Chapter Text
The clock reads 6:37 AM when Henry is woken by another nightmare, breathing hard and lying in a pool of cold sweat. It’s been the same blur of subconscious dissonance every night for the past week: a blur of small figures racing through dark corridors, stalked by a looming shadow that clicks with the movement of mechanical parts. In them his vision is always restricted, as if he’s watching through slats in the floor, unable to stop what comes next.
He sighs, and reaches for the glasses on his nightstand.
It had been exactly two years since Charlie died. Two years since she had lost her life alone, miserable and scared at a place that was meant to keep her safe. And here he was now, alive, putting on coffee in his musty, silent, kitchen, kneading absentmindedly at another crick in his neck.
Two years since he made the biggest fucking mistake of his life.
The sun begins to creep up past the horizon as he settles himself onto the arm of the sofa, laying out an assortment of news clippings and photographs on his lap. Sometimes they get put away in files or drawers, but they never stay shut in for long. No matter how much he tries to declutter, they seem to creep back in until every surface in the room is covered in a spiderwebbing layer of newsprint—reminders of his shortcomings.
The first clipping he pulls today is an interview with the chief of police. The man that looked him in the eye and told him that Charlotte’s death had been her own fault. That she had wandered into a restricted area, tampered with one of the suits and, in the dim light of the backrooms, tripped the springlocks.
It was bullshit, Henry had always known that. He knew his work—knew the shape and function of each part, their trajectories as they opened and folded in, the marks they would leave in case of a malfunction. It was unthinkable that anything created by his hand could murder his child, and he knew the mechanical principles to back it up.
But two years later, the headlines still sting.
A sharp knock on the door nearly sends him tumbling over the arm of the sofa.
He doesn’t know what he’s expecting, but all the same he’s somehow not all that surprised to be greeted by William grinning at him like a lunatic, rocking back and forth on his heels at the crack of dawn.
“Good, you’re up.” William says giddily, pushing past Henry. He strides through the living room without, Henry notes with some annoyance, bothering to remove his shoes, as he proudly sits himself down at the kitchen table in Henry’s seat.
“Mind if I move these?” William asks, not bothering to wait for an answer before sweeping a stack of files off of the table. He begins to dump his own folders out in their place, then deftly reaches in his jacket pocket for a cigarette. Despite the arrogant saunter he had taken through the kitchen less than a minute ago, he now grins up at Henry sheepishly, skillfully fitting on a mask of deference as he slides the cigarette between his teeth.
“You got a light, Hen?”
Henry wishes he could say that he had forgotten how grating William could be but he hasn’t.
It doesn’t stop him from offering William a lighter though. The other man snatches it hungrily, lighting up and taking a long drag with the fervor of a man who hasn’t eaten for days.
“The wood panelling in the living room is outdated.” He says casually, as Henry pours them both fresh cups of coffee. “And it clashes with your curtains. Which are also outdated by the way.”
“Nice to see you, Will.” Henry sighs, taking the seat opposite of him. He slides William the milk and sugar, both of which he knows he will use liberally. “Mind telling me why you’re unloading the Pentagon Papers onto my kitchen table?”
William leans back thoughtfully, taking a thespian pause to bask in the nail-biting anticipation of whatever he’s about to say.
“We.” says William slowly, “Are putting Freddy’s back on the map.”
Did he mishear that? He had to have misheard that.
He thinks maybe he should say No, absolutely not. Or maybe I don’t think it’s a good idea at this time Will” but neither come close to conveying the sudden burst of disdain bubbling up in his chest.
The very idea of resurrecting that place was so vile, so twisted, so holistically wrong, that what Henry really wants to do is slam his fists on the table, wipe that stupid smug grin off of William’s face and scream at the top of his lungs to get the fuck out of his house and his life forever.
Instead he sits there and gapes at William while the other man continues to generate smoke at the rate of an industrial fog machine.
“I’ve already started on the paperwork with my attorney,” William says, vaguely gesturing to the slew of files before him. “We’ve been renewing the liscence—you’re welcome by the way—and we just found the perfect site, you’re gonna love it. Obviously I wouldn’t make any big decisions without you, but we started going over the requirements for the zoning permit, and I feel pretty good about the whole thing.”
He can’t be serious right now. He always knew that William could come off as a little cold, but he had assumed it was because he had a business degree not because he was a fucking psychopath.
“Close your mouth Hen, we are not a codfish” William snorts in a phony British accent leaning across the table to tap on Henry’s jaw. “I know it’s brilliant, but you’ve got to let the shock wear off sooner rather than later. There’s shit we need to discuss.”
“I thought that you,” Henry chokes out, as slowly and calmly as humanly possible, “would understand better than anyone else why we can’t do this.”
William’s smile falls.
“Because of Evan and Charlie?” he says quietly. “Because if that’s what you mean I’d rather you just come out and say it so we can have a conversation like fucking adults rather than talking in euphemisms about things that make us sad.”
The smoke hangs heavy in the air like haze.
“Yes,” Henry says through gritted teeth, “because of Evan and Charlie. Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my waking life reliving nightmares I already deal with daily.”
“That’s exactly my point. You’re haunted by this, whether a Freddy’s is out there or not. The only way to overcome this is to face what we’ve suffered and make something good out of it.”
William’s eyes go soft as he reaches out to place his hand on top of Henry’s. For some reason Henry stays stiff and frozen in place, unable to meet William’s gaze, but unable to pull away.
“We have a chance here to make it what it was always intended to be: a place where kids can feel safe and loved.”
He’s talking very softly now, using that gentle, saccharine tone that has the mystical quality of calming anyone to near sedation: both kids and adults. Henry’s mind fights back, this is still fucking crazy but his shoulders slump down, unable to resist a physical reaction.
Charlie is gone—he has nothing left to lose. But he’s seen Vanessa and Michael from time to time, seen the burden they carry in their paradoxically young and haggard faces. The loss of their childhood was perhaps the worst outcome of all this tragedy. They deserved a chance to heal too. And they couldn’t do that with a Freddy’s around—taking up their father’s time and reminding them of the inescapable environment of death that seemed to plague the Afton and Emily families.
“The children…” Henry hears himself mumble vaguely, almost unwillingly thinking out loud. “What about them?”
“What children?”
“Your children, William.”
“They’ll understand my reasoning once I give them a little time to adjust.” He chuckles sardonically. “And once I have a little more disposable income on hand I doubt they’ll find reason to complain.”
Henry cringes slightly. There was the businessman side flaunting itself again. Henry had known since college William viewed people, scenarios, and risks as compilations of numbers and statistics to be crunched and weighed. But at the time he hadn’t thought his bottom line perspective on life would make its way into his parenting.
“But they’ve been through so much already.” He urges quietly, half looking down at the table.
“Look,” William sighs. He leans back in his (Henry’s seat) and drops a few ashes over the ledge of the table, where they leave ugly obsidian marks on the linoleum floor. “I don’t want you or I to associate Freddy’s with those accidents, and the same goes for Vanessa and Michael. They need a little joy in their lives as badly as we need a little peace.”
That one little slip of a word is enough to stir Henry from his bleary-eyed daze.
Accidents.
What had happened to Evan was a horrible mistake, a tragedy in every sense of the word. But what Charlotte had gone through was something grievously intentional. The whole world bought the lie sold to the press and now apparently William did too, despite countless hours of quietly mourning in his presence. He had thought then that William had understood, was on his side. But all along he had harbored the same notion as everyone else: that Charlie had dumbly stumbled into her own demise and that she was alone to blame. No.
Not his daughter.
And for the first time in two years some live, warm, insistent emotion surges through his veins again, dulling the icy numbness into submission. This is not just fear, or anger, or another step in the cycle of grief that has knocked him on his ass over and over again. This is a call to action.
Another Freddy’s might mean opening old wounds, but it might also be a shot at redemption for himself, the chance to finally lay Charlie’s memory to rest with the peace she deserves.
All he had to do was catch the killer. He knew now that Freddy’s was prime hunting ground, and that there were things about the last facility that even he didn’t know about. Things, he suspected, William knew about and held back from him. Deliberately.
And now he could keep the man by his side for months, even years. Just the two of them, talking on and on, Henry unraveling secrets a thread at the time, until the massive veil of lies between them was reduced to hanging fibers and sincerity.
Henry smiles, rising out of his seat as if a 500-pound weight has been lifted from his shoulders. He strides towards the gaudy plaid curtains in the living room, throws them open, and unlocks the window. It takes a little straining to get the thing up, after having been crusted shut with two years’ worth of rain, snow, mold, and debris, but it gives with a resounding crack as Henry flings up the great closed eye at the front of his house that has been shut for far too long.
A sharp, chilly spring morning air brisks in, the breaking of the dawn creeping with it. It shines too brightly for the time of day, illuminating William’s stunned face with crepuscular rays as the sun filters through the dissipating smoke. Henry takes a long, deep breath, pulling in as much air as the expanse of his lungs can hold, until he feels as if he’s about to burst with it.
The exhale will come later. All he has to do is catch the killer.
“When do we start?”