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Techno wakes up with his eyes stinging, the sickening scent of smoke and the distraught wails of his twin brother in the hallway.
He flings himself up, but vertigo sweeps him off his feet again, and he lands on his knees halfway from his bed to his door, already choking on smog and ash. He remembers reading something years ago about how smoke rises, so if you're stuck in a burning house, keep low to the floor - it makes him feel ill that the information from one of those hyperfixations would have to be useful one day, but the thought is swept away when he hears his father scream his name again, voice hoarse, and all he can think is help, get out, get them to safety, help them.
Techno crawls across the floor, wood under his palms creaking like it was about to give out, because Wilbur was crying, he could hear him, Wilbur was having a panic attack if the sounds of short, gasping breaths were anything to go off, and he wasn't there, he wasn't there. The idea makes his heart squeeze in his chest, and he grits his teeth and pulls himself over to his door and grips the doorknob-
and it burns his hand with metal so hot it was right out of a forge, and he tries not to scream because Wilbur is on the other side of the door and if he screams it'll make his twin panic more.
The loud shriek on the other side tells Techno that even if he was silent in his pain, Wilbur knew anyway, some horrible intuition they'd had their whole lives, like their spirits were tied together, like their nervous systems wouldn't function if one was lost.
Wilbur is crying, yelling his name, coughing his lungs out. Wilbur has asthma, and Wilbur is screaming through the smoke, banging on his door, tugging on the knob frantically, trying to get to his older brother.
"Get out!" He barks back, coughing and sliding down his door to the floor, tears welling up when he feels the fire creep around him, when the heat has filled the room suffocatingly, lungs struggling to keep up. "Get out!"
He can hear Phil yelling.
He reaches for the door again, trying to turn the knob, and it's locked. Because of course it is - because Techno is a light sleeper, and he wakes up at Wilbur's quietest knock. Because he has to, Wilbur has nightmares, and he's not always forthcoming about the fact that he wants his older brother to hug him and tell him everything's going to be okay. Because if he doesn't lock it, Wilbur worries about what would happen if someone broke in during the night. Wilbur worries about a lot of things, but Techno's pretty sure he's never agonized over a situation like this.
He wrenches on the lock so hard he probably sprains his wrist, and Wilbur is screaming, Phil is screaming, they can't get in, they can't reach him.
Some terrible vision springs itself upon him, and the fire is consuming him, licking at his clothes and his skin, and the heat is unbearable, and at that moment he knows.
I'm going to die.
He's going to die, alone in his room, wearing his twin brother's hoodie because he stole it off the chair in the dining room and didn't give it back when he passed out after finishing his latest essay, with his little brother and his dad on the other side of a locked door.
He's never gonna give Dream the notes he missed from philosophy class. He's never gonna return that flash drive to Harvey, and he's never gonna finish college, and he's never gonna be an uncle, and he's never gonna bake the cookies he was gonna bake for Niki to thank her for the cookies she baked for him because it was a running joke between the two of them ever since Niki made him cookies in return for helping her with an essay she just couldn't write. He's never gonna help Calvin finish that demonstration he needed for his engineering class, and he's not gonna be able to meet up with Nestor on the weekend to go to that Thai restaurant he wanted to go to, and Skeppy isn't gonna go to that party he wanted to drag Techno to without Techno, he knows it, because Skeppy never goes to parties alone and Bad is busy that day.
He wonders if they'll miss him.
He wonders if the girl who sits with him in the front row of his English class will notice he's gone. He wonders if his friends will be sad he's gone, or if they'll just mourn the loss of the clever kid who helped with projects and reports. He wonders if Niki will still bake a cake on his birthday. He wonders if Dad will lock his things away in his closet, shut his door, and keep it closed. He wonders if Wilbur will keep the clothes they salvage from the fire, keep them folded neatly in a shoebox under his bed like Dad does with Mum's favorite clothes.
He wonders if they'll put his name in the news, and all the kids who knew him back in elementary school will feel just a little bad for making fun of the adopted kid. He wonders if they'll even recognize him, or if he's just another faded memory.
He wonders if he'll see his birth parents again. If he'll see Mum again. Techno does not believe in God or Heaven or Hell, but if he did, if it's real, if that's where he's headed - to some angel choir, or more likely, a pit of lava, he hopes he'll at least get to talk to her again. See her, hold her hands, thank her for taking care of him and dedicating her time to him before she passed, love her endlessly for the woman she was, and tell her that Dad misses her very, very much.
Though, he does suppose, if Hell is real and he's going, if his fate is already decided, Satan probably wouldn't let him talk to his mum before dragging him downwards.
He stopped believing in God the first time his father hit him. He stopped believing in God the first time he watched his mother shove a needle into her arm. He stopped believing in God a long, long time ago, and now's not the time to start again, because if God was real, they wouldn't let Techno die in a locked room, suffocated by smoke, listening to his twin brother sob his heart out on the other side.
He just can't help wondering if he's right. If death is the end, if the unimaginable darkness of life being over is the truth. He wonders how it will feel - if he'll even know, if it'll be like floating through space for eternity without stars, if he'll just be... gone.
A word comes to mind. Ineffable. That's what he imagines death will be like. Unimaginable nothingness, swirling through time at a rapid rate, and yet never moving an inch, planted in the same moment, except the single moment is forever, one moment stretched over eons until there are no more moments to stretch, and even then, there will be space left to reach for, stretching and stopping all at once, running in place a mile a millisecond with legs that never move, crying with dry eyes.
He wonders what the funeral will be like. He read once that the funerals you see in movies are inaccurate - that it's unlikely that a funeral will be held in the actual graveyard, that the protagonist standing at the grave after everyone else has left the funeral is something near-impossible. He wonders if they'll slap makeup on his scorched skin, shove him into a suit and place him in a casket. He wonders if it will be open or closed. He wonders who will show up. He wonders if there will be a church, a priest, or just the short, plain ceiling of a cemetery chapel and speechless, echoey sobs.
He wonders what his eulogy will be like - he wonders who'll write it. He wonders what his grave will look like, what it will say, and he wonders what his obituary will say, wonders who it'll mention. Probably just Wilbur and Dad. He doesn't think Wil and him actually have any other living relatives.
He's so tired. The smoke wafting around him is stinging his eyes, every breath like dragging dull blades across his throat. He wasn't ready to wake up, but now he's not ready to fall asleep, because Wilbur needs him. Wilbur needs him, Wilbur will break without him, that's his baby brother and he can't just leave him, especially not now.
There's no wailing anymore - the void that Wilbur's voice leaves is devastating. He yanks the lock one more time, so hard the door jets out of the frame, the thick scrap of metal that held it closed screeching as it's dragged through splintering wood.
The last thing he sees before he crumples to the floor is Wilbur's curly brown hair strung across the floor of the hallway, being picked at by flames.
It never dawned on him, never once crossed his mind, that he wouldn't die alone. That there would be no father to plan his funeral, no brother to sit at his grave and strum his guitar. He never once considered the possibility that they would stay. That if they couldn't get to him, they would try until they could.
And if Techno wakes up the next morning in the burnt-out shell of his childhood home, hair singed and skin charred, and he holds his twin brother tightly in his arms, pets fluffy hair, grips the familiar fabric of Wilbur's sweater in his hands, it's nobody's business but theirs.