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For a prolonged period of time, there was nothing but darkness through a dusky visor.
Somewhere within the labyrinth of a derelict industrial facility, the RED Pyro’s slouched body gave a startled jolt, rubber suit squeaking as balmy heat seeped through slits in their optical mask. Breath quickening, they startled from their slump with a muffled groan, sucking in the dampness that wafted through the thin wafer of silicone. A familiar scent of burning embers lingered in the air.
“Mmmff… Mphh mhh?”
Pyro couldn’t understand why, but it had become a struggle to breathe. Not only was it hot within the confines of their bulky suit, but the room itself seemed to be steaming — in addition to the intense heat, the humidity was suddenly nauseating and they became ill at ease, squirming within the heavy suit and scrambling to their knees. Each hasty breath fogged up the mask and obstructed their vision, translucent eye holes allowing little light to seep through.
The room was dimly lit, a cramped space with twisted metal lining the walls and grimy tiled floors littered with shards of mirrored glass, so many shards. Images of Pyro’s teammates came to mind — the RED team’s faces and voices murmuring in a cacophony, bits and pieces of mundane conversations overheard from just last week, memories of battles burning bright then fizzling to sparkling dust. None of it seemed to matter now, though. They weren’t here to help.
Pyro still glanced around briefly with panicked suspicions crawling, thoughts of well-placed windows or hidden cameras out of sight. To expose the reality beneath the mask meant a betrayal of self.
But it was getting hot, really hot , nearly hotter than they could stand. Nothing but a bad dream born from malice and confinement. The whole situation reeked of the BLU team, Pyro felt sure — although despite the hostage theory, there was no evidence to back the crawling paranoia. It seemed there was no one else here, nobody but the lone Pyro to sit in this pit of despair — possibly a solace within the awful situation, if such a thing could even exist. The mask could be removed here.
They managed to stand on wobbly feet, gloved hands grasping behind their head to fiddle with constraints, muffled breaths growing heavy in an attempt to remove their mask. The rubber felt warm and slippery, squeaking against standard issue gloves as sturdy grasps quickly turned to panicked grappling.
“Mmpphh!”
Hands still clung to their head, Pyro stumbled into a wall and flinched like a startled animal, lightly patting the back of their neck as a shuddering realization came to face — not only had the mask been tampered with, but a new addition had been installed.
Pyro turned slowly, fingers wrapped around a foreign tube protruding from the mask's neck. The silicone pipe protruded from the rubber like an augmented limb, snaking up the wall and past a hole in the aluminum grid ceiling, disappearing into the filthy darkness above.
“Mmmph! “Mmmpphh!”
The Pyro yanked and pulled at the wretched tube but to no avail — the industrial grade rubber gave no slack. They thrashed around the room in a frenzy, all indistinguishable cries and insults. Only when a strange sound sputtered from overhead did the Pyro falter in their outburst, a grainy crackle of static preceding a ghastly pre-recorded message.
“Hello, Pyro.”
The thrashing stopped. Pyro remained frozen like an anxious fawn, waiting with bated breath.
“I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet, but the truth is on the contrary. I’ve been watching you, alongside all of them … What you are, it’s sickening at its core. Your world is shrouded in flames, concealed by a veil of childish fantasy. You frolic through life oblivious, remorselessly murdering others as you prance around in a daydream. But beneath that mask lies something so horrendous, not even you yourself can stand to glance at it. This is your chance to be purified. There is a broken mirror on the wall, and beneath it a tube of glue; You have five minutes to piece the shards together and mend your reflection, allowing you to face yourself, to face reality and find redemption . With each passing minute, you are being exposed to lethal amounts of sulfur dioxide. Fail to complete the task in time, and that mask you’ve clung to your whole life will become a chamber of suffocation. Sweet dreams, Pyro.”
The static crackled once again, leaving a repulsive silence hanging in the stale air. Despite the oppressive heat and mayhem, the poor firestarter was no longer in their element. The man this unfamiliar voice belonged to, who was almost certainly not a member of the BLU team or anyone recognizable for that matter, had taken something sentimental and twisted it into a depraved death trap — Pyro would rather die than be forced to face such a corrupt reality on someone else’s accord.
“MMMMMPPHH! HNNGG MMPHH!”
A deafening thud resonated through the room as tiles were smashed in a fit of rage, pieces of ceramic and debris flying through clouds of white dust. This was a loss of self, the destruction of what little sanity Pyro had been holding on to — worse than anything they’d ever inflicted upon enemies in the midst of battle, worse than their flamethrowers merciless inferno. Death by sudden blood loss, blunt trauma, even being burned alive would’ve been preferable to this slow asphyxiation.
Heat waves continued to permeate the room, boiling and saturating. And while anger ran heavy and thick through Pyro’s blood, the rank humidity hung thicker.
The walls seemed to close in as each breath became a burden, rage subsiding in favor of an all-consuming panic. The circumstances, though unclear, had become dire — and in favor of choosing life, reality left itself with no choice but to be acknowledged.
Bone clattered against ceramic as Pyro fell to their knees, shell shocked. They let out a frustrated cry as their limbs swung wildly, head whipping like a cyclone as they attempted to collect the scrambled shards of fate, shakily removing those clunky gloves for precision. Yet, it seemed they had been truly slighted this time — aside from the few large chunks of glass, the grimy tiles were covered in hundreds of miniscule fragments, far too small to possibly reconstruct the mirror in such a short amount of time.
Still, Pyro scurried like a blind rat next to the barren wall, bloody fingers sifting through the glittering shards with a stiffened tremble. A clock ticked somewhere nearby, echoing from some peripheral of this hell — but they couldn’t look up, wouldn’t dare to look up if it meant meeting their mournful fate in this psychopath’s sauna.
With an almost-empty tube of glue in hand, they managed to stick a jagged piece against the wall, flat glass edging the concrete border. One miserable shard was all that filled the frame, although Pyro couldn’t see their own reflection anymore, let alone their surroundings. Too many seconds had passed, it was inevitable now. The mask only fogged up impossibly as their knees ached against the grimy tiles, scalding. Pleading.
BBBZZZZZZ.
Time could only ever be so fair. Pyro didn’t move an inch. An eerie silence followed the devastating ring, and the outcome became clear — all the muffled pleads in the world meant nothing now — they’d been doomed to begin with. Bound to echo tragically into the nothingness and drown in this curtain of perspired death, inaudible and choked. Insignificant.
By the time Pyro could begin to make sense of their sealed fate, the process had already begun. The mask clogged quickly rather than slowly, purposefully leaving no room for sane thought or a spare epiphany. Thick gas ran its course through the tube and permeated the confined chamber with a white mist, acrid and inevitable, leaving the firestarter to hallucinate in dread as they instinctively grabbed at their throat.
Dirty fingernails dragged against rubber, frantic clawing. Racing thoughts permeated by suffocation, the strobe-like flashing of rainbows hallucinated through heat waves. A wet choke muffled by fumes, then a silence. With a final twitch, the body fell to a crumpled heap amongst the bloody shards.