Chapter Text
“This ends, for all of us. End communication”.
Something about the idea of a permanent end had always appealed to Michael Afton. Everything had to stop at some point, at least that's what everyone always said.
The End, at least for Michael, always seemed just out of reach. Every time he thought it was over, that he could finally rest, he found himself waking up. At some point he began to wonder if this was his punishment. If his killing his brother had resulted in a cycle that he could never escape. If the sins of the father had fallen upon the son in his absence. If the son’s own sins accumulated like his father’s, making them less and less distinguishable as individual people and more so a family name doomed to cause misery and suffering, even to those who bear it.
So, for Henry Emily to finally tell him it was over, that everyone hurt by the tragedy wrought by the Afton’s would finally be laid to rest - the sentiment was soothing. His heart felt heavy when he heard that Henry would die too, but Mike understood. Michael, even at only 54, felt so very old, with weary bones and aching eyes, finding the will to keep moving got more difficult each morning, the ash and decay that lay on his tongue making life taste bitter and sad. Henry was older still, suffering under the weight of the what ifs in the same way as Mike did. But unlike himself, Mike thought, Henry ought to die surrounded by loved ones, the big family he had always dreamed of mourning him as he faded painlessly. Henry had made some mistakes, but not like Mike. Not like William. He shouldn't have to die painfully in this hell, nothing but guilt to soothe the bubbling ache that the fire left as it licked its way up his calves. Guilt was a poor balm for aches after all, all it did was exacerbate the burning in your lungs as they filled with smoke. It only fed you stories of all the ways and reasons you deserve that sensation.
The crackling scorch of the fire engulfing his office had killed off most other sounds.
Elizab- Scrap Baby had been singing a haunting melody as she shut down, the metallic scraping of her cobbled together voice box forming more of a cacophony than a symphony, yet still eliciting that eerie unwelcoming togetherness that Michael associated with Baby. A song that seemed just as achingly familiar as it was completely foreign.
Molten Freddy had died screaming, a terrifying sound that seemed to mix and reverberate multiple children laughing and crying together until it was completely unrecognizable as anything human. Michael wanted to feel sympathy for the lost souls, but all he could really feel when thinking about Molten Freddy was terror. He thought that perhaps that made him rather terrible, but he had known that about himself since he was four, and had relearned it over again numerous times since.
He had heard nothing from Lefty since the fire had begun, the creepy Freddy knock off had always seemed more aware than the others, Michael wondered if Charlie had regained enough of herself to say goodbye to her father. He could only hope so. Neither of them deserved their fate.
The fire grew unbearable around him, and the sensation of sewn on bits of skin and sinew, tissue and organs falling apart even more than they already had been would have been disturbing if he weren’t existing three steps outside his own body, desperately hoping this would finally be the end. He couldn't bring himself to feel anything other than relief, though his relief was as painful as dying had been that day in Circus Baby’s Rentals. Of course the end couldn't be peaceful for Michael Afton, that would be far too kind, something Michael had never deserved.
The exits outside of the building may have been closed off to the animatronics by Henry, but his office hadn't been. This wasn’t so much a flaw in the design, Michael was always meant to play the part of a fly in the spider's web. Their plan had never included the what next though. There were no plans after Henry’s final words, just the end to a tragedy that started decades ago.
Perhaps this wouldn't have been a problem if Mike could die quickly like a regular human.
Maybe it wouldn't have been an issue if William Afton wasn't terrified of death.
Alas, neither of these things held true, and even as smoke gathered in what remained of Michael's lungs, and death crept upon him like a vine, slowly strangling him, William Afton, or more accurately, the agony of what was left of him, dragged himself out of the vent beside mike.
“Michael” The Spring Bonnie’s voice box was aged and breaking, but William still shone through, still found a way to speak, to break his son. Just as he always did.
“Father,”
Mike was tired. Far too tired to try and fight anymore, but something in him burned at the idea of his decaying father being the end of him. He didn't want to make it out of this fire, but giving his father the satisfaction of one more kill made whatever was left of him that still lived angrier than Mike had been in a long time.
So, he bolted.
He couldn't move very fast, not with his decaying body. But Mike had been fighting with his body for over 30 years, and the only thing that made that fight a little easier was pissing off his father.
He made it out the door at the back of the office in what felt like record time, but realistically, wasn't particularly quick. Smoke inhalation, even though he didn't really need to breathe anymore, still significantly affected his sense of reality. ScrapTrap remained right behind him, just out of reach. Both of them stumbled into the main hall, their fucked-up game of cat and mouse obscured by smoke and flame.
“It's over William!” Michael shouted, his raspy voice breaking mid-sentence. Between the smoke inhalation that night and the chain-smoking Michael had partaken in over the course of his life and death, you could barely make out what he was saying, but that was ok. Father would understand well enough.
“Only For You, Michael” Mike swerved around Candy Cadet just as his father made a swipe at him, only narrowly missing death by strangulation. “I Will Never Die.” The Mania that Michael only really associated with his father at his most deranged, at the height of his killing spree, seemed to have completely overtaken him. Even after all these years, it still made fear crawl up Michael's esophagus. He would never really stop being afraid of his father. All that remained of the man who had once made Michael’s week by giving him a hand sewn plush of his new prototype rabbit was a cowardly egomaniac, so desperate to get what he wanted that he sacrificed everything.
“Not this time father. You heard Uncle Henry. This ends tonight.” Michael felt like a child again, arguing with his father, using uncle Henry as a source to be cited. Suddenly, Michael was faced with a dead end. Two walls at his sides, a shitty, slightly suspicious ball pit in front of him, and his father behind him. He turned around to face his dad head on.
“I Always come Back,”
Out of the corner of his eye, just where they always sat, Fredbear lay limp and discarded. Corpse like. They appeared to watch the exchange, pinpricks of light aglow in their hollow eye sockets, though Mike was certain if he turned his head fully, the exoskeleton that haunted his nightmares wouldn’t be there at all.
“Not anymore. Not for either of us.” His Father continued to approach and the adrenalin, or whatever it was that had driven him forward thus far, broke into something more fragile. More bitter. “Can’t you be a halfway decent father for once in your goddamn life and just LET IT END?” Michael was screaming at his father by the end of his sentence, smoke, fear, desperation and anger blurring his vision and fuzzing out his inhibitions.
Maybe once upon a time, when William was mostly human, and expected only fear and adoration from his son, he would have been taken aback by Mike shouting at him. But now, years after Michael had left boyhood, father and son had faced off again and again. Using pseudonyms and false names, both with beating hearts and without. Mike had tried to stop his father time and time again, and in return William had killed his son more than once. This tango was familiar to them both, cyclical in nature and seemingly never ending, a true Shakespearean tragedy if ever there was one. So, in the face of his son’s collapsing corpse, in the face of his own seemingly imminent death, viewing what must appear, to his fractured psyche, as some cosmic joke built on a tomb of grief, William Afton laughed.
“My life and yours will not end until I say it can.” his laugh, manic and inhuman, reminded Mike of death. But not the silent, endless kind that Mike craved. No, instead, it sounded like endless cycles of pain. Dying and waking up. A perpetual game of cat and mouse that would loose all meaning and leave nothing but death and destruction in its wake. “I have conquered death, and in doing so my legacy is unending. Life bows to me as Death kneels at my feet, both subservient to me and my whims. I am the God of my world, and you, my son, will learn to pray at my altar.”
Michael wished he could argue with his father. Wished he could shove the man into the fire that crept up the walls to prove that he was as mortal as any of them. But at the end of the day, right now, as his body dissolved, and his remaining strength faded, he couldn’t really find fault with his father's logic. After all, everyone else that had been in the building with them is gone now. Henry and Charlotte, his two biggest opponents, seemed to be gone. It was only him and Michael still alive, as relative as that term may be. This was William’s world, a burning hell in which he was God. Mike was just as much a part of it as the earth and sky were, living only by William’s decree.
Michael was so tired.
Instead of fighting anymore, as he had been doing for so, so long, Mike closed his eyes. He wished, as had been wishing since Ennard stole things that could never be given back, that his senses worked as they should. That he could breathe in the smoke that was suffocating him and taste the ash on his tongue. He wanted to feel the death that surrounded them. Instead, all he had was a vague, aching, warmth and a permanent copper tang in his mouth. He was built of death in the same way his father had created it.
Slowly he opened his eyes again, and instinctively jumped away, Fredbear was right up in his face, only one eye aglow now, the seemingly indifferent curiosity he had felt before had turned to burning anger. Searing his dead skin more than any fire ever could. They were only there for a moment before disappearing, but Michael was dying and his head was foggy, and that momentary scare was enough for him to lose balance, stumbling backwards before rather embarrassingly tripping over its edge and into the dirty ball pit that lay behind him. Even the glimpse he caught of his father’s expression seemed baffled. Golden Freddy must have only appeared to him.
Well, if he was going to die in a stupid manner, at least he could take heart in knowing he had disappointed his father one last time.
The ball pit, when he hit it, seemed to swallow him whole. He was fairly certain it hadn't been that deep, but he sank in and seemingly kept sinking. He couldn’t see any light, and his body felt simultaneously weightless and far too heavy. It felt like falling and it felt like stagnation. Time suddenly seemed meaningless. The sensation of plastic balls surrounding him turned to a sharp stabbing sensation on his skin, like millions of needles poking him relentlessly. If his jaw didn’t feel as though it had cemented itself shut, Michael would have screamed, instead all he could do was wait for the end of whatever hellish ball pit he had fallen in, and hope no kids had peed in it.
All at once light began filtering through his eyelids again, and he realized he must have closed his eyes at some point. The pain had stopped and the smell of smoke had almost entirely vanished, leaving a vaguely nostalgic smell and an ache that felt bone deep.
He didn’t really want to open his eyes again.
Something about himself felt fundamentally wrong, and if he kept his eyes closed, he wouldn’t have to find out what. He could just exist in the quiet. No father, no fire, just... serenity.
…
No Fire?
His eyes snapped open abruptly, the cool light filtering in from his left blinding him for a moment, forcing him to blink rapidly so his eyes would focus on where he was.
His surroundings didn’t make any sense.
Instead of a burning pizzeria and a father prepared to kill him, he was met with an oddly familiar bedroom filled with moonlight. It was supposed to be a new moon on the night they burned down the pizzeria. There shouldn’t have been any moonlight to filter into a window. He also shouldn’t be sitting in a bedroom; he should have been burnt away to meaningless ash and all memory of him along with the rest of the Afton’s finally lost. And yet... here he was. Sitting in a stiff bed with trashy Star Wars blankets... his old bedroom? He thought this place had been torn down years ago to build a road into a new suburb. (And to destroy any evidence of the Afton Family and their crimes).
Maybe he had finally lost it. The psychotic break Michael had expected to come knocking years ago had finally happened. It certainly wouldn’t surprise him. Or perhaps he was dying, and this was his life flashing before his eyes. If that's what this was, it certainly wasn’t how he had expected it to go. He didn’t expect to view it as himself, but rather as a third-party observer, and he had also always expected it to be prominent memories. This seemed like an odd place to start anyway. There was nothing really happening that he could tell, and it appeared to be his teenage bedroom.
This was... strange.
Mike looked around more carefully, his head beginning to spin. What was happening here? How did he get to this place? To this point in time even. He had thrown out his Star Wars blankets the day after Charlie's fatal birthday party because he had accidentally slammed his face into the wall and had a bloody nose bad enough to cover a concerning portion of the comforter with blood. Which meant he was sitting in a version of his room that hadn't existed for decades. His breathing began to speed up.
He didn’t know what the fuck was happening, but he needed out of that room.
Everything was spinning as he scrambled to open the window above his bed, the bug screen having been discarded when he was very young after he practically shredded it when he was sick with a bad fever. His parents had never bothered to replace it. That served him well now, however, as he pushed the window open hastily and nearly went out headfirst before some ounce of common sense caught up to him and he remembered that his room was technically on the second floor. He swung his legs out first instead, but that was as much forethought as he could put into it right then. His mind was nothing but overwhelming panic, completely illogical and irrational but clogging up all mental functionality.
He didn’t remember letting go of the windowsill, but suddenly he was falling through the air and the sensation was so similar to his fall through the ball pit that he wondered if he would suddenly find himself facing down Scraptrap. This concept was quickly trashed as he unceremoniously hit the ground feet first and crumpled like a rag doll. The pain caused him to gasp, then his gasp made him realize he needed to breathe. Not that the realization helped much, as he apparently overcorrected and started hyperventilating. What the fuck was happening.
Logically he knew he was having a panic attack at what some part of his brain kept telling him was his childhood home. Illogically, all he could think about was his Star Wars blankets turning red with Charlie’s blood. Then the blood was Evan’s, then Elizabeth’s, and finally his own blood and organs like the scooper had pulled them out and placed them there and fuck he must be dead right? That was the only explanation for whatever the fuck was happening. This was hell and his eternal torment was just being stuck alone in his thoughts in the house where he had fucked everything up, where he had spent so many nights begging a dead boy and a missing girl for forgiveness that William had on more than one occasion come into his room to shout at him to “shut the hell up I'm trying to work you pathetic idiot.”
He could feel something warm and wet on his face and his mind immediately went to the blood that had splattered onto his Foxy mask after The Bite and he whipped his head back, accidentally slamming it against the brick wall that made up the side of the house, which in turn caused him to cry out in pain. He shakily wiped his hand through the warmth on his face and pulled it back to look at it. While it did, for a moment, look blood red, he blinked, and with a start, realized it was instead... clear? It only appeared visible when the moon reflected off it.
Tears? He hadn't been able to cry since he was scooped.
Mike tried to choke in a breath, feeling lightheaded, then another. He didn’t know why he needed to breathe, or why he could cry, but he could feel his panic ebbing away slowly, leaving him with just the regular anxiety, a stark confusion, and exhaustion. Another deep breath, like Henry had shown Mike the handful of times he had coaxed him through a panic attack. It took a few moments for his breathing to even out into something more normal, and as it did, everything began to feel a little less world ending. A little less real.
Maybe that wasn’t quite a good thing, but reality was difficult and exhausting. Floaty, non-reality was much easier to cope with. The moon didn’t seem so blinding that way, the crickets not quite so loud.
Mike stood up on shaky legs, taking another breath in before looking up at the window he had crawled out of. Probably not feasible to get back in the same way. The drop to the ground was far enough that Mike was amazed he didn’t have any broken bones, so climbing back up the same way was a bit unreasonable. Hopefully the front door was unlocked.