items. He was alone, but William could have sworn that the last voice that had spoken had been right behind him.
The tone of that voice had been harsh and accusing.
An echo of the past or something more?
William turned back to the mirror in a few jerky motions once the voices did not speak again. The dead man studied Spring Bonnie's head, before using the green-colored eyes of the suit to look to the side, where the open doorway was.
What to do, what to do.
This was a conundrum, to be sure. What did one do when they were dead but not remaining so?
Avoid detection until answers could be found.
William couldn't let anyone know who he was, for the time being. It would just figure that someone would connect the dots of what he had done while alive and then find some way to make his life a living hell. Or as he was now, an undead nightmare, William supposed.
But if he were to…speak to someone, what should he have them call him?
William stared at the mirror again, searching his new body, so to speak, as if a name would come to mind. It was Spring Bonnie, and yet not, with its patchwork fur not quite matching the old, and its overall battered appearance. A near-toothless grin, an echo of an old smile of William's surfaced as a light briefly flared in dead eye sockets.
Springtrap.
After all, had William not been spring locked to death in this suit?
It seemed rather fitting.
So Springtrap William would be to those who ran across him in this animatronic suit.
Springtrap raised a hand, clenching it into and out of a fist experimentally. It reaffirmed the knowledge that he would still have to figure out how to get the bulky animatronic suit to move around efficiently.
"Time…will help." Springtrap rasped, as he lurched unsteadily out of the storage room and back down the hall to the room that he had been left inside of earlier. Lowering himself to the floor was rather difficult and slow going, but Springtrap managed to get seated back in place.
And waited.
There wasn't much Springtrap could do at present until he learned more of his situation. Nor could he just walk himself out of the building, as Spring Bonnie's AI had accidently picked up some settings that prevented Springtrap from seeing what could have easily been observed before with human eyes. If he laid 'eyes' on an entrance or exit now, Springtrap would be unable to go through it because the suit he was trapped within couldn't 'see' the doors.
So, Springtrap would have to wait for the best opportunity to make his next move.
The guard couldn't return to this depressing place soon enough.
The nostalgia was one thing.
Faint whispers of those Springtrap knew to be dead was another thing entirely, and one he wasn't entirely sure was an echo of the past or not.
You can hide from the world in one of your animatronics, but in the end, you will be found. We may not be able to be there now, but when we all meet again, there will be no way out for you.
Another flash of gold came from out of the corner of the animatronic's vision, which made Springtrap's head sharply turn, both jaws biting down hard in tandem.
Nothing.
There was absolutely nothing.
Springtrap was the only one in the building at present. There was no one else that was dead that had decided to join him to torment him. The dead ought to remain dead. Yet with Springtrap's own continued existence, and what he had witnessed before he'd been spring locked into this suit…he wasn't as sure as he had been before.
A flash of gold in the mirror...and gone as quick as it had appeared, along with the sinister message.
Springtrap gave his head a shake, a sharp ache travelling through the pieces of metal fused to his neck.
A coincidence.
It had to be.
The sight of a suit similarly colored to his own had to have been figment of his imagination. Being trapped in the dark within a broken mind, with a body that was locked inside of an equally damaged animatronic? It wasn't all that surprising that whatever he had that passed for eyes may play have played tricks on him after so little use. The dead man within the dilapidated Spring Bonnie suit wanted answers, regardless of his situation, and what he may or may not have heard and seen since leaving.
Springtrap had all the time in the world to get those answers he desired, imagined voices haunting him or not. Another flash of gold and a whisper of a voice just out of hearing had Springtrap temporarily blocking out the world while he awaited the guard's return.
The voices that he had heard, just like the flash of gold he had seen...they were merely the past haunting him.
Nothing more.