Chapter Text
There is an empty spot in Monty’s memory.
It taunts him, as days pass and the techs check everything twice, then again, and find no malfunction, no corrupted file. No reason for his systems not to have recorded the six hours between the final employees leaving and the first ones arriving in the morning. Concerning on its own, that Monty only remembers stepping into the charging station, then waking on the catwalks, his internal chronometer indicating that no time has passed at all despite the low buzz of the morning shift’s computers over the Network and the low battery alert demanding his attention.
More concerning that no one can find Bonnie, that the last camera to catch sight of him was in the Gator Golf front lobby, that every camera went offline the moment he stepped into that elevator and didn’t come back online until the entire system was rebooted in the morning.
He wants to help, but they won’t let him help with the search and he doesn’t know anything particularly useful, or at least anything that wouldn’t get someone in trouble. Just that Bonnie came down to the golf course almost as often as Monty visited the bowling alley upstairs; that the rabbit was teaching him to play the bass, laughing when he fumbled a note because he was too stubborn to just download instructions. Just that one time they’d gone exploring, and Bonnie had winked and showed him how easily steel chains gave way when faced with reinforced claws and a few hundred pounds of force.
Just that about a week ago, Bonnie said something strange.
They’d been sitting in his green room, Monty directing most of his attention towards where his fingers were going as he slowly worked through one of the songs the band performed. He’d made a joke about taking Freddy’s spot as lead singer; “It’s gotta be easier than this, and besides,” he had said, leaning back and letting his eyes fall shut for a moment. “There’s no room for two bassists, yeah? If I was singin’, maybe you and I could perform together.”
Monty remembers the night in perfect detail, flagged it as ‘important’ so it wouldn’t be compressed for storage, mostly because of Bonnie’s response. He had expected a chuckle, or a jab at his refusal to just gain the skill the normal way, maybe something about trying to replace the face of the brand. Instead, he’d gotten silence, and he opened his eyes to an unusually-intense look on the rabbit’s face. He still hasn’t identified it, nor the matching low tone of voice when Bonnie spoke a moment later.
“Monty… if something happens,” he had said. “I want you to have my bass. Play in the band with the others, y’know?”
It wasn’t the first time Monty experienced an emotion he couldn’t immediately identify, but it was the first time he felt one so intense that his systems lagged, left his fans running on high to compensate for the sudden rush and overheat. Error.
“Don’t—“ A hitch in his voicebox. He recalibrated with a small rumble of static. “Don’t say stuff like that. What’s gotten into you today?”
“If I figure it out, I’ll let you know,” Bonnie had replied, and it was still worrying but that serious tone was gone, and with it the worst of whatever emotion had bubbled up, so Monty had let it go. Just for the time being, he had promised himself, reviewing the moment over and over when he was alone in his own little “home”. He would ask what the hell that was supposed to mean another day.
(He would never get a chance.)
———
Bonnie disappeared on Saturday night, just after a show. By the end of Tuesday, there’s still no sign of him, humans and animatronics alike are growing increasingly agitated, and Monty has gotten a little closer to figuring out that unknown emotion. It’s similar to panic, recognizable from that time he was caught under the splash bucket — roughly half a second to hit the first steel rafter and less than two more to hit the ground, then nothing at all until he woke up repaired. This isn’t a freefall, though. It’s been three days since their bunny disappeared, Monty is still restricted to his attraction, and he thinks maybe this is what it’s like for humans to have no air.
On Wednesday morning, Monty is called down to Parts and Service. As he sits down in the cylinder, he catches a glimpse of what the tech is holding; the fiberglass casing is shiny and new, in his own recognizable colors, but the claws are familiar for a different reason entirely.
Management’s word is law; the Wednesday shows will go on exactly as scheduled, with or without one rabbit. There’s no more time to practice, and even if there was, there’s no one to laugh and grin and show him how to do it.
Monty downloads the files.
———
Within a week, Management has erased nearly every trace of Bonnie from the Pizzaplex. It would be impressive, if Monty wasn’t so angry about it.
His green room had already been emptied on the third day, by the time he was let out of house arrest and told in no uncertain terms that he would be joining the band as bassist. At least it hadn’t already been restyled for him yet. He’s not sure he could have handled that.
Monty has fallen into something of a rhythm at night, searching and re-searching every area he can get into. Early on, he found some of the remaining Bonnie merch and handed some of it out to the others — he’s hidden the rest somewhere hopefully only he can find it, and assumes the others have done similar with theirs.
As for the areas he can’t get into, or rather, shouldn’t — well, they’d basically handed him the keys to a lot of those gates, now hadn’t they? Bonnie had only taken him along a couple of times, but he knew the rabbit must have gone wandering in restricted areas all on his own, too familiar and comfortable to be looking around for the first time. Monty can’t tell anyone about that habit, even the other bots, so it falls to him to look there for their missing bandmate.
It takes time to adjust to the new claws, of course. His hands are shaped just a touch differently, now, and they’re much sturdier than his old nails — a back and forth of an instrument designed to hold up to an animatronic, then fingers designed to hold up to the new strings. The technicians get sick of repainting or replacing parts pretty quickly. The little scratches he leaves across his casing are left alone, now, until they get too noticeable — no one is entirely sure where Monty picked up that particular habit, but he thinks he remembers seeing it from human employees.
A few days after the new installation, he was back in the cylinder, staring at the exposed endoskeleton of his hands and being scolded by one of the only techs that didn’t get nervous around him down here. He doesn’t wholly remember doing it, but there’s no clean empty spot like last time; the data is just too cluttered to review without getting the digital equivalent of a headache. An overwhelming mess of error messages and damage alerts and that damned emotion again, so intense that he couldn’t think. (He remembers his incomplete thought process though, that maybe the feeling would go away if he didn’t have to keep looking at his hands.)
He still hasn’t identified it, though he’s getting closer. It feels like falling, like failing, like being locked overnight in the cylinder because he wouldn’t stay put until maintenance could show up in the morning — a threat made somewhat often, but only occasionally followed through on. It’s ‘lonely’ and ‘panic’ and something in between ‘sad’ and ‘angry’. It isn’t ‘grief’, though he compares notes with the others and determines that to be a different new one. It’s adjacent, maybe.
The first few things he breaks are mostly out of frustration. It’s a poor behavior learned from upset kids and adults alike, one he would normally be better than if he didn’t immediately notice that it made staff worry. Maybe it would motivate them to find and solve this problem he’s dealing with. It doesn’t take long to realize that it helps with the feeling all on its own; his sensors measure every impact, the force he applies and the resistance of the object and at some point it starts diverting RAM away from the emotional simulator. It feels… well, not nice, exactly, but there’s a certain appeal to that blankness in the absence of feeling while the chip is offline.
He keeps it restricted to the off-hours, when the building is empty and there are no customers to hurt or scare. That little mark of self-control is probably the only thing between him and a much more serious date with P&S, though he’s currently unsure on whether they’d do a full comb-through to find the problem or just replace him with a brand-new Montgomery Gator. Not like he’d ever decide to attack a person anyway, so he probably won’t get a chance to find out.
———
He doesn’t get to search every night. His single-minded drive wears him down, and the others notice; they carefully drag him back into activities, fill his nights with clutter and company, little things to occupy him. Their worry looks different than the human staff. They still understand how this started, show him that he’s not alone.
He finds a new rhythm; perform and entertain in the daytime, then share his nights between the rest of the band and his continued searching. Pace around the catwalks. Break things when the emotions get too intense, and try not to make the techs any more nervous that he might break them. He notices that his maintenance team doesn’t overlap with the others’ so much, that there’s a pretty short list of them willing to go near him when the safeties are off and the anti-tamper protocols are active.
(He doesn’t remember hurting anyone, but nobody really remembers maintenance outside of a vague fuzziness and a general understanding of discomfort — too much of their awareness being tethered to those ‘safeties’, maybe. He tries to pay more attention now, to the way staff move and watch him. They don’t like to have other bots around while one is in the cylinder; the mere idea of it had been off-putting so he’d never questioned it, but he’s wondering now.)
When he’s alone, he finds a surprising amount of comfort in reviewing the footage immediately after the blank spot. His casing is pristine, in that moment, but it isn’t pride or vanity that has him focusing on that detail.
There’s no color on his nails aside from what should be there. No one looks at his face (his teeth) like there’s anything out of place. There are no scuffs or dings or scratches that weren’t there when he blacked out. Nothing was damaged or replaced that night.
Bonnie may have looked smaller, but the only difference was in the shape of their casing and how far the limbs of their endoskeletons were extended. They were built on the same framework, they had the same strength. If he had done the unimaginable, he would not have made it out unscathed. Bonnie would have fought back.
Hm. Clinging to that thought makes the emotion come back. ‘Desperation’, maybe. For now, he files it accordingly.