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“Something’s wrong with the animatronics.” Michael says, like he’s pointing out the color of the sky.
Henry hums and gestures to the spot beside him on the dock. “Sit with me for a while.”
He does. It’s late in the evening, the sun is setting somewhere on the other side of the lake, out of view behind the trees. It bathes the sky and the water alike in a fuzzy blend of orange and red. Michael can’t remember the last time he actually watched a sunset. He isn’t here to now, either.
He sits in silence for a while, mulling over his own thoughts. When he called up Henry and asked to meet, his mind was swarming with questions; all the things he had learned and had still yet to comprehend were swirling inside, aching to break free, to be told and heard by another. Henry was the only person he knew would listen, would understand.
Now, on the edge of the water, it all feels so far away. He still buzzes with curiosity, those ever aching questions ripping him apart from the inside, but he’s lost the words for them.
Henry, just as observant and empathetic as Michael remembers him, takes over the burden.
“Do you remember the last time we came here?” He asks. He sounds so tired, so saturated with an unseen sadness. Michael nods around his closing throat as he lets the lake bring him back in time.
“It was right after Evan…” He can’t say it. It’s been almost a decade and he still can't say it. “Dad asked you to pick me up from the hospital and bring me home, but we stopped here first.”
Henry nods. He hasn’t turned to look at Michael this whole time, his eyes vacantly reflecting the color of the water.
Michael remembers being angry. It was a feeling that came from so many places and swept him up in a windstorm. It was all he could focus on in those years, the burning anger and hatred he held for everything around him. It’s been so long, the embers are so cold, he barely remembers what he used to be so angry about.
He’d screamed when Henry tried to take him home. At Henry, at the doctors, at his own father. Why don’t I get to stay with him, too? I want to stay with my brother, I need to stay with him. He had been just as afraid as he was angry, afraid of what he had done, afraid of what would happen to Evan, afraid that he would never get to see him again.
It had been his father’s stern words, capable as ever at smothering the fire in Michael’s heart by force, that quieted his protests.
You’ve done enough, Michael. Go home with Henry.
The words still sting. Michael had looked to his mother in the hopes she would have something else to say, but she wouldn’t even look him in the eye. His mother was vacant and hollow as she sat by Evan’s bedside. Motionless, like a doll.
He left, but they didn’t go home.
Instead, he brought him here to this dock on this lake. The man had always been nothing but a source of joy in his young life, even when Michael misdirected his anger towards him, Henry would always give him that warm, forgiving smile.
The smile he wore was more strained that day, and Michael knew why.
He didn’t say anything as Michael screamed at him, too. He kept smiling, listening as Michael shouted until his throat was raw. He listened until Michael ran out of things to yell about, and instead settled into tense, wordless breathing.
Only then did Henry look at him, his eyes brimming with all the love his father never granted him, and tell him that he forgave him.
Michael could do nothing but cry. He cried harder than he remembers ever having done in his life. He cried until the sun was gone and air chilled, until there was nothing left inside of him to cry for.
In the present, a much older but no less kind Henry smiles at him again. “Do you know why I took you here that day?”
“No, you never told me.”
Henry lets out a small hum. “No one was thinking about you on that day.”
Michael stares at Henry, wide-eyed and affronted. No one was thinking of him? Of course they weren’t, it wasn’t Michael who was screaming in pain, it wasn’t Michael who wouldn’t stop bleeding all the way to the hospital. It wasn’t Michael’s birthday.
But Henry continues. “You were hurt too, weren’t you? Everyone was so focused on your brother that none of them stopped to ask how you were feeling.”
He feels like he’s suffocating. “Of course they didn’t, I’d just ki-” He chokes around the word. “I…ruined the party. I ruined everything. Why would it matter how I felt?”
“Ah, but that’s where they’re always wrong. People think that guilt should strip someone of their humanity. That people who do bad things must be monsters, because who with a good heart would ever do wrong?” Henry finally looks at Michael, and he suddenly wishes he hadn’t. The man’s eyes are sad, but kind. Scarred, but still full of love. It makes Michael feel small.
“Besides,” Henry says, softly. “You regret it, don’t you?”
Michael swallows thick bile in his throat. “Every single day.”
“Then you’re not a monster.”
For the second time, Michael nearly breaks down on this dock by the lake. He knows that Henry would let him, just like last time, and they would stay here until Michael ran out of tears to shed.
But he didn’t come here to pity himself again.
“Henry…my father, I think he’s done something terrible.”
The man beside him doesn’t twitch, his patient gaze urging Michael to continue.
“He asked me to visit his old workshop, the one with Circus Baby. He told me…he needed something that was left behind there. He needed me to get it for him.”
He watches the way Henry’s eyebrows draw in deep, suspicious thought. He’s always been the quieter kind of thinker, not partial to the boisterous and show-offy nature of his father’s intelligence.
“And what did you find?” He asks, and Michael prepares himself for a long story.
“Henry…I found Elizabeth down there.”
Henry’s eyes widen only a fraction. “Her body?”
“No. Her. She was there…she was inside Baby.”
Michael hears Henry mutter something, but the shock and disbelief doesn’t come. His stomach twists with dreadful suspicion. Henry asks him to continue, and so he does.
Find the pieces. Put them back together. Those were his father’s instructions after he called Michael out of the blue one day. And when has he ever been able to go against his father? After a lifetime of acknowledgement being pulled barely out of reach, his father’s approval dancing away from him at every turn, Michael has never been able to fight his childish need to impress him.
So he went down, he found his dead sister, and he looked her in the eyes as she hollowed him out and crawled inside. It’s what his father asked of him. It’s the fate he deserved after what he did to Evan. Michael was prepared to accept his death as it was, to slip into the nothingness that comes after.
But then…
Henry looks so patiently at him as Michael describes how it felt to be puppetted by that- thing. Being so viscerally aware of the way his body decomposed and rotted around the metallic skeleton taking the place of his innards. How he slipped in and out of consciousness as the constant pain overrode all his senses.
And how, in his dreams, he met four children wearing masks.
When his body was too far rotten for them to use as cover, they left, taking their spirits with them as they slipped away. Michael thought that would finally be it, until he realized that they- that Elizabeth had left behind a gift for him.
It took months for his body to knit itself back together using the traces of molten metal embedded in his heart. And even then, it could only do so much; The smell of death never left him, tainted everything he touched; He can’t move without limping and his joints won’t stop aching; The light never returned to his eyes- but maybe it was something other than death that broke that part of him.
During that time he wrote down everything he could remember from those dreams, and when the mystery looped itself together in his mind he was already scrambling to get Henry on the phone. Now, the truth sits on the tip of his tongue and it tastes like lead.
“My father killed those kids, Henry. The ones that went missing back then. He did it.”
Nothing happens at first, Michael wonders if he actually managed to get the words out or just imagined himself doing so, but he turns his head and his eyes meet Henry’s and he feels chills run down his arms.
“Michael,” Henry sighs, his voice rasping around his name, “I know what you’re going to ask me, but please. Believe me. There is nothing you can do.”
Michael looks at the weariness in Henry’s eyes, the certainty- the fear in his voice as he urges him. And it suddenly makes sense.
“...You already knew.”
He wishes Henry’s expressions weren’t so earnest, that they didn’t betray such a deep and raw level of emotion inside him. He looks miserable, wracked with guilt and grief alike.
“He was the one who took my Charlie away.”
Michael’s world— clinging desperately to the cracks of it as he has until now, to the illusions and excuses he used to keep himself sane in the face of all this chaos— falls apart.
He feels like a child again, sitting over the lake with his legs dangling above the water, not knowing whether to hate the world or himself more. He feels the urge to dive down, to swim under the current until it sweeps away his soul to meet with his siblings in the dark beyond, where he can hold them close and pretend that none of this ever happened.
But he can’t run away, not again. “I don’t believe you.” He says, surprising himself with the edge of his voice as Henry looks struck. “Not about Charlie. I mean that there’s nothing we can do. There has to be.”
“I tried back then, Michael. I did everything I could to connect with her and-”
“Then you didn’t try hard enough!” They both flinch at the volume, but Michael doesn’t back down. “I know they’re in there, all of them, and they can hear us. If we can just find a way to reach their souls, then we can help them. We can save them!
“And maybe-” He chokes. Tears run in fat drops down his cheeks, landing hot on the backs of his palms. “Maybe Evan is one of them. Maybe I can save him, too.”
Finally, Henry blinks and seems to be looking at him and not the irrational child he brought to the dock years ago. Michael takes in a shuddering breath. “Please, Henry. If there’s any way to help them, anything at all. Then I need to at least try.”
“Fine, I’ll…I’ll think about it.” Michael’s head snaps up and Henry raises a hand, “That doesn’t mean I’m going to agree. But, there are some things I could look into that might…put you on the right path.”
Michael can’t stop himself from throwing his arms around the older man’s shoulders. “Thank you,” He wheezes out, feeling more relief than he has in many, many years. Henry puts a hand on his back and they share a moment of mournful silence.
The sun is getting low, so Henry promises to contact Michael when he’s made his decision and they part ways. As Michael trudges down the hiking path back to where he parked, his mind wanders.
Thinking about those children, the world they’re now trapped in all because of what his father has done.
For the first time in years, Michael remembers what it’s like to be angry. He sits behind the wheel of his truck, eyeing the last bits of sunlight between the trees, and uses every inch of fury burning in his heart to etch a vow.
Father.
William Afton will not escape the consequences of his actions. Michael will make sure of it.
I’m going to come find you.