The Reluctant Apprentice: Friends Forever

Despair

⚠️⚠️WARNING: The following chapter contains depiction of blood 🍷 and death 💀. In particular, roadkill. If you find the following offensive or upsetting then I recommend you will probably want to skip this chapter. But you will be missing out on a very wholesome moment as well. ⚠️⚠️

POV: 3rd
                             When she fell asleep and entered her dream, it was not with William. Instead she was in a dark void surrounded by many rectangles filled with flickering memories like reels of film that have been disturbed. Some of the memories were hers and some of the others were his.
                               Quietly, unsure of herself, she touches the first memory that she can get into contact with. Suddenly she is sucked into the memory. She was sitting on her bed writing in her journal, she didn't need to read the journal to remember what she was writing about. It was perhaps the 4th time she had died to William in her dreams and she was writing up strategies in between classes on how to beat the maze. Things a few weeks ago, now feel like months ago to her. She curses how much has happened in such a short amount of time. But then again this was her fault, curiosity had gotten the better of her after all.
                              Back when things were simple, she wanted to beat the maze and find out what will happen. By that point, she had calculated that for every minute in the maze was roughly 30 minutes back in reality, meaning that if she didn't want to oversleep, then she had roughly 16 minutes to complete the maze or to outlast Springtrap. Of course, the way she figured this out was by immediately dying in the maze to see at what point in the day would she wake up. She remembered how she did everything for science and how maybe just maybe she was already like William before they truly ever properly met. Destroying her own body for science, mutilating herself just so that she could understand some thing out of her reach. She shattered at the thought and shut the memory behind her.
                               Back in the void, she grabbed onto a random memory. This one belong to William and weirdly enough it was a memory from way back in time. He was a young boy playing in puddles on the street. He was wearing a ridiculously shaped uniform, something you see straight out of an old fashion boarding school. And he had the dorkiest of bowl haircuts. It was cute in a way, how uncomfortable William seemed in his own skin to her. A part of her seemed relieved that he had an awkward phase as well and that he wasn't always the confident slick talker he seems to be now.
                               She watched as he walked along the side of the sidewalk with a big stick, whacking it on the ground every so often as the rain slowly poured onto his skin. He did so until eventually he came to a piece of roadkill, specifically of a rabbit. Body was split in half from the collision and its eyes stared endlessly into a void. She could feel a bit of sadness coming from the younger version of William, he already had a soft spot for rabbits. But that didn't stop him from taking his stick and drawing his initials in the blood and in the intestines of the creature. He seemed... lonely like he had nothing better to do with his time. And every so often, he'd rub his arm which was covered in a rather large bruise. The only ones around were a crow that was waiting for him to finish so it could feast on the corpse. Eventually the memory came to an end when the voice of a man, far off in the distance, caused William to jump up and run toward it.
                               She then found a memory from her own childhood that she entered, she was sitting alone filled with nothing, but despair, roughly the same age as he was in that memory. She had lost her best friend to the dreaded moving away. The world seems so gray and dead and she just was hitting rocks with sticks. She took a seat next to her younger self and began to monologue, "You know, I know bad people aren't born that way and they are typically just good people with good intentions gone wrong. But I was really hoping William was just one of those children that were just straight evil when they were a kid... If I become like William, am I doomed to repeat the same problems..."
                               Her younger self doesn't respond because it's just a memory, but she continues nonetheless, "Am I already a monster... I agreed to help him just so I can make some money in the future... And the worst part is I'm probably still gonna go through with it after this is all over..."
                               Nobody answers her and she simply gets up and leaves that memory, she quietly sits by herself in a small ball. Suddenly William appears behind her, "Are you still sad?"
                               He pokes her lightly and she falls over as if she had no weight to her. He groans as he squats down to her level, "Look you can look at the situation in two ways, with fascination or with fear, but crying is not going to do anything. When you're scared, it motivates you to try to prevent something like this from happening again and when you're curious, you will learn... I can't believe you're making me do this... Do you want a hug?"
                               "I don't want your pity. We both know that you don't care about me and you just want me to get over this so we can continue on our mission..."
                               "Yes, but at the same time..." He takes a deep breath and just hugs her. She struggles for a few minutes before giving up and just allowing herself to be held, "You're upset because you experienced my death, imagine experiencing it every single day as you relive the same memory for 30 years. If you do things, correctly you will never have to experience that ever so stop crying."
                               "Thank you..."