Chapter Text
“Come out already Susie, you already won! The rest of us are tired of waiting for cake!”
Cassidy should have known better than to indulge in hide-and-seek with the rest of her friends, but she was all out of Faz-Coins to spend for the weekend, and all the pizza in the world wouldn’t be enough to get her into that ball pit, it probably had enough germs to contaminate a schoolyard. Regardless, after being assigned seeker as a result of being the newest player of the game, she had found everybody else with relative ease, (She snickered remembering Fritz midway into the Women’s Restroom, almost as offended for his indecency as impressed he would dare attempt it.) but even after asking everybody else, nobody knew what crafty spot Susie had managed to keep from the rest of the group. It made more sense for her to have everybody split up looking for her, and everybody followed suit because it’s what they always did (It isn’t like anybody had the guts to challenge her.)
It was becoming extremely apparent that Susie was either a magician or the best hide-and-seek-erer in pizzeria history because Cassidy hadn’t been able to see so much as a tuft of blonde curls in the past ten minutes, and she found herself getting pretty annoyed in the middle of a boring, empty spare party room.
“They always complain about freeze tag but at least we can play it on a full stomach” she grumbled to herself, about to head out of the room when she heard a clatter behind her. Cassidy spun around, insults on her tongue that would definitely result in a lecture from some staff member when she realized what the noise was, or more importantly wasn’t.
An unmarked dust-covered door was cracked open, although nothing other than pitch-black darkness was visible through this. She wasn’t even aware that party rooms could have anything other than tables and plastic plates in them, much less a door that looked straight out of her mother’s office. It uncharacteristically had no animal designs, plastic flyers, or even a basic coat of paint that covered Freddy Fazbear’s, and part of her wondered why Evan had never mentioned this room before, did he even know it was here? She considered going back to the dining area to try to find him, Evan’s knowledge of the pizzeria essentially made him a GPS with a stuffed teddy bear, but her stomach groaned at the prospect. She couldn’t bear waiting another second for Susie to show off her camouflaging witchcraft, and the hint of new adventure in such a familiar and repetitive building certainly didn’t hurt either.
“Susie! I’m not waiting any longer so you can quit hiding around now!”
The door had swung open with little resistance, and Cassidy’s eyes adjusted to the small amount of light leaking into the room now. The walls were a colorless gray, and it was largely empty aside from a couple shelves with spare parts of the older animatronics, mostly endoskeleton limbs or appendages haphazardly organized. In the back of the room was a large table with papers sprawled all over with a small little desk lamp. Walking over to it she realized the papers seemed to be blueprints, roughly drawn sketches of wearable costumes for Fredbear and Golden Bonnie. Written next to the drawings were a bunch of engineering and designing gibberish she didn’t particularly understand or care for, although she had to admit the costumes appeared to be much more complicated to operate then she had given the employees credit for.
Glossing over the reminder of the room it was becoming clear despite being initially a thrilling prospect, the mystery space had ended up not much more than a gloomy storage room, and if Susie had known about its existence, she clearly had made the right decision that it was not worth her time. Cassidy was seriously pondering if having her stomach eat itself would save her of the debilitating hunger when she had a soft click behind her. She swerved to look behind her but her eyes were effectively plastic in the complete darkness that now surrounded her, the light of the party room now a memory.
Oh what I’m gonna do to those knuckleheads.
Cassidy was at the end of her patience, tired, annoyed and absolutely starving, and she marched over to the door to clobber whatever sorry prankster was setting her up when she saw a flicker of movement. She paused and squinted her eyes, and realized not only was there definitely somebody who had shut the door on her, the fool shut themself in with her! She grinned a little, it seemed like the only food she’d be seeing was a knuckle sandwich to donate, but it had been awfully long since she had gotten to humble someone at Freddy’s.
“Hey idiot! The game’s over, and judging from looking at you, you wouldn’t have exactly given me trouble.”
The shadow didn’t hear her, or at least seemed awfully unconcerned with her jeers, fidgeting with their hands until she heard a sharp click, and suddenly the only sound she could hear was her own breathing. She wasn’t aware the door had a lock on the inside.
“Are you crazy, you loser!? If you wanted a problem you definitely got one!” Cassidy shouted, fists clenched and shaking at the figure.
The figure finally stopped fidgeting, and Cassidy realized as it straightened up that the whole time they had been hunched over. Cassidy was the tallest kid in her group, but the shadow was at least a head taller, closer to two. They were lean to the point where it looked like they would blow away with a gust of wind, paper-thin arms that hung well past their waist. Its proportions looked closer to a complete endoskeleton than a human, and for a brief moment she assumed it was just some broken embarrassing prototype Henry had stowed away until it took a step forward and she got her first real good look.
It was a blob with no clothes or accessories, like a demon who had just been summoned. Its skin was completely purple, as if someone had vomited a pack of colored markers into its texture and it never got washed out, and she had goosebumps just by looking at it. The skin looked loose and uncanny, like it wasn’t something that it was born with but had taken and stuffed into itself. There were cracks all over the purple thing’s pigmentation, dried red marks of uncleaned blood and scars covered it. It absolutely reeked, of death and decomposition, of rotting hopes and dreams that died long ago and it made her feel nauseous. She felt herself shaking despite her best efforts, and it only got worse when she finally looked up. The purple creature’s face looked like death itself. No hair, nose, ears or most parts of a face, with only rotting purple skin in the areas unnaturally covered. It had an unnerving grin that reached as high as the top of its cheeks and the bottom of its chin, the mouth an abyss dripping with blood and wickedness. Where there should have been eyeballs was a void, and yet even though it shouldn’t have been able to see Cassidy had never felt so bare before someone’s gaze. It felt as if the monster was boring into her very own soul, picking her will apart like a wolf toying with its food.
Cassidy had never seen something so evil in her life, it looked straight out of Michael’s sketchbook, and for the first time maybe in her whole life, she was terrified. She was paralyzed with fear, a deer caught in the headlights of a purple car inching closer. Her usual shouts of defiance couldn’t make it out of her throat, she couldn’t even think about anything other than about how she needed to get away. The backroom became suffocatingly small as the gap between her and the creature lessened inch by inch, and it revealed the tool it had been fidgeting with. A serrated switchblade stained with old, dried blood that was bigger than Cassidy’s forearm, twirling with it before settling on pointing it directly at her. Her vision was blurry, shaking so hard she felt like she was in an earthquake, and she could feel the wetness of teardrops sliding down her face.
And then suddenly, the creature roared an awful sound, a deep scream from hell that she felt vibrate through her bones and took the breath out of her lungs. Her heart stopped as the primal cry sent winds that cut through her like paper, and her knees buckled under the immense pressure as she desperately tried to gasp for air with the wind knocked out of her.
Before she could take another breath, she watched as the demon hunched over and lunged for her throat.