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When Mangle had enough of the children pulling her apart for fun, she scurried through the vents to escape them and found peace in the abandoned portions of the old pizzeria. It was cool and quiet, if a bit empty. She liked it, could find a place to nestle down and relax and prepare herself for another round of playtime.
So it came as a surprise when she dropped from the vent near Pirate Cove and spotted Jeremy there with an old journal in his hands, looking up at the curtains surround Foxy’s stage. The serious expression on his face in profile, his hair curled over his eyes under the baseball cap he wore, triggered her facial recognition and hit an error.
He was looking more and more like his father the longer he stayed at Freddy’s.
“Ahoy, laddie. What brings ye here so early? Ye have night shift duty, right?” Mangle greeted as she moved closer to him, her limbs tapping lightly over the carpet. Jeremy twitched in alarm, spinning on his heel to face her with a frightened expression before holding up his hands and taking a deep breath. She could see he was trying harder to control his fear of them; she supposed it was easier in the day, when none of them were affected by the glitch.
“I came to ask about 1987.” Jeremy finally told her, still a bit nervous. He was drumming his fingers against the journal in a pattern. Mangle counted the beats, ran a check in her database, and matched it to the syllables in the Fazband Control base command.
“Ye’ll need t'be more specific, lad,” she replied kindly, dipping her head in an angle that -once upon a time- made her look beautiful and sultry as she gave the young man her warmest gaze. Memories of his father did that to her, those days when her original self lay in a wreck on the floor and he knelt by her, sunshine and gold, and called her beautiful as he worked to repair her.
The files still marked him as a criminal. Mangle hated it.
“My father,” Jeremy finally said, breathed it out in a tired sigh. He bounced the journal in his hands. “I don’t know much about him, don’t remember much. But you still have files on him, all of the animatronics do, and I wanted to….”
“They be sealed,” Mangle interrupted, raising her head with a frown. At Jeremy’s startled look she shook her head. “Yer father was a wonderfully clever man. Not the most aware, but very good at his job. Everything we have on him that not be truly personal memories were sealed when he fled.”
Jeremy looked at her in dismay. “You can’t tell me anything about him? Anything that could tell me why people thought he was helping the killer? Why he ran if he was really innocent?” he begged. Mangle shook her head.
“What we hold can be twisted against him, so he sealed them with a code in the hopes that one day, ye will understand more on your own, and discover the key to a treasure trove of memories.”
He didn’t look convinced. In fact, he looked faintly bitter. “You all sound like he was an amazing person, but he hurt me so much in the few memories I have of him,” Jeremy grumbled, eyes watering as he rubbed at them. “The codes I know, the commands and all the evidence I have, it’s all forced on me. All learned from him beating it into me.”
Mangle watched him cry in silence, ears flicked forward as her processors crunched the data and sifted through the files she could grant verbal access. There wasn’t much. His father was thorough in the limited amount of time he had before the police had been called on him. But… there were things she could say to hint at them. Pirates used riddles to lead to treasure, right? Here, the booty be the truth about Jeremy Fitzgerald Sr, so that may work. A loophole in the loyalty template. And, well, she was passing knowledge of one Fitzgerald to another, the heir of hope. It should work. She was still a good loyal fox.
“Yer father be precious, and in the right conditions he were a right powerful and fearful force t'see. The pizzeria is safest when he controls.” Mangle’s words were stilted, forced, data crunching harder as flags and warnings were raised in alarm to her actions. “Before the five fell, of the seven little ones, one existed, one was lost. That One was greedy and sad. They saw yer father as the shield. This place holds more than what is seen thus far, hidden away, a prized piece of gold.”
Her servos whined. Something else was accessing her files. Her mind generated images of thin black fingers and silver threads, wound around her muzzle, bound around a guard’s body.
Jeremy stared at her, open confusion on his face. She had to keep going. One more, one more. He had to know. Deserved to know.
“Ye know life and souls be fickle at the moment of passing, and once touched are never quite the same. The bodies left behind are no different.” Mangle felt herself shutting down, main processes switching off in a cascade as her parts fell to the floor in front of a startled young night guard. Her eyes fluttered as Endo pressed against her neck in a shiver. Her head was held up, resting in Jeremy’s hands while he knelt on the floor and looked at her with concern. Such warmth for life; his father had once been like that. A shame, a shame, he had been so beautiful in the light.
Her scratch file. The last piece of active memory she can store data on temporarily. Mangle pulled her last words, threw them there for her voice box to play, and fell to the last of the emergency shutdown.
Jeremy watched Mangle’s eyes go dark, her servos stopped humming, and she went still. But, with a last gasp of audio, her voice box played a final scratchy clip for him.
“Tis no use to begrudge an empty shell. He has always loved ye, and he always will, even in…”
Nothing more. Jeremy didn’t get any clear messages or decisive data. He should be frustrated and resentful. But… he stroked Mangle’s muzzle and smiled sadly. It felt like she had told him so much, he just wasn’t ready to understand it yet. He bent to touch their foreheads together. “Thank you, Mangle.” Jeremy felt his tears grow warm. “My father must have left proof he loved me. I’ll find it, too. And then everyone can be free at last….”
END