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When she was very little, Vanessa had wanted to be a scientist. She'd wanted to be all sorts of things, really. A firefighter. A florist. An adventurer. As is so typical of headstrong children, Vanessa had never really thought about her own limits until much later. As a kid, she'd wanted to be everything and anything - and she hadn't once doubted that her dreams were out of reach.
It was during school that she learned that even if she didn't believe she had limitations, other people weren't afraid to tell her exactly what they thought she was capable of. They told her she wasn't smart enough. That she wasn't strong enough.
Sometimes, they insulted her by calling her a girl. Those were the days when something twisted in her chest, and her parents had to be called because she'd beaten someone up and the other kid was crying too hard for her to convince the adults that he deserved it. Because he did, she was sure of it. It felt like justice, even if no one else seemed to agree with her.
Eventually, though, she learned to use her words the way her bullies did, saying things that were mean and hurtful but most importantly didn't bruise her knuckles or leave behind any blood.
It didn't make the bullying stop, but at least it made her feel better. And it made them pause sometimes, too, when she said something particularly cutting. Those days were the best, because they would go silent and leave, looking angry and confused. She supposed she was lucky that they weren't the type to get physical - although that, too, might've just become an excuse to hurt them back.
Later, as an adult, she would wonder if it was just that: an excuse to hurt. She likes to remember her younger self as someone who was just lashing out at a cruel world, but sometimes she wonders.
She had gone on to become someone involved with programming. She worked with code. She was a beta tester. And some other things as well. She'd become part of a game development team who handled different things from different companies, the roles she filled were almost pathetic in how replaceable she was. Still, it was something. She had fun while doing it, even if the coding made her want to bang her head against her desk sometimes.
Vanessa had gotten to know the people around her. Her parents didn't really stay in touch, but that's okay. She got to know Luis, Jeremy, Mark, Anna... and others, people whose names she can't even remember anymore.
They were all pretty nice. Stressed, most of the time - video games are finicky things, and there's little anyone can do if a bug refuses to be fixed, although not for lack of trying - but she remembers that everyone was mostly nice. They even started work on something else... something other than video games. She can't quite remember what that was anymore.
When her team was given the VR project for the Freddy Fazbear company, there were some mixed feelings. It was partly concern due to the scope of the project, and partly eagerness to succeed. They accepted the project, of course. They weren't exactly in a position to say no. And why would they? They've worked on VR games before - it's not like there was anything they couldn't handle. And besides, the company was essentially asking for a remake of pre-existing games, so there was little to do in the way of development. The programming would be a pain, sure, but the game itself was practically already planned out. And a previous team had already worked on it, meaning that though there were surely things they'd have to fix, the foundations should be there.
In other words, it was doable.
Or so they thought.
Jeremy was the first one to beta test it. In between his duties as the graphic designer, he was also a pretty decent gamer, and had eagerly volunteered to try it out and look for bugs. It could be monotonous work sometimes, but apparently he'd been a fan of the Freddy Fazbear games since he was a kid. He was one of the more energetic members of the team. They'd all agreed that he could handle it.
He had died. Tormented by nightmares and a presence none of them understood, and then he died. Painfully and slowly, without any semblance of sanity.
She can't bring herself to remember, exactly, how he died. She saw it, she knows she did, but putting it into words makes it feel too horrific. The guillotine paper slicer, the VR headset, and the blood - no, she knew the truth. She just can't admit it to herself.
The real trouble - for her, at least - was when she replaced him.
Vanessa had known, by then, that something was wrong. She only had three days before the project was passed on, taken away from their development team like an infected corpse that needed to be purged from their office, but that couldn't be true. She was certain there was more to it, certain that whatever Jeremy saw, it was something she had to take care of before the next studio takes over.
Those three days were all it took for her to lose her mind.
She tried so hard. She recorded warnings, tried to delete the virus, and even broke apart her own work to try and eliminate it. But that damned bunny just wouldn't die. Even worse, she messed up, letting it infect her before she could understand exactly what was going on. She hadn't learned from Jeremy's mistakes - she'd only known enough to delay the inevitable.
And yet, she kept trying. She worked on... something else. Animatronics, maybe? A delivery service? She can't remember. That part of her life was filled with a haze, her consciousness struggling with the looming presence of evil trying to control her.
The thing that pisses her off is that, most of the time, it had succeeded. Sometimes it warped her perception, making her act on things she wouldn't have had she known what she was doing. At other times it controlled her directly, giving her orders to act out like a puppet on some strings. She remembers carrying boxes of junk and electronic components for some reason or another. If she'd known what she was doing, she would've chucked it all into a landfill the first chance she'd gotten.
At some point, Vanessa went from being a programmer to being a security guard.
She's pretty pissed at that too.
Not because she thinks security guards are worse than game developers, don't get her wrong - it's just that of all the things she could be, she hadn't exactly planned on this job in particular. And it's not like she was bad at her old job. She's not sure if she was fired or if she quit or if the presence in her head decided she just needed to move on, but between one blink and the next, her job was different and so was she.
The worst part was that she was always looking for something. The world around her felt like a game sometimes, and objectives would appear in her head without any visible prompting.
When Vanessa picked up the white rabbit mask and put it on, though, she remembered.
She remembered Jeremy. She remembered the Glitchtrap virus. She remembered her hands moving without any input from her brain. And she remembered all the effort that she'd put into hiding, fighting, and trying to warn someone - anyone - and ultimately failing.
Vanessa started to learn how to work around the presence in her head.
At first, it was little things. For example, when she needed to eat, the presence - "Mr. Afton" - told her to eat, but she got to choose what she ate and how. When she wanted to hurt others in fits of insane rage, Mr. Afton let her loose on the children he wanted her to collect.
Right. At some point, he'd started collecting children.
She was starting to lose track of what and where things were happening.
Anyway.
Vanessa learned to work around him. Her security guard persona was one he hardly touched, probably deeming it less necessary than the other one. So she tried to use that, tried to work within the scope of what was given to her.
She wrote reports. She investigated malfunctions and suspicious events. She even tried to set down rules to make sure animatronics and children never interacted in much-too-private areas.
She still failed.
There was something else that she'd wanted to be as a child: a princess. Most girls are taught that each and every one of them are special, beloved little princesses. Princesses are loved. Princesses are praised.
Princesses, though, are the kind of character that can never, ever save themselves. That's simply not how stories work.
Bullshit.
It's not that princesses can't save themselves. It's that once they do, people stop calling them princesses and start calling them something else. Heroines and heroes. Knights and brave damsels. This metaphorical nonsense isn't really helping her organize her thoughts, but swearing always did make her feel better.
Anyway, Mr. Afton seemed to take that literally. He splintered her brain - maybe that was payback for her attempts to splinter him back when he was a virus in a game? She wouldn't put that kind of pettiness past him - into too many pieces. He locked part of her away in a game, locked another part of her away in a rabbit, and yet another part of her was locked into the role of security guard, a flashlight in hand and lies on her lips. She hated him, hated what he'd turned her into.
Whatever that was. A slave? A lackey? Worse, maybe. Sometimes she doesn't mind what she does at all, and that makes her angrier than anything else.
She'd had a life, at one point.
It was rotten work, what she did. Sometimes she took the children to the Lost-and-Found, hoping to hide them there until she could find their parents. Sometimes she left the children with certain animatronics, trusting that they would protect the young ones with the programming she knows was supposed to make them safe and good.
None of it ever did any good. She always led the children to places where they could be found and killed, whether she was conscious of it or not.
She couldn't even trust herself anymore.
It wasn't fair. She couldn't fight her way out of this brainwashing crap, couldn't punch the stupid dead man in his stupid face without breaking her own hand. Couldn't yell or argue with him about this crap. She didn't even have the freedom to just walk away from the whole thing.
However.
She just had to find a way around it.
She started to be irritable. As a security guard, she wanted everyone out before closing, because why the fuck would they linger? Children, adults, and patrons of all ages just needed to go, whether they wanted to or not.
She started to scream. Little princess lost in a game? She'd make damn sure her game was always running then, hoping against hope that someone would come along and play the game and win.
She wanted to win, wanted to be the one to break free, but there were too many damn chains on her and she knew she wouldn't.
And then - and then Gregory came along.
She'd learned his name when Freddy called out for the kid, the animatronic seeming to want to help instead of hurt. What a shock that had been, but she didn't trust it. Animatronics only hurt and kill and destroy.
Vanessa had hunted the boy with fervor, filled with a need to find him and -
She couldn't remember.
Probably kill him, come to think of it. That's how it usually went.
What had she been doing?
Right, screaming. Playing the game and hunting the child and holding a knife and looking through red, shattered eyes that couldn't see anything but prey.
She remembered that night in fragments, really. It was rather confusing, as that particular child had put up much more of a fight than the others. He must've been used to fighting for his life. Most children who enter the Pizzaplex do so with their family - but Gregory, he must have snuck in from the streets somewhere, his eyes tinged with the feral gaze of a stray.
She'd ended up fighting him. Or... no, was it a fight? It felt more like a game, using all her tools and pawns against that one child, watching him overcome the odds from far, far away.
And then, abruptly, she wasn't very far from Gregory at all.
He pressed a button.
Or... did she press it?
She can't remember anymore.
At the end of that night, she was dead. That's all that matters. She's not sure if it was Gregory or Mr. Afton or something she did that went horribly wrong, but she was no longer alive. Her heart was still, and so was her head.
Her body was silent, empty, and yet it still moved. She walked in broken, jerky steps, unable to tell where her limbs were without looking; but she was still moving all the same.
Mr. Afton did not seem pleased.
He still used her body, since she had neither programming nor springlocks to interfere with the movement of her possessed corpse. He made her go places and grab children, just as before, only now she had no need to pretend to be a security guard.
Now she had no way of trying to prevent herself from doing the animatronic bunny's bidding.
Vanessa didn't like to think of herself as someone who gives up, but that did break her, a little bit. To be dead, and yet still a puppet on a string. To have no hope, and yet still being forced to walk through a maze with no exits.
As an adult, she was, at the very least, supposed to be able to choose. It was the one thing she really looked forward to when she was a child. And sure, as she grew up, she learned that choices came with responsibilities and consequences and all sorts of nasty things. But she was supposed to at least be allowed to choose.
She chose to keep fighting.
If he wanted her to bring him the kids, she would make him work for it. She played games with the children, probably traumatizing some of them for the rest of their lives, but at least sometimes they won. Sometimes they escaped. Or maybe not, but at least she's not the one who gets them in the end.
There's a sick, senseless sort of satisfaction she gets from seeing the kids cry. She knows those kids won't live very long - the ones who live are the ones who are silent, the ones who know to run the instant they see the knife in her hands - but at least, when they're crying, they're still alive.
She sets traps and makes up rules and in the end it probably doesn't matter.
But she tries anyway.
It becomes like clockwork. As the princess, she walks through the maze and gets devoured by some unexpected shadow. As the rabbit, she wanders the halls and toys with the children who are unlucky enough to fall into her grasp.
Play, rinse, repeat.
She stops feeling guilt, at some point. She stops feeling much of anything other than anger and fear. Anger at her captor, and fear of what he could do to her should he catch onto her pointless antics.
But somehow, he never did. He only took the children from her - fuck, when did this one enter her hands? How long has she gone without noticing it - and sent her back out with that twisted, rotten smile.
He never had enough. She hoped he would run out one day, but unless she could make herself stop -
She never did.
Not once.
She played and struggled and hated with all her being. Neon lights engraved into her eyes until she knew the place better than she could recount her own childhood home.
One night, something changed.
An adult?
She laughed quietly to herself. She knows that Mr. Afton doesn't want adults. Why? She doesn't care.
Although it's strange. There haven't been any adults in a good long while. She wonders why.
Probably something to do with her. Heh.
She ignores the adult for awhile. A security guard, one that seemed to be there almost all the time, but no one worth bothering about.
His name in the system was "Eggs Benedict." Ridiculous.
It's only when one of her toys - Chica - was triggered that she realized that this wasn't any old adult. It was Gregory, the child who had killed her ages and ages and ages -
Hm?
Oh, wasn't she supposed to bring Gregory back?
No, only a child.
But she was supposed to bring "Gregory" to Mr. Afton.
She giggled to herself as she set up a new game. Oh, what fun! If she set the trap right, then maybe she'd be able to kill the little nuisance.
Wasn't he the one who killed her?
Or was it someone else?
She doesn't remember anymore.
Ah. She'd almost forgotten the whole pint of the game. Draw things out, let him escape - because that's the one thing Mr. Afton doesn't want, and she'd hate to disappoint.
She'd love to disappoint?
No, it must be hate. She hates him, after all.
Except all her toys end up broken and even though she's the one who invited him to play, Gregory seems to have other ideas. He leaves the office, isn't that against the rules?
But then he enters the elevator.
Oh, she gets it, now.
It's a different game.
Well, that's good! No one likes a useless damsel in distress anyway.
Vanessa laughs to herself. She takes the quick way down, her broken, long-dead body crumpling like a doll when she hits the bottom. Oh, isn't this fun, isn't this grand?
It's a different kind of game.
She itches to keep the adult away, because Mr. Afton doesn't want any adults nearby, which means she would have to kill -
She stops, and slows, and thinks.
No.
Mr. Afton had wanted her to bring "Gregory" to him, once upon a time, hadn't he?
She smiles to herself.
Fear? Anger? No, no no no, none of that has a place in their little game.
She stands and pats herself down, ignoring the knife in her hand. In this game, she's but a blind, obedient puppet. And if she brings Gregory to Mr. Afton, surely that can be nothing but following orders, right?
It's not right at all. He glared at her and she shrinks away and all she can feel of herself is the princess in the maze and she hates, hates, hates him so much.
And then he's laughing and talking and she hates even more.
The boy, the adult, the security guard, Gregory - she'd thought he was different, somehow. She'd thought he would break the rules, stop playing the game, and make it end.
She hadn't even realized that she'd been hopeful, not until the spark in her chest was cruelly shattered, leaving her to stand alone in the darkness.
And then Mr. Afton screams.
The ghost children drag him to hell - because that's the only thing that mass of darkness and roiling fire could be, a rip in reality leading to the worst existence possible - dragging him and his rotten, bloody body down, down, down.
The hole closes behind them.
Gregory collapses.
And it's very, very quiet.
The animatronic that had come with Gregory is picking the young man up effortlessly, cradling Gregory in a way that makes him look like a child. The animatronic looks over at her, and she thinks for a moment that it's going to kill her.
Can she die, finally?
She doesn't find out.
It just walks away, back down the hallway and towards the elevator. It'll probably take Gregory back to the surface, to recuperate for whatever the fuck just happened.
What the fuck just happened?
Vanessa wanted to be a lot of things as a kid. And as an adult, she'd thought she'd at least do something she could be proud of.
Turns out she can't do jackshit.
Vanessa feels her body for the first time in years and wonders why she isn't dead yet.