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Inside the cylinder of Parts and Service is, not unusually, quite cold.
Sun sits on the maintenance chair in the center, staring down at his hands in his lap. His palms are turned upwards, fingers curled loosely. He can feel his internal fans are, for once, completely still; they don't have to keep up with his constant movement right now, and the chill of Parts and Service is meant to keep animatronics at the optimal internal temperature, to make it easier for maintenance. The only sound is the faint blast of the air conditioning from the vents overhead, and the shuffling twitches of the endoskeletons littering the area outside the cylinder.
Their eyes tear into Sun through the cylinder's glass, staring past him and down into his very code, as they have for the last three days.
The nerve sensors in the silicone of his right hand are itching, buzzing faintly with the detection that they're in contact with something. Sun wonders if this is how the children feel, sometimes, when they tell him they have a bug bite but can't itch it or else it gets worse; but then, that's not particularly comparable to dried blood, is it?
It feels wrong, looking down at it, but Sun has barely been able to take his gaze away. It is wrong, that it's there, and he wants so terribly to scrub it away, but he has nothing to do so with. Management doesn’t like when they have to wash he and Moony’s pants, especially for stains like glitter glue or paint. Sun can’t begin to imagine how furious they would be if he used the fabric to wipe blood off of his hand.
It goes further down his wrist, as well, along the length of his arm to his elbow, a line telling of gravity’s force. It’s grotesque, and it makes Sun’s processor feel like it’s shaking, as similar a sensation to nausea as he assumes he can reach.
Softly, carefully, Moony’s presence curls around Sun’s processor, a slow crawl, the way the children shuffle forwards when they know they have done something wrong.
“What,” Sun asks, so quietly that the word is more static than sound, his voice box crackling after so many days of disuse, “Did you do?”
Moony’s presence bristles, sharp and fast, and offers no answer.
“What,” Sun repeats, louder this time, as he curls his hands into fists in his lap to hide the blood, “Did you do?”
Anger is an unfamiliar feeling to Sun. He doesn’t like the way it scratches against the insides of his code, such a foreign thing to his programming. It envelops his processor the way Moony does, except instead of a brush or a nudge or a touch, it grips him with hands so tight he cannot even squirm, claws digging down to his very wires. And it certainly doesn’t help, either, that Moony is angry as well; Sun wonders if this is what it feels like to suffocate.
Sun knows that humans often describe anger as being hot. In the air conditioning of Parts and Service, his fans as silent as the other half of him, Sun thinks that they’re wrong: anger, to him, is bitter and biting cold.
“You-You hurt someone,” he hisses. On his legs, his hands shake. He wants to wring them together, to pull on his fingers as he normally does when there is too much happening in his code, but he doesn’t want to spread the blood. Moony is making himself bigger, biting at Sun’s processor, and Sun flinches with it. It hurts when they switch without agreeing to—as much as anything can hurt, for them—but Sun wants answers.
Moony doesn’t force a swap, but he doesn’t settle back, either.
“You hurt someone,” Sun says again, fierce and quivering. When they were first brought down here, and Moony dragged Sun back up to awareness, Sun had tried to access the Daycare’s cameras; the blood on his hand hadn’t even been dried, yet. But Moony had cut him off from them then, and has continued to every time since, and does again now when Sun tries to lunge for the feed.
It makes Sun so angry—being cut off, being smothered, being ignored—that it puts him at a loss for words, his code so scrambled with frustration that he can’t string together a thought. Instead, he stares down at his fists in his lap, shaking so strongly he can hear the metal of his casing rattle softly—or maybe that’s just the endoskeletons, shuffling towards the cylinder, ever so slowly, staring into him like they can see every generated line of his fury.
Slowly, as the minutes pass, Moony settles again, laying lighter over Sun’s processor. For a moment, Sun doesn’t want to acknowledge him—wants instead to ignore him right back, to refuse to accept anything except an explanation—but just the thought of that kind of separation hurts more than any forced swap ever could.
It doesn’t feel good to fight with the other half of himself. It doesn’t feel good to be here at all. It doesn’t feel good to know that either of them are capable of something that stains their hands with blood.
“Are the children—” Sun starts, and stops. The words feel stuck in his voice box, strangling him. “Is-Is Sadie—”
Moony washes over Sun’s processor, the gentlest he’s been since they’ve been stuck in the cylinder, and Sun’s tension bleeds out of him bit by bit, ever so slowly.
That’s the best he could hope for right now, really.
—
It’s another two days before Sun hears anything that isn’t the twitching and shuffling of the endoskeletons, or the humming blast of the air conditioning vents.
The heavy clunk, followed by the whoosh of doors, makes Sun look up from his hands and toward the main entrance of the room. For a moment, he dares to hope: one of the staff, maybe even management, has come down to tell him what happened, and why he’s down here, and when he’ll get to return to the Daycare and the children. He misses them terribly—this is the longest he’s been away from the Daycare since he and Moony were made public—and he would like to think that they miss he and Moony, as well.
But that hope is dashed, just as quickly as it arrived, by the weighty, metallic thuds of animatronic footsteps approaching from the back of the cylinder.
Sun twists at the waist, turning his gaze behind him, and blinks in surprise as one of the bright, emblazoned doors opens above the ramp at the back of the room, revealing the Plex’s star animatronic himself: Glamrock Freddy.
“Oh,” Sun says, blunt and simple, shock buzzing through his voice box, “Hello.”
Glamrock Freddy stands in the doorway of his specially labeled maintenance entrance, ears raised in alarm, eyes wide, his gaze locked on Sun. Sun can’t help but read it as its own type of shock, though he isn’t sure why. While he and Moony don’t exactly interact with the main animatronics of the Plex, it isn’t as though they aren’t all aware of each other—at least, as far as Sun knows.
“So it’s true,” Glamrock Freddy says, slowly. Sun feels himself tense, just a bit. “The Daycare Attendant did attack a guest.”
Sun’s tension builds quicker over the span of a second than it did over the first three days of his containment.
Glamrock Freddy steps further into the room. The maintenance door swishes shut behind him, and the sound of it makes Sun feel as though he’s not about to like what happens next. Dread, he thinks mildly. It’s a feeling that appears often in the fairytales they tell the children. Moony’s presence curls around the sides of his processor, outstretched and ready to leap, and for the first time in nearly a week, Sun settles back against it instead of turning his attention away.
“I heard—” Glamrock Freddy starts, then stops. His hands are clasped in front of his chest, claws clicking lightly against his casing. Sun immediately thinks of how dangerous it would be to handle children with such large hands covered in nothing but a metal case: all it would take is a particularly rowdy child hitting Glamrock Freddy’s palm by mistake for a terrible bruise and a grand amount of tears.
“Heard what?” Sun asks lowly. Glamrock Freddy’s ears lower, and Sun doesn’t miss the way the bear animatronic’s gaze narrows, ever so slightly.
“I heard the security staff had to contact authorities to remove a guest from the Daycare, last week.” Glamrock Freddy move forward again, heavy thudding footsteps that echo metallically through Parts and Service, until he’s stood against the ramp’s guardrail, staring down at Sun through the cylinder glass. “The word among them is the Daycare Attendant shattered the bones in his hand. I believe they’re attempting to placate the parents of the children who were there.”
The way Sun’s processor stutters, tripping over his code like the generator wires in the play structures, is as close as he believes he may ever come to losing his breath.
Shattered the bones. Moony’s presence bristles, sharp and hissing, but he doesn’t try to move forward. Sun is left alone, staring up at the Plex’s star animatronic, as he finally gets his answers.
“What—” Sun starts, and stops again. It feels like he’s choking on his voice box, although he knows that’s absurd. The words are stuck in buzzing static, and it almost hurts to force them forward. “What happened to-to the man?”
Sadie, held so violently she was lifted from the floor, and the cries of fear from the other children; Sun doesn’t remember anything beyond that. If Moony attacked the man, shattered bones, made him bleed, staining their hand and their wrist and their arm, then… then the children could have seen.
“I don’t know,” Glamrock Freddy answers. The bear animatronic has tilted his head, gaze narrowed at Sun. There’s a thoughtfulness to it, now, but Sun is too busy turning his attention inwards to notice it, grabbing at Moony’s presence and gripping and demanding, just between themselves, an answer.
Did the children see?
Moony falls beneath the attention almost immediately—the first time he’s done so since they arrived in Parts and Service. A denial, deliberate and slow, creeps between them, and Sun releases his grasp carefully, one bit of code at a time, feeling for all the world as though he may shut down, right there on the maintenance chair inside the cylinder.
“Why did you do it?” Glamrock Freddy asks, abrupt and without decorum, and Sun’s awareness snaps back up front, his gaze focusing on the other animatronic.
“I didn’t,” Sun responds, and he watches the other’s expression drop from scrutinizing to shocked, then settle into a frown, ears lowered and eyes hard. Sun wishes, for a moment, that his face plate weren’t immobile, so he could offer the same look right back. He clarifies: “Moony did.”
“Moon…?” Glamrock Freddy blinks, then shakes his head, staring down at Sun like a puzzle he can’t truly solve. “There is another?”
Moony’s presence swells with offense.
“Yes?” Sun tilts his face plate, squinting back up at the bear animatronic. “There has always been two of us. We share our model.”
“How…?” Glamrock Freddy looks like Sun walked straight through the glass and up the ramp to slap him. The star’s hands rest on the ramp’s guardrail, fingers tapping listlessly against the metal. “Well. I suppose that changes things, doesn’t it?”
Changes what? Sun wants to ask, but the words don’t leave his voice box. He’s not sure if he regrets their absence.
“I will—” Glamrock Freddy stops tapping against the guardrail, ears low, and fixes Sun with what Sun assumes is an attempt at a smile. It isn’t a very good attempt, Sun thinks privately. “I will attempt to speak to the security staff. Perhaps we can get to the bottom of this together, hm? I imagine you want to protect all of the children here as much as the rest of us do.”
Why, Sun wants to ask as well, Would you help us?
Instead, he says, “I… Yes. Thank you, Glamrock Freddy.”
The bear animatronic blinks in surprise, ears lifting, then laughs, a far more convincing smile pulling at his expression. “Please, just Freddy is fine,” he hums, stepping back from the guardrail. “If we’re going to learn what happened, and how to best keep the children safe, let us be on a regular name basis.”
This feels so incredibly strange, Sun thinks. Moony curls beneath his processor, a soft brush of agreement.
“Sun, then,” Sun responds. “And Moony. He’s the Naptime Attendant.”
Freddy inclines his head, pats the guardrail once, and adds, “The others and I look forward to working with the two of you.”
Sun isn’t sure how much he believes that.
—
It is another two days, a full week of isolation, before the doors to Parts and Service open again, and Sun finds himself wondering just how much pull Freddy has in the Plex, and what exactly he told the staff.