Chapter Text
“So, let me get this straight,” Mike said, staring at him with wide eyes. The white pinpricks that denoted his pupils blinked back at Evan, narrowed to the point where it was obvious his brother was in some form of utter, complete disbelief.
“You secretly,” Mike repeated slowly, “want William and I to help you build physical animatronic forms for the nightmares. Am I hearing that right?”
“That’s what I said,” Evan answered, raising an eyebrow.
“And you’re saying that you have a way to actually transfer them into the animatronic bodies if we build them?”
“Yeah, I do,” Evan said, a little annoyed now. “What, do I have to repeat myself? Are you finally going deaf?”
The two were in the house’s basement workshop, one of the many rooms in the house that was weirdly tailored for specific purposes. The workshop took up a fair portion of the basement, and the inside looked almost exactly how one would expect a frequently used robotics and mechanical workshop to. There were a multitude of work tables sitting around the area, covered in metallic shavings, work-in-progress machinery, pencils, and tools. Shelves attached to the walls held work books, binders, sketchbooks, and rolls of large, thick paper.
Evan hovered just above the worktable that Mike stood at, kicking his feet and wings absently. His brother looked at him with pinpricks of white for eyes, just staring at him blankly as he processed. He almost looked like a deer in headlights, if Evan was using the expression correctly.
Mike blinked, before sighing and offering a mild roll of his eyes. “No, no, I heard you just fine. I’m just… confused as to how you’d know how to do that. I thought they were projections.”
Discomfort writhed in Evan’s gut as Mike’s questions got close to that thing he wasn’t exactly ready to tell Mike. He’d have to at some point, but for now, he wasn’t going to tell his brother. Especially not his brother, actually.
Sure, he was a little more comfortable with Mike than he had been at the start of all this. Their relationship had improved from barely talking to somewhat friendly conversation, which according to most people, could be considered progress.
Evan sort of just thought of it as ‘figuring out what the hell was going on with his brother’ instead of ‘progress.’ That word felt way too normal for this whole situation.
And in Evan’s defense, whatever the hell was going on with his brother turned out to be a lot. Like, to the point where it was so convoluted that Evan had a hard time keeping track of what had and hadn’t happened to this guy in the past forty years. He’d needed to make a literal checklist on his wall to verify what he actually knew about his brother.
And sure, maybe that sounded very much like a conspiracy theorist thing to do. But at this point, considering everything Fazbear Entertainment-related, you’d need three separate conspiracy theorist closets packed to the brim with every scrap of information you could gather and a therapist on deck. Just so you’d still have somebody to keep you sane while you unpacked all of it.
Then again, none of that was the point right now.
Evan wasn’t about to tell Mike how he could transfer them over into actual animatronic bodies just yet. Nobody needed to know how until maybe after the fact. Maybe.
Mike let out another deep sigh - somehow, considering it was a little hard to breathe if you didn’t have any lungs - and looked at Evan with a tired smile. It was a face that he’d been making a lot since they'd all started living under the same roof again. “Alright. I’ll see what I can do, bud. I can’t guarantee William’s help, but I’ll do my best to drag his crusty ass out of his room.”
Evan’s jaw dropped, but recomposing himself was quick and easy. “And if you can’t?”
Mike’s expression, where it had once been as sincere as you could get for a corpse, turned wicked. “Well, I’ll let you in on a secret.”
His older brother leaned against the table and pulled something out of his pocket, to which Evan’s eyes went wide and stayed that way this time. In his older brother’s hands, a silver lighter shone in the workshop’s orange light, with a faded Foxy sticker slapped onto the side. It had been the one thing Mike had treasured as a kid, and one of the few gifts he’d received from William before everything went wrong. The silver and the sticker were both a bit charred, as thought they’d gone through a fire themselves. Knowing what little he did about Mike, it probably had.
Now, most people with lighters weren’t exactly threatening. Michael Afton wasn’t ‘most people with a lighter.’ Utah’s news outlets had given him the moniker of “The Fazbear Firestarter” for a reason.
Stupid nickname, Evan thought immediately. I could have done way better.
Wait, why do I care about that? That’s not the point!
I still could have done better, though.
Michael, apparently having gotten the reaction he wanted, stuffed it back into the pocket with ease. “There’s a reason I always carry a lighter around, Evan.”
“Why don’t you use it on him more often, then? He’s a prick.”
“If I use it on him too much, he’ll get used to it,” Mike replied. He winked at Evan conspiratorially, and cleared a few tools off the table they were at. “It’s not up to me, but my advice? Maybe surprise them with the physical forms. I think they’d appreciate it.”
Evan blinked, almost ready to bite back and tell Michael that he couldn’t tell him to do anything, but the idea technically made sense. They would probably be way more enthusiastic about the idea if they were surprised by it.
Hopefully. It depended on the animatronic, honestly. Evan would have to just pray that it worked.
“Alright,” Evan said. “So what do you need to make it?”
His older brother winked, before grabbing something off of a shelf nearby.
“Step one,” Michael announced, picking out a weirdly slabbed pencil from one of his tool belt pockets, “Blueprinting. I’ll see if William’s got any ideas, but if you could help me with getting component blueprints made, then I can work with them much easier.”
Evan nodded, taking a second look at Mike, who was pulling down rolls of blueprint paper from a shelf that he usually didn’t touch. He actually seemed kind of excited, which was a little odd. Normally, Mike didn’t get this excited over robotics or mechanical jobs anymore - he only really did it because the only other person in the house who actually had any experience stayed holed up in his room for weeks at a time. And because there were a lot of animatronics in this house that needed repairs, mainly because people kept trying to kill each other.
This seemed… This seemed more like he was genuinely excited to do it than anything else. It was strange to see Mike with a smile that didn’t look chronically exhausted, the way it always looked.
Impossible, Evan thought immediately. Mike was never that excited to do stuff with me.
With a final dismissive snort, Evan teleported out of the workshop. He had other stuff to do.