Chapter Text
William didn’t like leaving his precious car in such a hideous garage, but not bringing it along to an opportunity to flex at a contractor also wasn’t an option. The parking area was far less flamboyant than the exterior had been, and he had to drive carefully through a poorly lit space with an uneven floor. As he pulled up to the back wall, the headlights glaringly illuminated a faded mural that read “Murray Co. Welcomes You!” alongside a truly hideous vacuum cleaner with a face.
“Jesus,” he said.
Henry peered out at the mural and squinted. “Wonder why this venture failed,” he said, deadpan. Most employees couldn’t tell if Henry was being sarcastic, and William thought it was hilarious.
“I’m not sure what he was even going for,” William said. “Just undirected quirkiness, I suppose.” He gestured at the mural. “This could have been you, Henry, if you hadn’t met me.”
Henry grimaced. “I have more taste than this,” he said, pushing open the purple passenger door, unfolding himself to stretch after the long drive. “It wouldn’t have been like this.” He looked around the parking area gravely before his expression settled on William and softened. “But I do appreciate you and all you do.”
William did not let the flutter of delight he felt reach his expression.
Instead, William turned to the present situation. He clapped his hands together. “Right. We have to figure out how we get in.”
They hadn’t been able to get into the front of the building; someone had enthusiastically boarded up the front door with plywood in advance of the storm that was rolling in. William thought it was excessive. They didn’t get severe storms here most of the time, and he was sure the news was exaggerating the danger. Even boarded up, the building remained gaudy, stained glass windows barely visible behind the stormproofing, their bright colors fighting to be seen. William doubted a few boards had ever saved anyone from a storm. If anything, they’d just become more flying shrapnel in the wind.
The expressive frontage might have been appealing if the whole building wasn’t in the middle of a wholly run-down industrial estate with little contact with the world outside. Location was part of business considerations. No wonder Edwin had been collecting dust in here, along with the rest of his numerous failures.
Henry peered into the darkness around them, lit only by the interior lights from William’s car, which still had open doors. “Do you have a flashlight?”
“In the boot.” William said, and then reflexively added “trunk” because Henry was still learning UK terminology. He flipped the lever in the driver’s seat to open it.
Henry wandered to the back of the Dodge to look for a flashlight to avoid falling down an unmarked hole or getting attacked by rats, and William could hear him rummaging around.
“Oh!” he said cheerfully. “You keep an emergency kit in here, too. My family is big on self-sufficiency; my sister, in particular, likes to rant about it all the time. A shovel, rope, many of the more uncommon items, even a tarp! Good judgment.”
William wouldn’t have let anyone else near his trunk, but he knew Henry was oblivious. If anything, Henry had lectured him on how he should invest in some bear repellent just a week or two ago.
Henry flicked the industrial-grade flashlight on and off with a cheery click. “Found it!” he said, closing the trunk again with a thud.
“Be gentle with my baby! He’s had a long drive.” William protested, finally getting out to check the trunk, making sure Henry hadn’t scuffed it with his lack of finesse. He patted the finely waxed paintwork reassuringly. “Don’t mistreat his delicate ass, Henry.”
“I think most people call their cars ‘she,’ Will,” Henry said, rolling his eyes. “And people say I’m the strange one.” Fortunately, he had already begun to drift away, exploring the garage with the flashlight, leaving William in peace to grab his knife and spare flashlight before locking up.
“I think it’s over here,” Henry said as William returned his car keys. He stood by a large steel door, an intercom mounted beside it, flanked by several oversized and colourful buttons. The intercom had a pair of staring eyes—cute, in a way. William liked it. He had always enjoyed making inanimate things feel alive.
He might just steal that idea.
William wasn’t surprised that Henry hadn’t pushed the button. He was used to taking charge in situations his partner would rather not handle. He rang, and the intercom crackled to life after a few moments.
“Hello?” the voice was harried, as though they didn’t get much by way of visitors, and William supposed they didn’t.
“Hello, Edwin,” William said in his most charmingly corporate tone. “William Afton of Fazbear Entertainment speaking. Henry and I were in the vicinity and thought we might stop by for a little impromptu tour of your operation, see how you are getting on, chat over a coffee, that sort of thing.”
There was a moment of stunned silence before Edwin replied. “Oh, yes! A pleasure. I’d been meaning to speak to you both and update you on the orders; it has been hectic, you see—”
“Perhaps we can talk inside,” William cut in, unwilling to linger in this cold, dark garage, especially not in his good shoes.
“Oh, yes, certainly. Let me buzz you in.” The intercom closed with a click, followed by a loud blare, and the steel door slid open with a loud gear rattle.
—
Behind the door was a large service elevator, its design immediately catching Henry’s interest. He stepped inside slowly, eyes tracking the hoistway door hinges and the wear along the track rails. He could hear the drive motor engage, the churn of counterweights shifting, and a faint hydraulic hiss beneath the mechanical whir.
It wasn’t particularly elegant, but the construction was deliberate, custom work, likely a mix of old and retrofitted components. The movements were rougher than a standard traction system, which made him wonder if it was running on direct hydraulics instead.
Henry was halfway to figuring out the lift’s setup when William cut in—
“What even is a costume manor?” William said sceptically, “You hear a name like that and you are supposed to know what to expect as a customer? It tells you less than nothing about what the hell you could be walking into. More questions than answers!” He gestured theatrically. “It’s clear Edwin has never consulted anyone with half a brain cell about this venture. They’d have vetoed this location for a start, before it even got off the ground.”
Henry thought William was cute when he got like this, passion written in every movement he made. Clearly, Edwin had failed to meet his exacting standards. Henry thought he was right, at least about the location. This place was in the middle of a rundown, desolate industrial estate. Sure, people could drive to it, but they’d have to know it was here. And with a seedy, vacant office building next door, it wasn’t exactly an inviting destination.
“At least the elevator functions. Can’t say the same for the advertising.” Henry said as they smoothly slowed at their floor.
“And I definitely don’t know what a costume manor is. Is it supposed to be a giant dress-up box for kids? A haunted house?” he shrugged. Fredbear’s Family Diner was self-explanatory.
Their discussion about the location was cut short as the doors opened, and they found themselves face to face with Edwin Murray, who looked nervous and stressed, or rather more nervous and stressed than his baseline. The man radiated a level of anxiety that was even higher than William, who operated on a tier of combined spite and distress that would crush lesser men.
“Hope we didn’t surprise you,” Henry said smoothly, despite knowing from the rumpled clothing Edwin was wearing that they had. Henry had learned a lot of conversation was about saying incredibly redundant things to put people at ease.
“No, no, not at all,” Edwin said, gesturing for them to come in. The lights at least were on at this level, and the elevator opened up to what had probably been the main factory floor at one point. The “costume manor” was a converted lace factory which had been filled in the years that followed with Edwin’s inventions. Henry consistently asked the man for whimsy, only for him to produce ugliness instead. He would have fired him if it hadn’t been for his skill with the underlying components and engineering.
“I would have set up a show to welcome you if I’d known you were around. As it is, everything’s in a bit of a shambles.” William’s slight twitch in his jaw made Henry think he was trying not to say that that may have factored in why he’d shown up the way he had. Henry wasn’t sure he could pretend to be impressed by Edwin’s shuffling army of mismatched creatures, each more repellant than the last. He had no doubt William would have had a field day with it.
“Shame.” Henry said. He was learning gradually the kind of platitudes you had to say in corporate company to stop people getting upset.
But he didn’t want to hang around here either. He wanted to see what they were paying this guy so much money to do. “We’ve been driving for a while. Where’s the bathroom?”
“Just up near the security room. I’ll show you.” Edwin said, bouncing into action. He was small, considerably shorter than William and himself, and slight in build, but he moved quickly, leading the way through the sprawling shelves of components and parts, lit from overhead by long dangling lights.
Henry was more interested in the components than anything else, his gaze flitting over the endless shelves as they went. Stepper motors, relays, and thick coils of insulated copper wiring lined the walls, stacked alongside bulky circuit boards and half-assembled mechanical linkages. A few newer integrated circuits suggested Edwin had been dabbling in automation, though Henry doubted he had the intellect or infrastructure to do anything groundbreaking. Fazbear Entertainment had paid for a lot of this, and Henry was the one who could tell if it had been put to anything resembling meaningful use.
When he was pointed to the bathroom, he left William and Edwin to it, using it both as an excuse for a needed pit stop and as a means to distract himself from the guided tour.
—
“Is this your security room?” William looked around curiously at the space Edwin had back here. There were windows overlooking the factory floor they had just been on, with security monitors and one of Fazbear Entertainment’s terminals on the desk.
William smirked at the drawings pinned to the warped corkboard, the scrawl of a kid in a mushroom suit curling at the edges, paper yellowing beneath old pushpins. “You draw these?” he said.
Edwin glanced at the drawings with the vacant look of someone who had long since stopped seeing them. “No, my son David drew them,” he said.
A son? That was news to William. “I didn’t know you had a kid; you don’t talk about him much.” He took pride in knowing everything about his employees and business contacts. Information was power; it was how you made people kneel, how you twisted the knife. Finding out he’d missed something this significant about Edwin was irritating. He didn’t like being caught off guard.
"Had." Edwin’s voice was hollow. “He was hit by a car.”
“Oh.” William paused. “I’m sorry.” The words left his mouth before he’d decided if he meant them.
He couldn’t imagine losing a child. Mike was infuriating, but he was his. Mine. The idea that anyone, including fate, could take him away made William’s stomach twist angrily. He’d rip open the gates of Heaven, Hell, and everything in between to bring him back because no one took what was his.
He glanced at the drawings again. Platitudes. “He was a good little artist.”
David wasn’t a good artist. That much was obvious. The lines were shaky, the shading haphazard. Michael was better. William had always resented how much time Mike wasted drawing—weak, useless, pathetic. But right now, he felt a flicker of pride because it was better than Edwin’s dead son’s scribbles.
Edwin’s big, bulging eyes shone with the threat of tears. Oh, for god’s sake. William had little patience for that, especially from a grown man. He turned toward the heavy door to change the subject and give Edwin a chance to pull himself together before he did something embarrassing.
He turned, glancing at the heavy door. “That’s a hell of a door for a security room.” He ran a hand over the cold steel, noting the weld seams, absolute overkill for a room lit by buzzing fluorescents and watched over by an entire bank of grainy monitors. “What are you trying to keep out?”
“Can never be too cautious,” Edwin said uncertainly, but William could hear the hesitation in his voice. William was good at tuning into weakness, and even with his back turned to Edwin, he could feel the opening in his defences.
“You can when it’s our money you are spending.” William’s voice remained light and conversational, but he knew his smile would tell the real story. “I’m afraid you must justify it more clearly than that. You don’t think I’m stupid enough to swallow vague excuses. I built this company by knowing when I was being fed bullshit, Edwin.”
Edwin fell silent for a moment and sounded more serious when he spoke. “I am working on the Mimic project like you requested. When it malfunctions, it is dangerous.”
Dangerous. The word sent a little thrill of delight up William’s spine. That was a word he understood.
What was life without a bit of risk? Some things had to be broken before being rebuilt the way he wanted.
“That’s more like it.” William’s eyes gleamed, his grin widening as he turned back to Edwin. “Honesty suits you better.”
“I’m not here to threaten you or fight you, Edwin. I’m here to make sure we understand each other.
“But I am also here to remind you that you contract for Fazbear Entertainment, and though being clever and slippery has brought you to this point, I expect absolute honesty.”
William didn’t care about Murray Co and whether it sunk or swam, but he cared if Edwin was creatively reinvesting their money or hiding their technology.
"I’m your friend, Edwin.” He moved to sit on the security desk amicably, hearing it squeak satisfyingly under his weight. “We work together and I’m here to help. You’d be surprised at how lenient this company can be with people who do the right thing by us. If you want your costume manor to exist, we can make it happen. If you dream of something more mundane - your vacuums, for instance - we can make that work, too. There’s nothing I can’t spin into gold. I did it for Henry and can do it for you.” He curled one hand tightly around the edge of the desk before pointing the other at Edwin.
“Just don’t lie to me.” The words were soft, almost offhand, but the weight behind them was impossible to miss.
William’s tone hadn’t changed, but there was a warning edge to his friendliness.
“I don’t like wasting time, Edwin. And I know you don’t either.”
Edwin nodded, but the acquiescence of the gesture let William know that he’d managed to - once again - get past some subtle boundaries. “The Mimic project has been difficult for me.” He said, “I didn’t tell you at the outset… it was constructed as a playmate for David. The learning capabilities were intended for play functionality.”
William raised a brow curiously. "You said it was destroyed in an accident," he said.
"It was," said Edwin tersely. “I destroyed it accidentally.”
William bit back a grin. There it was, weakness disguised as confession. He enjoyed nothing more than getting into the meat of someone’s truth. This was the key to everything with Edwin, and he didn’t realise what he’d given him.
“We all have our moments.” He said, waving it off. “Especially under the pressure you must have been with David. The important thing is what you do with those moments afterwards. You don’t need to hold onto it anymore. Let us put it to good use. You can use the funding to do whatever you like.”
“I just want to create,” Edwin said.
“And I’ll make sure you can.”
“If you choose to let us market anything you make, at that point, it will be up to you. This is just the last hurdle in breaking away from something you have been carrying with you for so long.. Henry agrees you have something brilliant to share with the world, and right now, we stand uniquely poised to help you.”
Edwin was an engineer, and William knew he was innately mistrustful of corporate-speak and spin.
“I value our creatives above all else; without people like you, Fredbear’s doesn’t exist, Fazbear doesn’t exist. I sell the board a story. But you? I expect the facts.”
Edwin nodded and gestured to William.
“I appreciate it. You and Henry have built something truly incredible. I admire how you both work together. I never had a partner to work with, and I respect that. I’ll do what I can to help. When Henry returns, I can show you some of what I’ve created; in the meantime, if you like, I can show you the security system I use here.
William couldn’t help but soften at the thought of Henry. Edwin was correct; there was a genuine delight in having someone he could work with and bounce ideas off, who shared his interests and cared about the same things. Perhaps it would be miserable to work the way Edwin did, alone in an empty warehouse without even his absent son for company.
“Certainly.” He said. “Let's have a look.”
—
The bathroom was exactly as sad as Henry had expected it to be, a dingy little closet of a room, with a streaky mirror and a truly dismal toilet. Its loose seat was precariously propped up against the cistern.
The mess didn’t surprise him. Before William, he’d lived in worse and hardly noticed.
It was easy to let the chaos pile up when you could hardly see it, let alone find a place to start. It was too easy to lose control of everything - your surroundings, your mind, your life - when the days blurred together, and you couldn’t tell how far you’d sunk.
Henry’s life had teetered on that edge not so very long ago. Deadlines, responsibilities, William, those things kept him upright now, whether he liked it or not. Left to his own devices, Henry had no doubt he’d have drowned in the mire too.
At least now when things got too much, he had someone to ask for help. Edwin had no one.
All things considered, Edwin was probably doing well, given the things he'd lost. Henry didn’t have any kids and couldn’t imagine the agony of losing one, especially to lose one because you’d looked away just for a moment. Henry was distracted all the time. That costing him something important was his worst nightmare.
Henry was careful to close the bathroom door quietly behind himself. Even if he was sure William and Edwin were in the security office, he didn’t want them to hear him. He wanted a minute to explore independently without the guided tour. Henry preferred to see the bones of a place, not the set dressing.
Sometimes, when you wandered alone, you caught sight of things the host hadn’t planned for at all.
In the oppressive silence of the warehouse, Henry’s footsteps seemed impossibly loud, making him wince internally with every step. The space was cluttered with a lifetime of Edwin’s failed work, designed presumably to delight children, now simply gathering dust and muffling sound in a derelict factory.
It might have been a mercy, Henry thought. Children would be more likely to be terrified than delighted by some of the things that stared out at him from between the shelves.
Echoes died too fast for a space this size in here. That bothered him. Sounds were painfully loud up close but oppressively stifled further away by the smothering dust and rotting materials. This made Henry acutely aware that someone could sneak up on him here, and he might not even hear them until they were practically on top of him.
It was such an irrational thought too, Henry was fit and strong. There weren’t a lot of people who could overpower him or who would even be inclined to try. He didn’t even have valuables on him.
Dust scratched at the back of Henry’s throat, clinging dry and aching in his sinuses. He tried to pay it no mind, but it left him swallowing, wiping at his large nose with the back of his hand like it might scrub the sensation off. Everything here felt like it was eroding him, grain by grain. The dust had saturated every inch of everything, leaving Henry wondering really how long Edwin had been torturing himself here.
The creations weren’t preserved—just abandoned. Metal rusted and joints seized up. They spoke of what felt like a compulsion, repeatedly iterating concepts without regard for their success. Paint peeled, foam bubbled and melted, and rubber distorted into tortured shapes in the darkness.
In this abandoned warehouse, the suits were rotting away, and Henry wondered if it was because they were too sentimental for Edwin to let go of or if he couldn’t stand to admit how much money he’d sunk into making them.
Although Edwin's engineering chops were sound, his taste was terrible. Fazbear couldn’t fix it either. When given a choice, the man would always opt for the kitschiest, most dated option available. Some people were trailblazers; Edwin was somehow the opposite.
The evidence was everywhere around Henry. Hideous cardboard cutouts piled haphazardly, fighting for floor space. Discarded mascot costumes were slumped against plywood dividers. Their polyester fur faded from cheery primary colours into bruised greys and greens under sodium-vapor lights that hummed high overhead. Neglected dioramas were scattered around. A particularly offensive one featured a smiling group of unappealing little frogs gathered together in a family, smiling at Henry. The plastic in their eyes had gone cloudy and was rendered nightmarish by age.
But Edwin clearly liked costumes best. Henry had conducted extensive research on mascot costumes over the years as part of his work for the business. However, it was always a stepping stone and not the end goal. He had always wanted to create something unique with Freddy and his friends, combining the technology and life lent by internal endoskeletons with the whimsical illusion of the exterior.
Edwin had just settled on churning out endless, expensive costumes for a buyer that didn’t - and would probably never - exist.
At least he was efficient at producing them. It might be helpful if he could be forced to design specifically along Fazbear lines. It would be good if they could somehow remove his ability to make ugly choices and leverage only his strengths. He didn’t have a discerning eye and needed one from someone else.
Without oversight, he chose incorrect materials or set weak stitching in areas that would see high tension in use. Without a designer, he would continue to make stupid, terrifying faces.
Henry instinctively sorted through the suits and designs around him, filing each one under why Fazbear would reject them or why simple fixes might address their shortcomings.
Still, wherever he saw a jutting servo or mechanism, he could at least appreciate the craftsmanship. That was positive. There was potential. They hadn’t made a mistake.
Henry turned a corner and came face-to-face with something that triggered his most primitive fight or flight instincts. He gasped sharply.
“Awful.” He said quietly as he composed himself.
It was only due to the black and yellow stripes that he could identify that the abomination in front of him had been intended to be a bee at some point. Edwin’s designs evoked all the negative aspects of rubber hose era cartoon designs but none of the positive ones. It was almost ironic that something based on such a flexible animation style clearly could not move well.
Henry rolled up the suit to examine the metal underneath, constricted in its awkward, bee-shaped prison. The bee had too many joints for something meant to move smoothly and frequently; each bend was a clumsy and unnecessary point of failure. No redundancy, no thought to longevity. A machine destined to seize up after a week of use and to frustrate any maintenance engineer forced to deal with it.
It didn’t matter how well built the joints were, the implementation defeated them before they even had a chance.
He frowned at it. There was a little of both him and William’s worst traits in Edwin’s warehouse. William could also get lost in a mire of bad taste sometimes. Without Henry to question his decisions, he was drawn to inappropriate features and terrifying smiles. Henry tempered him, forcing William to consider what he wanted to achieve versus what his gut instinct suggested was right.
Looking at the bee, Henry thought it felt like looking at Edwin’s solitude and hopelessness, doomed to repeat his mistakes over and over forever.
Because that was the thing—the bee wasn’t even the only one like it. Henry had seen at least three other iterations of this detestable thing. It was harrowing.
No one had told Edwin to stop; no one had told him it wasn’t cute because he had no one left.
Left alone, you could convince yourself any idea was worth pursuing.
They’d have to force him to run every design past Fazbear.
“William Afton of Fazbear Entertainment.” William’s voice cut across Henry’s thoughts, and Henry immediately and sharply sought the source of it, almost jumping out of his skin. He felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
“Will?” he asked, his heart thudding in his ears. “Will, where are you? I thought you were with Edwin, what happened?” But his voice echoed in the silent space around him before being smothered by the heaped and dusty costumes. He was penned in.
There had been something off about the voice, something ragged and crackly, as though it had come from one of the intercoms they’d used to get into the warehouse in the first place.
“Will?” His voice faltered, and he felt suddenly small in the oppressive space. He told himself it was some recording he’d heard—a glitched playback, maybe—an echo in the machine. After all, William had introduced himself in full when they arrived.
“I love you.” The voice said, and this time it was soft and sincere, something William had never said to Henry and almost certainly never would. Henry wasn’t sure that Will even knew the word to begin with. And yet, the thing that hit Henry like a physical blow, colliding with his terror, was that hearing it like this, his heart had soared.
His first instinct had been brilliant and beautiful elation that carried him up and up and up.
He’d wanted to hear it—with all his heart. It had been anything but fearful.
He’d never realised how much he craved it.
It was the impossibility of the scene that grounded him and shunted aside the terror.
“Who are you?” he challenged the voice because there was nothing else he could say; this couldn’t be William.
He was met with silence.
“Who ARE YOU?” He snarled, more aggressive than he meant to, his heart still hammering in his chest from more than just fear. He wanted to lash out at whatever was toying with him, not just for the horror of it, but for letting him feel - for just a single breath - something like joy. The injustice of it twisted inside him, and fury was all that remained in its wake.
The costumes shuffled, stirring and seeming to bubble up like a liquid made entirely of cheap fabric. Out from their midst crawled a bizarre endoskeleton with eyes that glowed like banked embers. It was different from anything Fazbear had ever created. It was put together from what looked like machine parts, bent and welded together only to be broken and welded together again. It had clearly been repaired, but even repaired, it was still not in good shape.
“Can I have some ice cream?” the thing asked, again in William’s familiar voice but edged with that intercom crackle from earlier. The words were more like the pleas of a child than his partner’s clipped and demanding tone.
The twisted mimicry rendered it horrific.
Henry took a step back, disgust and fear mingling in him. It wasn’t a normal response to have to a machine; he worked with machines every day of his life. But this one felt strange. Off somehow. It was dragging something with it in its pincers, a rotten and tangled clump of what had once been lace, shaped into a roughly quadrupedal animal form. It held onto it like an anchor, as though it was valuable.
The thing reached towards him with its free pincer-like hand. “Can I have some ice cream?” it asked again, desperate. Henry felt his revulsion rise.
More than the bee, more than the piles of despair around him, this thing felt deeply and viscerally wrong.
So Henry did the only thing that seemed rational at the time.
He turned and ran.
—
William was starting to wonder where Henry had gone when he abruptly burst into the security office. Henry was usually difficult to read, but even a stranger could have seen something was wrong. Very wrong. William had seen Henry shaken before - a risky test, an exploded breaker, even a near miss while driving - but nothing quite like this.
“Edwin, are your bathrooms haunted?” William asked, without missing a beat, turning away from Henry to permit him time to gather himself and instead redirecting the moment into a joke.
He was glad he did, it gave him a look at Edwin.
As he met Edwin’s gaze, the man flashed a look that was unmistakably guilt. He even opened his mouth like he was about to lie, but no sound came out.
You knew, William thought.
Edwin’s eyes darted to William, then away and that was all Henry needed too. Henry didn’t bother with subtlety; he gave Edwin a hard, accusing look. “Why do you have a malfunctioning animatronic on the loose in your warehouse?”
Edwin clutched his hands to his chest as if preparing to shield himself from an assault, backing up a few steps.
“It’s the animatronic you asked me to restore. The Mimic project,” He said. “It was contained but has considerable problem-solving skills and must have gotten out again. It’s not technically malfunctioning.”
“You said when it malfunctioned, it was dangerous earlier.” William cut in. “Don’t start wriggling now, Edwin.”
Henry did not look convinced by Edwin’s defences in the least. “It was imitating Will’s voice and saying things he’d never say. Why would it be capable of that?”
Edwin, turning to close the security door behind Henry, said with apparent nervousness. “The intercom. It can imitate things it has heard. It heard the intercom, I think.” Edwin peered to the factory floor before looking back at William and Henry. “It’s in my system; I don’t know how it managed it. Not the Fazbear terminals, but everything else.”
William should have been afraid, he supposed. His emotions were always dull, a calm and icy pool where others might have found something more vital and alive. Instead of fear, he felt fascinated. Voice mimicry was something that he could use, and so was problem-solving in a machine. William’s dreams weren’t of entertainment but something far grander, and this thing Edwin had created made his senses tingle.
The loose animatronic was valuable. Edwin had stumbled onto something far more interesting than he even realised. William intended to liberate it from him. He had considered disposing of Edwin and simply taking the machine without complications. Murder wasn’t something he’d ever committed, but anything was possible with the right amount of money to grease the wheels. Maybe later, maybe down the line, when he understood how this happy accident that was now his project had come to pass.
“Is it running code I paid for?” he asked Edwin, suddenly deadly calm. “Because if it is, I’d like to know why you haven’t previously told us about the more unexpected features it is now exhibiting.”
Edwin stammered. “I.. I wasn’t certain. It’s good at hiding. It was adaptable when imitating my son, but I couldn’t say what proportion was full imitation and what was improvisation.” The fear in his large, bulbous eyes was crystal clear. “I am certain it’s improvising now.”
“Is it dangerous?” Henry asked, anger flashing in his expression, hands balled into fists. William thought the man was beautiful when he was angry. Rage lived in Henry’s skin, chained in the dark beneath the surface.
His muscles were taut beneath that worn flannel, fit, lean, and dangerous.
Usually, Henry was passive, reasonable and detached from the world. But sometimes, he turned to pay attention it and really didn’t like what he saw. There was a twist of sadistic anticipation in William at the thought that Henry might actually hit Edwin and how much he’d enjoy seeing that.
“I don’t know,” Edwin said, and it was William’s turn to focus on his dithering nervousness.
“Oh, I think you do.” He said. Edwin’s reaction to Henry’s question on a gut level had struck him as someone who was hiding something.
William had a nose for people. It was a primitive instinct, but it was useful. He could practically feel when someone was weak - hungry for approval or eager to please - even when they did their best to hide it.
He knew the signs. A sucker. A victim. Someone who was begging to be told what they wanted to hear.
Right now, Edwin was a mess. Prey. A gazelle limping in the herd. It gripped him.
William knew he was on the right track when Edwin’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly at the accusation.
William didn’t give him space to speak.
“What are you hiding?” he barrelled in, with the calm insistence of an interrogator. “We are here to help you Edwin, and we can’t help you if you keep lying to us.”
He raised a hand slightly as Henry was about to speak, and Henry closed his mouth again. Just a moment, just a heartbeat. Wait.
Henry had learned to defer to William in social situations. He didn’t know people, and he made mistakes. His flaws and honesty were for William alone.
With almost theatrical timing, a distant roll of thunder shook the entire security office.
And he saw Edwin’s walls fall, deep resignation making him slump. “There were incidents-”
“Did someone get hurt?” William said.
Edwin looked right at William and met his gaze, almost frantic.
“I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. I didn’t know what to do.” Edwin sounded like a child, pleading for forgiveness and for a parent to tell him everything would be all right. It disgusted William. He set aside the urge to lash out, to slip the metaphorical knife into the weak spot he'd been presented.
“That’s fine.” He said instead. “Let us help you now.”
The words flooded from Edwin as if they’d been dammed up a long time – they probably had been. “The mimic felt wrong since I rebuilt it.” He said. “There was something off about it, how it felt being in the room with it, as if it was watching me, as if it knew what I did to it. It shouldn’t be able to do that. It’s not alive, just a machine, just a playmate. But it … it felt like it knew and made me doubt myself. I felt like it was alive. I had to lock it up. I did lock it up, but the Mimic OS started acting strange, too. I couldn’t keep the doors closed. I ended up making a normal door. I hired a guard. I would still hear noises at night.”
His hands shook, and he turned away to look out at the warehouse floor as if searching for something. The lights were off. Any daylight filtering through the skylights was now gone, replaced by the suffocating sickly yellow tint of the storm overhead.
William thought despairingly that they couldn’t leave until the storm passed. They were trapped here with this madman who was convinced his machines were alive.
He met Henry’s gaze across the room, expecting him to share his incredulity at Edwin’s ramblings, but he found an earnest concern reflected there that made him rethink his flippancy.
Neither of them interrupted Edwin.
“The guard told me it was watching him and that he didn’t like it either. It would copy him; it would say things in his voice. He told me what it said, and … it was .. it’s still talking like David sometimes. He’s dead, but it remembers him; it's as if there’s a ghost inside it.” He went quiet as if this was utterly unbearable to him. “Sometimes I wonder if it threw the ball that…”
Edwin collapsed forward under the weight of his own words, steadying himself with his hands on the console table. “I found the guard.” He said. “It killed him.”
He knew it was dangerous, lethal, and he had known it was out.
William’s interest twisted into blind fury at the thought that Henry could have been killed, and Edwin had known it. All other concerns were tossed aside in the face of prospective harm to his most beloved and valuable asset.
He lunged forward like a wild animal and seized Edwin by the shoulder hard enough to bruise. “You KNEW THAT THING WAS OUT THERE, AND YOU LET HENRY GO OFF ALONE?” His façade shattered in the face of absolute fury as he shook the slight, skinny man.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Edwin stammered repeatedly.
Henry reached out and touched William’s shoulder. “Will.” He said, drawing him back. “I’m here. I’m all right.” But he wasn’t trying to save Edwin. He looked at William with concern as he added. “Don’t waste your energy.”
“What did you do with the body?” William asked accusingly.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Edwin said, rubbing his shoulder lamely, looking on the verge of tears. “I put him in one of the suits.”
The suits.
That hit a different point in William’s mind. Just hearing it, he felt like he was spiralling. It felt like something was going wrong with this interaction—a glitch, a blip. Typically, his emotions were drab, distant, and numb, but the thought of a body in one of those hideous suits in the dark wrenched something like love into the light. It was beautiful—poetry.
Something about it made him want to laugh. They were so ugly, but so were people. Ugly and worthless. There was too much beauty in the horrific image in his head. A dead thing inside a dead thing. Like a Matryoshka doll. A suit inside a suit. But, suits had no bones.
The endoskeletons were skeletons. Could you?.. Could you? Hm.
He felt like he was getting hysterical. He kept his expression level. Focus.
“And then you welcomed us in here, knowing how dangerous it was,” William said. “You absolute imbecile.”
He crossed his arms. “You didn’t need to report the death to the authorities, but you should have reported it to us. We are the highest authority in your life right now.”
Henry set his mouth into a thin line and gestured at the door. “You said it can open doors. Can it open this one?”
Edwin shook his head. “This one is on the Fazbear network. It’s the only one like it in the building.”
“So we are stuck here if we want to be safe,” William said, sitting heavily on the couch against one of the walls. “Call for assistance.”
“The police?” Edwin said.
“No.” Henry cut in with a growl. “Not the police. They’ve never done anything but make things worse. Call headquarters. Call Ralph.”
Edwin stumbled over to the phone and picked it up. His anxiety at the situation had him behaving like he was drunk. The receiver clicked.
They could immediately hear the dead lack of a dial tone, and William sighed.
“Th.. the storm,” Edwin said by way of unneeded explanation.
“Fantastic,” William said.
—
Henry drifted through an ocean of black, the green text unspooling from his fingertips as he worked. Somewhere in irrelevance, his body was uncomfortably hunched as his fingers clacked over the sticky keycaps of the terminal. But he wasn’t there; he was here, wading through the Fazbear terminal.
> H.OS v3.5 (Fazbear Entertainment 1971)
> SUPERADMIN ACCESS VERIFIED
> user [email protected]
>/exec_projects/murray/mimic/logs/archive
Behind him, Edwin's feet scuffed on the floor as he paced up and down. William was a thoughtful silence by his side as he observed the security monitors, fingers drumming on the armrest of Henry’s chair.
Over the warehouse, the storm rattled against the roof, louder than it had been. One of the skylight windows had cracked, and Henry hadn’t even noticed. He glanced up, saw the rain whipping through the cracks onto ancient suits and designs that deserved to be water damaged, and returned to his task.
The lines unfurled before him as he navigated the logs. Dates and timestamps revealed themselves, as well as notes from Edwin in a shorthand that wasn’t intended for anyone’s eyes but his own. Henry didn’t even know what he was looking for. This wasn’t engineering; this was detective work, and the man was in the room with him. Normally, William did this sort of thing, but perhaps that was why he wasn’t right now; perhaps it kept Edwin at ease.
LOG ENTRY 256 | DATE: 197x-05-07 | AUTHOR: EMurray
> The unit responded to the name “David” during the diagnostic test. Not present in lexicon or loaded dictionary. Concerned bleedover from audio datasets. Scrubbed logs three times. Intermittent recurrence. Must review. Linked audio log – EMURRAY_TAPE042
Henry resurfaced.
“There are audio logs?” he asked, his voice half-absent, still caught between lines of green code and the stale light of the room.
Edwin froze mid-stride. “Yes,” he said, the word too fast to be casual.
William didn’t look away from the monitors, but his fingers stopped drumming.
Henry blinked slowly, his gaze moving past Edwin as if expecting the answer from the machine instead of the man.
“Then I’ll want to hear them,” he said. Not quite a threat. Not quite a request.
—
Click.
There was a roll of dead air
“Audio log six, five.” It was Edwin’s voice, calm. A contrast to his nervous demeanour in the security room.
“The unit is stationary, but it is not deactivated. Eyes are lit. I have observed issues with the lighting when it is activated. The recording room is presently dark. I have lit a lantern. I do not think the ambient lighting matters to these results, but record them for posterity.”
The crackle of someone adjusting the mic rang out through the security room from the recording. Edwin was uncomfortable; William didn’t care.
“What is your name?” he asked it.
“David.” A voice said, robotic, modulated.
“NO.” Edwin sounded angry and impatient, as if he’d done this a hundred times.
“What is your name?” it echoed
“Why do you torment me like this?” Edwin’s voice cracked. “What do you want?”
Silence, the kind of silence that seemed to draw in sound.
“David.”
“David is DEAD,” Edwin yelled, his voice ragged. “You were THERE. DID YOU DO IT? DID YOU KILL HIM? YOU KNEW HE HAD THAT BALL.”
“Did you do it?” it asked in its modulated voice, echoing Edwin. “David is dead.”
“I had to work. I needed to work.” Edwin’s voice sounded thick. There was a scrabbling of paper. “Why am I arguing with a machine? What is wrong with me? The lantern has gone out. Test ends.”
“What do you want?”
Click.
—
There was a crash of lightning, close TOO close, and every light in the warehouse went out.
The security door slid open.
“Oh for f— Henry, I told you the doors should CLOSE when the power goes out.”