Work Text:
It was the rabbit again.
Jeremy had never seen this rabbit in his entire life before the game – he had no idea what it was. It had to be some sort of old, run-down version of Bonnie. The suit looked ragged and poorly-made, clearly created on a shoestring budget. That only made it creepier; its unnatural, manic stare and crazed grin pierced through his sleepy haze and shook him to his core.
This time, it was in the prize corner, standing near the Marionette’s box in plain sight. It stared at the camera directly, unmoving for what felt like eons. Jeremy couldn’t look away; he felt rooted to his seat, fingers hovering over the tablet. It tilted its head, waved, and promptly vanished into thin air. Jeremy froze in his seat, unable to tear his gaze away from the now-empty space.
He began to tremble, and he struggled to hit the button to switch the cameras.
The rabbit never made itself too obvious. Not like this. It usually appeared in corners, ducking behind the broken TVs in the security office, frolicking in the hallways – there for a moment, then gone. This is the first time it had simply vanished before his eyes, and Jeremy felt a cold dread creep up his spine, making his hairs stand on end.
Jeremy turned on his flashlight and waved it around, desperate and frantic for an answer, or help – something. He could hear Toy Bonnie scuffling through the vent, Mangle overhead emitting the ever-familiar static, Toy Freddy stomping down the hall at a painfully slow pace …
This, he was used to. It terrified him, he would never not be terrified, but this rabbit was an anomaly. He had no idea how to deal with it. Jeremy flicked through the cameras one more time, trying to catch that odd suit just for another second. If he could learn its patterns, surely, maybe –
He didn’t get a chance to finish his thought. Blue robotic paws slammed his tablet down, and Jeremy stared up in terror at Toy Bonnie – seconds before it lunged at him, its inhuman screech ringing through the office.
Its face changed as it got closer, much to Jeremy’s surprise. The blue hue of the animatronic twisted into a mustard yellow, its beady eyes replaced by the plush ones – the buck-toothed grin of the anomaly that had invaded his nightmares.
He felt something – something odd – something that he couldn’t pull away from. The rabbit had a certain pull to it now, something that Jeremy couldn’t explain. He couldn’t move, and the rabbit reached out towards him, taking his head into its paws. It never broke eye contact.
A piercing pain shot through his head, and someone – it had to be the rabbit, had to be – had started to burrow its way into his head. It had to be, he was sure. It clawed at him, scratching through his skin, muscles, bone – to his brain, what made him him. And it was trying to take that out, tug it away – and step inside so it could take control instead.
He could barely register what was happening. The pain wouldn’t stop. The more this thing dug, the more he felt like he was going to just split open. It had never been this vivid, the animatronics just killed him and let it be, why was – why was –
Jeremy woke in a cold sweat, shivering and shaking. It had been too many damn years since he had left Freddy Fazbear’s, and that one week still haunted him.
‘Playtesting this stupid VR game was a mistake,’ he thought to himself as he wearily glanced at the clock. 6AM – of course. Jeremy groaned quietly, and flopped back down on his comfy bed. He knew he would have to be on location in a few hours, but lord knows he didn’t want to. Since he had started, the nightmares from his youth had started to catch up with him again, becoming more and more vivid.
Truthfully, it scared him. If he had his way, he’d run and never look back.
But god, did he ever need the money from this thing more than ever. His wife had divorced him only a few weeks ago, complaining about his distance all those years. She told him over and over again about how many times he left her alone while he had curled up in bed, all the days he left their kid to fend for himself. And eventually, she had finally called it quits.
He couldn’t blame her. Not really. But it sure did leave him in a financial hole he had no idea how to dig out of. At least this stupid game gave him something to work with for the time being, until he could figure things out in the long-term. He knew why they offered as much as they did – he had been there. He had ‘seen it happen’. He was some way to discredit the ‘rumors’ and ‘slander’, to have a ‘night guard’ endorse the game.
It was scummy behavior, but he couldn’t turn down that money. He had already lost what morals he had eons ago, selling his silence to the company. How was this any different?
It was depressing to think about.
Jeremy forced himself to stand up, and trudged to his closet to throw on whatever was clean. These people didn’t deserve anything more than the bare minimum effort. Scumbags, the lot of them.
But this wouldn’t be for forever, he reminded himself for the tenth time that week. Just a few more days, and he’d get that payout. Then he could be done with Freddy’s forever, curse out the assholes running this whole circus, and storm out.
Good thing, too. He didn’t know how much longer he could take this.
‘Just a few more days,’ he thought to himself one last time as he shrugged on his jacket. Jeremy forced himself to walk out of his apartment, each step feeling like a lead weight strapped to his feet.
He didn’t bother greeting anyone when he entered. David’s con-man smile set him on edge immediately, and anything he said sounded like nails scraping on a chalkboard. Jeremy nodded now and again, and grunted at the appropriate times to show that he was still ‘paying attention’.
Then, just like all the other days, he was shoved off to the closest testing room and left to his own – well, their – devices. Jeremy stared at the VR headset, and willed himself to put it on.
Going through the menu was just muscle memory at this point – sure, there were Freddy, Bonnie, and Chica staring down at him, following his every movement, whatever. That was programmed. That was easy. He set his jaw and hit ‘continue’.
The moment the main hub loaded, though, something felt … wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it, aside from it being wrong, but something made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
Jeremy looked around warily, hands gripping the controls tighter than he wanted to admit to, but nothing seemed out of place. He slowly turned around, facing away from the terminal, to get a better look at everything.
That one doorway to the left looked fine. Nothing was in there, poking its head in and staring at him like some other times. The prize corner didn’t have anything weird about it, just the same pointless ‘prizes’ the game had. Nothing was swanning around, prancing about. Everything looked all right.
Then, Jeremy turned back to the main controls. He froze, and his entire body tensed.
It was the rabbit again, closer than it had ever been before. It stood over the terminal, looming over Jeremy with that same sick, sadistic grin. Jeremy expected it to pounce on him – to try and kill him. It did that in the nightmare from last night, and he didn’t expect anything else from one of these stupid mascots.
But the rabbit didn’t lunge at him. It barely even moved at all. It only raised its right arm, towards Jeremy. Jeremy stared at it, confused, then looked back up at the rabbit’s face.
Things … changed. Things were darker – all he could see was the now-useless terminal and the rabbit. Everything else seemed to fade away in the pitch black; that made it impossible to focus on anything else but what the rabbit was doing. Glitched graphics began to warp the rabbit’s arm, slowly expanding past the terminal, and towards Jeremy.
Everything blended together – a sea of purples and greens flickered across Jeremy’s vision. While a static sound rang through the room, it was promptly overshadowed by a gravely, whispering voice. One he had never heard before.
‘Let me leave,’ it rasped. The sound surrounded Jeremy, burrowing into his brain. It sounded so much closer than it should have. Jeremy found himself shaking violently, his trembling hands barely able to hold the controls.
“What?” Jeremy couldn’t help the tremor in his voice. “What are you doing?”
‘Let me leave,’ it repeated. Its purple eyes glowed brightly, cutting through the darkness. Its piercing gaze cut through Jeremy like a knife. Jeremy still found himself frozen, unable to move and try and fend this thing off.
Then, the pain from his nightmares started again. An immense pressure built up around his head, stabbing his skull a thousand times over. It was comparable to the worst of his migraines. If it kept up, surely his head would split open. They’d find his remains crumpled on the floor, brains splattered across the walls –
“Stop! I don’t know what you’re doing, but stop it! It hurts!” He couldn’t hear what the rabbit said back to him, but he didn’t care. Jeremy clawed desperately at his own head to try and ease his own pain, and it was all he could focus on. “Stop it – stop it –!”
As sudden as the pain started, it stopped. The bright walls of the testing room flooded Jeremy’s senses, and only then did he notice that the VR headset had been ripped off of him.
“Jeremy!” He felt someone shake his shoulder. It sounded like David, but it seemed so distant and faded. “Jeremy, for god’s sake, just snap out of it! It’s not real, remember!? Shit, you’d think you’d be over this bullshit by now --”
“Something’s wrong.” Jeremy’s voice quavered. The room fell silent, and Jeremy could see the execs glancing at one another. Worry was etched on their expressions. “Something’s in there that shouldn’t be. A rabbit. A weird rabbit is in the game ...”
“Christ, get him out of here,” he heard David say. “Go home, Jeremy. We’ll have someone else do play testing today. You clearly can’t.” Someone gently pulled him up – he couldn’t see who – and guided him out of the room. He stumbled, still trembling violently, barely able to take those steps forward.
Everything seemed so distant and warped. The walls shifted as he walked through the office, twisting and turning before his very eyes. Chatter sounded distorted, like the white noise on a television. It felt unreal. It felt strange. Maybe it was a side effect of being yanked out of the game with no warning – or maybe it’s what that rabbit did. He didn’t know. He didn’t care.
“Can you get home?” She sounded like she had taken one-hundred steps back from him, and only whispered barely whispered loud enough so he could hear. “You can sit in the break room for a while … let me know if we need to call a taxi, all right?” There were more words, but they sounded muddled.
Jeremy didn’t respond to any of it.
She ushered him to the break room, as promised, and sat him down carefully in one of the chairs. She didn’t say anything else to him, or at least, he thought so. The door shut after a few moments of hesitation, and Jeremy was left alone.
He burst into sobs.
‘Just a few days left,’ he forced himself to think. ‘Then I never have to do this again.’ But he was starting to wonder if he could hold out for even that long.
A flash of yellow could be seen out of the corner of his eye, and it vanished as quickly as it came.