Chapter Text
Michael leaned back against the wall of the prize corner, the quietest spot in the pizzeria he could find at the moment, sighing as he slowly slid down to sit onto the floor. When had his life started to spiral downhill like this?
It certainly hadn’t always been bad. Hurricane was small but on the way to enough places to have a steady flow of visitors. They had plenty of outlets of larger chains, but Fazbear’s had an appeal to many as the town’s home-grown business, and as such the Aftons seemed a picture-perfect family- a father who had moved in to help his local friend’s business and whose skills had helped it flourish, three children who had excelled in school and been popular with their classmates… but recently everything had just started falling apart.
His dad had always been a busy man, but it seemed to Michael like he was spending less and less time around his family. Evan and Elizabeth too seemed to be slipping away from him, talking less and less, the interactions they did have were starting to feel rote and almost scripted. Of course Michael knew what he should do, he knew he needed to stop getting hung up on this strange feeling of yawning emptiness, but it still weighed on him.
“Alright Mike,” he muttered to himself “Stop wallowing in self-pity already and get up”.
A dull thud to his right made Michael jolt. He looked to see that the top of the giant striped box that stood next to the prize counter had come unhinged, its halves folding to either side. A stark white shape began emerging from behind the walls of the box as the masked puppet within rose very slowly, almost cautiously, the dark shapes of its eyes blank, yet almost human-like in shape compared to the circular sockets of the other characters in the building.
Michael felt the tension in his muscles drain out. He’d almost forgotten about that thing. The Puppet had been part of the restaurants for as long as Michael could remember, but while the more famous mascots sang, danced, and told stories of their adventures, The Puppet had always been in the background, silent, and content to spend most of its day in a box.
As it peaked fully over the edge of the box, Michael couldn’t help but wonder what on earth Mister Emily and his father had been thinking when making it. Instead of the soft bulk of most animatronics, it was incredibly slim, like a stick figure that had leaped out of a child’s drawing, red and purple marks standing out against its white mask. Michael knew he should probably find it creepy, he knew plenty of other people found it creepy, but somehow he didn’t. There was something about The Puppet that was comforting, its presence felt almost familiar even if he had only interacted with it in passing before.
“Hey there” Michael said, feeling like a complete idiot. “I guess I woke you up. I’ll be out of your face in a few moments, I just needed the quiet”.
The Puppet tilted its head to the side slightly, neck bobbing backwards and forwards again, almost like a polite nod to show it was listening. Michael rubbed his eyes. He really couldn’t be getting enough sleep if he was starting to get the impression that an animatronic was listening to him. But as long as he was doing this, he might as well get it all out, right?
“There’s just a lot going on and I don’t have anybody to talk to about it” Michael explained. He stood up, stretching from side to side before stepping up to the Prize Counter. The Puppet quickly rose a few feet, its long striped arms extending out of the box as it lay its hands against the opened sides of the lid.
“It’s just… not long ago, I thought I had everything I could want. My dad was one of the people behind the coolest place in town, my brother and sister were doing great, school was going alright, I had… I had a really great friend, and her dad let us all look at the new characters he was thinking of. But now dad’s caught up in his work all the time. I know I’m the oldest and I should be able to take care of Evan and Elizabeth, but sometimes I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing with them. Liz is getting into trouble so much more than she used to… and I suppose I am too, and Evan’s scared all the time now, and I’m trying to make him cut it out but I don’t think it’s working. I barely even see Mister Emily any more, and Charlie is…” Michael’s voice caught, and it took him a few seconds to remember to breathe.
“None of which you understand of course, because you are a machine. God, what am I even doing, this is ridiculous”. Michael turned back towards the dining hall, ready to go out and find his siblings before they could get up to anything, when he heard a rustling from behind him. Michael turned to see The Puppet leaning forwards out of its box, staring at him while stretching its spindly arms towards him, a laminated poster unsteadily balanced between two three-fingered hands. Michael took the poster and held it under the bright lights illuminating the Prize Counter.
It was a simple poster, just the pizzeria’s logo stamped onto one corner of a photograph, taken of the dining hall during a party from a spot near the building’s entrance which had a good vantage point. The camera had perfectly caught the stage, the band performing, Fredbear and Spring Bonnie walking from table to table, the way the multicolored spotlights mixed with the softer warmer light in the rest of the room. But Michael remembered this poster, even if it had been a while since it was created, and his eyes instantly locked on the leftmost table one row back from where the cameraman had stood. The boy at the far end of that table was shorter and slightly-rounder faced than Michael was now, but it was recognizably him. Elizabeth’s reddish-blonde hair and her arm tugging on one of Michael’s arms were visible, her face obscured by somebody in the row of tables in front of her, but picture-Michael didn’t seem to notice, he was too focused on an animated discussion he was having with the girl across from him. She was facing partly away from the camera, most of her face obscured by the angle or by her long dark hair, but you could just see the wide luminous smile across her face.
Michael looked up at The Puppet, feeling a pressure in his chest like something was squeezing his heart. It rarely reared so far out of its box for him to really appreciate how tall it was- its mask was just short of scraping against the ceiling, which was admittedly a little lower in this corner than the extremely high roof of the main room, and its legs were still partially inside the box. Despite how high above Michael it loomed, the way it swayed struck him as apprehensive, and for a brief moment Michael was reminded of the image of a person holding their hands behind their back, blushing and nervously smiling.
He shook his head. You were supposed to anthropomorphize the robots, that was the whole point behind making each a distinct character with a memorable and colorful design, but his slightly sleep-deprived mind was taking it too far. The Puppet repeatedly ran a basic cycle of resting in the box, emerging, and giving prizes to people, none of what had just happened was at all out of the ordinary for its behavior.
Still, Michael found himself saying “Thank you” to The Puppet as he walked out of the Prize Corner, and as he tried to figure out which off-limits area Liz had broken into this time, he felt like a set of carved black eye-holes were fixed on him whenever he passed through the dining hall.
The rest of the day went by in a blur for Michael, and in what seemed like no time at all, he was back home, lying in bed with the lights on as he ran his fingers over the poster he had been given. In the privacy of his own room, he felt tears welling up in his eyes that he would never have allowed himself to shed anywhere else.
In the early days of the pizzeria, William Afton and Henry Emily had practically been joined at the hip, always working on some project together or wandering through the restaurant watching children go wild over the animatronics. Likewise, Michael had spent almost as much time with Charlotte Emily as he did with his own siblings, especially when they were young- he was ever so slightly older than Charlie, but she was much older than Evan or Elizabeth and so she had always felt more like a peer, less like somebody he had to deal with and more like somebody he could connect with.
Charlie’s energy and radiant enthusiasm had always been able to light up his day when things were bad at home, and she seemed to know just how to cheer his younger siblings up when he couldn’t. Michael always thought it would be the two of them forever against whatever the world had to throw at them… but then Charlie had vanished, and turned up dead in an alley the next day. Now that he thought about it, that was most certainly the start of everything going wrong. Michael fell asleep with the poster still clutched to his chest, and in his dreams a pair of dark eyes continued to watch him with concern.
---
It was an unusually cool afternoon for the very beginning of summer, and a quiet day at Freddy’s for the most part. While schools had let out several hours ago, they weren’t quite out for the summer yet, meaning not many families with children would be travelling, and though Freddy’s was popular with the local children, only a few were the kind of dedicated regulars who came more than once or twice a month. However one could almost always count on at least three children in the building this time of day- William Afton rarely went home any earlier than six, and the staff had long ago grown accustomed to having the Afton children around, even on slow days like this.
Michael tucked a newly-finished sheet of math homework back into his bag and leaned back in his chair, watching the band perform. He knew all the songs by heart of course, but there was something comforting about the show, watching a carefully-designed routine come together seamlessly. As Michael got older so much of the world seemed to lose its wonder and luster, and everything was so much bleaker than he remembered- just the price of growing up he figured. But even after all these years, there was still a child-like joy Freddy and friends could bring out in him that hadn’t been extinguished.
His eyes darted back and forth, carefully checking who was on duty in the main hall before pulling a thin spiral notebook from his backpack, flicking it open. The pages were filled with sketches, some careful intricate charts of wires, pistons, and servomotors, some more freestyle depictions of various objects, including numerous scenes of the animatronics. Michael could remember when there were always a few of his drawings up on the fridge and scattered around the house, but that had stopped years ago, when his father had told him he was getting too old to waste so much time doodling. The pace at which the notebook had been filled in had slowed down a lot after that.
Still, he had quite a few more pages left in the book, and Michael was starting to get the beginning of an idea forming somewhere in the back of his head as he saw some of the group shots he had made of the animatronics. Michael walked to a large table that was set partway into the wall about halfway down the dining hall, on which was a large box of paper and a second box which he instinctively reached into only to find his hand running through air. Michael looked with suspicion over the nearly-empty dining hall. It wasn’t nearly busy enough today for the art supplies to be running out, unless…
Michael found his younger brother Evan in the corner of the room, sitting next to a black-haired girl around the same age as him who was wearing an orange shirt. Pieces of paper were scattered across the table in front of them, the girl pointing to something on one piece of paper while Evan drew with a colored pencil, more of which were piled at the table’s edge. Evan had an expression of intense concentration, somewhat ruined by the fact that he was slightly sticking his tongue out one end of his lips.
“Heeeeyyyy there little man” Michael said, slowing the first word into an extended drawl. “I’m going to borrow these for a bit if you don’t mind”. He scooped up the remaining colored pencils in one hand, leaving Evan with only the dark yellow he was currently holding. Evan inched back on his seat, his eyes shooting wide open as he stared apprehensively.
Michael had never quite understood Evan. How did he expect to survive, much less get anything done, when he let everything in the world frighten him? He and Elizabeth were afraid sometimes of course, and they’d gone through phases of being flighty, but they’d quickly gotten over it. They were Aftons, fear didn’t control them, they controlled it, as Father frequently said. Still, Evan being unable to stand up for himself was a known factor.
The girl in orange was more of a surprise- she immediately latched both of her hands onto Michael’s, pulling at his arm with more strength than he would have expected of someone half his height. “We were using those,” she shouted. “Give them back!”
Tugging his arm back, Michael couldn’t quite break the girl’s grip. “Wow, Evan, I didn’t realize you had friends. It’s cute, really, but I’m not going to let you two just hoard all of these, better to let some more talented people have a turn…”
Evan gently rested his fingers on the girl’s shoulder, very softly saying “Cassidy, it’s not that big a deal, you don’t need to…”
“No!” shouted the girl, Cassidy apparently, redoubling her tugging on Michael’s hand, her piercing green eyes locking with Michael’s. “You’re a big jerk, you know that? I’m not going to quit before you do.”
Smirking, Michael said “I think there’s a very valuable lesson about sharing to be…” he was cut off when Cassidy’s foot slammed into his chest. Despite his size advantage, he hadn’t been expecting it and the impact disrupted his footing. Michael fell back onto the tile floor, colored pencils scattering in every direction as he felt the force of the fall reverberate through his shoulders.
Michael rose up to a seated position, blinking at the lights suddenly pointed right towards his eyes from this lower vantage point. Once his eyes adjusted he could once again see Evan and Cassidy, but strangely neither were looking at him, both staring somewhere above and behind him. As Michael stood up, the distant sound of songs on stage was drowned out by soft resonant notes accompanied by a faint mechanical ratcheting. The five-note end to each short reel of song was immediately recognizable- Pop Goes The Weasel.
Turning, Michael felt his heart skip a beat. The Puppet was looming over them, its box empty in the background as it hung at the edge of the Prize Corner. Michael stepped back to put himself between it and the table, and he could feel Evan cling onto his hand squeezing for dear life. Cassidy pushed around the side of them, her hands balled up into fists, but she seemed vastly less confident than she had a moment ago.
The Puppet tilted its head, long striped arms drawing slowly upwards and backwards at the shoulder before going slack. Michael couldn’t shake the impression that it had just sighed at him, or as close as a thing with no lungs and a permanently fixed expression could do to sighing. Now Michael was really sure he was starting to see things. As always the Puppet’s eyes were dark and blank, its mouth an unchanging grin, so why was he getting the impression of… disappointment? Was he really that much of a nutjob to be projecting his conscience onto a piece of fabric and painted plastic? His questionable sanity aside, maybe he was getting to something. Evan’s hand digging into his arm was starting to get a little painful, but he couldn’t be that angry as he looked at his brother. He couldn’t even be mad at Cassidy for kicking him.
Giving a sigh of his own, Michael turned his back on The Puppet entirely, he leaned down to eye-level with Evan. Michael knew his brother was just too soft, too weak to deal with what the world had in store. So Michael tried to toughen Evan up, get him ready for whatever he might face, but even when Evan’s inability to deal with much of anything drove him mad, he could never hate his brother. He’d tried to, and indeed he’d gotten quite good at being angry and frustrated at Evan. Hate would be so much simpler and easier to manage than his true feelings.
Maybe if things weren’t working right now, he could try a different approach, just for a little bit? Even if it didn’t work, that gnawing feeling that he was failing his family, brought out by the disappointment he had imagined, made him want to try. “Hey, It’s alright,” he said. “You’re safe here, there’s nothing here that’s going to hurt you, I promise”.
Evan silently pointed at The Puppet, his hand trembling. Michael tried to crack a smile. “You don’t need to be afraid of them, they’re a friend”. He turned back to The Puppet. “Aren’t you?” Against all odds, The Puppet nodded, fluidly floating a few feet back.
Michael rose to his feet again, Evan letting go of his arm and generally looking a little calmer. Cassidy was still glaring at Michael, but she said nothing. Looking at the floor, Michael winced at the scattered pencils. “I’d better get this cleaned up before closing time” he muttered.
“I’ll help.” Evan said, his voice still quavering a little. “Dad isn’t going to be happy with us if we leave a mess”.
The two of them began picking up colored pencils, Cassidy joining in unprompted, practically glued to Evan’s side as if she were afraid something might happen to him if she moved more than a few feet away. The Puppet moved back into its box, but it didn’t retreat beneath the lid, instead staying upright and watching the three of them as they gathered the supplies they had spilled together. “All right you little twerps,” Michael said as they brought the last few pencils back to the table, “Mission accomplished”.
Now that nobody was working on it, Michael could see the drawing Evan had been working on much more easily. It was, as he expected, not very good. Shapes were uneven, lines scrawled and drawn over, and the style was quite childish, but he could still recognize it as a group picture of the animatronics. Two yellow figures with purple bow ties at the center, one with a hat and one with long ears, a near-copy of each central figure in brown and bluish-purple, a brighter yellow figure with an orange beak and a white bib, and a red one with pointed ears, a single eye, and a grey question-mark shape in place of one hand.
Running his hand through the multicolored pile they had collected, Michael picked out three pencils in black, red, and purple, holding them out to Evan. “You know I think this picture is missing somebody. I’m sure they won’t mind letting us draw them”.
Michael and Cassidy sat on either side of Evan as he drew, offering input as he added the final Fazbear character to his drawing, a tall and incredibly slender black and white striped figure with a wide smile. It was surprisingly soothing, and reminded Michael of before he and his siblings started to pull apart from one another, back when they had watched movies together and introduced their friends to each other, and really acted like family.
When the drawing was finished, Evan and Cassidy walked over to the Prize Counter, holding it up to face The Puppet. The spindly figure leaned in close to look at it, then very slowly stretched out its arms, resting a three-fingered hand on each of the children’s shoulders. Once again Michael was struck by how comfortable he felt around the thing, no matter how weird it was. Like it listened, like it was thinking of him, like it wanted him to be better. The Puppet sprung up to near its full height, grabbing something from a shelf and leaning down to place it in Evan’s hands.
Evan locked eyes with first Michael, then Cassidy, then he opened the box. Inside was a stuffed animal about the size of his head, yellow with two buttons and a purple bowtie down the front, a similarly purple hat stitched onto its head. Evan’s eyes lit up as he held the plushie tight to him, a smile lighting up on his face. God, how long had it been since Michael had seen Evan smile? How long had it been since he had really genuinely smiled? It must have been before… back when Charlie was still around, he thought. Nothing had really been the same since then after all.
Michael watched as Evan and his friend returned to the main dining hall, but he stayed in the Prize Corner for the moment, staring into the mask of The Puppet. “Thank you” he said quietly, still feeling a little bit stupid talking to one of the mascots. “I’m glad Evan is making friends of course, it’s just… I never know what to do with him.”
The Puppet leaned its head inquisitively, and Michael continued “He’s my brother, and with father busy it’s my job to take care of him. I try, but sometimes it feels like I don’t know any more than Evan does, like I can’t help but keep making terrible choices. My friends at school say I worry too much, but what if one day I do something I won’t be able to fix?”
His eyes narrowed. “...and then on top of all that, there’s you. I don’t know if I’m starting to crack under the pressure or if there’s more going on, but I know there’s something up with you. The way you act… you can hear us, can’t you?”
The Puppet nodded, and Michael’s heart started racing. He still didn’t trust himself completely, but something very strange was happening here. Michael remembered bits and pieces of The Puppet from when he was younger, and it had never been any different than the other characters, it played its script to perfection but it wasn’t aware, wasn’t thinking. Now it was.
“I don’t know what’s happening with you… but I’m going to find out”