Work Text:
He checks the number at the bank three times to be sure.
Two thousand, five hundred dollars.
Well— technically it's actually two thousand, five hundred thirty-seven dollars and twenty cents, but the point is that this last paycheck put him over the admittedly somewhat arbitrary line he set at sixteen. He's leaving. This is enough to leave.
For Colorado, specifically. A new place. A clean slate. Anywhere that isn't here.
He hasn't told his father yet, since he didn't want to blow his one and only shot at impressing him before he was really sure of it(not that moving out at twenty-two is all that impressive when his father moved to the USA for college at nineteen), but maybe he'll let him know.
Then again, maybe he won't. He actually did get over that line once, back when he was eighteen, but then he got a little careless on a twenty hour double shift and long story short he ended up with a nasty hand injury. It would've been unfair for his father to give him special treatment when he knew he had the money, so he paid for it out of pocket, which ran him about twenty-four hundred.
Anyway, Father's been demanding to know when he's going to do anything except clog up Fazbear's staff with pity nepo jobs. They're really in sync— his father wants him the fuck out of his house, and Mike wants the fuck out of his father's house.
Mike spots Sand Hollow while he's driving home from work. Maybe soon he'll forget what this drive looks like.
*
The sun was in his eyes. The sun was in his eyes and he was running late for the delivery. The sun was late and he was running late for the delivery and he was thinking about last night.
"You had an accident?" Father asks calmly.
Mike holds the phone, silently trying to gesture for Ralph to leave the office. He had to radio Mike to tell him that there was a high alert emergency and he needed to get back immediately, so he got back with two pizzas still in his car. "Uh, yeah," he says. "I backed into some lady's passenger door. I gave her our insurance info—"
"I see," Father says, tone freezing.
Mike stops. "I-it's just a scratch," he says. "And a minor dent, maybe? She could probably fix it herse—"
"I'll deal with it," Father says. "Michael, this is the second collision in three months."
It is. Three months ago he opened a door too fast and dented a customer's car. "I'm really sorry," Mike says.
"That's wonderful," Father says flatly, "but this is such a consistent pattern of complete disregard for safety that I can't possibly trust you with the civic. I'm taking away your car privileges for as long as you're living here, and I'll be charging you for the insurance premium for your accidents— that's fifty-seven a month for the hit and run, plus whatever the payout is for the crash three months ago. The bill for this crash is going to be out of pocket, however, as I am getting tired of my record suffering from your recklessness."
"…What?" he asks, reeling. "I— I can't— I need the car for work."
"No you don't," Father says. "I'm taking you off delivery duty."
"The St. George location is eighteen miles away," Mike pleads.
"And there is a bus that can make that trip," he says.
"It stops at 8 pm!" he says. "The night shift doesn't even start until midnight!"
Father sighs sharply. "If you couldn't bear to wait four hours, you should have been more responsible," he says. "I'm tired of you making excuses. I'm being generous enough by allowing you to keep working for me."
BUT I DIDN'T KNOW! he wants to scream. He wants to cry. He's on the floor of Ralph's dingy office. "I can't get home from the evening shift," he says. "It ends at 11:30 pm. The buses have stopped running by then."
"Then buy a bloody bike, Michael," Father says. "I'll tell you when I have an estimate for the out of pocket cost of the repair and collect the insurance cost from your paychecks before I deposit them in your account. Do you understand?"
Mike stares at the floor. An ancient stain from an ill-placed cup of Fizz stares up at him, its vaguely facelike shape taunting. "Yes sir."
The line goes dead.
He can't seem to force himself to stand, ending up slumped against the desk.
Mike screws his eyes shut and forces himself to breathe.
It is his fault. This situation is entirely, completely his fault.
The hit and run was when he was eighteen. He wasn't paying attention and backed into someone's rear license plate, but he didn't see anyone in the car, so he didn't really know what to do except drive away. They tracked him down and he got in a lot of trouble, but his father let him off with formally apologizing to the driver.
He didn't think parking lot collisions were that big of a deal. He made sure to give all his info to the customer even though the damage was minor, and he did the same thing with this.
But the accidents still happened. He hit peoples' cars. He has to deal with the consequences of his actions.
Sure, it's bad. Catastrophically bad. Father's right, he's got no choice but to find another way home, and a bike is by far the cheapest option. Even if it's still a lot of money.
He just… has to bike at least eighteen miles.
Uphill.
Every day he has an evening shift.
Which is usually three days a week.
He laughs. Can't do anything but put up with it. What's he going to do, argue with him?
At least the bill shouldn't be too expensive. A dent and a scratch can be fixed with a toilet plunger and a few strokes of paint. The insurance is… bad, but it's only a little more than twenty hours of work a month. That's only two thirds of a full week of night shifts.
Mike grimaces. Okay, it sounds bad when he says it like that. But still, he's going to be making more than he spends, and after he moves out Father can take him off the insurance plan.
*
"Ffffourteen… hundred…?" Mike croaks. He's been sick for the last two weeks, the exertion and freezing desert night giving him a semi-permanent cold. The bike home is just about manageable if he can catch the bus over, but if it's delayed too much(which it is about 30% of the time) he has to bike both ways. Maybe he misheard.
"Fourteen hundred seventy-four dollars," Father says, handing him the printed bill. "That's the price for a T-bone with massive damage to the vehicle."
Mike blinks. "I just scratched her door," he says.
Father shrugs, tapping the paper. "The mechanic said it was a T-bone, with damage totaling fourteen hundred seventy-four dollars."
"I— I can show you!" he insists. "It was just a scratch, she said she hoped they could just paint over—"
"Michael," Father says. "The woman you hit is eighty years old. She could barely understand what I was saying, and if I don't make this as painless as possible for her, she will go through the insurance. Because there have been so many accidents, I am in danger of losing that insurance. She has taken the car to the mechanic, and they have given us a price. You are going to pay for the damage you caused."
"I don't have this kind of money," he says weakly. "Please, I just can't see how that damage could cost this much to repair."
"They have to disassemble the car to understand the extent," Father says. "This is an estimate, the actual bill may be higher if they discover additional problems."
"But—"
"I feel as if I've made myself rather clear," Father says. His hand is raised, but he hasn't hit him since Elizabeth died. "I'm having trouble understanding what grounds you believe you have to argue on. The cost we have to take on for this singular repair is indescribably less than the price I would pay if your actions revoked my insurance."
THIS ISN'T EXACTLY A WE SITUATION. He looks down. "I understand."
*
The number keeps getting bigger. The mechanics need five days to completely disassemble the front of the car, so she has to rent a replacement, which adds another seventy-five dollars. The mechanics offer a ten dollar car wash that Father says would be complementary if she had gone through insurance.
He breaks at the end of the third week. He begs, he pleads, and he throws out every ounce of bargaining power he can think of— finally, he says that he was about to move out.
Father looks up where he's been irritably trying to get Mike to leave him alone while he's working. "Were you now?"
So much for being proud of him, but it's the first thing that hasn't gotten him an outright rejection. "I had enough," Mike says. "Just a few weeks, maybe a month or two, and I would've been out of your way. You— you're— uh, I cost you so much living here, it'd probably be cheaper for you to just cover the costs yourself."
He sits back, glancing at his computer screen. Finally, Father sighs. "Michael, I'm not doing this to punish you," he says. "I love you, and I want you to succeed. I do not have infinite money, and you have cost me quite a lot of it, but I have paid so many of those bills for you. Your brother's hospital bills cost me tens of thousands of dollars. I took full custody of you when you were born, no matter how inconvenient it was, because I believed in you. I understand that this is upsetting for you, but it is one bill. You have the money to cover it, and it is entirely due to your own actions."
His eyes are burning. His face is burning. He feels like he's been doused in gasoline and set on fire from the sheer force of the shame.
It is entirely due to his own actions, but he's so tired. "Please," he whispers. "Please. I swear to god you'll never see me again."
Father frowns. "Christ, Michael," he says. "I don't know why you always act so afraid of me. I'm trying to explain that this isn't meant to hurt you. If you need to live here for a while longer, I will let you stay. I want you to be independent for your own sake."
A month ago he asked if Mike was planning to make a single goddamn cent on his own or if he was happier spending the rest of his life siphoning money off the blood, sweat, and tears that his father had spent building the company from the ground up.
…He was angry. Mike had fucked up the register. He'd had a few glasses. He's told Mike to stop interpreting everything he says in bad faith when he's only trying to give him advice.
"Please," he says again anyway. "I just want to move out."
Father's face softens. He sighs. "I'll tell you what," he says. "I will pay the fees. After you move out, I will give you six months to get a job before you will be expected to start making monthly payments until you have paid me back. If you're willing to pay for your own insurance, I'll even give you the civic for the price I paid to buy it for you in the first place. That's the best and last offer."
It's… it's not a good offer, exactly. But it's better than another day of this. "Okay," Mike says.
"I would like to make it clear," Father says. "You had goddamn better get me my money, and if I hear another milliliter of whining about the fees, the deal is off."
He nods. "…Yes, sir."
*
Centennial is more expensive than Hurricane, but it pays more.
Not so much more that he doesn't miss a couple payments.
The first time he's allowed until the next deadline to get both payments together, but from then on Father starts charging fees.
It ends up taking two years and four thousand dollars to pay off the full bill.
That's actually the easy part, funnily enough. The hard part is that he was planning to cut contact with his father, but the payments mean that he had to give him his new address and phone number. So every time a skilled employee bites the dust, Father has a funny little number he can call, and Mike has to take a week off work no matter the circumstances.
Which gets him fired from his actual job twice, because neither the owner of the auto shop nor the owner of the IT company are all that sympathetic to him having so many 'family emergencies'.
The IT job paid so well he would've been able to move into a new apartment if he'd had another year.
The consequences of his actions strike again.
*
Just six more months.
Just six more months.
Just six more months.
He finally got a job in computers again, it pays well enough that he will be able to move out once this lease ends. Just six more fucking months and he will never have to talk to his father again. This is the last job.
Of course it has to be a fucking miserable, awful one, but it's the last job.
Elizabeth's body was never recovered. Father found out where she was. He needs to retrieve the… parts, and put them back together so she can finally get a proper burial. It's a dignity that Cassidy was denied.
It's been seven years since the first and last day of Circus Baby's Pizza World.
He and Elizabeth weren't exactly on good terms. After Mr. Emily finished the job on his brother and took four other kids with him for good measure, Father didn't exactly have the bandwidth to take Elizabeth to school every morning, so Mike was tasked with basically full-time childcare.
He was not good at full-time childcare. He forgot most things that weren't regular appointments unless she reminded him at least twice and could have been generously described as emotionally unstable. She hated him, and he knew it, but he could never maintain anything above the bare minimum. He'd take her to school, go to school himself, work the afternoon shift so she had to find someone else to stay with, and then maybe pick her up if she'd told him who she was playing with and he didn't have the evening shift. If she didn't remember to bug him about an appointment, half the time he'd have shifts scheduled that he had to scramble to get covered. They barely interacted outside of her trying to get him to do things he'd forgotten about promising to do, and then he drove her to a party that she never got back from.
That kind of ended his father. Broke whatever was left of him. He did his best to keep up a brave face in public, but the snowballing weight of Henry Emily, Dave Miller, the engineer who hadn't properly secured the internal machinery on Circus Baby, and Michael fucking Afton was too much for him to handle. The only thing he really seems to care about these days is trying to keep Afton Robotics from fully going under.
And recovering his daughter's body. Mike sighs. It's going to be a long week.
*
Father said he'd be home after the second day, but when he hasn't even heard from him on the third, he ends up doing something fairly stupid. He checks his office.
He really does intend to stop as soon as he finds out where he is, but when he realizes that he might never have this kind of opportunity again, he ends up going down a rabbit hole that lasts a few hours.
And he finds a few things.
Firstly, his father gets a lot of money from Lionheart Shielding Inc., especially in the last few years. For services rendered. They're based in the UK, but either inflation over there is just awful, or he's charging them quite a lot for some pretty unimpressive jobs. They paid him ten thousand dollars for consultation a year ago. That does explain how he's keeping the lights on, since the actual amount of rentals CB's gets are pretty low, and the amount of people who have the need and resources to commission animatronics isn't quite enough to cover operating costs a lot of the time. Especially with how many employees they bleed every quarter. It's strange— Mike had never really questioned how his father always managed to recover from the constant string of financial disasters. He… never even… he didn't ever really seem to get poorer. He thought it was just savvy spending, or maybe that the things he was buying weren't as expensive as they looked.
But secondly, when he finds the tax records, he realizes that his father actually spent quite a lot more than he realized. He'd always known that he was generous, but it turns out he was dropping hundreds of dollars on hosting events for various organizations and thousands on donations to the news network or police department. And his personal spending wasn't cheap. Mike recoils when he finds a receipt for two hundred dollars worth of vintage spirits from Europe. It's from this year.
He's snooping. He's in deep shit if his father comes home before he has time to put whatever file he's currently digging through away. But he can't convince himself to stop looking.
And it's the third thing he finds that he realizes he was looking for.
In March of 1992, James Vogel accused William Afton of committing a hit and run. He and his family had been driving on the highway at night when a car had abruptly swerved into them, causing their car to flip over into the divider, severely injuring him and killing his teenage son who was sitting in the seat that took the heaviest hit. Mr. Vogel alleges that the driver did not pull over, and that he was only able to identify the car because his wife had caught the make and model as well as the license plate when she had commented that the car was driving erratically and worried that the driver was under the influence.
Obviously the company lawyer got on the case, and insisted that they had no proof whatsoever that they hadn't picked a car at random and multiple employees testified that he had still been at work at the time the accident took place. Mr. Vogel kept pushing, and the case was ongoing when Mike backed into Mrs. Harcourt's passenger door, right after his lawyer managed to dig up records of a DUI conviction from when his father was twenty-five and a crash from 1978 where father's AMV8 got the sweet kiss of death from the minivan he crashed it into.
And it is the funniest fucking thing. It is hysterical. Because he knew that his father drove like shit. He knows that his father never drives under 80 mph on the highway— hell, he knows that his old man sometimes has a beer or two before he gets on the road. He knows Father totaled a car back in the 70s and that Mr. Emily rode him about it for six months because he was driving on a vodka martini and the car he hit was threatening to sue. He knew it wasn't the only crash he'd been in.
That's before he even finds the car repair bill.
The total cost of the parts was seventy-seven dollars, and it took about two hours to finish the repair job. He finds this out from an itemized bill tucked away that explains that the disassembly, which cost almost eight hundred dollars and included the entire front half of the car, did not find anything else that needed repair. The remaining cost is made up by "miscellaneous", an hourly charge for "paint supplies", the seven and a half hours it took to take the car apart and put it back together, and the somehow exactly equal "paint labor" time, which is charged separately from the hourly "paint supplies" and also distinct from material costs, which are distinct from the cost for parts.
Mike puts the piece of paper away.
He sits down on the floor of the office.
He cries like a bitch for a good long while.
His father always told him to demand an itemized bill because otherwise contractors would scam you for everything you were worth. He always told him that if he saw a charge that didn't make sense, he should never pay it without a reasonable explanation.
Why wouldn't he have offered to take the car in himself? Why didn't he argue the price down when the mechanics saw a little old lady who had no idea how much it cost to fix a car door and decided to wring every dollar they could out of her?
Why did he say he couldn't cover the cost when he spent fifteen hundred dollars on a new watch six months later? Why did he say he couldn't afford to raise Mike's pay after the minimum wage was doubled because they were operating on a shoestring budget when that was the year Lionheart paid him twenty thousand dollars for "miscellaneous"?
Why is he asking those questions when he knows the answer?
Because it didn't matter. It never did. Father knew there was nothing he could have done about it even if he'd known all of this.
He is never, ever, ever going to get to move into a new apartment. There's always another bill.
*
William Afton is declared missing about three months after Mike wakes up in Centennial with a lot of missed calls from his boss. It's some Greek tragedy level shit— the one time he had a real chance was the time he decided that he might as well just kill himself rather than suffer another day under his father's thumb.
Mike hangs up the phone.
He knows the motherfucker isn't dead. He's not dead, and whatever the hell his father was fucking with, Mike knows without a shadow of a doubt that he had some kind of plan for this exact situation.
Which is good, really, because it means Mike still gets to kill him.
*
"It's a bad idea," Charlie says, apprehension crackling through the ancient voicebox. "Sure, it'll kill Mr. Afton if you can keep him from escaping, but… it'll kill you too."
Mike crosses his arms. "I'm already dead," he says. "The fuck else am I gonna do?"
Charlie stares at him. The Puppet's eyes are completely blank, and yet he still feels it crawling on his rotten skin. "There has to be a better way," she says. "If you do this I'll try to stop you."
"Good luck with that," he says. "But there's some shit that's out of your control."