"Malice & Malpractice"
For how the fireplace veils its surrounding log-paneled walls in welcoming orange, your home's atmosphere suffocates under a distinct sense of incompletion. You muse a soft, dejected sigh as you skim over what letters have piled upon your side table over the course of months. Each opened envelope tells a written story of distanced communication between your wife, Therese, and yourself, Gregory Müller.
Each letter starts the same, with apologies for something that no longer needs to be pardoned (you've always told her that she's too harsh on herself). Then, she tries to reassure you that she's safe in the daemon's nest that is ironically the Holy City, and that she'd rather think nothing of the Capital and instead of your own exploits in rural Calemberg. Worried for everyone but herself. You've forgiven her again and again – not that she still needs to be forgiven – and that it's okay. Though, you doubt she'll ever really escape her guilt. What an all-consuming beast it's always been, ever since you knew her.
You'll be alright, you assure yourself. No, we'll be alright, even if neither of you had ever been apart from one another since being wed – when you were merely seventeen and she, sixteen. More than that, you both grew into your own together. You watched her flourish, and… you miss her. You know the feeling is likely mutual. It was over a month 'til autumn set in, maybe you could return to Regalia. Maybe you could make things better. Maybe you could–
"Gregory, are you home?"
A familiarly monotonous voice calls for you, spilling in from the night through an open window. So typically reserved and flat, though for you, Therese's tone might as well have been a melody.
"Therese?"
"I think I've got my foot stuck in the mud and it's not coming out, can you come help?" comes a plea.
A gleeful, yet urgent instinct to both greet and help your wife overwhelms you in lieu of sense. You could wonder about why she was back in Calemberg after you unstuck her foot. After all, didn't she also once insist on surprising her own brother with both of your arrivals in Regalia?
Fumbling some over your own ankles for all of the big, charming oaf you are, you throw only a coat across your shoulders and a belt around your waist. The evening consumes you, seemingly made all the darker in the countryside, and in the thick of it is Therese. Concern stings at your heart, and you quicken your pace to close the distance.
Though she's turned from you, ultimately focused on shaking her engulfed ankle from the earth, you can recognize her dress. Her unkempt hair. You notice just how much her blonde roots have sprouted against the black dye since you last saw her, and something once lost blossoms in your chest to grace you with a pleasant warmth. "Terry," you mumble past an affectionate chuckle. Albeit recalling her aversion to touch, you gingerly grasp at her shoulder anyway. You just want to see her face.
It turns to you.
That is not her nose, those are not her eyes. A cruel, malformed mockery of your wife sheds its skin, and something crawls out of it anew: the Ringmaster – though you would never know them by name. Leathery flesh of bloodied burgundy and sickeningly playful magenta contorts to sprout half a dozen tents of wings, and a pair too many arms spiral to ravenously cage above you. You cannot comprehend the ungodly beast which has so tragically chosen you, and there is no time to try.
Hundreds of needle-thin teeth which line its long, vertical maw blossom outward to tear the flesh between your neck and shoulder – greedily robbing you of your blood and channeling vampiric corruption through your veins. In the midst of inconceivable terror, you hear screams. So terribly desperate and pathetic, even now it would have struck you with pity, until it dawns upon you that they're erupting from your own throat. Propelled by humanity's foolish endeavor to escape death, you wrestle free of the monster and ignore the pooling heat of spilled blood across your torso as you cross the threshold of your home.
Your back thrusts only briefly against the front door in an ultimately fruitless attempt to shut out the demon. As the sheer force of it meets you on the opposing side, you're sent tumbling across the den, over the lounge, and to a rolling halt in front of the fireplace once your shoulder meets the floor. Daring to catch only a glimpse of the thing's ghastly silhouette, you decidedly fix your honey-brown eyes to the rifled Puretek hanging above the mantle. The last time Terry was in Calemberg, she had given it to you. You pray that you will live to tell her how grateful you were for it.
Adrenaline assists your hands around the trigger and forestock of the weapon, and just as the unsightly entity lashes its taloned grasp for you, your rifle's muzzle explodes with faithful light. There is a simple moment you choose to relish in, where you are so blind in consequence to the shot of holy radiance, that you can choose to believe that you've vanquished the demon completely.
You understand that this is not the case as what is revealed to be not a monster at all, but a person, begins to shriek and wail with kindling wrath. Devoid of magic or flair, they mercilessly hollow out your gut, your chest. As you are rendered a strangling husk, you recall once sticking your hand into the gears of a moving watermill and breaking almost every bone in it. That was the worst pain in the world, you thought. You know better now.
You are briefly rescued from your agony as you're lulled deeper into reminiscence. You'd never realize in the moment that this is simply an intoxicating side-effect of dying. Oh, the care in which you remember Terry angling the little splints against your broken fingers! She was only a student in medicine at that point, but Everwatcher above, how excited she was to practice.
You aren't quite sure when you closed your eyes and began dreaming, nor were you awake to witness the undisguised Sanguine leave you for what it assumed was death. Maybe if you weren't so kind as to regularly bake the neighboring farm blackberry pies, they wouldn't have investigated the shouts and found you mauled apart. Alive, but only just.
Consciousness finds you upon a clinic bed. You spend hours tracing the cracks of the ceiling and reflecting on the night prior until you muster the strength to call for a medic. You find your voice so weak and raspy, it's unfamiliar to you – but you lack the energy to be appalled. Still, you wonder: what would dad say if he saw you like this?
"Oh, thank goodness. I thought we lost you." Definitely not that. You peer to the clinician who'd made her light-hearted entrance, and you cannot help but manage a chuff of humor past the dull, throbbing anguish of your still-mending wounds. Though it strikes you as odd for an Isldar to be tending to a clinic in Calemberg, her kind face becomes an appreciated one over the course of three days as she tends to your every whim and care.
She seems only eager to listen to you ramble on about your values, and does not appear to tire when all she hears of is family, Unionism, and labor. Not once does she worry over your condition, which initially graces you into a state of ease – even as she injects you with one strange fluid after the other.
"I've had patients in worse conditions than yours, ha."
Even when you inquire after the nature of your treatment and fail to receive an answer.
"You'll be out of here before you know it."
Even when writhing anguish spreads like flame through your bone marrow.
"There's no need to worry."
Even when, after every dose of her unnamed medication, you feel yourself slipping further from life.
"It'll all pass."
You were telling this woman your story. Your parent's stories. Your wife's story. And, you would never know that she was killing you – thus finishing the job that the daemon didn't; a job that was never meant to be hers. Was it misfortune? Miserable coincidence? Or, perhaps the "Braunschweiger curse" that your Terry always joked about did not spare those merely related by marriage after all. It wouldn't matter. You would never be blessed with the gift of knowing why.
For how the setting sun prospers through the window by your cotside and embraces your face in tepid yellow, the clinic air is burdened with the sense that something is horribly, irrevocably wrong. You claw at your closing throat and wordlessly beg your once friendly medic for assistance, communicating with nothing but bulging eyes.
Your injuries would tell a dishonest story, one to be ignorantly told in pitying whispers from one distant cousin to another at your funeral. "I heard Greg was mauled by a demon," you practically hear them say. "He only died from it later in a clinic, if you can believe it." You know Therese will weep, and the very idea keeps you stubbornly awake for one… more… moment.
You die confused. You die scared and unwilling. You die before ever seeing your twenty-third year, or your first child. You die as an Isldar – a stranger – maliciously beams down at you.
You die as poor, devout Gregory Müller: a good brother, son, and husband.
—---------
[OOC]
[OOC]
Thank you for reading the first Lore Story I've ever posted! The co-writers of this piece are @KrakenLord01 ; @Aibori ; & @ChapterDeath. This story is necessary because: Therese's NPC husband, Gregory Müller, deserved a proper send-off. rip gregory from fnaf security breach
The story here is a full report of a canon, off-screen occurrence through the eyes of Gregory. But, just because this is IC & will have real, important roleplay consequences, doesn't necessarily mean that what's written here is public knowledge.
Lastly, a credit to the character appearances by: @KrakenLord01 as the Ringmaster & @FINDOUTIC as an Isldar.
