Chapter Text
When Fredbear's jaw clamped down he thought that he was probably going to die. Jean had died. He hadn't had much time to think about it before everything went black.
He woke up in a quiet hospital room, or at least he thought it was quiet until he realized that there were people there talking to him.
A nurse's mouth was moving, but she wasn't making any noise. He'd opened his mouth to tell her that, but couldn't get the words to come out, realizing there was something blocking his throat. At first he'd thought that there was still a spring in it, but when he looked down he saw a tube coming out of his neck.
She was still talking, but still wasn't making any actual noise. Eventually she turned away and said something before writing something on a piece of paper and handing it to him.
It had a bunch of words on it he didn't recognize, but then she pointed to the handwriting at the bottom. Can you hear me?
She handed him a pen.
Relieved, he shook his head, glad she finally understood the problem.
Instead, she had made an unhappy face.
*
The world is quieter now. All quiet, actually. It took him a while to figure out that it wasn't that everyone was being quiet, it's that he couldn't hear.
That's not so bad. His father figured out how to turn on words under most shows, so he can understand what's going on, and he doesn't have to go to school anymore.
He thinks he doesn't have to go to school anymore. His father wrote a note to ask if he wanted to go back to school and he said no, but he saw a pamphlet for Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind. He hadn't known what deaf meant until he read it and found out it was the word for not being able to hear.
He doesn't really want to go back to school. Nobody likes him. Nobody likes him at home either, but at least he doesn't have to do homework.
The tube is still in his throat. He can't quite spell the word for it and he doesn't know how it's said, but the doctor eventually got him to understand that his throat is damaged enough that he wouldn't be able to breathe or eat without it, and that's why they put a tube into his stomach too.
This is all, he guesses, bad. People definitely act like it's bad. He only goes outside for doctor's appointments and everyone looks at him. But it's not so bad, really. Now instead of his brother being in charge of him there's a new woman who comes and she checks on the tubes and watches him while he watches TV, which he's allowed to do all day.
His brother doesn't bother him anymore, which is probably the best thing, and most of why it's really not so bad. He was scared when he first woke up and Mike was sitting next to the bed, but all he did was look at him with an unhappy face and say something he couldn't hear. Now that he's home Mike doesn't even look at him most of the time.
This is fine because he has the caretaker now. Julia mostly just sits on the couch next to him, except sometimes she makes him play games or do stretches. They're hard and boring, but she says he has to, and she helps him when they get too hard. She has to use the stomach tube to give him food because his hands are too shaky. He kind of misses eating food. Sort of. He feels like he's supposed to miss eating food, but most of what he ate was takeout from the diner and Fredbear's food tastes terrible .
Tasted. It's closed now. He saw it on the news. He has to learn most things from the news because nobody talks to him.
His father is still at work all the time, which is okay because when he's home he's not very nice. Unless he has something to ask he mostly ignores him, which was worse when that meant he left him alone with his brother, but now it's not his problem. Mike and Elizabeth are always getting in trouble, though. He doesn't know what about, because nobody talks to him. His father hits a lot more now, and yells all the time.
He didn't really do that before. It would probably be scarier if he could hear the yelling, or if it happened to him.
At first he wasn't at work all the time. At first his father stayed home and took care of him, but he thinks he got bored because after Julia started coming he started ignoring him the same as before. Once he saw his father and Julia arguing, later she said it was because of money.
He knows money is something people argue over, but he always thought his father had a lot of it. Maybe he doesn't anymore, or maybe he doesn't want to spend it on him. Either way, Julia won and she keeps coming so that's good.
*
They did some tests at the doctor and found out that he can hear a little, but not enough to ever be able to hear voices again. This was fine with him, but his father hadn't liked it. Now he doesn't come home anymore, and he doesn't look at him when he does.
He's going to the school now. It's okay. There aren't other kids with tubes, but none of them can hear and some of them have other stuff like wheelchairs so nobody stares at him really.
They're teaching him sign language, which he hadn't heard of before, so that he can see people talking. They're also trying to teach lip reading so he can see people talking out loud, but he's really bad at it because all the shapes look basically the same and people cover their mouths with all sorts of things when he tries to do it outside. Sign language is easier. He learns fingerspelling quickest, but it takes a long time to sign more than a couple words so he does have to learn the rest of it.
It's nice. He can understand his teachers now. He can't understand anyone else though because almost nobody has heard of sign language and nobody at all knows how to speak it except for Julia who uses it to talk to him instead of writing now and the doctor who has an interpreter. So he mostly just talks to the same ten or so people.
The teacher says there are places where everyone can't hear where he could go and everyone would speak sign language but he hasn't told anyone because he doesn't like talking to people and nobody makes him go anyway.
Some of them asked about the tubes and scars. It turned out most of them are deaf because they got sick or they were born like that. There's only one other kid who's deaf because they got hurt and he's only deaf in one ear. Nobody understands when he tries to explain until he tells them where his dad works. It turns out one of them goes to Fredbear's sometimes. It's still hard to explain because they don't know about the springs but when he says his brother put his head in Fredbear's mouth and it bit down and the parts got in his ears they think that's really scary and ask how his brother could do that.
He says Mike is just mean. He feels kind of bad about that because Mike isn't really mean anymore because all he does is stay in his room but he was mean for a long time before that and it was really mean to put his head in the mouth so he decides it's fair. They agree that he's mean. The boy who goes to Fredbear's asks if Mike was trying to kill him.
He doesn't know. Maybe. Jean died. Mike didn't see it so maybe he didn't know, but the doctor said if his head had been there even a little different the springs would've gone into the important parts of his brain and he would've died, so even if he wasn't trying to he probably would've. He says he doesn't know.
The boy who goes to Fredbear's asks if they're going to take away Fredbear because he almost died, and he says yes, and he says that's sad because he's his favorite. He doesn't understand that at all because Fredbear is what Jean died in but he doesn't like arguing so he just says that it was bad publicity because parents started worrying about kids trying to play with the animatronics and getting hurt, but they might make a new one once they're safer.
The boy who went to Fredbear's is the only one who keeps talking to him after the rest of them figure out why he looks like that. He's still sad about the diner, and doesn't really care when he tells him about Jean because he says it would be fine if you just didn't touch the suit and then he starts talking about how lots of fun stuff is dangerous. When the boy starts listing off fun dangerous stuff he realizes that he doesn't really feel like crying.
He might not be a crybaby anymore. He hasn't cried since that day. He gets sort of mad and happy sometimes but he feels kind of like he has something between him and his feelings. He didn't like being a crybaby much so he lets them stay there. The people at the school don't know him any other way but one day one of them tells him that he's really creepy. That makes him a little sad, but he doesn't cry, and he stops caring about it as soon as he gets picked up from school.
The new place opens. It's just a new Freddy Fazbear's. He doesn't actually learn about that until the boy asks him why he didn't tell him. He just says that nobody at home really talks to him about anything, so he didn't know that's what the commercials on the TV were for.
*
Elizabeth comes home one day with two big books. The Color ASL Encyclopedia and Deafness (child's edition) . They didn't talk that much before, but she watches TV with him sometimes. She shows him the books and after flipping through the ASL encyclopedia, slowly signs "Hello, my name is Liz."
He blinks. "I know that," he signs.
She huffs. "Your name," she signs.
But you know it already? He does his namesign.
Elizabeth shakes her head. "It's Cassidy," she fingerspells.
He realizes she doesn't know his namesign. "Cassidy is the sign for my name," he explains.
She tries to mimic it, but he has to repeat it three times for her to get it right. "What's the sign for my name?" she asks.
He shrugs. "I don't know," he says. "My teacher had us all make names."
It turns out the color encyclopedia didn't teach her that many signs because she doesn't know "teacher" or "make" or past tense so he ends up just spelling almost everything. Actually it's kind of annoying and he doesn't know why she's talking to him all of a sudden, but he feels like she's trying to be nice and he wasn't very good at it before either so he decides to also be nice.
Elizabeth keeps coming to talk to him. She gets better slowly because all she has is the encyclopedia and him trying to remember his teacher's lessons from the very start, but she does get better and eventually they're signing more than they're spelling. They don't talk about that much. Elizabeth is doing good in school and she wishes Father was home more and Mike just learned how to drive so Father is making him pick her up from school which he hates but Father said he had to do it or he would kill him so he does. Also sometimes he watches her because he has to or else Father will kill him but all his friends aren't talking to him anymore because he almost killed someone so he just sits in his car in the parking lot while she reads in the library, which is where she got the books. She says she asked about books on feeding tubes and tracheostomies but there weren't any, she's sorry, and he says it's okay.
He asks if Mike is mean to her and she says not really. Not like before. She asks if he's mad at Mike and he says yes because it feels weird to say no because it did hurt a lot and he was really mean before. When he really thinks about it, he doesn't care that much, but if he had to choose either hate or forgive he thinks it's still hate.
He knows his father is mean to Elizabeth. His father said Elizabeth is a pest. Julia says his father isn't very good to him either but he thinks that's just because he doesn't want to spend money on him. He asked once what would happen if his father stopped paying money for doctors and stuff and Julia said he would probably die because if he had a seizure or one of the tubes ripped or he started bleeding there would be nobody around to help, which he agrees would be pretty bad so he hopes she keeps coming.
He still has nightmares a lot. More nightmares now. Elizabeth lets him sleep in her bed and that makes them stop. She says she has them too when she's alone so it's a win-win.
Elizabeth and him barely talked before, so sometimes he wonders why she learned sign language just to talk to him. He hasn't asked. Now the two of them do their homework together and sometimes he helps her with hers. She says he's a good big brother but he kind of wonders if he's just better than Mike.
Mike still doesn't look at him. At this point he's learned that Mike probably feels guilty about almost killing him, although Elizabeth says he had to go to a doctor because they thought there was something wrong with him and the doctor said he was a sociopath, which means he wouldn't be able to feel guilt, so maybe he's just mad that now nobody likes him.
He doesn't know how he's supposed to feel about Mike. Elizabeth thinks he's okay now because he isn't that mean to her anymore, even if he is a sociopath, although he's not nice either, but when he has to sleep in his own room, he always dreams about the last thing he heard, which was the crunch.
It's not like he's mad at him. He was always scared of Mike before, but now he isn't really scared of him either. Not being mad kind of sucks because in the movie he saw recently after the main character kills his daughter she comes back to haunt him forever and even when he tears out his hair and throws himself off a cliff to make it up to her all she does is laugh, and that sounds super cool. He has thought about trying to force Mike to make everything up to him, but he doesn't know what he would do really. Even if he did die, so what? That wouldn't give him back his hearing or mean he didn't need the tubes and stuff anymore, so there's not that much of a point in it. His father had to pay money to his mother after they got divorced, so maybe there's something like that for when you almost kill your brother. Maybe he can tell Mike to pay him whenever he gets a job.
Although Elizabeth says Mike is trying to get a job, but it's hard because everyone knows he almost killed his brother. Also Mike might just say no.
Mike also won't learn sign language so he would probably have to ask Elizabeth to tell Mike to pay him. He's thought through the whole plan a few times at this point and it just seems like more trouble than it's worth.
Maybe he does want to be like his mother. One day his mother said she never wanted to see any of them again and left forever, which sounds nice.
At least, he doesn't want to see Mike and his father again. Elizabeth can come visit sometimes.
When he asks the doctor about living on his own he says that there's nothing really stopping him from doing it since he's starting to work the feeding tube himself, but if he does have an accident he can't call an ambulance since he can't talk or hear. Also, as he learns, the fact that the tubes need to be replaced every once in a while mean that he needs to be able to afford health insurance unless his father pays for it forever, which seems unlikely.
It doesn't matter that much at first.
*
It's a year and a half after the bite when anything that matters that much happens.
It is a pretty big thing.
It's Julia who tells him what's going on because she says she's quitting. The pizzeria is being shut down because five kids disappeared.
His father came home and told him that Mr. Henry had been arrested for committing a very serious crime. The pizzeria would be re-opened after they remodeled the animatronics. Then he and Julia had an argument for three hours and she left forever.
Elizabeth asks if he's sad. He says he is because he feels like saying that he's annoyed that she just quit and now he has nobody to drive him to school or call an ambulance if he has a seizure would sound mean, or at least creepy. She says she's sad because she feels sorry for the kids and he realizes that it is definitely mean and creepy that he forgot that was even a thing, so he's relieved he didn't say he was annoyed. He agrees that it's terrible that Mr. Henry did that. She seems especially sad about it because she always liked him. He has no strong opinions on Mr. Henry outside of thinking that killing children is pretty bad. He's mad at Mike and he didn't even manage to kill one kid so successfully killing five is way worse, if you look at the numbers.
His father isn't unemployed. He still has the franchise and the new location is already almost built, so it's just bad press. Apparently they're going to put facial recognition in the new ones so they can recognize criminals and make an animatronic to guard the doors. He kind of wonders why they didn't feel like doing that after he got bitten, but maybe it's different because he didn't die. At least he hopes it is. It's still pretty frustrating to know that all that stuff could've been done because if it was maybe the stupid puppet would've knocked Mike and his friends over before they got his head inside Fredbear's mouth.
This is not the main problem, however. The main problem is the fact that Julia quit and his father doesn't hire someone new.
This is an issue because Elizabeth says his father says that now Mike has to drive him to school.
DO YOU WANT ME TO DIE?! he can't say to his father because Father won't learn sign language. He doesn't cry but it's the first time he's felt really scared since he woke up in the hospital. Instead he goes to bed and dreams about the bite.
He wakes up the next morning and gets all the way through getting dressed and walking into the living room to wait for Julia when he remembers.
Mike is sitting on the couch. He looks up, and they make eye contact for the first time in he thinks a year.
His eyes don't look like a different person's. He doesn't really know why they would, but he's surprised that they don't. Mike looks like he did when he got the flu so bad for a week everyone thought he was going to die, though, which is sort of a problem because the reason he has to get up at three in the morning to go to school is because it's a long drive.
Mike says something. With his mouth. He tries to read his lips, but only gets that the last word is probably "go".
Is he asking if he's ready to go? Is he asking if he wants to go to the closed down pizzeria and see what happens? Who knows! He nods because on the off chance it's the first one he needs to get to school.
Instead of walking out the door, Mike walks past him and knocks on Elizabeth's door. Several knocks don't make her open it, which makes sense because she's never awake when he has to leave for school and says she has no idea how he wakes up before seven. He sits down on the couch as he watches Mike realize this.
He knows what happens next. It's obvious if you think about it. They're not allowed to lock their doors, so he'll just go in there and drag her out.
He waits for it, honestly kind of hoping he does it quickly because they really are gonna be late if he takes too long.
Eventually he does open the door, but it's almost ten minutes later when he leaves, with Elizabeth trailing behind him with her eyes almost closed. Mike looks at him and the death glare that was on his face a second ago twists into something else. He sighs and points at the door.
Mike steps on the gas enough to shock Elizabeth awake. He drops her off, but an hour and a half before school starts the place is dark. He doesn't think his brother realized that, because Mike slams his head into the steering wheel. He's trying to figure out how late they're gonna be if Mike and Elizabeth start fighting until he sees people in the fenced off field. He taps Mike on the shoulder with the confidence of someone poking a really big angry bear, which is to say not much.
Mike looks up. He points at the field. Mike sees the people and says something to Elizabeth.
He sits up to see behind them.
"There are people in the field," he signs. "You can go inside."
Elizabeth's face screws up for a second before she huffs. "Fine," she signs, and gets out of the car. They watch her realize the door's open and go inside.
Mike looks at the time on the car, shouts what he thinks from context clues are probably swearing, and pulls a map out of the glovebox.
He stays quiet, suddenly grateful that they can't talk and therefore he is not expected to respond.
His brother peels out of the school parking lot and speeds through a yellow and red light before at least getting to a part of the route he recognizes.
He's eager to check out, but his fears are confirmed when Mike doesn't merge left on the right street. Rapid-fire weighing his options and deciding Mike is going to be angrier if they get lost than if he gives directions, he points left.
Mike goes left in time. They're on the crosswalk a little but nobody's crossing so it's fine.
From then on he pays attention and points whenever they need to turn so Mike doesn't get mad because he didn't tell him in time. He glances at the clock every now and then to see it tick from five minutes late to an hour, all the way to two hours before Mike finally pulls into the parking lot. He gets out quickly, half-jogging into school, and only stopping when he's inside to see Mike drive away.
When he explains to his teacher that his old caretaker quit and now his brother is taking him and his sister to school, she understands and just says to see if his brother can wake up a little earlier next time.
At lunch, one of his classmates asks if the brother taking him to school today is the one that almost killed him.
"Yeah," he confirms.
His classmate's eyes widen. "Aren't your parents scared he's gonna hurt you again?"
I WISH. He shrugs. "I guess not."
"That's really scary," she signs. "Dang. If you're alone in the car with him he could totally just crash it and kill both of you."
See, thank everything that stupid spring went right into the part of his brain that made him a crybaby, because otherwise he would burst into really embarrassing tears right now. Instead he just sits there until the pause becomes awkward. "I hope he doesn't do that," he responds eventually. "He takes my sister to school and she hasn't died," he continues mostly to reassure himself.
"Maybe he just hates you ," she points out.
God I hate talking to people. She's probably right but it's the last thing he wants to hear.
He looks around for someone he could sit next to instead, but the boy who liked going to Fredbear's isn't around. He rudely stands up in the middle of a conversation and walks away to ask the teacher where he is.
It takes a while for her to figure out who he's talking about because he didn't ever actually learn his name. "Fritz?" she asks finally when he describes a short boy with freckles. "He didn't come to school today."
Just his luck. He decides to stand facing the window until lunch is over and ignore anyone trying to get his attention.
Hopefully Fritz comes to school tomorrow.