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The world comes to her in pieces.
A piercing beep, once and then twice and then continuous, rhythmic in its cries. The distinctive woosh of industrial air conditioning cranked up high. The slight buzz of LED lights not installed properly.
The intrusive, unfamiliar feeling of something down her throat. Her mouth, parched and thirsty. Blankets weighing her down.
She tries to open her eyes, but strangely, it’s a struggle. When she finally pries them open, she’s assaulted with bright light. White stark walls and an open window flooding her eyes.
Finally, finally, after squinting at the unforgiving light for a while all too long, the picture completes.
A hospital room.
And that is when she starts to panic.
The beeps get faster in tandem with the race of her heart. Why is she here? What the fuck happened? Does—
A nurse rushes in. She moves frantically, and that, despite her calm, collected look, is telling enough.
Is something wrong? How long has she been out?
What the fuck happened?
Why can’t she remember?
The nurse stops at her side. “Hi, Vanessa,” she says, voice full of unending professionalism that Vanessa desperately wishes she could have.
“Hello,” is what she attempts to say back, followed by about a million questions, but it comes out as a weird gasp and then she is rocked with coughs that send spikes of pain down her abdomen.
“Oh, no, honey,” the nurse says, holding out her hands in the universal ‘stop’ motion. “Don’t try to talk. You had a tube down your throat for a little while. It’s going to be a bit difficult to talk for a bit.”
Vanessa just stares at her. She… she had a breathing tube down her throat. For a little while. How long is a ‘little while’?
“I know you’re probably a bit confused right now,” the nurse continues, voice soothing. She’s good at her job, at least. “But don’t worry, we’ve got a good team. We’re going to help you.”
That clears up nothing.
Vanessa wants to push for answers— somehow, somehow with her eyes, maybe, plead until someone tells her something. But it seems this full 2 minutes of lucidity is a bit too much for her wrecked body. Her eyes are fluttering shut, and despite her attempts, they comply to the exhaustion sweeping over her and shut.
She can hear the nurse humming as she slips asleep.
—
The next time she wakes up, it is dark. The window doesn’t blind her as she forces her eyes open. The lights are still on, though dimmed.
She scans the room for a moment. It looks the same as it did the last time — how long ago was that?
There is a chair in the corner to her left, right next to the window. An IV runs up into the crook of her left arm. She tries not to think about that too much. On her right, medical machines clutter the wall and area. What they’re for, she has no idea.
Her eyes focus on the wall in front of her. There’s a whiteboard with writing on it. She strains her eyes to read in the dim writing.
‘Vanessa Shelly- Stable’ is written in bold letters at the top.
A laugh escapes her, much to her regret a second later as a rocket of pain shoots up her stomach. It’s just— it’s fucking ridiculous. Stable.
She doesn’t think she’s been stable, as the word implies, since she was… 9? 10? 12? Up to interpretation, she supposes, what was the thing that really pushed her over the edge.
Guilt laces her stomach, and the beep beeps start to sound faster.
Maybe she won’t think about that.
She refocuses on the whiteboard, eyes running down the surface. There are other comments, but they’re written too small and in the distinctive chicken scratch only legible to doctors. She can’t make them out in the dim lighting anyway.
The door is pushed open before she can mull it over too much.
Like a magical summoning, the same nurse walks into the room. How she keeps catching Vanessa just as she wakes up is a mystery. Then again, she doesn’t know what the fuck medical technology is up to nowadays. Maybe they’ve got some sort of thing tracking her sleep pattern.
Regardless, the nurse looks much less frantic than last time, which is a minute relief. Her body isn’t wired, and her steps aren’t rushed. The calm look on her face looks less forced.
“Welcome to the waking word again,” she says, smiling. It crinkles her eyes.
Vanessa pauses for a second. The foreign feeling in her throat is much less prominent now, which is probably a good sign. “Hi,” she goes for. Simple and to the point. Perfect.
It comes in a raspy kind of choke, but it sounds like words, and she doesn’t immediately launch into a coughing fit, so she’ll count that as a win.
The nurse seems to agree, smile widening. It looks genuine, which is nice. “Oh, honey! Look at you! You’re improving very fast,” she says.
She can’t really focus on the nurse’s words when it finally goes through Vanessa’s thick skull that she can talk. Anticipation grips Vanessa’s heart like a vice.
Finally, finally, she can understand what the fuck is happening.
“What happened?” she rushes out, in her still-raspy croak.
The nurse’s face falls at once, and so too does a pit in Vanessa’s stomach. The beeps of the heart monitor shuffle a bit faster in their cadence.
“What all do you remember, honey?” the nurse asks, composed.
Vanessa thinks.
—
She remembers work.
Ever since she had started at the station, she had always taken the night shift. It was just easier that way.
—
She remembers the call.
His voice, hauntingly chipper and all too condescending, told her about the new security guard. Reminding her of what she needed to do, like she didn’t already know.
He had seemed too happy about the new guard. She wasn’t sure why— he didn’t tell her shit beyond what measly details he determined she needed— but it made her feel uneasy.
She hung up the call, his voice echoing in her ears, and debated throwing up in her trash can.
—
She remembers meeting Mike.
First impression: he was weird.
He was different from the other security guards. Dark eye bags under his eyes. Eyes always a little unfocused. Movements a bit slow, jerky. His hands shook from time to time, a small tremor. There was something haunted about him. He looked narcotic, like he was one strong wind blow from collapsing.
He didn’t notice the giant, bleeding gash in his arm. Vanessa was genuinely befuddled by that. The wound was obviously Foxy’s doing, and the animatronics weren’t the subtlest. Not to mention, the wound was actively bleeding.
He didn’t give her his last name. He put up a poster of fucking Nebraska, of all places. He sounded so utterly exhausted every time he spoke.
There were a million different things that all pointed to: this guy was weird as fuck.
Something was going on, and at Freddy’s, that was never good.
Vanessa knew that nothing was ever an accident there. Not with him pulling the strings.
(She told him to quit. He didn’t.)
(It wasn’t her fault.)
—
She remembers finding the bodies.
4 people. They killed 4 people.
Vanessa, standing in the doorway to Freddy’s kitchen on shaky knees, had called in sick to work. She didn’t have to fake anything: the tremble in her voice and the strained inhales from lungs that didn’t expand properly. Her knuckles were white from her clench on the phone, as if it was the buoy in that sea of blood keeping her afloat.
“Aw, dude,” her co-worker said, his voice full of pity. “Yeah, I’ll cover for you. Rest up, you sound terrible.”
She hung up without replying. His words were consumed by the numbness encroaching upon her mind.
She, one by one, moved the bodies. Dragged them through the halls. Hauled them down the stairs. Pushed them up against the basement walls, and turned away immediately as soon as they went limp.
The animatronics just watched her. They never did a lot, post-incident. Every time she passed them, she tried not to listen to the screaming echoing from within them. She tried not to think about the faces of the corpses still inside of them.
She walked up and down the halls like a ghost, like she too had succumbed to the building and its horrors. Her limbs acted on their own: pulling, pushing, walking, all without the guidance of her mind, long gone to a place somewhere in the past. She was 11 and 28 and too young for this and so, so old, staring into the unseeing eyes of another dead person.
It was worse cleaning up the blood, head clouded with memories and ears echoing with screams.
Her arms moved in vigorous circles, scrubbing off the red streaks across the floor, the pools staining the edge of the door. Her heart raced in her throat, scrubbing the red off the floor. She pushed down gags at the smell of bleach and iron. She had to get rid of it. She had to, and it wasn’t working, fuck, it wasn’t working—
Freddy’s would never be clean.
No matter how hard she scrubbed, hands blistering and Dad’s yells ringing in her ears, the sickly red stayed. It pooled at the feet of the animatronics, in puddles on the floor, drip-dropping down their metal teeth. Screams of the kids were cut off, drowned out by the tsunami of blood. It was everywhere, and he would see it, oh God, oh God—
(When she looked, there was always blood on her, too. Blood on her hands, blood leaking from her heart.)
(She was always next.)
—
She remembers leaving.
Morning light had begun to filter in through the windows, finally pulling her from her reverie.
The floors were sparkling-white, so clean she could see her own frazzled reflection looking back at her. She looked terrible.
She staggered out, blindly following the light as her savior. She shoved the front door open in a burst of frantic strength and just breathed. Full, deep breaths for the first time since, hours ago, she had entered Freddy’s.
Her phone started to ring.
—
She remembers Mike by the river.
She watched Mike, taking in all of what he wasn’t saying. Mike’s eyes flickered from place to place like he had taught them, too, to run from it all. His foot tap-tapped on the soft dirt. His face was always twisted, haunted, by guilt.
All the parts of him sang a horrible choir: It’s my fault.
Vanessa could only stare back, face blank, foot still, eyes locked on him. She kept her choir inside, locking away its crescendo as the realization hit.
It said: I know who took your brother. I know, and I won’t tell you.
Doesn’t that make it my fault?
The pill bottle was clenched in her hand too tight, leaving red imprints on her palm. She threw it into the river.
Stop doing this to yourself.
It’s useless. It always is.
She left before the guilt threatening to overflow broke past her dams, leaving Mike sitting on the riverbed.
Because he must have known. Because that was why he had sounded so happy about hiring Mike. Because he was fucking sick and twisted. He wanted a pair, the two brothers, lined up neatly in body bags. It was only a matter of time.
Only a matter of time before Vanessa would be scrubbing Mike’s blood off the linoleum floor. She would never be able to get his blood off her hands.
—
She remembers Abby playing with the animatronics.
They looked happy. Really, genuinely happy in a way that sent unease down her spine. Vanessa couldn't remember the last time she saw them experiencing something even remotely close to fun. She didn’t know what it meant.
But she didn’t intercept. She helped them build the fort, she didn’t pull Abby away.
It was sweet, in a way. It reminded her, once again, that they really were just kids. Kids who had been ripped away from their futures, murdered in cold blood, shoved down into metal machines, left to rot—
So she let them be. She watched them embrace Abby, a good 4 feet shorter than them and owner of a body so fragile they could’ve crushed her in one go. They were gentle with her. They played, talked, emoted around Abby like they were just friends. Like she was one of them.
—
She remembers Mike in the storage closet.
He was infuriating. He was catching onto the wrong things: asking about her knowledge, asking about the kids. He was poking where he shouldn’t, too perceptive and yet not enough. He didn’t understand yet; that Freddy’s was a minefield, and it was only a matter of time before something went snap.
Too wrapped up in his own dumb, thick skull to realize what he had done to Abby. He was still searching the past, letting go of what was right in front of his own fucking face.
Garrett.
He was still looking for Garrett. Trying to change what had already happened.
She looked into his eyes. His stupid fucking exhausted eyes, so tired from his interrupted sleep, trying to dream of his brother over and over. She looked and tried to say: Your brother is dead.
Don’t let Abby be next.
Instead, she just told him to let it go. Just like she told him to quit, just like she told them all. If only any of them had looked beyond the surface. If only they had noticed the hand gripping her shoulder too-tight, the man hovering just behind her, ears always open and fists clenched. If only.
—
She remembers Mike walking up to her car.
“What are you so afraid of?” he asked.
Asking like she could answer, like she wasn’t wrapped up in Dad’s strings so tightly she was losing circulation.
She shouldn’t have been so mad. But all she saw was blood, blood, blood, leaking from Abby, dripping onto the arcade floor. All she could hear was the kids’ screams, awaiting the addition of one more to their discordant symphony.
Abby needed to stay away.
“If you ever bring Abby back here, I will shoot you,” she hissed.
She fucking meant every word, hand hovering over her holster. She would not let another kid die by her hands.
—
She remembers finding Mike.
He was slumped over, half-propped up on the exit door, surrounded by a puddle of blood.
It took all of her courage to press her shaky fingers into his neck. One horrible, terrible moment passed and she did not feel a pulse. Just as she was about to let go, a tide of nausea ravaging through her, she felt his heartbeat. Slow, weak, and yet it was there.
Vanessa sank back onto her knees, allowing herself one moment to breathe before letting her training take over.
There was a gravely injured person in front of her. What were his injuries? What did she need to do?
The animatronics had obviously gotten to him. Their attacks were unusually vicious: deep gashes across his whole body. Why that was the case, she didn’t want to think about it. His injuries were too much for the first-aid kit, sitting so uselessly close on the shelf. Its supplies were dwindling, she needed to replace it soon, but she didn’t, and Mike was fucking bleeding out on the floor, think, think, come on Vanessa—
The supply outpost.
Vanessa shoved down all feelings of guilt for using another work thing for this horrible, fucked up restaurant. She half-carried, half-dragged Mike out into the main lobby and through the doors.
The animatronics — except Freddy, which was concerning, but there were only so many things she could deal with at a time — watched her go. They looked unhappy about her trying to save Mike, but they didn’t protest. Just stared. Like always.
—
She remembers telling Mike.
Her whole life had been spent hiding.
Vanessa, listen to me.
And even then, standing in the outpost, she covered for him. She danced around his name, like revealing it would make his actions real. Maybe it was for herself. Maybe for him.
Do you know what to say when the cops get here?
But, finally, Mike asked, voice pleading. And Vanessa was caught.
This is important, okay, fucking listen to me.
Could he really see her? The blood on her hands, staining her clothes. The smell of bleach and iron, never fading. The exhaustion, lying dormant in her sleepless nights. The puppet strings, tight around her neck and pulling.
You need to tell them we were home.
Could he see how her world hadn’t stopped crumbling in decades? She was falling apart, facing the world with dead eyes and a smile, and it was catching up to her— she was always next. What did it do to a person to be at gunpoint for 20 years?
You will tell them that, do you understand me?
Vanessa ripped out her still-beating heart and laid it out upon the table between them.
“His name is William Afton. He’s my father.”
—
She remembers going.
It was useless. They were dead anyway. Just more bodies to move and blood to clean, and worse, he would actually be there. Just the thought of having to talk to him in Freddy’s again made her want to throw up.
And yet, she grabbed her gun and left.
A stupid decision. A stupid, stupid decision that he would ridicule her for when it was over. Because what the fuck was she thinking. She couldn’t do shit against him. She never could. It would go the same as always: he wouldn’t even need to say anything, just look, and her rage-induced bravado would slip away. Because before he was a murderer, he was Dad, and he always would be. Because, despite everything, Vanessa still loved him.
And because she was always next.
He had made sure she knew that from the moment she, a stupid, dumb, naive kid had followed screams into Freddy’s backrooms. A lesson learned through swinging fists and dark bruises and earsplitting yells whenever she got a little too bold. But also a lesson learned from hugs and bad jokes that were still funny anyway and him laying a blanket over her sleeping form on the couch.
She clenched the steering wheel, knuckles turning white.
She couldn’t fucking do this—
But Abby was out there. Sweet, funny Abby who was dwarfed by the animatronics but still befriended them anyway. Abby, who would be dead in minutes. Abby, who would be left to rot in a cold, metal suit. Abby, who didn’t deserve that.
And Mike, too. Tired, well-meaning Mike who was just trying his best. Mike, who just wanted his siblings to live. Mike, who had asked her to help. Her refusal – her cowardice – would be the last thing he remembered of her.
Vanessa slammed her foot down on the gas pedal and went.
–
She remembers threatening him.
“That’s enough!” It sounded deafening, ringing in her ears like a gunshot. “Drop the knife.”
Her hands gripped the gun like a lifeline. It was a lifeline, a separation between her and Dad, manic in his suit. He was warped; he looked alive in the suit, more alive than Vanessa had ever seen him out of it. Like he was made to kill, to drain the life out of the bodies he made.
Her finger rested on the trigger. She would shoot if it comes to that.
She repeated that like a mantra in her mind. She would do it. She would not cower to him.
And of course, he did exactly what he always did. Laughed in her face, diminished her resistance.
“Not over temper tantrums, are we, Vanessa?” he mocked, condescension dripping from his words like poison because, despite it all, he still thought of her as a child. The little girl who did everything he asked, because how could she not? The kids he killed with ease; the blood that splattered on Freddy’s floors; it could’ve been her. It always could’ve.
But she wasn’t that kid anymore.
Vanessa’s grip on her gun tightened. “I’m not kidding, Dad.”
That got his attention. He slowed, turning fully to her, and pried his helmet off. Vanessa didn’t know if it was better to be able to see his expressions – see just how much mania danced in his eyes, to be reminded that he was real, made of flesh and not the tainted yellow fabric of the suit – or to have to stare at the rabbit head.
“You may have forgotten your loyalties,” he spat, slowly, words full of anger. “But I assure you,” he gestured towards the animatronics with the knife like it was a part of him, “they have not.”
The animatronics just stared, with their haunting red eyes. But Vanessa and him both knew if he told them to attack, they would. They didn’t know any different; all they did was follow the yellow rabbit.
His helmet fell to the ground with a resounding thunk.
“Now, put that thing away, and clean up the mess that you created.”
‘Her mess’.
It always had been.
It was her fault the moment she stumbled upon him and a still-dying little boy. It was her fault the moment he cornered her in the same room, holding her wrist too-tight. It was her fault when he said ‘Vanessa, you’re going to help me with some things’, a glint in his eyes.
She had led the kids to him. She had picked them for their deaths; a pre-teen Grim Reaper with pigtails and shaking hands. She had watched them die, watched blood spray out of stab wounds, and stared into their unseeing eyes. She had cleaned the blood from the floors until it was all gone, scrubbed until her hands were sore. She lied to them all: concerned cops and grieving, sobbing parents. She had gone to sleep and heard their screams every night like clockwork.
Through it all, it was ‘her fault’. Dad was always devoid of fault.
Even when he was the one with the knife, even when he was the one pushing her out into the lobby, even when he was the marionettist behind it all.
He moved towards her, one step at a time. Alarm bells blared in Vanessa’s head. She couldn’t let him get close, she couldn’t let him win; not when she was armed, not when she had a chance, for once in her damn life.
“Come on. We both know you’re not going to use a–”
She shot it.
She aimed for his side, not his head, but it felt all the same. It felt like her too-late teenage rebellion. Because look at her. She fucking did it, she hurt him; it was his blood on the suit, no one else’s.
It felt fucking terrifying. It was a victory.
He keeled over for a moment, clutching at his side. She wondered exactly how he felt. She researched gunshot wounds for work, had read about the initial hot-poker feeling that he must have been experiencing.
But it wasn’t enough. It never was.
He rushed forward, all anger, all rage. He slammed his hand into hers and the gun went flying. It clattered to the ground, somewhere unreachable; it sounded like a funeral pyre. It sounded like defeat. Even after all this time, she couldn’t win against him.
“You had one job, one,” he hissed. Vanessa kept her eyes on the knife, waving wildly in his grasp, and backed up to avoid its wrath. “Keep him in the dark, and kill him if he got too close.”
Anger seeped from him like a fatal disease. It was everywhere; in the deepening of his scowl, in the too-careful enunciation of his words, in the clenched fist around the handle of the knife.
5, 10, 15 years ago, Vanessa would have backed down. She would’ve conceded to the fury in his voice and would’ve done whatever he asked.
Instead, she said: “That’s two jobs.”
His hand shot out and closed around her neck.
It wasn’t a shock. She had spent her childhood studying his reactions, his body language, all of his subtle indicators. She learned his anger and all its different types.
Her fingers clawed against his, trying to pry them off of her. She scrambled for some purchase, but it never worked; the suit was too heavy, too stable, and his grip was always too tight. She gasped and spluttered for breaths, each one fucking hurt, holy shit, she couldn’t fucking breathe–
He dropped her. She crumpled to the ground, taking in heaves of air to greedy lungs. Her throat burned and her vision was shaky, a tunnel of black around the edges slowly fading.
She lifted her head, a monumental task. He was walking away, towards the kids’ pictures. Towards Abby, desperately trying to pin up the fixed picture.
He was going for Abby.
She shot up from the floor, clinging desperately for his knife. The blade sliced into her fingers. “Don’t!” she shouted.
Anything to slow him down; anything at all, because he wouldn’t fucking listen to her. She wasn’t important enough for that, no, of course not. His hobby always came first.
“Let go!” he roared.
“I won’t let you hurt her too,” she said. Not like the corpses in the animatronics. Not like the little girl, horrified, in Freddy’s backrooms.
He yanked the knife from her fragile grasp and he–
He stabbed her.
The knife went in easily, too easily. She was just a kid against her Dad, just another victim.
She looked up at him.
He hadn’t always been this monster. There was a time when Freddy’s was just a pizzeria, there was a time when the animatronics were just machines, there was a time when her hands didn’t shake and her sleep wasn’t filled with screams.
There was a time when he was just her Dad.
Was it too much to ask for it back? No dead kids, no blood staining the floors, no bruises hidden under long sleeves. She just wanted to go home.
“Dad?” slipped from her mouth, involuntary. It was a plea; it was everything and nothing. It was ‘I thought I was more than this’. It was desperate, raw; ‘I loved you. I gave you my life, over and over. Didn’t you love me too?’
He didn’t reply. He didn’t owe her even that much.
She fell to the floor.
There was blood; it flowed from the wound and pooled onto the floor, staining it red, red, red. She thought, dully, deliriously, the pain crowding into her mind like a virus: I don’t want to clean that.
It was her birthright to die by his hands. She was always meant to die in that cursed pizzeria, to haunt the halls along with the other kids. She had known that since she had found the first body, the little boy bleeding out in front of him.
She was always next.
—