Chapter Text
It turns out a lot of stuff happens if your father mysteriously dies.
Bad stuff, mostly. Overwhelmingly bad. Eventually people figure out that their father is gone and then there's a whole investigation.
He ends up telling about 10% of the truth. His father committed the MCI and the massacre of '87 and disappeared when he realized someone had figured it out. Mike backs him up.
He thinks Elizabeth knows something's up, but she doesn't call him on it, probably because she's too busy grieving the tragic disappearance-presumed-death of his father.
They re-open the case and release Mr. Henry, who was in the process of asking for an appeal anyway. He's pretty sure Mr. Henry inherits the company by default because they recover so fast the new location doesn't even close.
Who he'll get stuck with is as difficult of a problem as he expected. Elizabeth's mother is willing to take her in and Mike is legally an adult, but his biological mother could not be less interested in being stuck with a child who's 60% medical bills by volume.
That's what he expected, but it's still not nice to learn.
Elizabeth tries to ask her mother if she can take him in too, but she says that he's not her problem. She offers to see if they can be put in the same foster home, but he tells her to take an out when she sees one.
He's not even expecting them to consider Mike for custody. Mike isn't expecting them to consider him for custody. He has a history of issues, no steady employment, and didn't ask for the job.
But he's a legally adult biological relative who knows ASL and when they ask and find out Mike was already kind of semi-parenting him, they say that he's probably his best option.
"You could have told them I almost killed you," Mike says. "Twice."
They're sitting outside a playground in Salt Lake City after Mike picks him up from school.
"More than twice," he says. "You did other stuff before the bite."
Mike grimaces. "Yeah. Like I said. You could tell them."
"Or I could tell them you're crazy."
"Yeah."
"Why don't you tell them?" he asks.
"I thought you already had."
Mike isn't a good option. He hasn't seen his mother in years and she said she wanted nothing to do with him, but she at least would have a stable income and of the two people who don't want anything to do with him there's fewer bad memories between them.
But he's fluent in ASL and knows all of his medical stuff already and the social worker said she'd try and help Mike get a job and when he asked if he could be sure the foster home he'd be put in would know to cover all his medical stuff they said that he could see if he could get covered under Medicare and not given him any straighter answers.
"I know you don't want to do it," he says. "But you're the least bad option I have here."
Mike fidgets before responding. "Aren't you worried I'll turn out like Father?"
"You're already like Father," he says. "Although you could stop being like him."
His brother gives him some kind of deeply tortured look and sighs heavily. "Looks easy when you say it like that."
Kids are playing on the playground. A spirited game of catch has one kid on the monkey bars poised to eat shit if he ever misses even a single ball.
He knows he's a mean kid. He had suspected it before, but he guesses he's picked up more from his family than he meant to.
Although his teacher did say that thirteen year olds are psychopaths by nature, and the main thing your teenage years are about is trying to grow out of being a psychopath as quickly as possible.
Mike is a little old to still be a psychopath, but it's not like he's exactly the same as he was, and he's still young enough that he could probably get some self-improvement in before he successfully kills anyone.
Before he kills someone. He doesn't think it's hit him yet that he's killed someone. Apparently it really is always the ones you wouldn't expect.
Mike knows. And he hasn't said anything. And he's said he won't say anything. And now coincidentally all the evidence pointing to him burnt up without his even knowing about it.
And he really doesn't know if he'll ever forgive Mike for the bite or for everything before or it or for all the things since it, but he's…
"I think you can do it," he says. "You know, my friend says that if you work hard enough, someday even the worst person in existence could be kind of normal. So there's hope for us."
After a solid few seconds of staring, Mike bursts into laughter. "Kind of normal," he mimics. "That's a good goal. If I get there will you forgive me?"
He decides to give some concrete terms. "If you help me pay for medical and school stuff until I turn eighteen I'll forgive you for the bite."
"And I guess I have to not kill you, too?"
"I thought that was obvious."
"You're really needy," Mike complains, but "I'll ask for that social worker lady to help me find a job."
The kid on the monkey bars wipes out hard, although a strategic roll keeps him from cracking his head open. Still, his friends gather around him in a panicked group huddle.
"…Thank you," he says. "I— I actually do know this is a huge thing to ask of someone."
Mike's face softens. "Eh. You have a lot of big favors saved up. Might as well cash them in."
"Also thank you for—" he checks for anyone watching them. "Helping me. With Father. I think you… did something."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Mike deadpans.
"Right."
*
Mike gets hired as a maintenance tech on the other side of Utah so they don't have to wake up before sunrise to go to school. Hurricane is where his entire childhood takes place, so needless to say he's not that sad to leave it behind.
Now they live in a tiny two bedroom apartment. It's mostly paid for by their combined inheritance and a downgrade from their house in every way, but it's also a blank slate.
Elizabeth's mother wants nothing to do with them, but eventually lets herself be, in Elizabeth's words, "annoyed" into letting him drive down to meet with her once a month, and they write letters to each other.
"We're getting a TTY," he says one day when they're sitting at a mall. "Ollie was surprised I didn't already have one. I said I just made Mike call people for me and he said I was living like a caveman."
"What about a pager?" Elizabeth asks. "A lot of my friends' older siblings are getting them."
He frowns. "I might get a pager," he says. "I don't know, I need to be able to make phone calls, but I don't really care about chatting with people."
"What— what about me?!" she asks. "Is your own sister not important enough to chat with?"
"We already talk," he points out.
"Once a month! And sometimes we send letters." He was worried her sign language would degrade since they don't live together anymore, but she says there's a kid at her school with Deaf parents who she's friends with. Although she does keep picking up weird slang. "How am I supposed to annoy you the rest of the time?"
"If you're going to annoy me I won't get a pager."
"Rude!" she mimes outrage. "I can annoy you if you get a TTY too."
"No you can't. I can just ignore it."
"You're so mean to me!"
"I might get a pager," he repeats. "I don't know. I'll see if I like the TTY. Ollie says to call him with it if I do get one."
"Get one, get one!" she says. "I already know how to call someone with one since Belle's parents have one. I can teach you if it's confusing, even."
He waves her off. "Mike says it's expensive enough that we'll have to save up for it."
"Do you have an email yet?" she asks. "We don't have a computer at our house, but I made one at the library computer and I've been using it to talk to my friends from Hurricane."
He covers his eyes with his hands for a second. "We don't have a computer at our house either," he says. "I'm putting off making one until I need to look for work."
"You're almost an adult now," Elizabeth points out. "That inheritance isn't gonna last forever."
"Don't remind me," he signs glumly.
She grins. Although her kill count is— as far as he knows— zero, she can still be a dick when she feels like it. That doesn't seem to be her intention right now. "How is stuff with Mike?" she asks.
"Fine," he says, because that's really the best word for it.
Things are fine.
Which is a luxury he never thought he'd live to witness.
The first while fucking sucked, they were having to rebuild their lives almost from square one and both of them were acutely aware of how bad things would be if Mike couldn't hack being a legal guardian, but now he's old enough to drive and that helps a lot.
They're not close, really, but they're… very slowly approaching being on good terms. He's been getting better about bringing things up before they're urgent disasters and Mike is trying some anger management stuff.
Happy ending.
"That's good," Elizabeth says.
She hasn't asked him about Father, even though she knows he knows she knows he's the one who told the cops that Father committed the MCI. He doesn't know what she thinks about him now. They mostly don't talk about their father at all outside of the inheritance.
"How are things with your mother?" he mirrors.
Elizabeth scrunches up her face in a way that means not great. "Same old, same old."
"That bad?"
"I don't really want to talk about it."
"…Sorry," he says. "Should I not be bragging?"
She laughs. "I don't wanna trade," she says. "We're just fighting right now."
He looks her over. She doesn't look hurt. Anywhere he can see. "Stay safe," he says.
"Right, right." She waves him off.
The conversation wanders to less depressing stuff— Elizabeth's friends, his friends, the fact that Elizabeth feels like she's losing her accent, whether he would still have a British accent if he could speak, if either of their accents ever actually counted as British, and eventually what they're going to buy since Elizabeth just got her allowance. They never reach an agreement on the accent thing, but Elizabeth decides to spend her allowance on a pager in case he ends up getting one, so he'll for sure have someone to talk to.
She walks home when the sun sets, and he drives back home.
On the way, he notices a new billboard for Freddy's. It has the same address, so the '88 location must not have had any new murders.
So it really wasn't Mr. Henry.
…It wasn't murder. It was voluntary manslaughter. Mike explained the different kinds of killing people to him, and he says a court would probably agreed it was justified self-defense.
He'd asked if they should've just gone to the cops, and Mike had said that he probably could've, but their father was so involved with the police and Fazbear is committed to cover-ups that the outcome would've depended on what they thought was most convenient. They didn't even actually convict William Afton for the MCI, they just agreed there was enough of a doubt to overturn Mr. Henry's conviction.
He'd thought killing his father would feel… more. It feels like the kind of thing you don't just get over. It was a lot for Elizabeth and Mike, but—
He doesn't know when he stopped loving his father. He definitely loved him before the bite, but whether it's the brain damage or the fact that his father didn't look at him in the eyes once from the time the doctor gave him the news until that day, at some point they became more or less strangers to each other.
He wants to fix you.
Better off dead.
He's had a lot of time to think about if that was true by now, and he's come to the conclusion that it is, in fact, good to be alive.
Even after everything. Even with everything.
And now he's got his whole life ahead of him.