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The man known as William Afton exists in extremes. Two of them, to be exact.
William Afton, the murderer.
William Afton, the father.
Intersection of the two is a cataclysmic affair. A black hole collision. The moment of convergence being when she calls him Dad.
Out of necessity, really, not so much anything else. Vanessa brandishes the title like a weapon whenever they fight, and they've only ever fought more and more since four became three became two. The word itself tastes of venom when she spits it at him, every curse and aspersion punctuated with the searing reminder that, yes, I hate being your daughter, but you'll always hate being my father more, and isn't it just awful for both of us that you let me grow into something you'll never have the heart to nurture or the stomach to put down?
Knowing that becomes a point of pride, almost. Little fires she stokes out of spite because she's always preferred his loudness to his silence.
One time, just the one time, she told him that she was glad Evan was dead, a few years after the fact; not because it was true, but because he'd lamented a little too openly about losing the son he didn't even like, the son he used to tease and berate endlessly for feeling things too deeply within and beyond himself, and something about his grief had offended hers, so she'd let loose with the single-minded intention of hurting him and hurting him bad.
And what happened immediately after that was the brute-force tipping of a scale she'd never known to exist, so sudden in the shift that she didn't realize just how small she'd always been until she was dwarfed in his shadow. And she knew his silence, then. He didn't raise his voice or his hands. He didn't force her out. He'd simply gone up to bed, changed the locks while she was at school the next day and didn't answer the door after the bus dropped her off.
And she'd tried so damn hard to get one over on him, too. She considered the very real risk-reward ratio of shattering her bedroom window and crawling in, but she couldn't find a rock big enough to break the glass. And so when that was ruled out, she went on to try the back door, which was just as locked, maybe changed, but he'd also thrown away her key under the entry mat, so there was no way of knowing. And when that didn't work she beat at the front door, heavy-on-the-fist, like a cop, and kicked and screamed and begged for an hour to be let back in, without answer.
And then and only then did she start to cry.
It was there, in the nail-biting cold of autumn, that slow season of endings, the embers of that anger smoldered into a child's desperation, where Dad was no longer a weapon but an entreaty for peace, a pleading to remember she was, despite everything, still his daughter and she was, despite herself, still the same little girl who never stopped needing her father, her Dad, the murderer, murderer, murderer.
Another hour came to pass before the lock clicked and the hinges creaked open.
“I wanna come home,” she'd said, voice like a cough, “Dad, I just wanna come home already.”
“But you are,” he'd said, making room for her in the entryway with a smile that didn't reach his eyes, “You've been here the whole time.”
There's a body in the trunk of her car.
It doesn't carry the weight that a tragedy should. Feels equivalent to nothing, like the closing mark at the end of a sentence, like air. The night's getting colder, and there's a body in the trunk of her car.
It's not a change to the usual formula; there was always a car, some kind of body, her and him and someone else ruined by them. The only difference being that today is her birthday, and she's driving with a license, not a permit, and the car title has been transferred over to her name, even though she's claimed unofficial ownership of it for over a year. No cosmic significance to the sweet sixteenth beyond that, really. She'd spent half of it at school, less than half of it at work, and now she was going to spend the remainder of it on the road with a body in the trunk of her car, and her Dad, the murderer, the one who put it there, rolled up neat and tight in a tarp they'd later have to burn.
He remains chronically indifferent to this fact and that. She didn't inherit that from him, didn't inherit much at all in the Afton department, but there's no taking the Afton out of a person. He tells her she looks just like him, and she's not inclined to disagree. She makes a pointed effort not to stare long enough at her own reflection, most days; feels too much like playing into his ego.
“I could smell your car from half a block away.”
“It's the air filter.”
He laughs, barely real. “Funny stuff, Van. No, I'm talking about the, eh, farm you're growing in here?” He touches his fingers to his lips and makes a loud, puffing sound. “Most parents can't say they don't care that their kid smokes, but I really wish you'd learn to roll the windows down.”
So saying, he takes this additional time to light a cigarette. Marlboro, unfiltered. The kind that makes her stomach sick and scatters ash all over her passenger-side seat. This, like many things, is an act of spite, and they both play the part exceedingly well.
“Thought you said you were quitting that stuff for good.”
He's not looking at her, now, although she can't be sure he was to begin with.
“If bread makes your blood sugar spike, it's dessert, right? By the same logic, this is medicine.”
Maybe if you squint. Maybe if you're used to lying. It's definitely not like him to rationalize.
“Medicine for what?”
He shrugs. “You'll learn all about it, if you keep hunchbacking like that over the wheel. You're gonna wanna turn here,” and he gestures with his cigarette-hand towards the oncoming on-ramp, which she swerves into a little late, which, in turn, upsets the inertia of the third passenger.
As a rule, they never talk about the body in the trunk. Idle conversation gets reserved for all things living, not dead, because his interest in them ends as soon as they do. At the end of the day, it's always him who remembers, him who commits their name and face to memory, not her, except for when he occasionally lifts the tarp up and asks her if the sight reminds her of anything specific, to try and be funny, but she's never laughed, not even once.
They don't talk about that, either.
“God, that stinks,” she'd put the window down, but he'd simply roll it back up to drive the point home.
“Better than dope. You get pulled over smelling like this, cops won't think twice about doing a search. Wouldn't be able to stop them, either. Plausible cause and all,” he taps the butt of his cigarette; misses most of the ashtray, too. “You should start following your own advice. I'm doing you a favor here.”
“That's not what dope is,” her fingers tap idly on the wheel, “And if I needed legal advice, you wouldn't be my first option.”
He laughs, again, mostly real. “Oh, sure! I get it. I mean, looking inward's been working wonders for you, hasn't it? I've only gotten a call from your principal once this month.”
The thing is, she'll claim culpability for a lot of things, she always has, for things inside and outside her control, but that—
“That,” she dares to say, “was fucking bullshit.”
“So you've said.”
“Because it was.”
“You beat the candy out of that kid, Vanny. They gave you a two-week suspension and his parents are still talking about filing an assault charge. But go ahead and tell me you've got it all figured out. I'm sure you had your reasons, but you sure as hell didn't share them with me.”
Truth is, she didn't have many defenses to fall back on. She could say, well, it was a weekday, a particularly bad one at that, bad enough for the date to be marked on her calendar months in advance. Letting her mind lull into a half-dead haze and blend as seamlessly as possible had been the goal, and if she made it home without stopping or stalling or breaking down once, it would have been an achievement. But someone she didn't even know the name of had stopped her during fifth period, and he had this awful, pitying look about him that made her loathe him on principle.
And he'd asked her if she was doing okay.
And he'd asked her what it was like to watch the life leave someone.
Her jaw tightens with her throat. “Everyone's always asking questions.”
“About?”
“About him, he— I never know what to say. That's why I hit him.”
A long, heavy beat of silence passes before he answers, but not before he stubs his cigarette out, the smoke fogging up her front view, getting in her face, her throat, her lungs. “Word gets around, you know? Stupid kids will ask stupid questions. You've had plenty of time to rehearse your answers.”
His voice is careful when he says it, too, walled up and measured.
It's barely an answer, much less a solution.
The problem, she's discovered, is that Evan was always, always, secondary to the stupid question, an afterthought in his own murder story; it's never about the types of food he liked, or how he ruined every pair of shoes he ever wore because he insisted on getting them one size too big, insisted he'd eventually grow into them and never did, or how he loved in the absence of love, no, it's not that Evan they're interested in, they want Gruesome Aftermath Evan, Newspaper Headline Evan, bone splinters and brain matter trapped in a gold bear's teeth Evan, the mounting pressure of metal against a human skull and the sound it made before—
“Hey, ease up on the throttle—”
The car stutters to a hasty stop, humming deep against the rumble strips as it veers into a half-baked park job, nestled between highway and shoulder. She can't be sure what exactly does it, in the end; the cigarette smoke, the body in the trunk, the body in the bear, her Dad, the murderer, but one minute she's fumbling out of the driver-side door, and then she's on the ground, emptying her stomach onto it.
Dimly, it occurs to her she could have killed them both, just now. The ease it would have taken, the weight of the last sixteen years condensed into one final motion of her wrist, her foot on the gas, and then nothing. No more roads. No more bodies.
“Vanessa.”
He's outside of the car, now, and he sounds like her Dad, the father, here, confusion in his eyes and a deep-set crinkle in his brow, not the worrying kind, but something evidential of his age, just another corpse in limbo. He could almost pass for something human.
She won't look.
“Look, we really don't have time for this,” he must have grabbed a napkin from the glove compartment because he's suddenly knelt at her level, wiping her face with it, “Can you get it together?”
“I wish it had been me,” and she doesn't mean to say it out loud, it's effluvia of the mouth, no different than everything she just spit up.
The napkin falls. “Why?”
Because everything began and ended with him.
Because I wish this life was ours, and not just mine.
Because my little brother is dead and I don't deserve to miss him.
He scoffs.
“That's really too bad,” there's an edge underlying his tone, threatening to skewer her. “I thought you might have had something to say to me or, maybe, you'd just taken too much of whatever this was before we left, but you're actually just throwing another one of your pity parties.”
This sounding suspiciously like a box of Tic-Tacs when shaken, this being the noise that draws her head upwards from a puddle of vomit to an unlabeled pill bottle. The one she kept in the glove compartment, under the napkins.
“This would get you pinched in a search. It's like you're not even trying anymore.”
He's angry. He's angry, but more than that, he's disappointed, and his silence couldn't compete with that. Shame, and every other nasty feeling she's dry-swallowed, lets itself in without so much as a knock.
“I didn't— I wouldn't trust myself behind the wheel—”
“No. You wouldn't.”
He lifts himself up, impossibly tall, taller than the trees and the mountains and their whole Misery State of Utah, and he overhands the bottle over the guardrail, into the dark, somewhere meaningless.
“Vanessa,” he says, and she feels the venom, feels the stomach-dropping fear of her own tactics being repackaged and applied against her because his victories could never be anything short of absolute. “I like to think I've been really nice to you, all things considered. Kinder than I should be, I mean, more than any parent probably would be, right? I don't talk about him out of respect for you, because of your feelings, which, let's be honest, you didn't have a whole hell of a lot of until you killed him. And don't think I can't see the irony in it. He spent most of his life listening to you complain about how much of a brat he was, but just what in the hell are you doing right now?”
She tries and fails to say much of anything, lips opening and closing like a beached fish, eyes staring at the crooked bridge of his glasses.
“What is it you want me to say, hm? Want me to lie to you and tell you it wasn't your fault? That you shouldn't feel bad about it? Need me to soothe your poor, aching conscience every single time you start feeling sorry for yourself? It's a little too late to play innocent.”
Her breath congeals in her throat, clots like spoiled milk. “I'm—”
“Sorry? Yeah, it's been established,” he's on the move, again, disappearing behind his side of the car. “And if you're really sorry, you'll get back in and drive. I'm not trying to be out here all night.”
Vanessa violently undergoes something akin to myoclonus, a ten-dollar word she's seen exactly twice while studying medical, the many ways in which death invites itself into a body, involuntary movement of the extremities or the limbs, except it's her whole fucking body that's moving, a system of frayed nerves connecting to brain connecting to heart connecting to arteries connecting to venules connecting to capillaries—
“—and for the record, it doesn't look good on either of us, you picking fights at school. I don't care what that kid said or how it made you feel. This isn't just about—”
bound to muscle bound to flesh aided by blood by oxygen by neurons by blood by blood by blood—
“—and if you really have to pick a vice, stick to one and don't leave 'em in the car. Seriously. You'll put yourself in an early grave or a prison cell—”
it's always so much blood, but it's never hers on the outside, not even when she deserves to feel empty, like light from an eye, like blood from a body, like parents without children, like children trapped in the teeth and the stomachs of animals and—
“—and for the love of God, if it's the weed, just roll your window down once in a while, okay? It really stinks—”
and fingers. It's her fingers on the steering wheel, key in the ignition, engine off. The world outside of her window no longer a freeway lined by the speeding blur of trees, but a children's restaurant, stationary, secluded, a small-sad thing haunted by smaller-sadder things.
Vanessa feels herself nod on instinct, half-wrought and nothing whole as she is; once, then twice, more visibly with a vacant hum of acknowledgement. And he's all smiles after that one, her Dad, the father, the murderer, the animal promising love and safety with exposed teeth. When he claps his hand on her shoulder, she feels it ache somewhere deep between her ribs.
“See, long as we understand each other, there's no problem, right? We can make these things work, you and me, you just gotta listen with your ears, bunny. Look, you're— I'll take care of it, you're not gonna be much help to me like this, why don't you drink some water? I'm seeing a lot of half-empty ones on the floor here, you could probably stand to clean up a bit, but it can wait until we get home, I'll be back in a jiffy—”
Vanessa hears the trunk shut. Today was her birthday.