Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Michael leaned back against the wall of the prize corner, the quietest spot in the pizzeria he could find at the moment, sighing as he slowly slid down to sit onto the floor. When had his life started to spiral downhill like this?

It certainly hadn’t always been bad. Hurricane was small but on the way to enough places to have a steady flow of visitors. They had plenty of outlets of larger chains, but Fazbear’s had an appeal to many as the town’s home-grown business, and as such the Aftons seemed a picture-perfect family- a father who had moved in to help his local friend’s business and whose skills had helped it flourish, three children who had excelled in school and been popular with their classmates… but recently everything had just started falling apart.

His dad had always been a busy man, but it seemed to Michael like he was spending less and less time around his family. Evan and Elizabeth too seemed to be slipping away from him, talking less and less, the interactions they did have were starting to feel rote and almost scripted. Of course Michael knew what he should do, he knew he needed to stop getting hung up on this strange feeling of yawning emptiness, but it still weighed on him.

“Alright Mike,” he muttered to himself “Stop wallowing in self-pity already and get up”.

A dull thud to his right made Michael jolt. He looked to see that the top of the giant striped box that stood next to the prize counter had come unhinged, its halves folding to either side. A stark white shape began emerging from behind the walls of the box as the masked puppet within rose very slowly, almost cautiously, the dark shapes of its eyes blank, yet almost human-like in shape compared to the circular sockets of the other characters in the building.

Michael felt the tension in his muscles drain out. He’d almost forgotten about that thing. The Puppet had been part of the restaurants for as long as Michael could remember, but while the more famous mascots sang, danced, and told stories of their adventures, The Puppet had always been in the background, silent, and content to spend most of its day in a box.

As it peaked fully over the edge of the box, Michael couldn’t help but wonder what on earth Mister Emily and his father had been thinking when making it. Instead of the soft bulk of most animatronics, it was incredibly slim, like a stick figure that had leaped out of a child’s drawing, red and purple marks standing out against its white mask. Michael knew he should probably find it creepy, he knew plenty of other people found it creepy, but somehow he didn’t. There was something about The Puppet that was comforting, its presence felt almost familiar even if he had only interacted with it in passing before.

“Hey there” Michael said, feeling like a complete idiot. “I guess I woke you up. I’ll be out of your face in a few moments, I just needed the quiet”.

The Puppet tilted its head to the side slightly, neck bobbing backwards and forwards again, almost like a polite nod to show it was listening. Michael rubbed his eyes. He really couldn’t be getting enough sleep if he was starting to get the impression that an animatronic was listening to him. But as long as he was doing this, he might as well get it all out, right?

“There’s just a lot going on and I don’t have anybody to talk to about it” Michael explained. He stood up, stretching from side to side before stepping up to the Prize Counter. The Puppet quickly rose a few feet, its long striped arms extending out of the box as it lay its hands against the opened sides of the lid.

“It’s just… not long ago, I thought I had everything I could want. My dad was one of the people behind the coolest place in town, my brother and sister were doing great, school was going alright, I had… I had a really great friend, and her dad let us all look at the new characters he was thinking of. But now dad’s caught up in his work all the time. I know I’m the oldest and I should be able to take care of Evan and Elizabeth, but sometimes I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing with them. Liz is getting into trouble so much more than she used to… and I suppose I am too, and Evan’s scared all the time now, and I’m trying to make him cut it out but I don’t think it’s working. I barely even see Mister Emily any more, and Charlie is…” Michael’s voice caught, and it took him a few seconds to remember to breathe.

“None of which you understand of course, because you are a machine. God, what am I even doing, this is ridiculous”. Michael turned back towards the dining hall, ready to go out and find his siblings before they could get up to anything, when he heard a rustling from behind him. Michael turned to see The Puppet leaning forwards out of its box, staring at him while stretching its spindly arms towards him, a laminated poster unsteadily balanced between two three-fingered hands. Michael took the poster and held it under the bright lights illuminating the Prize Counter.

It was a simple poster, just the pizzeria’s logo stamped onto one corner of a photograph, taken of the dining hall during a party from a spot near the building’s entrance which had a good vantage point. The camera had perfectly caught the stage, the band performing, Fredbear and Spring Bonnie walking from table to table, the way the multicolored spotlights mixed with the softer warmer light in the rest of the room. But Michael remembered this poster, even if it had been a while since it was created, and his eyes instantly locked on the leftmost table one row back from where the cameraman had stood. The boy at the far end of that table was shorter and slightly-rounder faced than Michael was now, but it was recognizably him. Elizabeth’s reddish-blonde hair and her arm tugging on one of Michael’s arms were visible, her face obscured by somebody in the row of tables in front of her, but picture-Michael didn’t seem to notice, he was too focused on an animated discussion he was having with the girl across from him. She was facing partly away from the camera, most of her face obscured by the angle or by her long dark hair, but you could just see the wide luminous smile across her face.

Michael looked up at The Puppet, feeling a pressure in his chest like something was squeezing his heart. It rarely reared so far out of its box for him to really appreciate how tall it was- its mask was just short of scraping against the ceiling, which was admittedly a little lower in this corner than the extremely high roof of the main room, and its legs were still partially inside the box. Despite how high above Michael it loomed, the way it swayed struck him as apprehensive, and for a brief moment Michael was reminded of the image of a person holding their hands behind their back, blushing and nervously smiling.

He shook his head. You were supposed to anthropomorphize the robots, that was the whole point behind making each a distinct character with a memorable and colorful design, but his slightly sleep-deprived mind was taking it too far. The Puppet repeatedly ran a basic cycle of resting in the box, emerging, and giving prizes to people, none of what had just happened was at all out of the ordinary for its behavior.

Still, Michael found himself saying “Thank you” to The Puppet as he walked out of the Prize Corner, and as he tried to figure out which off-limits area Liz had broken into this time, he felt like a set of carved black eye-holes were fixed on him whenever he passed through the dining hall.

The rest of the day went by in a blur for Michael, and in what seemed like no time at all, he was back home, lying in bed with the lights on as he ran his fingers over the poster he had been given. In the privacy of his own room, he felt tears welling up in his eyes that he would never have allowed himself to shed anywhere else.

In the early days of the pizzeria, William Afton and Henry Emily had practically been joined at the hip, always working on some project together or wandering through the restaurant watching children go wild over the animatronics. Likewise, Michael had spent almost as much time with Charlotte Emily as he did with his own siblings, especially when they were young- he was ever so slightly older than Charlie, but she was much older than Evan or Elizabeth and so she had always felt more like a peer, less like somebody he had to deal with and more like somebody he could connect with.

Charlie’s energy and radiant enthusiasm had always been able to light up his day when things were bad at home, and she seemed to know just how to cheer his younger siblings up when he couldn’t. Michael always thought it would be the two of them forever against whatever the world had to throw at them… but then Charlie had vanished, and turned up dead in an alley the next day. Now that he thought about it, that was most certainly the start of everything going wrong. Michael fell asleep with the poster still clutched to his chest, and in his dreams a pair of dark eyes continued to watch him with concern.
---

It was an unusually cool afternoon for the very beginning of summer, and a quiet day at Freddy’s for the most part. While schools had let out several hours ago, they weren’t quite out for the summer yet, meaning not many families with children would be travelling, and though Freddy’s was popular with the local children, only a few were the kind of dedicated regulars who came more than once or twice a month. However one could almost always count on at least three children in the building this time of day- William Afton rarely went home any earlier than six, and the staff had long ago grown accustomed to having the Afton children around, even on slow days like this.

Michael tucked a newly-finished sheet of math homework back into his bag and leaned back in his chair, watching the band perform. He knew all the songs by heart of course, but there was something comforting about the show, watching a carefully-designed routine come together seamlessly. As Michael got older so much of the world seemed to lose its wonder and luster, and everything was so much bleaker than he remembered- just the price of growing up he figured. But even after all these years, there was still a child-like joy Freddy and friends could bring out in him that hadn’t been extinguished.

His eyes darted back and forth, carefully checking who was on duty in the main hall before pulling a thin spiral notebook from his backpack, flicking it open. The pages were filled with sketches, some careful intricate charts of wires, pistons, and servomotors, some more freestyle depictions of various objects, including numerous scenes of the animatronics. Michael could remember when there were always a few of his drawings up on the fridge and scattered around the house, but that had stopped years ago, when his father had told him he was getting too old to waste so much time doodling. The pace at which the notebook had been filled in had slowed down a lot after that.

Still, he had quite a few more pages left in the book, and Michael was starting to get the beginning of an idea forming somewhere in the back of his head as he saw some of the group shots he had made of the animatronics. Michael walked to a large table that was set partway into the wall about halfway down the dining hall, on which was a large box of paper and a second box which he instinctively reached into only to find his hand running through air. Michael looked with suspicion over the nearly-empty dining hall. It wasn’t nearly busy enough today for the art supplies to be running out, unless…

Michael found his younger brother Evan in the corner of the room, sitting next to a black-haired girl around the same age as him who was wearing an orange shirt. Pieces of paper were scattered across the table in front of them, the girl pointing to something on one piece of paper while Evan drew with a colored pencil, more of which were piled at the table’s edge. Evan had an expression of intense concentration, somewhat ruined by the fact that he was slightly sticking his tongue out one end of his lips.

“Heeeeyyyy there little man” Michael said, slowing the first word into an extended drawl. “I’m going to borrow these for a bit if you don’t mind”. He scooped up the remaining colored pencils in one hand, leaving Evan with only the dark yellow he was currently holding. Evan inched back on his seat, his eyes shooting wide open as he stared apprehensively.

Michael had never quite understood Evan. How did he expect to survive, much less get anything done, when he let everything in the world frighten him? He and Elizabeth were afraid sometimes of course, and they’d gone through phases of being flighty, but they’d quickly gotten over it. They were Aftons, fear didn’t control them, they controlled it, as Father frequently said. Still, Evan being unable to stand up for himself was a known factor.

The girl in orange was more of a surprise- she immediately latched both of her hands onto Michael’s, pulling at his arm with more strength than he would have expected of someone half his height. “We were using those,” she shouted. “Give them back!”

Tugging his arm back, Michael couldn’t quite break the girl’s grip. “Wow, Evan, I didn’t realize you had friends. It’s cute, really, but I’m not going to let you two just hoard all of these, better to let some more talented people have a turn…”

Evan gently rested his fingers on the girl’s shoulder, very softly saying “Cassidy, it’s not that big a deal, you don’t need to…”

“No!” shouted the girl, Cassidy apparently, redoubling her tugging on Michael’s hand, her piercing green eyes locking with Michael’s. “You’re a big jerk, you know that? I’m not going to quit before you do.”

Smirking, Michael said “I think there’s a very valuable lesson about sharing to be…” he was cut off when Cassidy’s foot slammed into his chest. Despite his size advantage, he hadn’t been expecting it and the impact disrupted his footing. Michael fell back onto the tile floor, colored pencils scattering in every direction as he felt the force of the fall reverberate through his shoulders.

Michael rose up to a seated position, blinking at the lights suddenly pointed right towards his eyes from this lower vantage point. Once his eyes adjusted he could once again see Evan and Cassidy, but strangely neither were looking at him, both staring somewhere above and behind him. As Michael stood up, the distant sound of songs on stage was drowned out by soft resonant notes accompanied by a faint mechanical ratcheting. The five-note end to each short reel of song was immediately recognizable- Pop Goes The Weasel.

Turning, Michael felt his heart skip a beat. The Puppet was looming over them, its box empty in the background as it hung at the edge of the Prize Corner. Michael stepped back to put himself between it and the table, and he could feel Evan cling onto his hand squeezing for dear life. Cassidy pushed around the side of them, her hands balled up into fists, but she seemed vastly less confident than she had a moment ago.

The Puppet tilted its head, long striped arms drawing slowly upwards and backwards at the shoulder before going slack. Michael couldn’t shake the impression that it had just sighed at him, or as close as a thing with no lungs and a permanently fixed expression could do to sighing. Now Michael was really sure he was starting to see things. As always the Puppet’s eyes were dark and blank, its mouth an unchanging grin, so why was he getting the impression of… disappointment? Was he really that much of a nutjob to be projecting his conscience onto a piece of fabric and painted plastic? His questionable sanity aside, maybe he was getting to something. Evan’s hand digging into his arm was starting to get a little painful, but he couldn’t be that angry as he looked at his brother. He couldn’t even be mad at Cassidy for kicking him.

Giving a sigh of his own, Michael turned his back on The Puppet entirely, he leaned down to eye-level with Evan. Michael knew his brother was just too soft, too weak to deal with what the world had in store. So Michael tried to toughen Evan up, get him ready for whatever he might face, but even when Evan’s inability to deal with much of anything drove him mad, he could never hate his brother. He’d tried to, and indeed he’d gotten quite good at being angry and frustrated at Evan. Hate would be so much simpler and easier to manage than his true feelings.

Maybe if things weren’t working right now, he could try a different approach, just for a little bit? Even if it didn’t work, that gnawing feeling that he was failing his family, brought out by the disappointment he had imagined, made him want to try. “Hey, It’s alright,” he said. “You’re safe here, there’s nothing here that’s going to hurt you, I promise”.

Evan silently pointed at The Puppet, his hand trembling. Michael tried to crack a smile. “You don’t need to be afraid of them, they’re a friend”. He turned back to The Puppet. “Aren’t you?” Against all odds, The Puppet nodded, fluidly floating a few feet back.

Michael rose to his feet again, Evan letting go of his arm and generally looking a little calmer. Cassidy was still glaring at Michael, but she said nothing. Looking at the floor, Michael winced at the scattered pencils. “I’d better get this cleaned up before closing time” he muttered.

“I’ll help.” Evan said, his voice still quavering a little. “Dad isn’t going to be happy with us if we leave a mess”.

The two of them began picking up colored pencils, Cassidy joining in unprompted, practically glued to Evan’s side as if she were afraid something might happen to him if she moved more than a few feet away. The Puppet moved back into its box, but it didn’t retreat beneath the lid, instead staying upright and watching the three of them as they gathered the supplies they had spilled together. “All right you little twerps,” Michael said as they brought the last few pencils back to the table, “Mission accomplished”.

Now that nobody was working on it, Michael could see the drawing Evan had been working on much more easily. It was, as he expected, not very good. Shapes were uneven, lines scrawled and drawn over, and the style was quite childish, but he could still recognize it as a group picture of the animatronics. Two yellow figures with purple bow ties at the center, one with a hat and one with long ears, a near-copy of each central figure in brown and bluish-purple, a brighter yellow figure with an orange beak and a white bib, and a red one with pointed ears, a single eye, and a grey question-mark shape in place of one hand.

Running his hand through the multicolored pile they had collected, Michael picked out three pencils in black, red, and purple, holding them out to Evan. “You know I think this picture is missing somebody. I’m sure they won’t mind letting us draw them”.

Michael and Cassidy sat on either side of Evan as he drew, offering input as he added the final Fazbear character to his drawing, a tall and incredibly slender black and white striped figure with a wide smile. It was surprisingly soothing, and reminded Michael of before he and his siblings started to pull apart from one another, back when they had watched movies together and introduced their friends to each other, and really acted like family.

When the drawing was finished, Evan and Cassidy walked over to the Prize Counter, holding it up to face The Puppet. The spindly figure leaned in close to look at it, then very slowly stretched out its arms, resting a three-fingered hand on each of the children’s shoulders. Once again Michael was struck by how comfortable he felt around the thing, no matter how weird it was. Like it listened, like it was thinking of him, like it wanted him to be better. The Puppet sprung up to near its full height, grabbing something from a shelf and leaning down to place it in Evan’s hands.

Evan locked eyes with first Michael, then Cassidy, then he opened the box. Inside was a stuffed animal about the size of his head, yellow with two buttons and a purple bowtie down the front, a similarly purple hat stitched onto its head. Evan’s eyes lit up as he held the plushie tight to him, a smile lighting up on his face. God, how long had it been since Michael had seen Evan smile? How long had it been since he had really genuinely smiled? It must have been before… back when Charlie was still around, he thought. Nothing had really been the same since then after all.

Michael watched as Evan and his friend returned to the main dining hall, but he stayed in the Prize Corner for the moment, staring into the mask of The Puppet. “Thank you” he said quietly, still feeling a little bit stupid talking to one of the mascots. “I’m glad Evan is making friends of course, it’s just… I never know what to do with him.”

The Puppet leaned its head inquisitively, and Michael continued “He’s my brother, and with father busy it’s my job to take care of him. I try, but sometimes it feels like I don’t know any more than Evan does, like I can’t help but keep making terrible choices. My friends at school say I worry too much, but what if one day I do something I won’t be able to fix?”

His eyes narrowed. “...and then on top of all that, there’s you. I don’t know if I’m starting to crack under the pressure or if there’s more going on, but I know there’s something up with you. The way you act… you can hear us, can’t you?”

The Puppet nodded, and Michael’s heart started racing. He still didn’t trust himself completely, but something very strange was happening here. Michael remembered bits and pieces of The Puppet from when he was younger, and it had never been any different than the other characters, it played its script to perfection but it wasn’t aware, wasn’t thinking. Now it was.

“I don’t know what’s happening with you… but I’m going to find out”

Chapter Text

It had been just over two weeks since Michael had sworn to get to the bottom of what was happening with The Puppet, and all he had accomplished was to reinforce that The Puppet was something of an oddity and enigma within the Fazbear family.

Fredbear, Spring Bonnie, Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy were all well-represented in advertising and merchandise, they all spoke and put on performances, they were the iconic characters that held the establishment together. The Puppet just didn’t quite fit in- silent and subtle, it would be easy to visit the restaurant without even realizing it was there.

Still, The Puppet had been around for quite some time, and Michael was sure that if he just asked around enough, he’d find somebody who knew more about it than he did.

Asking his classmates at school quickly turned out to be a bust. Nobody knew anything Michael didn’t, and he was getting the feeling his friends were beginning to think something might be wrong with him. He’d slowed down the pace of his questions at that point, and might have forgotten his investigation entirely if his siblings hadn’t unintentionally reminded him on Saturday morning.

Evan had quickly gotten extremely, childishly attached to the Fredbear plushie he had been given (Evan was a child of course, but Michael still thought it was rather immature for a child of his age). ‘Little Fredbear’ went everywhere with him, including to the breakfast table, which their father raised an eyebrow at but didn’t comment on. Elizabeth was almost as entranced with the toy as her brother, slowly stroking the stuffed animal’s arm between mouthfuls of scrambled eggs.

“Where did you get him? He’s so cute.” Elizabeth asked. While her reddish-blonde hair stood out from her brown-haired family, Elizabeth’s voice ensured that everybody in Hurricane could tell she was part of the only family in town with accents like hers.

“That… one with the mask in the Prize Corner gave him to me.” Evan explained, eying Elizabeth suspiciously as though she might somehow harm Fredbear by stroking his arm too much.

Elizabeth’s already smiling face lit up even more. “Oh, the Puppet? I love them!” she shouted. This wasn’t entirely surprising, Elizabeth was practically a ball of radiant energy and enthusiasm, and she rarely met anything she didn’t like, but the conversation caught Michael’s ear. “I love how pretty the little red cheeks and the lipstick are,” Elizabeth continued. “Daddy, can there be more of them that look like that?”

William inclined his head ever so slightly, his expression unchanging. Michael knew his father could be downright theatrical back when Fredbears was still a small business run by two men and William regularly filled in as a performer, but outside of when he was playing a role, actively trying to broadcast an emotion to the world, he was very blank-faced, his moods forever unreadable. After a pause he said “Even with two locations running, there is only so much room for new characters, that said I do have a number of projects running, and will keep that in mind once I reach the stage of having to consider visual design”. He carefully set his silverware down and rose from his seat. “If any of you want to come along. expect all of you to be at the door and ready to leave in ten minutes. There’s much work to be done”.

William of course meant there was much work for him to do, and he had no particular interest in sharing the details, leaving the Afton children to their own devices in the restaurant. For them though, that was how it had always been. Only Michael was old enough to remember the days before there was such a thing as Fazbear Entertainment, but even now that William and Henry had ceded full authority over the restaurants, the Aftons still held a deep familiarity with the place.

Michael had never spent much time in the Prize Corner before. Most people didn’t, the place was for getting gifts and leaving, there was no expectation anybody would just hang around there. But Michael found himself heading there right away, dodging a number of children who were, for reasons quite beyond his comprehension, running around, screaming, and occasionally ramming into walls.

“Seriously,” Michael said as he ducked around a child running at top speed with the Foxy plushie The Puppet had just given him “Are they putting caffeine in the pizzas or something?” The Puppet, which had been retracting back into their box, stopped and reached one arm up to hold a hand in front of their ‘mouth’.

“Are you… laughing?” Michael asked. There was no sound, but the shaking and the gesture were unmistakable. “That wasn’t even that funny.” he protested, but The Puppet just kept not-exactly-laughing. Michael waited for them to top before he continued, sitting down in the small space between the box and the Prize Counter.

After making sure nobody else was within hearing range, he said “Thank you, once again, for being there. I mean, not like you would be somewhere else, but you understand what I’m trying to say”. Michael leaned back, resting his head against the wall. “It’s not like I don’t have anyone, but there’s nobody I can be… vulnerable around. God it feels so wrong calling myself that. I’m supposed to be better than that”.

He took a deep breath before going on. “I can’t look… weak like that around the kids at school, and definitely not around my family. If I hadn’t started talking to you, had to just keep everything I shouldn’t feel chained down, I’m not sure where I’d be. I used to have a friend that I felt like I could tell anything to, but she’s not around anymore”.

While Michael had been letting words simply flow freely, he stopped himself there. He tried to avoid thinking about Charlie if he could, it was always just too painful. That she was really gone after all the time he’d known her was something he could barely process. Michael shook himself, trying to focus on something less hopelessly tragic.

After half an hour of resting there by the box, Michael returned to the dining hall. He hadn’t had any particular plans today, but the conversation this morning at breakfast had reminded him that he had been working on finding out what was happening with The Puppet. He didn’t have room to complain about it, but he had to admit there was something very unusual about them. He’d asked plenty of people- technicians, waiters, kids, parents, and learned almost nothing about The Puppet… but he felt stupid now that he realized he’d never asked the people that created it.

Unlike the customer side of the restaurant, the hallways of the staff area were a simple uniform cream color, lit by long fluorescent tubes suspended between the exposed piping on the ceiling. Each door was marked only by a small placard, but Michael knew where to find the one he was looking for. Though no bigger than any other, the placard to this door was ringed in brass and styled to look like thin spidery handwriting- William Afton, Fazbear Entertainment Board of Directors. Michael rapped his knuckles on the door and heard his father’s voice calling “Come in”.

William Afton kept a workshop at home, but his office space at Freddy’s had quickly become overrun with half-completed machines. A large paper-covered desk and filing cabinets were pushed against one wall, but the clear centerpiece of the room was a long workbench with a shiny laminated surface. William looked up from his work. “Michael, I wasn’t expecting to see you here. Pull up a seat” he said, gesturing to a row of stools lined against the wall, tone carefully clipped as always.

Michael carried a stool to the side of the workbench and sat next to his father, who had picked his tools back up already and returned to what he was doing. An oval wireframe mesh sat on the table, a rough approximation in size and shape head and neck made from densely-packed metal filaments. The upper left quarter of the mesh was covered by a featureless white piece of plastic. Michael could just barely see the tiny metal rods holding the plastic in place. William slowly traced the edge of one of these rods with a dental pick.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you Father,” Michael said carefully. He knew William could get quite engrossed in his projects. “I just wanted to ask what you knew about The Puppet. Elizabeth mentioned them this morning, and it got me thinking. I realized I knew almost nothing about them compared to the other animatronics here”. Of course Michael was going to leave out the part where he’d been talking to The Puppet and was becoming increasingly sure it was listening. Liz and Evan were young enough to get away with treating the robots like they were really alive, if Michael admitted to it, people would have every reason to think he had gone mad.

“The prize vendor?” William asked. “I’m afraid there isn’t a great deal to tell. I’ve barely thought about that thing in years. I was around when it was made of course, I even helped make the mould for the mask, but it was always Henry’s big idea”.

There was a hint of something that wasn’t William’s usual calm demeanor when he mentioned Henry. Michael wasn’t entirely surprised- Henry Emily was his father’s oldest and closest friend, but ever since Charlotte's death, Henry had withdrawn from the world, or at least from the Aftons’ world; Michael had gone from seeing him almost every day to never at all very quickly. “His big idea?” Michael repeated “W…what was he… trying to do with it?”

William extracted his dental pick from the wires in front of him and pointed it at Michael, furrowing his brows. “Don’t stammer Michael, it makes you sound slow”. He put down the pick and picked up a tiny screwdriver, returning to whatever it was he was doing. “I’m not entirely sure. He wanted to use it as some manner of security system. I was always quietly doubtful, but that was Henry through and through, eyes locked on the horizon, able to see limitless possibilities but not able to watch his step while he walked there. Sure enough, it didn’t turn out to be very effective, but too much effort had been put into the thing to scrap, so the board retooled it as the prize vendor”.

Leaving Michael to reflect on that, William inched his seat back, gently tapping a tiny black dot on the side of the wireframe with the head of his screwdriver before wrenching his hand back. There was a loud hiss as the tiny metal bars holding the plate of plastic extended, revealing a hinge that hadn’t been visible in their coiled state. The plastic shell was pushed up and outwards by the tiny piston, swinging to the side like a door on hinges before locking into place around the side of the frame.

William’s face contorted into a smile. The ends of his mouth didn’t extend very widely, but his face pinched and twitched like he was putting far more tension into his muscles than the expression required. “Marvelous…” he said under his breath.

A loud metallic crash suddenly echoed from outside the window, and William raised his screwdriver to his chest, his grip on it tightening. He loudly took a breath through his teeth and started to shout “If that dratted dog has gotten into the dumpster again…” he slammed his hand against the leg of the workbench, leaving a tiny dent in the wood with the screwdriver. He stood up, slowly running his hands through his hair when a knock came from the door.

“Mr Afton?” somebody called out. “We’ve got a man who's demanding to see somebody in charge, could you…”

“I’ll deal with it” William interrupted, tone both irritated and faintly sing-song. “I’m sorry Michael, it has been quite a surprise to have you around, but business calls. I think it would be best if you found your siblings and gave your father a little space, all right?”

Michael nodded vigorously, leaving his father’s office in the quickest strides he could manage without looking like he was running, and returned to the main hall to find Evan and Elizabeth. William stayed in late that night, sending the three of them home with some money for takeout, and once again Michael took out the poster that the Puppet had given him while he lay in bed. Michael drifted off to sleep remembering how his life had been before it began to fall apart.
—

He hadn’t wanted to be here, but Michael still didn’t have the answers he wanted, and there was only one person who knew more about The Puppet than his father did.

In Michael’s memories, the Emily family home was a sprawling colorful place that was constantly suffused with a warm glow and surrounded by a thorny tangle of a garden. While he knew from the address that he was now standing in front of the same house, it didn’t stand up to his childhood memories in the slightest. The paint was a subdued cream with green accents, the garden was simply three poorly-trimmed rose bushes, and it was actually a little smaller than the Aftons’ house.

Less attributable to the imagination of childhood was how somber the house felt. Every curtain was drawn, and the antique lantern hanging from the porch, which Henry had always been so proud of and lit whenever he was expecting guests, was covered in dust and cobwebs. If not for the fresh footprints in the dust that had accumulated on the stairs, Michael could have believed that nobody had lived in this house for years. Steeling his nerves, Michael knocked loudly on the front door.

After a few moments of silence, there was a shuffling behind the door and it opened with a click. “Michael?” Henry asked. He was a tall skinny man with long wild hair and a beard to match. The dark circles around his eyes were so large and deep-set that the thin black rims of his glasses were nearly invisible. “What are you doing here? More to the point, what are you doing here at ten in the evening?”

Michael smiled nervously. He’d wanted to ask Henry some questions since his talk with his father, but he hadn’t seen Henry in a long time and didn’t know a good way to meet him. The idea to go over to his house had just seized Michael while he was about to go to bed before he could spend much time thinking about it. “I ah… couldn’t sleep?” he tried. “Mind if I come in?”

Henry wordlessly ushered Michael inside, his eyes darting back and forth before he shut the door behind them. “Michael, I can tell something’s troubling you, what’s wrong?” Henry’s voice was deep and soft, he sounded quite calm but his hands were twitching like he was expecting somebody to jump them.

Michael gave another smile, this one less of a nervous tic and more of an attempt at reassurance. “It’s not a crisis or anything, I’ve just noticed something rather strange. This is going to sound like a weird question, but what can you tell me about The Puppet? Father told me you wanted to use it for security, but he didn’t seem to know much”

Raising an eyebrow, Henry made a beckoning gesture, leading Michael through the house into the workshop. Henry’s workshop was a little neater than William’s, with the main workbench kept clear and tools all put away on racks, but the walls were covered in cork boards plastered with schematics and rough sketches of characters. Henry carefully pulled the pins out of one of these sketches and laid it on the table.

The paper had numerous drawings, all of a tall and thin figure with a wide smile. With each sketch, Henry had honed in on what he was looking for- after the first few the striped limbs became fixed, the shape of the mask was refined, until at the bottom of the page a drawing that had been circled showed The Puppet as Michael knew it.

“I’m not sure what’s gotten you so interested Michael, but I suppose there's no harm in telling you,” Henry said, gingerly running a finger across the old sketch. “That was years ago. Back then there wasn’t a big company or multiple locations, just two men in way over their heads trying to balance a family, a business, and inventing novel applications of robotics”.

A little color was returning to his face, making him look more like the lively jovial man that Michael remembered. Michael had been angry at Henry for practically vanishing from his life, but it was hard to stay upset at him when he looked so hollow, so drained of life. “We had a security guard of course, but there were plenty of little things that cropped up. Children usually get separated from their parents. They were always fine- they’d hidden in the bathroom, went outside without telling anyone, or at least once somehow getting stuck in the crawlspace under the stage.”

He chuckled weakly, moving over to a large set of drawers and rummaging around in it as he spoke. “At the time, I was always reading to try and keep up with the latest discoveries in technology, and came across a fascinating paper about radio transceivers. I thought that if we could just make them a little smaller, we could have a way to keep track of children much more easily…”

Henry pulled a number of bracelets from the drawer, showing them to Michael. They were simple bands in numerous bright hues, each with a slightly thicker and more rectangular fastener where the face would be on a watch. “I figured that even a simple computer system could track the number of security bands we’d need better than any human. It took months to program. William was always the better coder between us and he was busy with the stage animatronics, and that was before we had Murray backing me up on the scripting. I got it done in the end though. The Puppet can track the transceivers in these bracelets from half a mile away. I thought… I thought as long as we could find a child, they’d be safe. But that didn’t work out in the end I suppose”. His voice cracked a little. Henry was a tall man, nearly as tall as William, but hunched over the table like this, he almost reminded Michael of Evan; small, delicate, and terrified of the world.

Michael cautiously put his hand on Henry’s shoulder. He wasn’t good at comforting people and he knew it, but he couldn’t exactly tell a man his father’s age to grow up and get over it like he instinctively did with his siblings. “Thank you Mister Emily,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you, I just noticed The Puppet acting strangely and thought maybe knowing more about it might give me some insight”.

“You don’t need to apologize for stopping over Michael,” Henry said “You’re of course welcome here, I simply haven’t had very much company since… Well, you know when. The mechanics still call me sometimes when there’s something with the animatronics that they can’t figure out though, and I haven’t heard anything about The Puppet. What did you see?”

Michael started to raise his hand, pointing his finger defensively, when he stopped. There wasn’t anything accusatory about the question, no implied disbelief, just the plain meaning of the words. “There don’t seem to be any actual problems with The Puppet, they’re doing their job just fine, but there’s something… about it. You know I used to talk to Foxy all the time when I was little, but of course he never actually noticed my presence or responded to it. The Puppet though… I feel like they can see and hear me. Like when people talk, they understand what’s being said. They watch when I speak, tilt their head, nod, that sort of thing” Michael shrugged “I did say it sounded crazy”.

Putting a curled-up hand on his bearded chin, Henry slowly nodded. “That’s an interesting observation. The Puppet is capable of detecting sound, but that’s just for some emergency triggers to bypass the normal standby mode, it shouldn’t have any reaction to human voices. Maybe I’ll come over in a few days and check, it’s… probably for the best if I get out of the house a little more anyway. Now, you should get back home and get some sleep, you don’t want your family to wake up and you not to be there.It’s a terrible thing, to lose somebody that close to you, and I wouldn’t want to put them through it even though you’re not really gone”.

As he walked back home, Michael still felt rather empty. He’d learned things, sure, and it had cleared up a lot of what his father had said, but there was still something missing, something key to the whole problem, and he knew it. There was a massive piece missing somewhere from this puzzle that stopped him from seeing the full shape of what he was uncovering. As he went back into his room, he sighed and hoped it would all make more sense when he’d gotten some sleep. He wasn’t going to count on it though. Even his dreams had been weird lately.

Chapter Text

If you had asked Charlie to imagine what it would be like to be a ghost, she would have expected the pain, the anguish, but she wouldn’t have anticipated the sheer boredom.

The first days had been the worst of course. Pain, sorrow, betrayal, and then everything had faded to darkness. Then she woke up in a body that wasn’t hers, that wasn’t even a real living thing. Charlie had tried to scream, to cry, but she had no lungs, no voice. She held three-fingered hands up to her face, only to feel an unmoving plastic visage.

After what she was fairly sure was multiple days of this panic and despair, Charlie had calmed herself enough to start discovering things. She ought to at least understand her predicament, shouldn’t she? At the very least, it provided her with a distraction. Within a week, she’d figured out the basic rules of her new body. Whenever the pizzeria was open, a vague presence started weighing at the back of Charlie’s mind. Not really thoughts, they were far too simple to be called that, just a nagging certainty that she should be doing something. She could ignore it if she tried, but if she didn’t focus on it, she found The Puppet moving on its own to give children presents.

At night though, The Puppet’s simple functions shut down, and Charlie was as close to free as she could be under the circumstances. She’d have flung herself out the door and never looked back but… where would she go? Even if there was somebody out there who would believe her if she tried to explain who she was, she couldn’t speak any more.

So Charlie had to content herself with watching and listening, hoping something would change. It seemed quite futile to expect when she didn’t have the faintest idea why she had gone from bleeding and blacking out in an alley to suddenly being The Puppet. Charlie was well aware that she didn’t know everything about the world, but she was fairly certain that wasn’t a thing that was known to happen. If there was anything to say for the situation, it was that she had plenty of time to think and sort out her incredibly messy tangle of emotions, at least to the extent that she was even capable of such a task.

Sometimes when she was folded up in the darkness of her box like she was tonight, with simple soft music playing around her, Charlie started to get the sensation that instead of looking through The Puppet’s eyes she was sitting next to it, almost like things were normal again. She knew it wasn’t real, but she had to allow herself these moments to imagine that she’d be able to go home soon.

The music box’s jingle suddenly stopped with a loud scraping and ratcheting sound, and Charlie felt herself snap back into The Puppet with a feeling like being tugged by dozens of cords. Dim early-morning light filtered in from the unfolding lid of her box, shining onto the small collection of plushies she had brought into the box to keep her company. She was mostly made of cloth and could fold up quite tight, and Charlie had figured she might as well use the spare room to make her new home feel less like a prison cell.

Charlie floated up out of the box, bending her legs to prevent them from dragging against the ground. As terrible as this whole situation was, she did have to admit that being able to float was pretty cool. Pirate Cove, right across the dining area from the Prize Corner, still had its curtains drawn. At this time of year, sunrise was a few scant minutes before the end of the night shift. Charlie left the Prize Corner, rising with the higher ceiling of the dining room to float above the tables.

Freddy, Bonnie, and Chica stood on stage motionless, their plastic eyes vacantly staring into space. Charlie would have bitterly laughed had she still had the ability. She’d tried to sleep through the nights, but she couldn’t anymore, she could wind down and relax in her box but she was always conscious. At least the shackles of The Puppet’s AI were a distraction during the day. The freedom that night gave her also made her even more alone. She loved the robots, but they weren’t really company.

Turning at a sound from behind her, Charlie saw the restaurant’s main doors open, letting in three men in crisp uniforms. She recognized Matthew, the man who restocked the Prize Counter every day, hurriedly shaking the shoulder of the two next to him. “Jamie, Ralph, are you seeing this?” Matthew said.

A device within The puppet activated with a nearly inaudible hum, followed by the pizzeria’s lights switching on. Freddy’s opened at 8:30, but the daytime staff started trickling in at 6:00, so that was when systems left their night modes.

Back to your places.

‘But’... Charlie thought.

Back to your places.

The Puppet lowered down, gliding back into the Prize Corner and setting its legs inside the still-open box. This was enough to get the whining pressure at the back of Charlie’s head to dissolve, though some of the staff that trickled in over the next two and a half hours still stared at her. Let them. Charlie was where she was supposed to be, and their faulty machinery had deprived her of the best rest she could still get, so they shouldn’t complain that she was bored without it.

“What do you think is going on with it?” she heard somebody say. It was one of the first three men who had come in, a fidgety man with large bright eyes who wore the pale blue button-up shirt from the Freddy’s uniform without the colored jackets used by most staff.

The man he was talking to, who wore a tight grey jacket and an extensive toolbelt, shrugged “Dunno. The music box behind the counter broke down, and that one is supposed to have responses to cues from it, but without input it shouldn’t be doing anything at all. Whatever it is, it’ll be lucky if we get a chance to fix it before the end of the day, we definitely won’t in the fifteen minutes till we open. Just put up a sign.”

Grey-Jacket-Guy walked off, leaving the fidgety one to take out a large plastic pole with a space at the top where paper could be inserted. He walked over to the counter, nervously eying Charlie, and used it as a flat surface to write ‘Sorry, this area is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please speak to a staff member if you have difficulty redeeming your prize tickets’.

Charlie felt a chill go through her. She hadn’t needed a mechanic yet and she really didn’t want to know what it would feel like to have somebody picking around inside her like that. Charlie had no idea whether it would hurt or not, but even if it didn’t, the idea made her skin crawl. Perhaps it would be best to not make the staff question her behavior too much.
—

Her plans to act normal were quite thoroughly foiled a few hours later when Michael Afton arrived in the restaurant. Charlie and Michael had been very close friends when she was alive, and on the days she was being honest with herself she’d acknowledge that Michael made her feel a lot of warm fluttery sorts of sensations that were too new to her for her to really say much about. Of course she knew that he spent a lot of time around Freddy’s- some of her fondest memories were of spending time with him and his siblings here while their fathers worked, but she hadn’t expected just how much he’d be around her.

Charlie definitely hadn’t expected he’d ever talk to her, but then it had happened. In the strangest possible way he had remained part of her life. It made her want to scream. He was right there, talking to her more and more, but he didn’t realize that he was talking to her, and she couldn’t say anything back. Even if she was prevented from explaining who she was, Charlie wished she could actually make him know she was supporting him with everything he was telling her about.

Elizabeth immediately went running off from her brothers to look at the band perform on stage, and with a gentle nudge from Michael, Evan joined her. Charlie was glad to see they were at least tolerating each other again. As much as she liked spending time with Michael, he could take things way too far when he was in a bad mood, and not-particularly-assertive Evan made an easy target. With what she now knew about what his father was really like though, Charlie couldn’t be surprised that Michael had picked up some very bad habits without realizing it.

She felt a warm sensation come over her as Michael approached, which she had to assume was purely a mental phenomenon, since her body kept a temperature only slightly above the air-conditioned room around her. He stopped at the sign, looking at her, then back at the sign, then shrugging, walking up to the edge of the box.

“Good morning,” he said, the end of the phrase stretching out into a yawn. “Sorry, I didn’t sleep very well. What about you… I mean… Do you sleep?”

Charlie shook her head. It was amazing how fast Michael had gotten used to talking to her like this. She was happy of course, but what did it say that he had nobody better to talk to than somebody who he hadn’t even realized could hear him at first?

“That would be… different. Not sleeping. Not sure what I’d do while everyone else was asleep, but at least I wouldn’t get weird dreams. Looks like you didn’t have the most relaxing night either, the sign said something about technical difficulties? There isn’t something broken in you, is there?”

Once again, Charlie shook her head. There was of course something broken within her, and she suspected within Michael too, but not of the sort he was implying, the sort that a mechanic could help with. Charlie rose up a bit and stretched herself around the Prize Counter’s corner. The back was covered in shelves, mostly containing densely-packed stacks of posters, masks, shirts, and other Fazbear-branded objects, but tucked into the upper right corner was a small box with a shiny finish made from plastic but meant to look like wood.

Charlie carefully wrapped her hands around the music box. She could lift a lot more than she would have expected from something as stick-thin as The Puppet, which she assumed to be part of the same package of weirdness as the floating, but with three pliant fingers that she could barely bend her hand, she needed both to grip even small things like this securely. Charlie picked up the box and set it onto the top of the counter.

“Huh,” Michael intoned, popping the top off the box. He got a rather cute look of concentration on his face as he stared into the insides of the mechanism. “I’m not even entirely sure how these things are supposed to work, but…” he trailed off, leaning down over the box to get a closer look.

Leaning down to rest her arms on the rim of her box, Charlie folded them and set her head down on top of them while she watched Michael. Their conversations were unfortunately one-sided, but she loved having him around nonetheless. When they were younger, Michael had been contemplative, creative, and a bit emotional. Now that she was gone though, it was almost like he was scared to be seen like that. When he didn’t think anybody was paying attention, the mask slipped and he returned to his old habits. It hurt to see him now sometimes, but Charlie was glad that the Michael she’d known wasn’t completely gone.

Gently prodding at the music box, Michael muttered “It looks like the central disc thing is supposed to spin and hit the long bits on the edges. It’s a bit askew, but if I just pressed it in…” there was a faint metallic click, and when Michael wound the crank on the side, the music box started up.

Michael stepped back, as though he was shocked with what he’d just done, and turned to stare at Charlie with a wide-mouthed grin, which she returned, though admittedly she didn’t have much of a choice in that regard. She would have hugged him, but she was a little worried that having an animatronic lunge at him like that might give the wrong impression. It was a little thing, sure, but the quiet music helped her relax, and these days Charlie needed whatever small comforts she could get.

“Very impressive Michael”. Charlie felt the warmth drain from her as she heard William Afton’s voice. Michael’s posture immediately straightened, his hands folding behind his back as he turned to his father, who was slowly walking into the Prize Corner.

William had a wry half-grin, which certainly looked a lot more natural than the attempts he sometimes made at an open-lipped smile, but was just as chilling for Charlie. As a child she’d always thought her father’s best friend (and best friend’s father) was a little strange, and as she and Michael grew up she had started to privately suspect that William wasn’t necessarily the best father out there, but he had never come across as actually dangerous. How had nobody known?

“Thank you father. I know I shouldn’t be messing with the machinery here of course, but it was a simple fix really”. The way Michael lit up at such a simple compliment made Charlie twitch. Michael had often griped about what a suck-up Elizabeth was, but Charlie could see that he and Evan were always grasping for approval too in their own ways.

She was seething. William didn’t deserve that kind of attention, and his children deserved better than feeling like his approval was worth anything. But what was she supposed to do about it? She’d been powerless to do anything to him when she was alive, why would it be any different now?

“Simple perhaps, but for someone of your level of training, I think it speaks volumes about talent. I’ve seen some of the drawings you made of the machinery… Perhaps I should show you how to draw a proper schematic some time, but either way, I think you should spend some time in the workshop. Most of my current projects are rather… advanced, but there’s plenty of useful skills to be picked up regardless”.

Charlie couldn’t see Michael’s expression from this angle, but his hands were fidgeting behind his back. Charlie would grant that William was correct- Michael definitely showed a lot of promise, but she didn’t want anybody, much less somebody she cared about so much, to spend more time around William than necessary. She didn’t think he’d hurt his own son, but then she had never expected he would hurt her either.

Michael took a breath, seemingly ready to respond, when he stopped and stared at somebody walking up behind William. Craning to the side to take a closer look, Charlie felt herself instinctively trying to gasp even though she didn’t have the ability to anymore. It was her dad.

Henry looked far worse for wear than Charlie remembered. His hair was poorly combed, his skin a bit paler than usual, and he looked like he hadn’t been sleeping very much. Seeing Mike breaking down had hurt a lot, seeing her dad the same way? Charlie was practically frozen with the intensity of her emotions. William fluidly tuned on the balls of his feet, and Henry gave him a weary smile.

“Henry. I wasn’t expecting you to be here”. William said. Like usual, his voice was soft, flat, and almost emotionless, but there was a slight strain to it.

Shaking his head fondly, Henry said “We spent decades bringing our dream into reality, and you’re surprised I want to be there for it?”

“I am. You’ve been quite content to keep your distance lately. If you’ve already forgotten, when Fazbear Entertainment formed we were both offered positions on the board. You declined”.

“I was in mourning William, I’m sure you understand. Business work was always more your talent than mine at any rate, I don’t imagine that suddenly precludes me from visiting”.

William slowly chuckled, a laugh utterly devoid of warmth. “Of course you can visit Henry. This is a restaurant, it would be rather counterproductive not to let in anybody who wants to come, wouldn’t it? Now if you’ll excuse me, Springbonnie is due for maintenance and I want to make sure it’s done right”. With that he walked off, leaving Henry, Michael, and Charlie the only ones in the Prize Corner.

Henry let out a deep breath. “Michael,” he said “Your father is a brilliant and talented man that I’m honored to have worked with… but he’s always been a prima donna. I told him many times his talents would have served him well in theater”.

Michael put his hands over his mouth to stifle a laugh. Charlie finally recovered enough to start moving again, rising up further from her box and intently staring at her dad, hoping that she could somehow transmit some of the love and worry she was feeling despite her static expression.

“I wasn’t expecting you to be right here when I came, Michael, but it’s good to see you again. I thought I’d come and check up on The Puppet after our discussion. Maybe there’s nothing wrong but it doesn’t hurt to look”. Henry walked up to the edge of the box, looking The Puppet up and down.

Seeing how tired her dad looked had hurt, but this just tore Charlie apart- he was right there, looking right at her, and he didn’t know who she was… oh, to hell with it all. Charlie wrapped her arms around Henry as he approached her, their length and flexibility such that they wrapped all the way around him, her hands meeting each other on the front of his chest.

Michael rushed up “Henry, are you alright?” he asked.

Henry waved Michael off. “I’m quite fine, thank you. I just wasn’t expecting that. I got little kids hugging me all the time back when I still played Fredbear, but I hadn’t imagined I’d be on the other end of an embrace with one of my characters… Now don’t mind me, my tall friend, I just need to get a look at something. Michael, could you stand over there by that fuse box? I’m going to need you to turn off the power running to the show routine computer for The Puppet so I can check on it”.

The two of them went to work, and despite her caution about having maintenance work done on her, it made Charlie feel much better to see them like this. Actually having a project, a task, something to care about made her dad and her closest friend light up in a way she hadn’t seen since she was alive. The power switch clicked as Michael pressed it, and the pressure at the back of Charlie’s mind vanished like the building had just closed for the night.

Even when she was too young to understand what he was saying, her dad had always talked to her when they were together in his workshop. Henry liked to explain what he was doing while he worked, and Charlie suspected that was why he kept Michael around instead of walking the six feet between the fuse box and the systems he was working on. She wasn’t going to complain though, it was nice to see and hear both of them once again, even if she kept thinking of things to say before remembering that she couldn’t speak.

The check-up took around two hours, but, aside from a bit of grime that he had cleaned out, Henry couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary in the panel of circuits Charlie had never even realized was hidden in the wall right behind her box.

Henry wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, then put his hands on his hips. “Huh, nothing wrong there that I can find. Of course The Puppet also has internal circuitry, the routine computer just acts as a transceiver, but I don’t want to open it up while the place is open”.

Michael nodded, re-latching the bolts keeping the fuse box closed. “Really you didn’t need to go to the trouble of doing all this work and dealing with me, The Puppet has been acting… odd, but they still seem to be working just fine”.

“Nonsense, It’s no trouble. Honestly I’ve always found routine technical work to be rather relaxing,” His eyes narrowed a bit “And you don’t need to apologize for being here Michael. You’re not a burden… I know I haven’t been around much, but it wasn’t because I didn’t want to see you”. Henry placed a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “You can come over any time you want Michael, though I’d recommend coming at a more reasonable hour next time. Now, could you perhaps tell me where your brother and sister might be? I think I want to see them again too”.

Charlie felt herself stiffen. Of course Mike and her dad had to go at some point- they couldn’t exactly live in the restaurant, could they? But she knew it was going to be hard to see them leave… but what could she do? She had one purpose here, giving gifts.

Looking through the prizes around her, Charlie struggled to think of something. Presents were one of the few means of communication freely available to her, and she’d tried her best to use them, but there was only so much that could be said with them. Suddenly she remembered something that wasn’t meant to be given out, something tucked away in the corner of her box. Grabbing it and leaning out to her father before he could go, she dropped a small green bracelet into his hands.

Holding it up to his eye level, Henry went quiet. He stared at the green plastic band with a curious blend of expressions for several minutes before choking out “I… I must be going”. Michael gave her a little wave, and they both walked out.

Charlie retreated into her box for the rest of the day, once again untangling the complex mix of emotions the day had left her with. The indistinct chatter of guests began to fade out, then stop entirely as the building closed and the staff started cleaning up, then trickling out themselves. The only thing she caught was a snippet near the end of the day of a young man.

“Sorry sir, I know, it’s just… a bit of a mess. There’s a birthday party tomorrow and we’re heavily booked. It looked like everything was ready; we’ve got kitchens prepared, banners hung, fresh checkups on all the bots, every last springlock on the costumes cleaned and oiled… if this damn stomach bug hadn’t hit our performers so hard, we’d…”

“Don’t worry about it,” William replied calmly. “Accidents happen all the time, it's just a matter of knowing how to outlast them. I have some ideas for remedying our performer shortage. We’ll make sure the kid has a day to remember”.

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.