Archive of Our Own

The pig has done this too many times to count now.

It’s routine to her now. It’s like clockwork. Some days she loses. Some days she wins. She thinks about what's even considered winning or losing in this hellhole. She questions if such concepts can even exist in the fog. It doesn’t matter. She’ll be stuck in this sick, demented game for God knows how long, if there even is a God. 

There’s no use trying, anyway. What could she even do? All she knows is that there’s something out there in this place, something controlling her that isn’t John. That something wants her to hunt. To sacrifice. She doesn’t fight it. It’s the only thing the pig can do anymore. 

She breathes heavily as her rotten mask weighs down on her head, the sun beating against her covered face, pooling with sweat. She’s at the farm again. It doesn’t make much of a difference to her, though. These places in the fog have all become the same over time. She doesn’t even know how long she’s been here anymore. They merge together and contort and shape themselves into one land, one being that’s alive when it shouldn’t be, when everything that inhabits it is dead. That bright substance underneath the floorboards of the basement breathes. 

The pig does the same thing every day, every minute, every second on this land. She hunts, she sacrifices, and sometimes she kills when the thing controlling her deems it necessary. Rinse and repeat. Like clockwork. Her red robes drag across the ground as she hides in the tall cornstalks. She hears the sparking of a generator in the near distance from her, and crouches over to the location of the sound, quietly like the predator she is. 

She finds the one responsible for the noise. It’s the widower, alone, his hands holding the wires of the generator. She’s seen him before. She recognizes his blonde hair and his dark green jacket that always seems to be stained with blood, and his tired eyes that have surely seen better days. He looks exhausted. Possibly even sad. She doesn’t quite understand why. The trial hasn’t even started yet. Maybe he knows that any attempt at escape is futile at this point. But she’s killed him before, too many times for either of them to count. At first, she questioned why he didn’t stay dead. She questioned why any of the survivors were still alive when rusty hooks have pierced their shoulders and their jaws have been ripped apart.

She questioned why she was still alive when there should be a bullet in her throat when there isn’t .

It really doesn’t matter anymore. The widower is always like this. It’s always the same. Nothing ever changes in the fog. It’s all on repeat like a broken record. 

She stands up and ambushes him, an inhuman roar emitting from her throat as adrenaline pulses through her veins, the blade from the contraption inside her sleeve slashing the widower across his back. Red blood spurts out as it tears through his jacket. He cries out in pain at the impact, breaking off into a sprint away from her, his blood nearly the same color as her robes. She chases after him as he runs from her into the tall cornstalks of the vast farm. He doesn’t seem to know where he’s taking her, and he doesn’t look behind him. He’s reckless, like he’s asking to be killed. Sweat drops down her face, nearly drowning her in it. 

The pig quickly catches up to the widower near the shack at the edge of the farm, slashing him to the ground. He screams as he makes impact with the dirt, landing face first. But before she can loom over him and attach a reverse bear trap to his jaws, he mutters something, his sullen voice haggard.

“Just get it over with,” the widower says, his voice nearly inaudible, his face buried in the ground. He refuses to move or look at her. He isn't like the others. He doesn’t fight. He only lays on the dirt ground of the farm, blood trickling from the wound on his back from where she injured him. “Just kill me.”

But the pig can’t satisfy his aimless demands now. She can’t kill him yet. The bear trap will do that for her if he isn’t able to remove it in time, but that thing in the sky constantly demands she place him on one of the many rusty hooks to be sacrificed to it. She doesn’t exactly know what happens to the survivors after they die. She doesn’t understand how they’re able to come back to the campfire, a resting place for the survivors in between trials. She never even knew it existed until the ghost face told her one time while she was building a bear trap at the meat plant. Killers can’t enter it, but they can watch from afar, stalking them in the distance. 

Regardless, she doesn’t respond. What’s the point of talking to the survivors, anyway? It’s not like anything of meaning will come out of it. She knows they hate her. She knows they want her dead, want her to suffer just like they have. The pig places the bear trap on the widower’s head and carries him on her shoulder to a hook. He doesn’t protest, doesn’t scream or beat his fists against her or kick her in an attempt to break free like so many of the other survivors do. He only remains on her shoulder, motionless, blood from his wounds trickling onto her mask and her cloak. 

She soon throws him onto a hook, the rusted metal piercing a familiar hole through his shoulder. He screams loudly from the excruciating pain, a piercing sound, his eyes widening. No matter how many times she’s done this to the survivors, the pig always feels a hint of remorse and guilt at the sight of them dangling helplessly from the hooks. But they have to die. It’s not like anything is going to change in the fog. They probably never changed in their old lives, either. 

She steps away from the widower, leaving him there to die until some other survivor rescues him in an endless cycle of death and hopelessness. A part of her wants them to give up. She just wants to get this over with. 

The rest of the trial goes just about as the pig expected it would. The other three survivors manage to get their traps off, but she ultimately sacrifices them. This leaves only the widower left as she watches the street racer’s bleeding body ascend into the air as she’s consumed by that thing in the sky. Only a single generator was completed the whole time. They aren’t cooperating today. 

She’s heard stories about survivors reaching their breaking point and killing each other out of frustration and sheer insanity from being stuck in such a hellish place for eternity, but she doubts they’re true. Maybe it’s just something the ghost face made up to make her miserable like he always does. It reminds her of the nerve gas house, how the test subjects, including herself, struggled to survive together. She recalls how Xavier had thrown her into that pit, the filthy needles piercing her skin. It only reminded her of her addiction. She shudders at the mere thought of it. She doesn’t want to remember. She wants to forget. But she knows she can’t. 

The pig searches for the widower, finally finding him near the old cow tree. He’s struggling to get the bear trap off of his head, his hands searching for the key inside the razors of a jigsaw box, blood trickling from the sharp metal. He fails just like so many of her test subjects, and Billy simply turns his head and laughs at him, sitting atop his seat. The timer on the trap ticks loudly and rapidly, telling the widower that he has to act quickly. He doesn’t have time to search for another. Maybe if he’s fast enough, he can find that hatch in the ground that somehow leads back to the campfire. She never really understood how, and she doubts anyone else does. 

She hides in the cornstalks and watches him, the shadow of her mask making her eyes seem almost black. But he knows she’s there. 

He notices her, turning his head to meet her dead gaze. He doesn’t speak. His tired eyes only stare back at her, nothing but misery washing over his face. He begged her to kill him earlier. Doesn’t he want death? Why does he want to live now? But he doesn’t move. He just stares, like his eyes could somehow cut through the pig’s body, into her soul. She doesn’t look away. She doesn’t look away when she should have, when she knows it’s time for him to go. 

And as she watches the reverse bear trap burst open the jaws of the widower, how his lifeless body falls to the ground, the pig feels nothing. She doesn't get enjoyment out of this. Not anymore. Did she ever in the first place? Maybe the first few times, back when she thought this was all just another test from John. But she never really did get any enjoyment out of it back in her old life.

She knew she rigged those traps on purpose. They didn’t deserve to live. But she wanted them to. She wanted them to succeed. She wanted them to be good. She wanted so badly for there to be some semblance of redemption out there in the world, in people, where it mattered most. But there isn’t. Not after everything she’s been through, with all of the pain and the anger. 

She couldn’t find it with John, and she won’t find it in the fog. 

The Gideon Meatpacking Plant isn’t like how the pig remembers it. 

She spent too much of her time living there to the point that she’d memorized the entire layout of the plant, creating traps and helping John as his illness grew worse and worse. It was where her final test took place. It’s a twisted imitation of what she remembers from her old life, like most of the other realms and their associated killers’ memories. She assumes the thing controlling the fog is mocking them, or it simply doesn’t understand how to replicate anything at all without error. Over time, the pig has come to the conclusion that the thing doesn’t really understand what’s real. She knows all of this is real, but not in the way that thing can comprehend it. Nothing in the fog makes any sense at all, like it was some sort of demented nightmare. She doesn’t bother pondering the legitimacy of it anymore. 

Out of all places in her old life, why is the bathroom here? Why did this bathroom have both Gordon and Adam’s dead bodies on the dirty floor? Gordon was alive, right? But that’s where it happened. Where the pig killed Adam. But she decided to do it. Not anybody but herself. John had never told her to. He was going to die down there, left to rot. She couldn’t stand to see him like that, completely powerless to do anything to save himself. It wasn’t like Gordon would come back to Adam either, too much of a hysterical mess, and John had left him for dead to starve in that empty room. She kept having these terrible nightmares about him dying a painful death down in that hellhole. She couldn’t take it anymore. He had to die. She was an angel of death, and she would put him out of his misery once and for all. 

But the pig was weeping when she suffocated Adam with a plastic bag as he violently thrashed in her hold, leading him to crash his head against the toilet. Her remorse only amplified at the sight of his corpse and the sounds of his fading breaths. He couldn’t die like this. She’d only made it worse.

Like she always does. 

She feels herself physically tense at the mere thought of Adam in her mind. She’d met him at his apartment building when she was about to knock him out and kidnap him for the test, but he’d complimented her hair. Said it looked “very rockstar”. He’d told her about his friend’s concert, and even went as far as taking her picture. She didn’t know why she let him. It mortified her even more when she knew what she was going to do to him only hours afterwards, the suffering that would be inflicted upon him. 

Maybe she should’ve gone to that concert after all. Maybe things could have turned out differently.

She knows they couldn’t. 

The pig tries to finally clear her mind for once. She needs to focus: a trial could happen at any moment. She sits at the disk, tinkering with a bear trap for the next inevitable game. She’s placed her rotten mask on a shelf, her face exposed, her brown hair tied into a ponytail. She leaves her cloak on her bed, and she wears the same clothes she did during her final test and death. They aren’t stained with blood anymore. It’s as if nothing had really changed. 

The thing that controls the fog summons her at completely random moments. One second she’ll be laying on her bed staring at the ceiling, and the next she’ll be at a freezing winter resort hunting survivors for sport. She remembers her first test as she stares at the steel trap in her scarred hands. She knows now that the only reason John tested her was her addiction to heroin that had started when she was thrown in jail for a crime she didn’t even commit. And it was all the fault of that bastard Matthews. But John was so full of shit, spouting nonsense about redemption, that people could change themselves for the better. She couldn’t believe that she once thought he had changed her. She never changed. Neither had he. No one changes. 

She’s pulled out of her thoughts by the sudden sound of a camera abruptly snapping behind her. 

“Looks like someone’s busy.” The ghost face snarks, a low chuckle in his throat. His face is always hidden by his signature white mask, its sunken black eyes and open mouth almost sorrowful, in a disturbing sort of way. But the man underneath the mask is nothing like it. She’s never seen his face before, and she doesn’t plan to, but she doesn’t need to see it in order to know who he really is. He kills for his own enjoyment, looking happy to murder the survivors over and over again. 

“I thought I told you to stay on the second floor, or I’ll kick you out.” The pig warns the ghost face, focusing on her trap and refusing to even spare him a glance. “Leave me alone.” 

“Relax,” The ghost face replies, shrugging his shoulders and hiding the camera in one of his many pockets. He only ever takes photos of her when he wants to mess around with her, but he takes countless ones of the survivors during trials, beaten and bloody and sometimes even dead. He’ll show her these grim photos occasionally, like they’re trophies to him that he can flaunt around without a care in the world. Outside of trials, she avoids the second floor of the meat plant altogether nowadays. Who knows? Maybe he’s lined the walls with those pictures. "I'm just passing through."

"You can pass through somewhere else.” The pig retorts. 

“What, aren’t you bored?” The ghost face asks in a somewhat mocking manner, which is how he constantly talks to her. “It’s not like you do anything around here in the meat plant. You and I should pay the campfire a visit sometime.” 

“Do you wanna get kicked out?” 

“Your loss, piggy.” The ghost face laughs, retreating to the second floor or wherever the hell he goes when he doesn’t feel like bothering her. 

She doesn’t understand why she keeps him around. He’s a complete nuisance, and all he does is disturb her with his photos that are too disgusting even for her. But he’s told her about the forest between the realms and the campfire, which is how he found his way to the meat plant and practically made himself at home without her knowledge for what could be considered months here in the fog. It’s not like time exists here, anyway. She doesn’t even remember how long she’s been living in this nightmare. It could be years, decades even. But she hasn’t aged at all. She hasn’t changed. In fact, none of the other killers and survivors have.

They’re all in a perpetual state of limbo, forced to sacrifice and survive and die again and again with no end in sight. Will the survivors ever finally be laid to rest? Will the killers ever get tired of all this constant hate and suffering? Will this ever stop? Will the thing controlling the fog ever be satisfied? What does it even gain from this continuous pain? Does it ever get bored like she does? 

Maybe the ghost face is right after all. The harsh reality is that there really is nothing to do in between trials. It’s mind numbing, fixing her traps, wandering the meat plant, sleeping in her shitty bed over and over again. It’s like she’s in a prison, reminding her of her jail time so many years ago. 

She doesn’t go to the second floor that much these days. 

Does she ever feel remorse when she kills the survivors? She doesn’t know them as people, individuals. While she did stalk her test subjects from her old life in order to effectively create their tests personally designed for them, she didn’t know them either. Sometimes she hates seeing them in pain, hearing their pleas for help and cries of anguish. The survivors remind her of Adam and Lynn and everyone in the nerve gas house too much. She doesn’t want them to die. She wants them to fight, to prove that they can change. 

But they can’t. 

Every single one of them is all the same. 

All of them deserve to die. 

They're all nothing but meat. Meat that dangles on a hook where it belongs, feet hovering from the ground. Meat doesn't change, no matter how many times it says it will or how hard it tries. 

Meat doesn't deserve to live. 

The pig finds herself reflecting on her old life more often than not in the fog these days. 

She knows that John is finally dead now, and he isn’t crawling out of his grave like she had. It’s unthinkable to even consider that his methods were ever once effective for her, hell, for all of his victims. She’s glad he’s finally gone now, out of her life. However, she still remembers how hard she tried to keep him alive, going as far as kidnapping Lynn while her husband Jeff went through his own series of tests. She never knew they were married at the time. John always kept her in the dark about the bigger picture. He knew she was losing faith in his methods. In him. 

But she doesn’t know why she thinks about John so often. She sees his dead body sometimes, laying on his bed during her second test. Some days he’ll be laying face first on the floor of the bathroom, mimicking Adam and Gordon’s game. On other days he’ll appear at the foot of her bed, his eyes completely lifeless. She sees Lynn’s corpse, too, her head completely blown off, her brain matter and hair splattered across the wall in a grotesque sight. The pig had been killed before she even saw Lynn die, but she knows what the shotgun collar around her neck would have done to her. 

The pig hears both John and Lynn’s voices calling her sometimes. She hears them begging for her to come and die with them again. 

She only looks away from them, and tries to block them out. 

Lynn’s headless, dead body follows the pig around sometimes. She trails behind her during quiet moments at the meat plant and during trials alike, breathing down her neck. The pig can feel blood trickling onto her skin when she does, nearly desensitized to the feeling now. She whispers things into her ear, asking her why she keeps killing when there’s no reason to even do it anymore, if she ever feels remorse for murdering so many people in both of her lives. She asks her if she enjoys all this killing, all this bloodshed. She asks her if she ever regrets creating the shotgun collar and putting it around her neck, forcing her to endure so much pain. Lynn stands by her when she’s able to kill a survivor by her own hand, a sign from the thing controlling the fog that she’s served it well. The pig knows Lynn would never say that. Why did she put words into her mouth? 

To be honest, she never really did hate Lynn, no matter how angry and spiteful she made her, no matter how much her emotions got the best of her during her final test. She never wanted to shoot her. She didn’t want her to die. 

She never really knew her, though. She intended to keep it that way, but she couldn't help but feel something when she looked into her brown eyes, remembering all of the jealousy and hatred she felt when she was close to John. The pig’s attachment to John means nothing to her now, here in the fog. She regrets putting Lynn through her games, forcing her to keep him alive. He’s gone now, and so is she. 

But that doesn’t change that Lynn didn’t deserve to live. No one did, including her. 

Outside of the meat plant, the pig isn’t entirely alone in the fog. Someone from her old life knows her, and she recognizes him. 

She saw the detective during one of her very first trials, finding him crouched near a tall tree in the MacMillan Estate, carefully wrapping bandages around the competitor’s chest from where she’d been hooked. The pig stopped in her tracks at the sheer sight of him, instantly remembering her nervous testimony she had told him after her first test. She often avoids him during trials, but she’ll make sure he’s dead on the ground if she finds him on her own. She remembers how obsessed he’d become with taking down John and locking him up for once and for all. He had been chasing him before he even interrogated her, but she knew she only amplified his devotion to the case. It was all her fault. It practically ruined his life, getting himself kicked out of the police force. 

Now they were stuck here to play the same games together for eternity. She couldn’t face him. 

But Zep shot and killed him. He was dead. The pig was dead, too. The thing controlling the fog has some sort of power to bring back the dead to force them to participate in its demented trials. Maybe they really did end up in hell after all, where they belong, where they were always destined to go. 

The detective has a healed scar lining his throat from when John had slashed him with his blade, similar to her own. The scar on the pig’s throat from when she was shot is still there, too. She can’t feel it anymore these days, though. Not physically. The moment still repeats in her mind like a broken VHS tape, static across the screen. She still remembers the burning hatred in Jeff’s eyes after she shot Lynn in the back. 

She’ll bring her hand to her throat sometimes, feeling the scar. It’s a clean line against her throat, the blood that once exploded from the spot nothing but a faint memory in her mind. 

She doesn’t know why it makes her think of Cecil so much. 

The pig never did love him. She didn’t even like men that way. Despite everything, they both knew the truth about their relationship. They never did take the time to talk about it together, though. There was always an air of silence between the two of them that they wouldn't break. Maybe they were too scared to. Maybe neither of them wanted to know the outcome.

But one day, the pig had convinced Cecil to rob the clinic of its methadone supplies that night, constantly urging him to just get it over with when he had second thoughts. She watched everything unfurl from her hiding spot as Cecil held Jill at knifepoint that night, commanding her to open the door to the clinic. But when he rushed to steal the supplies, he slammed the door against Jill’s body too fast, crushing against her stomach when she was pregnant at the time. The pig recoiled in horror at the sudden sight of blood trickling down between Jill’s legs and onto the floor. Jill fell to the ground, tears streaming down her cheeks. 

Cecil had killed her baby.

No, the pig did. It was all her. She did it. She killed the baby. If she hadn’t convinced him to rob the clinic that night none of this would have ever happened. Everything was her fault, and all because she was itching for a hit. 

Perhaps Jill really did deserve it in the end. She deemed the pig a “lost soul”. She couldn’t treat her addiction, and she’d given up on her completely. She was just some hopeless fucking junkie to her. Perhaps she was right about her all along. She knew what she really was. Did she want her to fail in life? She doubted she even cared about her anymore. Maybe she never cared about her in the first place. The pig once thought rehab could help her move on in her life, that maybe, just maybe she could finally turn her life around. Now she knows that nothing could. No one changes, including her. 

But Hoffman knew it happened. He knew she was there the whole damn time, knew she was the one responsible for Jill’s miscarriage, for Cecil’s death, for everything that had taken place. That damn bastard! He wrote that fucking letter! If he hadn’t blackmailed her then maybe Lynn would still be alive, and John could still be living, too. They wouldn’t be haunting her in this shithole. Hell, maybe she wouldn’t even be here in the first place. How long had the thing controlling the fog been watching her for? Does it know all the horrible things she’s done?

That’s why it took her. It knows she’s a cold-blooded killer. That’s the only reason it took her. Was she always destined to be here? Had fate dealt her a cruel hand that she deserved? 

But that letter Hoffman wrote is nothing but an old piece of paper now. The one at this meat plant she holds in her hands isn’t real, not like the one from her old life. Like everything else in the fog, it’s an imitation. A copy. A faulty reproduction. It doesn’t even know what it is. 

Maybe the pig isn’t so sure who she is anymore.

Perhaps she should've died all those years ago during John's first test for her. Then maybe all of this would have never happened. A butterfly effect of sorts. She’d still be living in her dingy old apartment, sitting on her bedside injecting doses of heroin into her veins and cutting her wrists. 

It doesn’t matter, anyway. 

They’re all dead now. 

The only time the pig ever felt real enjoyment from hurting someone was when she had locked that bastard Matthews in the bathroom, the very same one from that test.

She swore revenge on him since the day he threw her in prison, and she gladly returned the favor and trapped him in his own. He’d kick-started her heroin addiction while she was in prison, and she’d make him pay for it, for all the suffering he put her through. She still remembers the satisfaction she felt when she shackled him to a rusty pipe at the corner of the bathroom, just like Adam and Gordon all over again. 

His son Daniel was nothing like him, though, too kindhearted and soft for his own good. It hurt, seeing them all try to get through the nerve gas house. She was only there to make sure that they followed John’s rules, but Daniel had helped her from the needle pit and comforted Laura. She wanted them to succeed, to survive. But they fell apart, just as she’d suspected. She can still see the dead bodies of Jonas, Gus, Addison, Xavier, Laura, and Obi. She’s come to finally understand now that all of them deserved the deaths they were given. Sure, she felt empathy for many of them, as they’d all been falsely arrested by Matthews. But they couldn’t live, just like her.  

The pig is still trapped in a prison, though. She moves from one prison to the next, an endless cycle that constantly repeats and has no end to it, and it consumes all of her lives she’s lived, no matter where she is. The fog is now her jail. She’ll never achieve freedom, something she’d always believed since she was a young child. Her mother passed away when she was too small to even remember, leaving her alone with her father. He was a disgusting man, constantly berating her and yelling at her, even going as far as hitting her. She remembers the times when he’d lock her in the dark for hours, leaving her completely alone. 

But on some days, her father would take her to the shooting range when she was younger, back when he thought she was a boy. She was raised that way, but it never felt right. She felt like she was inside a cage, waiting to burst out and become who she was always meant to be. 

When she was eleven years old, the pig's father had taken her on a hunting trip in the woods outside of the city. He told her to shoot a deer with a gun that was too big for her tiny hands. But she shook her head, tears building in her eyes as the deer's black eyes stared back at her before it fled into the forest, never to be seen again. Her father slapped her across her face, and she felt the snow hit her back as she fell, and how the blood trickled down her skin. 

Thinking back on it now, she guesses he wanted her to “man up”. He still thought she was a boy back then. He never did accept her when he found her wearing more feminine clothing she’d bought with money from her part-time job to make ends meet. The clothes were something that made her feel more comfortable in her body. Why would he accept her? It wasn’t like he even cared about her at all. He always neglected and hated her, long before she came out. But he was like a ghost to her, and she honestly knew next to nothing about him. He never did talk about himself, always quiet unless he was yelling at her or the neighbors. 

She finally decided she’d had enough of his abuse on the day of her eighteenth birthday, and she felt happy, a rare instance of actual joy in her miserable life. She went to school that morning, ignoring him as he screamed at her when she walked out of the door. She arrived at the counselor’s office, finally spilling her guts to her about him. The next thing she knew, her father was in prison, a place that she would soon be trapped in for the rest of her existence, spanning both of her lives. She was taking her first step into adulthood, leaving her rotten father behind in the dirt. 

But her happiness didn’t last long, just like everything else in her life. She knew it never would in the long run. What would she do now? Her father was gone. She thought about going back to college, getting her degree. She always did have an interest in music since she was young. She could’ve picked up the guitar again, maybe even joined a band. 

She didn’t deserve those things, though. Her life would always be a never-ending tragedy of her suffering on display for all to see. She began cutting herself, her self-loathing the worst it had ever been. She kept self-harming after serving time in prison, keeping blades and gauze in a box. 

That was why she was so drawn to John after her first test. She needed a leader, a teacher, a father. She was lost, and she needed guidance in her miserable life. It was the biggest mistake she’d ever make in her whole life, following in his footsteps and doing everything in her power to keep him alive when he should’ve died. She remembers crying at the foot of his bed, hoping that he would wake up. She wanted him to stay. She didn’t want to be alone. 

Now, here in the fog, it’s just the pig. 

The pig leaves the meat plant one day. 

The thing controlling the fog will snatch her up and take her to a trial when it needs to. Maybe she’s just sick and tired of doing the same thing every day, sitting alone in the meat plant while waiting for trials. She knows the fog will never change, just like all of its inhabitants, but it doesn’t hurt to explore it. What could kill her, anyway? Does it even matter? She knows she’d just get resurrected, just like her survivor counterparts. The thing controlling the fog isn’t done with her yet, and it never will be. Hell, it’ll never be done with any of them. It won’t let her go that easily. There is absolutely no chance in hell it will ever be satisfied. 

She walks through the forest between the realms and the campfire, her black boots crunching against the black leaves on the dirt ground. She doesn’t wear her rotting mask, letting the cold air caress her skin. The gray sky is shrouded by the tall trees, with hints of it peeking through the leaves. She spots a family of small rabbits with white fur and a lone deer among the trees as she pushes away tall plants in her way, but there’s something off about the animals. 

They seem like normal animals at first glance, but the pig knows nothing really is as it seems in the fog. The deer has three eyes, all of them a strange shade of orange, like the tips of those claws that pierce the survivors as they ascend into the air. It stares at her for a moment before it prances away, disappearing into the forest. She returns its gaze, finding herself unable to look away. There’s a grotesque beauty to it, but it won’t fool her. 

Just like the letter and everything else in the fog, they’re replicas of subjects from the outside world that the thing can’t comprehend, just as the survivors and killers can’t comprehend it. She’s stopped trying to understand it now, anyway. She’s read pulp comic books about unnatural beings back in her youth, tales of incomprehensible monsters that drive people to insanity just by looking at them. Maybe they weren’t just fiction after all. 

She closes her eyes for a moment, and upon opening them, she finds herself at the Yamaoka Estate. The ghost face occasionally tells her about all of the realms like some sort of demented vacation salesman, insisting to her that they’re not all that bad. He’s completely lost his mind, and she knows he’s always been that way, long before he was taken. 

The sky is an unnerving deep purple, and bamboo stalks and tall grass protrude from the ground. Yellow leaves float around the pig, falling from the trees. The Yamaoka family’s derelict residence is covered in long green vines, its doors and windows broken. She knows it’s an imitation of the house from the outside world, but she can’t help but wonder how it became this way. She’s seen a pile of broken glass stained with blood on the lower floor during trials. It’s still there, a grim reminder of past events. 

She finds a river at the estate, hearing the soft sounds of the water flowing. She crouches down on her knees beside the river and looks at the water, her reflection absently staring back at her. Her eyes look tired. She’s so exhausted. She should just go back to the meat plant and take a nap in her shitty bed that won’t give her any rest in the end. 

Regardless, she dips her hands into the water and splashes her face, cleaning away all the sweat and grime that had stained her from her rotting pig mask. Maybe it’ll wash away her sins, like a baptism of some sort. She thinks about drinking a handful, but both survivors and killers alike don’t have the need to eat or drink in the fog. They don’t need to sleep either, in order for them to be constantly prepared for a trial at any moment. She still sleeps anyway, using it as a way to distract herself from her new life, killing the survivors for eternity. 

She doesn’t feel any different. This was a complete waste of time. Why did she think she could ever change? 

Suddenly, she hears a disturbed wailing throughout the estate. 

It's the spirit. 

The ghost face has told her numerous stories about a ghostly woman with flowing black hair before, her limbs cut apart and amputated, but she’s still alive, still breathing. Her skin is almost an unnatural shade of light blue, shards of glass ranging from tiny to huge digging into her body. Due to the ghost face's constant gossiping, the pig knows only a bit about her past. 

The spirit was attacked by her father while she was still alive, nearly hacking her to death with the family katana. She’s now completely blinded by her rage, too angry to think rationally. She’ll never get revenge on her father, trapped in the fog for eternity, and the pig only assumes she’s taking it out on the survivors. But she has no control over herself, as both the killers and survivors are victims of the thing controlling the fog. 

The pig starts to think about her own father. But they’re probably nothing alike, anyway. She ponders the spirit’s existence, how her unreal appearance came to be. Was this the doing of the thing controlling the fog? 

Why isn’t the pig a ghost? Both she and the spirit were dying, but only one of them ended up with a ghostly appearance. She wonders the same thing about the detective. The thing controlling the fog reanimated them back into their human forms from their old lives. Why didn’t it do the same to the spirit? Could she have been a survivor in another life? But none of them were ever buried, never given a proper goodbye into the afterlife. They were taken away by that thing before they were even given the chance. Maybe the spirit had people who loved her, but no one would bury the pig. 

Before she can even move, the spirit is already advancing towards the pig, her limbs twitching and contorting. She still stands by the running river, accepting her fate as the spirit’s white eyes disappear, along with the rest of her body in an instant. A cold chill runs down the pig’s spine, hearing the sound of what can only be described as air passing through her ears and all around her, like it was suffocating her. 

The spirit emerges from the nothingness. She shoves her katana through the pig’s back, and her brown eyes drift to the bloodstained blade going through her chest like a butter knife, an unreal sight she can't process. She can't look away. Is this how the survivors feel? The spirit grabs her shoulder and tears it out of her body with little struggle, then shoves her, causing her to fall to the ground as blood spurts from out of her chest and onto the ground. She lays on the cold ground, staring at a patch of grass nearby her. But it doesn't stop. 

The spirit's katana meets her side. It meets it again. 

And again.

And again.

She hacks at her body, her blade digging into her skin repeatedly, leaving proof on her sides, back, and stomach, over and over until the ground itself is bleeding. The pig feels every swing, her eyes wide open. She feels nothing and everything at the same time. She can feel her grip on reality slipping even further. 

And now she's dying for the second time.

She always knew she was going to die here. She deserves this. Maybe that was why she came to the estate in the first place. She'll never really lose her self-destructive tendencies. She knows that now. She deserves to feel this pain, this feeling of death that always follows her. She’ll always be a dead woman, just like the spirit. 

The pig wakes up at the meat plant again. How long has she been dead? It doesn't matter. She takes off her cloak and lifts up her red shirt to see the damage. 

There are no scars left by the spirit. 

The pig stares at the long stairs leading to the basement.

Each realm has the exact same one. It reminds her of her childhood, recalling her father's tendency to lock her up in dark rooms. She carries the competitor on her shoulder as she descends the staircase. She’s a short young woman, seeming to be in her mid-twenties. She wears an unfamiliar blue and black uniform, her shorts stained with dirt and blood, knees scraped. Out of all the survivors, she puts up the most difficult fight. 

"Let go! Let go of me!" The competitor yells, beating her fists against the pig and kicking her legs, attempting to break free from her hold. "You bitch!"

The pig struggles to carry the competitor, nearly losing her balance and falling over. The competitor is the last survivor left, and she just wants to sacrifice her and get this trial over with already. She’s a tough one, clearly committed to escaping all of the meaningless trials she’s been in. Is she even aware that there isn’t a point to it at all? Unlike the widower, she actually makes an attempt. She smirks at the pig when she successfully evades her during a chase, wasting enough of her precious time that she has to let her go. She won’t let her leave this time, though. She has to die. 

Before she can throw her onto one of the four hooks in the basement, the competitor suddenly reaches up and tears the pig’s rotting mask off of her head. She loses her grasp on her, causing the competitor to tumble to the basement’s floor with an audible thud. She reaches down to pick up her mask and cover her face from any prying eyes nearby, something the survivors have never seen in their lives, and never will. Before she’s able to, she hears an abrupt, strange noise emitting from behind her. 

For some reason, the competitor erupts into a hysterical fit of laughter as she lays on the hard ground. The pig is too stunned to move, confused by the competitor’s sudden behavior. Why isn’t she scared? Why isn’t she making a run for it? The pig is completely distracted by her exposed face. This is the perfect chance for her to escape, but she’s still on the bloody floor of the basement, her chest heaving with laughter, nearly crying. 

"Tapp was right all along!" The competitor cackles uncontrollably, tears oddly beginning to form in her eyes and stream down her face stained with dirt and grime. "So, you really are a human after all!" 

Is this all just some sick game to the competitor? What the hell is she talking about? Do the survivors really believe that she isn’t human? Is she some strange pig-human hybrid monstrosity to them? The pig wonders if that’s how the survivors truly view all of the killers. She supposes she understands why they would. There’s no way for them to know what their past lives were like, or how they feel about being trapped in the fog. Some of them don’t even want to kill. But they don’t deserve any sympathy. All the killers do is murder and torture, and the survivors will never forgive them. 

God knows she can’t forgive herself. 

The pig needs to end this trial already. She needs to put the competitor out of her misery. 

The pig finally looms over the competitor and grabs her by her short black hair, slitting her throat with her blade, regardless of what the thing controlling the fog would do to her afterwards. Blood splashes against the pig’s exposed face, staining her cloak even further, unsure of what’s blood and what’s cloth anymore.

But the competitor still laughs at her, her voice gurgling with liquid, reaching up to clutch her neck as blood spills from her large, gaping wound. She tries to say something to her, but she can’t, the blood stopping her from speaking, like she was drowning in it. She finally breathes her last breath, a defeated, terrifying, sad smile on her face. 

Looking at her body, the pig feels the sudden urge to hold the competitor in her arms as she dies, to comfort her during her last moments until she has to go back to the campfire and then endure another trial all over again. It reminds her of Adam, during that night in the bathroom, when she had to put him out of his misery. Maybe she does want her to escape. Maybe she should’ve let her go, then this would’ve never happened. 

The pig looks away from her, unable to get the image of the competitor’s corpse out of her head. She reaches down and puts on her rotting mask, closing her eyes. It’s still there. Still tormenting her. 

The pig can feel Lynn’s lack of eyes staring at her again. 

The pig’s pathetic excuse for a room is located in a small corner of the workshop of the meat plant.

Blueprints and rotting pig masks line the walls. Her bed is a white mattress with an old blanket and a red pillow. Papers are scattered across the floor. She doesn’t bother picking them up or keeping her room clean. She doesn’t use her box of knives and bandages on herself anymore. She keeps it underneath her bed, hidden away from view so it doesn’t mock her like the thing controlling the fog intends. But one thing from her old life stands out, something that’s always been ingrained in her mind. 

She has a postcard of the painting The Birth of Venus hanging on the wall in her shitty room beside her bed. She doesn’t remember how or when she bought it anymore, but she finds herself staring at it more often these days than she did during her old life. The thing controlling the fog somehow managed to replicate it perfectly. Venus is a beautiful goddess, her nude body and pillowy skin, her brown eyes warm and her long golden hair blowing in the breeze as she stands on top of a shell at the shore. 

She’s the kind of woman the pig once thought was the perfect example of femininity, what she thought she could be when she transitioned. Maybe she’s the kind of woman she wants to fall in love with someday, but she doesn’t even think about that anymore. The pig always knew she loved women since she was young, but it took her until her high school years for her to really figure out that she was one herself. It never felt right when her father called her a boy.

Venus emerges from the ocean in full bloom, her birth on display for everyone to see. She looks heavenly, otherworldly, like a true goddess as she comes out of the sea foam. This is her beginning, her first step into the world of the living. But the pig will never have that opportunity again. John couldn’t change her, the fog can’t change her, and she’ll never change herself. She’ll never be reborn, and her new life is exactly the same as her old one. She’ll always be trapped in another prison, each one the same as the last. 

Nobody changes. Nobody is reborn, even in the fog. It's all bullshit.

John told her one day that swine were a symbol of rebirth, as the pig began a new year in the Chinese Zodiac. That was the year John’s son Gideon was supposed to be born, someone she had taken away from him on that night at the clinic. She wondered if he ever knew that. Hoffman sure as hell did. But she believed that she had been changed, reborn from her first test, that she finally had the will to live.

It was just a lie. A lie John was feeding her, a lie she kept telling herself. Maybe she truly did believe that the test had changed her at the time. She can’t feel that surge of adrenaline she once felt anymore, how she carved open Donnie’s chest and searched through his guts for the key to her trap, his intestines in her bloody hands. She remembers crying afterwards, unable to look at his mutilated body, her face and hands covered in his and her own blood. To think they went to the same clinic. The rush was unlike anything she’d ever felt in her life. 

But she’ll never feel it again. She can’t change. If she can't change, then no one else will. They all have to die, regardless of who they are. 

What really is redemption? 

It's a second chance. The chance to start over, to be forgiven for past deeds while still acknowledging them, and learning from them. Becoming a better person. To be saved from all of her sins. But no one deserves a second chance, especially her. Was the fog a second chance? She’d been reanimated, like she was meant for a new life. But this new life is practically the same as her old one. It’s an endless cycle of suffering and death. 

She can't continue John's legacy, and she never will. She doesn’t even want to, not when his methods don’t even work. She’d heard of other survivors, and they probably all hated him, just as she had grown to hate him. He never even saved her. In fact, he put her through hell. What's the point of it all anymore? No one truly dies in the fog. 

Pigs are disgusting, vile animals that bathe and wallow in their own filth. They're born to die, bred to be slaughtered and eaten by something greater than them, something that couldn’t care less about them. 

She wonders if anyone cares or remembers her in the outside world, and if they even remember her at all.

Perhaps she's some sort of urban legend now. Maybe she’s something the neighborhood kids made up to scare each other, chilling stories shared around a campfire of traps and torture, making lovers cling closer to each other from fright. She can see herself as a boogeyman, a tale meant to scare boys and girls from misbehaving. Don’t go out too late or the pig-lady will get you and gobble you up for dinner. She stalks in the night, always on the prowl. 

Murals of the pig-lady are crudely spray-painted on the walls of old abandoned houses and underpasses of bridges, warning everyone to stay home at night. She knows where you are, and she’s seen you. Some have reported sightings of a woman with a pig head on the streets, draped in a dark red cloak with a shining blade in hand. The authorities don’t believe them, though. She’s nothing but a tall tale, just a local legend. 

Everyone knows the story of the pig-lady. 

She wants to be remembered. She wants to be immortal, like hushed whispers among children on the playground at recess. She wants to leave behind her own legacy, no longer a tool of John’s sick games. She wants to be remembered for who she was. 

The pig knows she never will be. She knows she’s long been forgotten. 

There’s nothing left of her for the vultures to pick at. 

The pig returns from another trial, completely numb.

That group of survivors put up a fight this time, but she managed to kill two of them in the end. She doesn’t care if the thing punishes her or what it thinks. She doesn’t care about the stories of killers getting tortured for failing to please it. She doesn’t feel anything. She just wants to sleep, but there’s work to be done. She feels nothing as she takes off her mask and her cloak, catching a glimpse of her scars on her wrists from cutting, and throws them on her bed without a care. She sits at the table in the workshop again, fiddling with a reverse bear trap for what feels like the thousandth time. All of the traps look the same to her now. 

It’s quiet now. The ghost face hasn’t interrupted her in a long time. Maybe he’s in trials more often these days, or he’s finally leaving her alone like she always wanted. She doubts it’s the latter. Or he’s in another realm or stalking the campfire, carefully watching all of the survivors. She wonders if they’ve ever caught him. 

She doesn’t know why she thinks about the survivors so much. They’re all pathetic, but she doesn’t want them to die. It’s not like she can do anything about it, though. Don’t they know everything is hopeless? Why even try anymore? 

The silence continues until she hears numerous footsteps behind her. 

This time, she has visitors: a rare occurrence for both of her lives. 

There are four survivors she recognizes from past trials standing on the first floor of the meat plant, looking around and observing their surroundings like some sort of tourists. It’s the street racer, the teacher, the botanist, and the detective. Of course, it had to be the detective. It’s like they’re bound by fate to always meet each other. But in any other situation, all four of them would be dead. 

There isn’t an ounce of fear in their eyes this time, though. They’ve been to the meat plant in countless trials before, and they should probably know the whole layout by now. They don’t flinch at the traps surrounding them or the featureless mannequins. They aren’t scared of the pig anymore, seeing as how they practically walked up to what could be considered her house here. It’s a depressing thought. She doubts they’re even scared of any of the killers now. They’ve all been trapped here together for what could be years, eternity. She doesn’t even want to think about that aspect of the fog anymore. 

She knows for a fact that the detective isn’t scared of her. Maybe he never was. But she doubts he sees her as that scared, disturbed woman with scars from her first test lining her skin during her interrogation anymore. However, there's a hint of anxiety in the botanist's brown eyes beneath her glasses. The pig understands. She always looks somewhat hopeful in the trials and cares about her fellow survivors like they were family, but she’s just as terrified as all of them. 

She doesn't care if they see her face, though. She's sure the competitor has told them all about it. She still remembers that terrible smile on her face, her neck and her chin drenched in blood, the gaping wound staring back at her, no matter how hard she tries to bury it in the depths of her mind. 

“Why are you here?” The pig questions as the four survivors step into the workshop. They’re outside of trials, and she doesn’t feel like she needs to kill them. What’s the point? She just wants them to leave her alone. “And make it quick.” 

"Look, we don’t mean you any harm,” The street racer says, which is an odd thing for a survivor to say to a killer, of all people. She doesn’t see her in trials too often, but she always puts up a fight to the point that it’s frustrating, a defiant look always on her face occasionally hidden by her goggles. “We just want to talk to you."

“What’s there to say?” The pig asks, sarcasm in her voice, staring at a blueprint for the reverse bear trap, the only thing she can use to distract herself. She's a woman of few words, trying to keep her sentences short. “Just get lost before I change my mind.” 

“We’ve noticed something.” The teacher explains in a calm voice, not even treating her like she’s a killer that’s murdered him countless times over. He’s an elegant looking man, his long coat covered in dirt and blood. He’s always looking out for the survivors, but he’s too kind. Too soft. “It’s about the basement. There are these lights that are always peeking out through the floorboards and the walls. We’re certain that might be the entity.”

“... The entity?” The pig lifts her head, her interest peaking. She does remember the lights seeping through the walls from the basement of all the realms, but never cared to think about what they really were. But the breathing coming from the lights was too unnatural. “What is that?”

“It’s the being that controls everything that’s happening here.” The botanist says, pushing up her glasses. She nervously shifts around, unsure what to do with her bandaged hands. “I know it sounds really crazy, but maybe if we somehow dug up the basement, we could get out.”

“What do you mean?” The pig asks. So that's what they call the thing controlling the fog. She guesses that it has a better ring to it. 

“We want to team up with some of the killers, and we thought we could go to you.” The teacher explains, finally cutting to the chase. “We’re going to find a way to get out of the fog and return to our old lives.”

Out of everyone in the fog, why would they ask her? She's no use to them. Besides, they would never escape. They'd be trapped here for eternity. Why even try? But the pig is dead. If she even did escape, she'd go straight to hell. 

“You’ve asked the wrong killer.” The pig laughs, a poor attempt at a smile on her face. “I’m not the one for this. I’m sure there are more of us out there. Try the spirit.”

“Hey, we’re asking you for a reason.” The street racer says sternly. “Believe it or not, I know what you’re going through. I know what it's like to be misunderstood by society. I know what it's like to be shunned, to be treated like complete garbage. But it doesn’t have to be like that anymore. We can help you. We can help each other.”

The pig almost feels like bursting out laughing at the street racer’s statement. What the hell does she know? She’s only saying this so she can cooperate with them. She doesn’t care about her. In fact, none of them do. Why would they? There’s nothing to care about. 

"I need you to leave." The pig says, shaking her head. She tries to keep her voice neutral. They wouldn’t understand her. How do they even know about her past? It's probably the fault of the ghost face again, telling all to everyone who breathes. Does he really spend his trials gossiping? Or did the detective tell them? Why would he? 

It’s a lost cause, anyway. No one could save her.

"Please-" The botanist begins, reaching out her hand for seemingly no reason at all.

"Go." The pig responds flatly. "'I'll ask you nicely." 

“Mandy.”

The pig only stares at the owner of the voice. It’s the detective. Her eyes widen, the mention of that nickname catching her by surprise. That was a name she hadn’t heard in a long time. He’s barely spoken this whole time, like he was a ghost. In a sense, he is. They both are. She scoffs and turns her head, standing up from her desk. She takes a step away from them to hopefully leave the room. Maybe she’ll go to the second floor. It’s better than hearing these insane requests. 

But their words keep running rampant through her mind. Do they forgive her? Do they forgive any of the killers? Do some of the killers even express remorse at all like she does? Maybe that’s why the survivors are giving them a second chance. Maybe they’ve talked to the other killers before her. Do they really want her help? It pisses her off. They have no idea what they're talking about. She should just kill them. She doesn’t understand why they think this is a good idea. She’ll just lead them astray. 

They don’t need to help her. Things will just get worse and worse until the entity punishes them. Maybe it’ll kill them all for good. They’ll never come back this time. She doesn’t understand why the detective is asking her . It doesn’t make any sense. She came to him after her first test, and now he’s returning the favor. Why doesn’t he understand that there isn’t any hope for either of them? If they escaped, they’d both be corpses. 

Suddenly, her head whips around to face them.  

"Why do you want to escape, Tapp? Huh?" The pig yells, her brown eyes shooting daggers into the detective. "You're dead! We're both dead! John is dead, too! And so is Sing! Everyone’s dead! Where the fuck would we even go? There's nothing left for us! Do you ever think about the outcome of this little ‘escape’ you’re planning?! We should be buried in the ground but we’re not! It makes no fucking sense! What’s wrong with you?!”  

The pig breathes heavily, her face burning up. The survivors just stare at her, shocked by her sudden outburst. She’s said too much. This is the longest she’s ever talked in a long time. She instantly regrets it, her emotions getting the better of her like they always do. Strangely, it reminds her of when she blew up at John and shot Lynn in the back. How long has it been since that moment? Since she died for the first time? 

"I…" The pig stares down at the floor again, averting her eyes and refusing to spare the detective or any of the other survivors a glance. "I'm sorry. Please leave. Just go! Get out of here! And don’t come back!" 

Surprisingly, they do. 

She’s alone again, just like she always is. How she should be. She hears them walk away, but the detective looks back at her one last time. There’s a solemn expression on his face, like he feels sorry for her. Maybe he pities her. He doesn’t need to. Why doesn’t he just give up like she has? He lost his partner Sing. John is dead. There’s no revenge to be had. She understands if he hates her. She’s not the scared woman to him anymore, but maybe she’s just Jigsaw’s apprentice. A sad, lost woman with nowhere to go. 

They all deserve to die. None of them can change or become better people. But no one deserves to be trapped in this hell. They don't deserve any of this. None of them do, even some of the killers. 

Not Yui. Not Adam. Not Claudette. Not Feng Min. Not James. Not Rin.

Not Tapp. 

The pig collapses onto her bed and curls up into herself, burying her face in her hands, as if she could disappear into nothingness. She feels like a lump has lodged itself inside her throat, her eyes welling up. She feels the need to cut herself, a feeling she hasn't thought about in a long time, but she can't move. Her limbs are completely frozen, her fingers digging into her skin until it bleeds. 

She feels like a ticking time bomb about to explode, all of the emotions she’s bottled up since she was sent to the fog finally releasing into her hands.  

For the first time since her death, Amanda Young cries.