Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jeremy was thinking again.

Not really about anything in particular. He probably would have been if he could actually remember anything to think about.

All he remembered was that stupid shift he had offered to take from a friend at work and the next thing he knew he woke up in a hospital, 2 years after he had last been conscious.

His parents had decided to move him from Hurricane back to Santa Cruz in California to get better medical treatment for his condition.

Apparently one’s entire prefrontal cortex doesn’t just “grow back”.

But it wasn’t all bad.
The doctors had managed to salvage most of his prefrontal cortex, because it was hanging on by a thread.

The one shitty part about losing the main memory collecting part of your brain was that he had to relearn practically everything.

Fuck, even trying his shoes was hard the first couple of weeks.

He rolled onto his back in the grass and skipped to a better song on his Walkman.
He didn’t even remember adding any of these songs.

He had listened to a bunch of his old ones when he got home and thought that it would be something nice to pass the time.

This one was dated more recently and wasn’t finished. It was just labeled “6/27/1987 M-“ whatever was past the M was too smudged to be legible.

This one was a lot different than the others he had listened to. Jeremy’s music taste tended to be a lot more upbeat and wild, whereas this was a lot more mellow and almost melancholy.

The song he had skipped to was sad, something about a guy not wanting to go home again because he had too many bad memories there?
Back to the Old House!
Yeah, that was it.

Jeremy stretched his arms out and thought.

Something about this song was scratching an itch in his brain. It was… familiar.

That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Half the time he thought he was remembering something it was just Deja vu.

But this felt different.
There was something attached to this song that his brain just couldn’t retrieve.
No, not something… someone.

Someone important to him, or someone who was important to him.

That itch in his brain would have bothered him for the rest of time already, but there were other things too.

Little things would randomly set him off as if there was something he remembered about them, but he was never able to put his finger on it.

Jeremy would have lost it honestly, except for the fact that he had been dreaming recently about being whisked away from his life by a really hot looking guy. You could never see his face though. It was always blurry or smudged.

Finding out he was gay again was funny. He hadn’t really thought much about who he was yet. It was just easier to focus on more important things, like walking, and writing, or sitting without falling over. But when he went through some of his old stuff he found a jacket with a pink triangle patch and a couple of really cool pins that did not make sense for a straight guy to have.

Hey, if he had found out he was into guys through going through his old stuff, he might be able to find out some other things too right?

If his mystery man really did exist, he had to be in some old photo book or a yearbook or something!

He laid down in the grass and daydreamed about what he would do if he found someone who knew him. Like really knew him back then.

Jeremy hadn’t realized how lonely he really was until then.

Sure, he had his parents, but they never really understood why he was so fascinated with his past and he always just felt like a burden to them.

He missed having friends.
He missed talking to people.

He tried not to ruminate on the emptiness he was feeling and waited until the end of the tape.

Chapter Text

Jeremy was sitting in a pile of his old stuff strewn about his bedroom floor.
He had gone through everything, and he meant everything.

There has to be something here about that guy.

He puzzled about it for the longest time. His brain could never really stay focused on much before his botched lobotomy, but now it was even worse. He had to take extra time to think things through and if he didn’t he got really really impulsive.

Jeremy looked around trying to imagine anywhere he would put old yearbooks or pictures or anything when something caught his eye.
The rope to pull down the ladder to the attic was swinging around.
Somebody had left a window open and the breeze was tossing it around.

Suddenly he got an idea. Yeah, he totally could’ve left something there.
He tugged down the ladder a little too fast and he heard his mom yell something about not breaking anything before he climbed up.

It infuriated Jeremy how careful he had to be with himself. He had to use railings a lot more, and be gentle, and ease himself up and down and it just felt humiliating. He was still getting used to working his body again and it was really setting in that he would just never be the same.

He would never be able to walk and get around the way he used to. Sure, he hadn’t really changed all that much, but to him it felt almost catastrophic.

Jeremy climbed up and almost started coughing when he breathed in that musty air. None of them really ever went into the attic so it was dusty and covered in spiderwebs.

He looked around to try and find anything obvious. There were a lot of boxes, old furniture, paintings, Christmas gifts nobody wanted but couldn’t throw away.
A few boxes were labeled in sharpie. Wedding photos, string lights, grandma’s cat plates, and then in shaky handwriting, “Jeremy’s DON’T TOUCH!!!”

Jeremy walked over to the box and dragged it out of the corner. He sat down and looked at it. He didn’t even stop and consider what this could mean, he just opened the box and peered inside.

There was some beat up high school yearbook, well his beat up yearbook. He pulled out a nice letterman jacket. It wasn’t really decorated except for a few patches on the back and the big ‘87 on the sleeve.

Of course. Just another reminder.

There wasn’t much else in there. Some high school memorabilia, a small street sign, and a tux, which was probably the fanciest thing he had ever worn.

He took out just about everything until he found a pack of cigarettes. It was some ancient pack of Marlboro reds. Oh, so he smoked. Guess that made sense.

Jeremy tossed the pack aside and was ready to just give up on this and go back to listening to his dumb tapes in his dumb room when he saw something.

It had hit the floor in a funny way and the pack had opened, letting things slide out onto the floor.
It was full of photographs (maybe Polaroids?).

He dived over to pick them all up like they were gold. He grabbed the pack and dumped it out.

Jeremy spread the contents out on the floor to see what was in there. It was a bunch of photographs of… him?
But it wasn’t normal awkwardly posed pictures of him. It was almost creepy…
The pictures started at a distance. Each one got increasingly closer, but it was very clear that he didn’t know he was being photographed.

The photos were all like that, until they got closer enough that his younger self turned around and looked confused.
He didn’t look scared though. And in the next photograph he just looked completely star-struck.

Jeremy might not remember much about his own life, but he knew that face.
He gently sifted through the rest of the photographs and saw himself turning to smile at the photographer, and then reaching out to them, and then-

There he was.

It was him!
The guy he’d been seeing.
He was right there and he, he knew Jeremy.

He sorted through each of the photos frantically just to see his face. There were a couple of those pictures, though not nearly as many as there had been of him.
Each picture seemed so new and yet so nostalgic.

Jeremy wanted to memorize each little detail of the man’s face. He looked tired and a little beat up, but he was so smiley. He had curled brown hair that laid all strange in a poorly chopped mullet. He had these steely blue eyes. They weren’t that type of violently bright blue, but a nice deep blue. He was wearing a ratty muscle tee and these spiked leather cuffs.

He flipped through the last couple photos. Oh, oh. He really knows me.
The last two photos were of Jeremy holding the boy all close, which wouldn’t be suspicious if they hadn’t been making out in the final picture.

Well. This meant something. This meant something really important. He looked through the remainder of the stuff in the little pack. Most of them were little sketches. Some the animatronics who had nearly killed him, some little doodles of a cranky old man.
But most of the drawings were of himself.

Again and again and again he was depicted in pencil and paper. Each drawing captured the same uninterrupted expression as the pictures.
Did he make them?
Did he just like Jeremy that much?

“Jeremy, come down for dinner!”

He nearly fell over out of surprise. Something about this felt too personal, too secret to show his parents. He quickly tossed everything in the box and stashed the pictures and drawings back in the cigarette box. He slipped it into his pocket and struggled his way back down the ladder.

Man that fucking sucked. Ladders were like a creation of hell. He used to love them too which is honestly the worst part.

Jeremy quickly put the ladder back up and slammed the little door shut. He dusted himself off and just prayed it was enough for his parents not to ask questions about where he had been.

Chapter Text

Dinner was awkward. It usually was. They all sat at the dinner table a little forced and Jeremy didn’t know how things had been before his accident, but clearly it put a strain on things.

His parents were trying their best really, it was just hard.

His dad looked at him and smiled.
“So, mom said you went on a walk today? How was that?”

He had walked before. Like a lot. He just hadn’t told his parents about when he went out without them.
“It was fine. Went to the park for a while. I didn’t fall over or anything, and I didn’t get lost.”

Jeremy’s dad seemed to be sigh and slump over slightly out of relief.
“Good, good. That’s good.”

He went back to eating for a moment before thinking about his attic discovery.

“Hey, uh, did I have any friends? You know like back home?”

If Jeremy hadn’t been so nervous he would’ve noticed the way his mom’s face crinkled all angrily for a second or the way his dad cringed when he referred to Hurricane as “home”.

His mom was the first to answer him.
“Sure Jere, you had lots of little friends in Utah.”

He nodded, okay this was a good start.

“Why do you ask? Are you having trouble finding friends here? I know it’s been a struggle with us keeping you in the house a lot, but you can always ask us.”

He shook his head.
“No, no it’s not that. I just- I mean, I- I wanted to know if there was any dude who like knew something about me. Like who I was before…”

Jeremy’s parents went silent and just looked at each other for a moment. His dad opened his mouth for a second, but he shut it right away. His mom looked at him a little concerned.

“Well Jere, it’s not like we can just call them up. I mean most of those kids probably moved on and went to colleges outside of state and we don’t even know their parents numbers at this point.”

She was rambling. She did that whenever she was nervous or trying to tell him something he didn’t want to hear.

Now’s the time to rip off the bandaid. I got this. Yeah totally.

“I went through some of my old stuff and I just found some old like pictures of this guy I was friends with I think. He was tall, kinda lanky, brown hair?”

His parents sighed and his mom looked a little upset. What could be that bad??

His mom rested her hand on his and looked at him.
“Look, you got into a bad crowd as a kid and we really tried to be supportive, but it just wasn’t the right place for you. So we figured moving might be a lot, but it would help you get away from all of that.”

Jeremy looked at her frowning, he still didn’t get it.
Apparently she picked up on that because she kept on explaining.

“You had this friend, his name was Mike. He was just bad news honey. We all knew it, but none of us wanted to have to break you two up. You brought that boy over almost daily.”

Jeremy wasn’t just confused, he was upset. The more he put two and two together the more upset he became.
“And you guys just kept that from me? Why?”

Jeremy’s parents started to notice how agitated he was. His dad gave him a look of either concern or disappointment.

“He was a criminal Jeremy! A convicted criminal! He was practically a murderer too with that sick idea of a prank he pulled on that poor kid.”

Jeremy wrenched his hand away from her and backed away.
“I don’t care! I don’t care if he was a serial killer, I deserved to know!”

“Jeremiah Sweeney Fitzgerald! It doesn’t matter if you thought it was ‘fair’ or not. We were keeping you safe.”

Jeremy left the dinner table and stumbled into his room. This was so fucked. It was bogus. It wasn’t fair. It was his life. Why did they care?

I mean… being besties with a killer wasn’t something he thought he would want to know, but it was important to him.
Besides, his mom was probably just being dramatic.

So…

I’m dreaming about a guy named Mike? Who knew me in Utah, and kissed me, and might be a murderer?
Great.

Mike. Mike from Utah. Mike from Hurricane Utah. That shouldn’t be too hard to find. Hurricane was like tiny. And there were only so many guys named Mike around his age.

Am I seriously considering this?

The more Jeremy thought about it the more he realized he really did want to go find this mystery Mike.

At first he just wanted to find someone he knew, but now he just really wanted to meet Mike again.

He had way too many questions. Like did that date date? How long did they go out? Were they friends in high school? Was he around during the accident? Did he miss him? Is there a chance he would want to go out again?

…wait

So… maybe he had kind of ulterior motives for this trip.
But you can’t just discover that you have a cute ex boyfriend who drew you obsessively like that and not want him back just a little bit, right?

Okay maybe most people definitely could but Jeremy was honestly pretty desperate and had been dreaming about this guy for weeks now.
It really wasn’t weird.

He wasn’t even sure who he was defending himself against. But here he was.

You know maybe losing like a giant chunk of his brain had some effect on his judgement… but he had been shut in his stupid house recovering for like 2 years. It was almost the fucking 90s, he was adult enough to take ownership for his own stupid decisions.

And so began the obsession. Jeremy’s brain tended to be irrational and flighty, even before his accident, but when he found something that piqued his interest it stuck with him for months.
He’d obsess about it at any free moment. And this one had a goal which was even worse. Interests that were just interests could go away at any time.
But interests with a goal?

He wouldn’t be able to feel satisfied until he reached that goal.

Chapter Text

Michael Afton was tired. Tired of being here, tired of working, tired of living.
Well, if you could even call what he was doing living.

He wasn’t exactly alive really. He was, but he wasn’t in a way? It was confusing. I mean, he definitely was walking and talking and breathing, but he died? Well he was dead and then it was like he was a reanimated puppet for a bunch of metal monsters.

It was confusing.

He had the little things to live for he supposed. Sure he was a zombie and his whole family was dead and he was forced to spend the rest of his life hunting down the undead ghost of his abusive father, but it wasn’t all bad.

He had Henry, and he had his house, and he had his little best friend he made.
Helpy was probably an unoriginal name, but he made a whole fucking robot so honestly who’s winning here?

He was on his way back from work, trudging his way home.

Luckily with all these new tech jobs opening up, he could monkey around with code and technology without anyone ever having to see him.

Which was good.

Cause otherwise he could probably only be hired at a horror house, hah.

It wasn’t really that funny but how’s a guy supposed to cope?

For a while after he had his guts ripped out and was filled with stinging, cold machinery he had felt too dead to move.

He thought if he just laid down for long enough he’d finally be able to die.

He’d slept through days? Weeks? Months?
He didn’t know.

Michael had been sleeping in the bathtub of his old house because his mother’s room wasn’t just his mother’s room, and the my little ponies in Liz’s room kept watching him, and the window in his room was still broken and he was so cold.
He couldn’t even look at Evan’s room without feeling like throwing up until he collapsed.

Which was strange because he wasn’t completely sure he had a stomach.

It was a day like any other of crying, hunching over in pain, and trying to take as many painkillers as he could without like having a digestive tract, and then collapsing and sleeping for 14 hours.

He had been curled up in the bathtub when he heard the click of a lock sliding unlocked and the squeak of the door hinge.

Michael’s eyes widened and his breathing picked up and he covered his own mouth and froze so he’d stay dead silent.

His heart was beating out of his chest and he was shaking out of fear this time instead of the cold.

Michael took a deep breath and tried to remind himself that William was gone. He was gone, he left. He had abandoned Michael years ago.

But still the panic and disgust wormed its way into his chest.

He sent me there to kill me.

If he finds me he’s going to kill me.

Michael bit down on the skin of his cheek and squeezed his eyes shut.

I can pass as dead.

He laid there silently, listening to the quiet footsteps through the house and the incomprehensible chatter.

He didn’t know how long he was there before somebody turned the door handle and walked in.

“Jesus Christ. It smells like something died in here- how did I let you talk me into this?”

The voice was low, but nervous.

Familiar too.

They stepped closer to him and pulled the blanket aside slightly.

There was a gasp and a clatter and they must have backed away.

“Oh lord, Vin! He’s-“ A gag and a heavy breath. “He’s dead!”

Michael opened his eyes the tiniest amount, his eyelashes and overgrown hair covering it up.

His hair had started falling out in clumps and it freaked him out, but slowly after what he could only assume were months it started growing back.

He hadn’t cut his hair because it felt like a marker of his improvement.

He scanned the room and saw a familiar face.

It was a shorter black man with round glasses, a sweater vest, and a ghostly expression on his face.

Then he saw the other man.

He gasped and shot up.

He threw himself back and kicked everything away from himself at the man.

No.

No, no, no.

No, he’s supposed to be gone.

He’s gonna kill me.

Michael ran out of things to kick and he curled into himself, crying and hyperventilating.

The man reached over to him and he knew it was over.
But then he didn’t pull his hair back to scream in his face, or hit him, or touch him violently at all.

He just lightly rested his hand on Michael’s shoulder.

“Michael? I-is that you?”

Michael took several panicky breaths and steeled himself to open his eyes.

His vision was fuzzy with tears and he waited for the world around him to come into focus.
He took in the lanky frame, the pale tint of his skin. The dark brown hair in a ratty ponytail and the steel blue eyes.

It was not father.

“Uncle Vincent?”

Vincent and his husband Scott managed to coax Michael out of the bathroom after at least an hour reassuring him that William wasn’t here, and nobody was going to hurt him.

It turned out that when William left, he had also stopped paying taxes and the house had been repossessed.
Vincent and Scott were just here to claim anything left.

While they had made it clear that Michael could stay with them, he couldn’t bring himself to leave Hurricane. There was something left here for him.

But he couldn’t stay there anymore, so they spent weeks trying to hunt down a place for him to stay.

That was how Michael came to live with Henry Emily.

Chapter Text

Michael walked into the house and dropped his bag off on the floor next to the coat rack.
He could hear Helpy padding through the hallways and right over to the door.

Recently the animatronic seemed to have been gaining a much more human understanding of the world.
Michael had designed his personality or the brain of this little animatronic to constantly be expanding and understanding new concepts so he didn’t stay stagnant.

During the first few months nothing really seemed to happen.

He picked up on new information and it took multiple repeated efforts to get him to remember what it was, and even then it was temporary.

But lately he had been gaining all sorts of new ideas and functions.

Michael had started to question how much of Helpy’s personality was even animatronic programming anymore.

Helpy was even claiming to be able to “smell” things now.

The little bear had become pretty keen on Michael as his personality began to develop properly. He didn’t like when Michael left for jobs, and he would just listen and wait for him to come back.

The animatronic himself ran over as fast as his little legs could take him and clung to Michael’s leg like a kid.

“Hey buddy, did you have a good time with Henry today?”

The two often spent their time together during Michael’s shifts, just doing whatever little activity they saw fit.

Henry had grown surprisingly attached to the little guy. He had taught him how to read, how to write his name, the names of colors, animals, shapes. He treated Helpy like a son.

It probably wasn’t a good way to cope, but if that helped Henry he wasn’t gonna say anything about it. It’s not like anything about him screamed healthy either. The “cat scratches” he’d been covered in since high school proved that.

Helpy did a little spin around and smiled all wide and happy at Michael.

“Helpy helped!! We made muffins. They smell nice.”

Again with the smells thing, he wasn’t supposed to be able to smell.

Michael scooped the little guy up and held him.

“Really? What do muffins smell like?”

Helpy made a frowny face and kicked his legs back and forth. He went quiet for a second while he was thinking.

“Smells… good! They are good.”

“Alright then. I think they’re good too.”

He walked with Helpy over to the kitchen, snatching a muffin out of the tin. He whipped his head around to see Henry, catching him completely red handed.

“Hi Mike. How was work today kiddo?”

Michael smiled and stuffed the rest of his muffin in his mouth.

“M-fine, what’d you get up to today? Besides uh muffins?”

Henry brushed his hands off on his pants and wandered over to the chair he always kept in the kitchen.

“Well I showed Helpy here all bout baking, and we worked on the car, did a little tinkering round the house. Oh, found some of your old stuff in the basement.”

Michael nodded along and gently set down Helpy when he started kicking his feet and wiggling around.

“I want to see! I want to see the stuff!!”
The animatronic had already started scrambling down the stairs, and Mike wanted to make sure he didn’t fall and get hurt. Well, not get hurt exactly, but not get broken.

Helpy was currently scooting down the stairs on his butt like a little kid would.

Now Michael was aware that he had programmed Helpy to be more childish in nature, but it was almost uncanny the way he seemed like a kid. There was nowhere for him to learn that from, but he knew it anyway.

Maybe it was just the way he and Henry treated the little guy?

Like a nature vs nurture type of thing?

Whatever, he’d tinker around with Helpy later to study what had been going on to make him so… sentient.

He had been about to yell up for Henry to ask if this box was full of his stuff when he saw the name “Mikey” scrawled across the side. Helpy was running around the box and jumping to try and climb to the top.

Michael let out a little chuckle at him and carefully lowered himself down to sit and open the box.

Fuck, moving was hard.

He carefully opened the box and scooped Helpy up so that he could see everything inside without it being a struggle.

There was a lot in there, Henry must have really dug through the house to find these.

There was some old sweater with an Immortal and the Restless joke on it he had worn for at least a year straight at one point. An old sketchbook or two. Some rolls of bandages which was sweet. He didn’t have to go out and get more for a while now.

A lot of it he just couldn’t bring himself to care about. It was too personal, too painful for him.

The things he did care about was a pair of his mother’s earrings he found laying at the bottom of the box, which made him glad his ears hadn’t rotted off, and a small plushie lion Charlie had given him for “safekeeping” last time he had seen her.

His name was Sammy. Poor, poor Sammy.

He pulled out that stupid sweater and the bandages and was ready to bring that all up to his room when something fell out of the sweatshirt.

Helpy stopped lifting Sammy and making him do a little dance to look over and cock his head.

Oh fuck…

It was his boutonniere from his senior prom. It was dried, and crumpled, but he recognized it. He was too busy just holding it and feeling the texture of the dried leaves and the old ribbon on it that he hadn’t even noticed a little photo flutter off and fall onto the floor.

“Who is that? Michael, who is that?”

Michael glanced up to see Helpy holding a little picture that looked like it game from some shitty photo booth.

He took the picture from the little bear’s hands and just felt a pang in his heart.

“Jeremy,”