Chapter Text
Henry Emily stumbled and staggered on his walk home, so preoccupied by the green wristband held tightly in his hand that he could barely commit any thought to his movements. If not for the fact that he’d walked this path about a hundred times, he’d probably never have made it home at all with how busy his brain was running through what had just happened again and again.
Michael’s late-night house call had been unexpected, but quite welcome. How long had it been since he’d last seen Michael, or any of the Aftons for that matter, a few months? Mike was getting to the age where he shot up in height like a weed whenever you took your eyes off him, but he still seemed so much older than Henry remembered. Talking to the Afton children used to feel so natural, so after Michael left Henry had wondered why he’d stumbled so much on his words. Part of it could be attributed to what had happened between that night and the days when he spent nearly as much time with the Aftons as with his own daughter, but he realised another part of it was that he’d simply gone so long without talking to anyone beyond what was strictly necessary. Sure he still bought groceries, still answered questions from technicians who called him when they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with one of the animatronics, but he’d been cut off from anyone who knew him- William, his sister, anyone who he’d ever really been close to.
He hadn’t believed that whatever was wrong with The Puppet was truly anything serious, but like he’d told Michael, he really needed to get out more. Yet if anything Michael had been underselling how strange the behavior of the white-masked animatronic had become. Outside the present-giving script, The Puppet should only have been barely aware of the presence of a person with no security band, just enough to avoid bumping into them. Yet it had clearly changed its behavior in response to him and Michael, and even stranger, it had acted slightly differently in response to each of them.
Then there was the thing that had really kept his head spinning even as he arrived back home, the security band that it had given him. The bands had been made in bulk of course, but after that rainy night that would forever be etched into Henry’s memory, Fazbear Entertainment had done their best to quietly phase his security system out. Henry couldn’t exactly blame them- it had failed after all, but the fact that The Puppet had once had functions beyond just the prize vendor had been swept over. There shouldn’t have even been any of the bands still in the building, much less somehow mixed into the prize rotation.
Heading into the workshop, Henry placed the wristband on the table, then kneeled down to look beneath it. A large metal box coated in dust lay there among various bits of old projects, one that could easily be mistaken for a toolbox if not for the screen on one face surrounded by knobs and dials. Getting a grip on each side, Henry tugged at the box, which created a grating metallic screech as he slid it across the floor to a wall with a plug so he could attach a cable to a port just under the screen.
The machine let out a two-tone ding, the screen flickering to life, showing blocky light-green letters on a dark green background, clearly visible despite a layer of static.
RemoteSense Prototype V2.6 is active
Receivers Active: 00
Transmitters Active: Err no scanner connected
Henry let out a sigh of relief that the old system monitor still worked. While creating the security system of The Puppet, he’d needed a way to access the data of the bracelets and the receiver inside of The Puppet, but once it was working, there had been no need- the whole point was that the system could run itself better than a human could have sorted through the locations of each bracelet. Still, a strange question burned somewhere in the darker parts of his mind, one he could only answer by bringing this long-obsolete piece of the system out. Grabbing the green bracelet from the table, Henry clicked it into a small divot in the box.
Processing…
While it was probably less than a minute, Henry felt like hours passed with him crouched down, no movement on the screen but the flickering of static, until finally the device let out a hum and the display changed.
Verified
Code: 93401233
Henry rocked backwards, collapsing down into sitting on the floor. With everything that had happened that night and the days that followed, where exactly the security band that Charlotte had been issued went had never crossed Henry’s thoughts, but had it been brought up he’d likely have assumed it was tossed back in with the rest of them and then tossed out when the security bands were taken out of use. How had it even gotten into the Prize Corner, much less never been noticed during the regular restocking and inventory taking? As unlikely as it was, adding in the odds that The Puppet would mistake it for a prize item and then happen to give it to one of the few people who would understand what the security band was and where it came from, one of the few people to whom that particular security band would be meaningful, the chance of it all being random was almost none. Somebody was trying to get this to him, there was no other reasonable explanation. But who? What were they trying to accomplish? Why go to such strange and indirect lengths to do whatever it was they wanted to do?
The device in front of Henry abruptly began emitting a series of clicks and sputters like a dying engine. Re-adjusting his glasses, Henry leaned forwards to inspect the screen. The static had intensified, making the words nearly impossible to read, patches of noise flickering from the top to the bottom of the screen like raindrops. Still, Henry thought he could just make out the words:
Receiver FZ554 has connected
Receivers now active: 01
Pixels pulsed and flashed across the handful of green hues the display could use, creating strange mesmerizing patterns that sometimes looked like they held identifiable shapes, but which quickly dissolved into chaos. Everything about today had made Henry’s mind spin, but this was definitely working its way up the list of strangest things he’d seen. His old test receivers had been cannibalized for parts long ago, the only working one out there should have been the one inside of The Puppet, and he was sure that was out of range.
Had somebody put together a new receiver to try and contact him? Henry couldn’t see why someone would go to the trouble. Surely anyone who knew enough about him to reverse-engineer a receiver and knew where to place it so it would be in range would know where his house was. Why count on him using a machine he hadn’t touched in ages instead of just knocking on the door? Fiddling with the knobs and dials, Henry activated a setting that would request a data ping from all active receivers. The data in question was mostly for ensuring the receiver worked, but there might be something that could help him trace it to the source…
The indicator lights of the machine all went on at once, adding even more to the dizzying chaos of the screen. The words faded away for a second before returning, then fading away again almost instantly- letters flashed across the monitor far too fast to read them all, like messages written on a series of speeding cars. Henry caught a few of the words; ‘can’t’, ‘again’, ‘planning’, and ‘danger’, but most of it was a jumbled mess. Henry quickly felt his eyes beginning to strain just having the screen in his line of sight. He tried to return to the main menu, but while the words did disappear the menu didn’t pull up. A whirring began to rise as the machine’s fans blasted at full power and the controls began to heat up beneath Henry’s fingers, causing him to reflexively recoil.
Dizzying blends of green light converged together, and for a brief moment, two words were visible clear as day, written in giant letters across the entire screen: Save Them. Then the display went black as a shower of sparks burst from around the screen’s edges.
After everything that had happened, Henry had figured it would be best to get a good night's sleep, and that it would be easier to make sense of everything come morning. It wasn’t. When Henry woke up it was a few hours until dawn, but the little rest he had gotten only made everything more confusing.
Before even having breakfast, he went back down to the workshop and pried open the receiver control box. The circuits were completely fried, their edges charred black, and when Henry tried to take one out it was so brittle that it shattered at his touch. It was clear enough that the old machine had no more secrets left to tell.
—
Partway across town, Michael Afton was also having quite a restless night. He drifted in and out of consciousness, his bedroom slowly fading away from his perception as he found himself walking through a long dark hallway, the walls and floor barely visible by a faint light far in front of him.
He tried to walk faster, but as he moved he could feel some force pushing back against his legs, as if the air was thick and heavy, keeping him from moving too quickly. Michael turned his head to look behind him to the other end of the hall, but nothing could be seen in the darkness. While he couldn’t see much beyond the light he was moving towards, he could hear that there was something else nearby; the silence around him was periodically broken by creaking, heavy thumps, and a strange rasping sound which Michael was increasingly convinced was something breathing each time he heard it.
Michael had never been afraid of the dark. He’d always found it strange and rather irritating how much his siblings could panic without sufficient light, even in places like home or Freddy’s that all three of them could easily navigate blindfolded. But this felt different, knowing with ever-rising certainty there was something approaching him, yet being unable to see it. One of the things that Michael did fear, and one of the fears he could readily admit to in his more self-reflective moments, was being alone. He hated the idea of being by himself, left with nothing but his thoughts and the void, but he’d long ago resigned himself to it. Nobody really had much reason to pay attention to him unless he was getting into trouble, he knew his friends would drop him in a heartbeat if they could see his turbulent true feelings, understood how weak he really was on the inside, and his family had never really needed him around, so Michael knew the discomforting quiet of his own mind quite well. However one thing perhaps even more frightening than being alone was not being alone when he should be.
Suddenly another sound joined the mixture, a fading echo of a voice. It sounded like somebody on the other side of a maze, speech garbled from bouncing off wall after wall until the reverberation barely carried through. Even though the words were indistinguishable, Michael was absolutely sure he’d heard the voice somewhere before.
“Charlie?” Michael asked. His words had come out before they even settled fully into his mind. The voice got louder in response, still incomprehensible yet very clearly the voice of Charlotte Emily, one he’d heard enough to easily recognize even now. The weight restricting Mike’s motions seemed to lift a little as he ran forwards down the hall, bursting through a smaller dark room and into a door hard enough to open it.
On the other side of the door, Michael found himself standing just outside his house. Colorful patterns of light and shadow flickered over the ground. Michael looked up to see what was making the light. His house was just under the center of a slowly-growing stormcloud; darkness rippled out like smoke while quick bursts of violet and vermillion lightning fleshed.
Charlie’s voice was still there, slightly louder now if no more clear, and Michael kept going in the direction it seemed to be coming from. Could he really be hearing it right? And if he was… everything about this was wrong, that nothing about the situation made any real sense, but something about it felt very real.
As Michael walked it began to rain. At first droplets came down irregularly and gently, but the falling flecks of water became thicker and harder-hitting as he kept moving. Soon Michael could barely see the outlines of the buildings around him through the shimmering curtain of water. His clothes felt like soaked rags, his hair was flopping into his face, and there wasn’t a single speck of his body that remained dry. He could feel sheets of fluid cascading from his skin like tiny waterfalls while the sound of Charlie’s voice was barely audible over the pouring rain.
Holding his hands above his eyes for a second to keep the water out of them, Michael strained to try and make something out through the downpour. He stood in front of a large but single-story building with a low sloped roof. A flash of movement near the corner of the building caught Mike’s eye. There was something standing there, a dark silhouette that was as tall as the building itself. “Is someone there?” he shouted.
Dazzlingly bright green filled Michael’s vision, obscuring everything else for a few seconds, and when it faded enough for his eyes to adjust, there was a second figure, this one much more identifiably human. “Michael?”
This time Charlie’s voice was clear enough to make out despite the din of the rain around them. Michael felt himself freezing up. He might have been crying too but with water all over him anyway. “Is… is that really you Charlie? What’s going on, how are you even…” his voice kept failing him, a thousand things he had wanted to say catching in his throat.
Charlie walked up, still barely more than an outline through the rain. “You can really hear me?” she asked, her voice sounding a bit strained as if she was on the verge of tears. She balled up her hands then slowly flexed out her fingers before relaxing them. “I’m sorry, I don’t even know how we did this and there isn’t much time, but I see things, hear things. Your father is planning something Mike, something bigger, we’ve got to… damn it, already?” she jerked her head around abruptly, then dashed towards Michael.
For a second, she was close enough for Michael to see. It was definitely Charlie, she had the same face, the same hair matted down by the rain as it was, even the same light dusting of freckles that was invisible under most lights, but just about everything else was horribly wrong. Her skin was horribly pale and waxy, while her hair and clothing were smeared with what looked like ink, which dripped in black lines through her brown hair down her face, concentrated around her eyes. From this close it was clear that Charlie’s eyes weren’t covered by shadow like Michael had assumed for a brief moment, they were completely black, shimmering like they’d been replaced by marbles.
Her mouth opened to say something, but before she could several somethings shot around her too fast to clearly see, and before Michael could blink she was restrained by numerous black-and-white tendrils which lashed backwards and pulled her off into the darkness.
Michael stood there, still frozen, his heartbeat getting louder and louder. Thumping noises filled his ears, overpowering even the noises of the rain. It was his heartbeat, wasn’t it? Or maybe it was footsteps, Michael thought. Something massive, coming closer and closer, and…
“Get up already Michael!” Elizabeth shouted. Michael’s eyes fluttered open, early morning light coming through his curtains. He winced as his head throbbed. Elizabeth aggressively knocked on the door.
“One minute!” He shouted as he groggily pulled himself up, wiping sweat from his forehead. He’d been having strange and vivid dreams more and more often recently. That one in particular had felt astonishingly lifelike, it was almost as if the sound of rain was still ringing deep in his ears. Still, he couldn’t dwell on it for too long. There was plenty else to do that didn’t need the distraction of getting lost in the past or in his own mind.