A/N: This chapter is short, and reeeally late. Unfortunately I was busy with commissions and convention prep this month and had barely any time for writing. Hopefully we're back on track now!

I vote Funtime Freddy as MVP this chapter, he truly went above and beyond.

CHAPTER FOUR

"You, like, only have to push the doorbell once, y'know."

Michael pressed it three more times while looking him dead in the eye. Sighing now, Mac fumbled with the chain, and with some clattering and swearing he at last creaked the door open just wide enough for him to step inside.

He didn't. Because Mac took long enough to get his ass downstairs that he lit a smoke to pass the time—not to ease the tremor in his hands, he told himself—and he was damn well going to finish it. So he leaned there on the railing, picking off bits of ice with his nails and flicking them at his shadow where it hunched over the empty street, waiting. Waiting for him to come back and hunt. Mirrors could lie. People could, too, to make him feel better about himself. Shadows could not.

"Nice apartment," he said, blandly. "I like the dead pot plants."

"Thanks," came the answer. "I killed them myself. Now c'mon, my legs are getting cold."

Michael eyed him, puffing smoke from his nose like a dragon. Mac was already in his PJs. Given that his day clothes were also a T-shirt and shorts, the only real difference was that he had decided to accessorise with a ratty old bathrobe. Risqué. "Maybe you should wear actual pants, then."

"Mike!"

But he'd already turned back to what he was doing and his next projectile hit its mark. Boom, headshot. The shadow, of course, didn't react in any way, and he was starting to lose feeling in his fingers. "Fine, whatever," he groused, stubbing out his cigarette on the railing and tossing it into the dead rhododendron's pot as he stepped inside.

"Are you a vampire? Because I like already did the inviting you inside thing. Several times."

"You salted the doorstep and I had to summon all of my infernal power to cross it." Michael shook the snowflakes out of his hair and jacket and made his way, uninvited, through to what he assumed was the living room. He assumed correctly.

It looked about the same as what he'd expect from a new suburb terraced house. Compact, efficient, everything painted white. No personality at all. But Mac was good at asserting his personality onto things he really shouldn't, and more than compensated with the random assortment of objects he chose to clutter it with. There was a claymore hanging over the fireplace with a piece of silly string still caught on the crossguard, well out of reach. Odd socks littered the floor. And there was a bookshelf with no books to speak of, only comics. Well worn, he noted, thumbed through frequently and without care for their future value.

"Wow!" Said Funtime Freddy in his ear, and he scowled. It wasn't that much nicer than his place.

Well, sure, there was actually pile on the carpet, and framed pictures on the walls. And the couches didn't sag. He decided to remedy this by immediately flopping down on one and putting his feet up on the armrest. Better.

"Good to see you making yourself at home." Mac ran a hand over his short scruff of beard. "Y'know, when you said you were coming over, I didn't think you meant, like, now."

"I always mean now. Foresight is for people who give a shit."

"Don't all humans give 'shits'? When y—you eat food and then you have to—" Freddy chipped in again, and Foxy burst out into laughter. Or, well, dolphin noises.

"Freddy!" Ballora gasped. "Language!"

"W—what?"

With all that racket in Michael's head, he was pretty sure he was starting up with a migraine. And his eye was twitching. And he couldn't tell them to knock it off without looking stark, raving mad. It was tempting to yank out the cable running under his jacket to the hard drive in his pocket. Instead, he said to the ceiling, "what's there for a man to drink around here?"

Mac shrugged. "Water."

Michael raised his head to glare at him over his feet.

"Or maybe coffee is more your style."

"Good man."

"At this time of night? Sheesh, do you like ever sleep?"

"Only on the holy days when my powers wane."

"Is instant okay? I, like, totally don't wanna start up the machine right now."

"I retract my previous compliment." He let his head fall back to the armrest with a groan. "Ugh, fine. Make it black."

"What do you say, Michael?"

He made a face like he was being force-fed lemons. "Please."

Freddy and Foxy soon complained of being bored of looking at the ceiling, so he rolled over to consider the Infinity Gauntlet surrounded by empty Monster cans on the coffee table. He found that he could knock them over with discarded receipts screwed up into balls, and it was on this fast-paced new sport of taking bets on how many cans he could topple at once that Mac returned with coffee, cookies, and some sort of cake thing that looked past its best.

"You can't keep still, can you?"

"I'll rest when I'm dead."

Trying, and failing, to find a spot on the table to put the mugs and plates, Mac opted to sweep off the remainder of the cans—eclipsing Michael's record of four—and set them down on the sliver of free space exposed. "That's Oreo slice," he said, pointing to the cake thing.

"It looks like dried shit pressed into a loaf tin."

"Michael."

"Thanks," he said, even more sourly. But he was thinking 'fuck you', and maybe if he thought it hard enough she would hear him.

Mac eyed him over this strange and sudden new development of manners, but wisely said nothing, and retreated to the comfy armchair directly facing him. "So," he said, sipping from his mug.

"So."

"You're… going to tell me, like, everything, right?"

Michael sat up and reached for his own mug. "Everything," he answered, amiably, after only a moment's hesitation. It was too easy these days, to pretend. Elizabeth would be proud of him. The lines around his mouth deepened. He would be proud of him. "From what I had for breakfast on the day it all started, to the number of hairs on Freddy's butt-chin."

"H—hey!"

"... Are you really?"

Absolutely not, he thought, and maybe it was something to do with chemicals in his bloodstream, or the way his face moved when he thought about him, but that time he knew that Ballora heard it.

1993

"I would fire an employee for speaking to me like that, Mr. Schmidt."

Michael shot him a razor-lipped smile. "But you said in your advertisement that you appreciate honesty in the workplace."

It's not like the man was in the position to be making threats—everyone knew Freddy Fazbear's was on its deathbed. Maybe if he had an ounce of feeling left in him, it would hurt to watch it die. The place where he grew up. The place that raised him. But this wasn't that restaurant. It wasn't, and never would be, because Fredbear and Friends was already long gone.

He wasn't going to mourn a trademark, a company. And he wasn't fucking blind. He didn't need the peeling wallpaper and stench of rot and mildew to know that the place was circling the drain. Henry had the good sense to pull the plug years ago and, frankly, these people deserved everything they got for pumping the blood back into something that should've stayed in the morgue.

He'd play their game, but he wasn't going to play fair. And he sure as hell wasn't going to make it easy.

Mr. Heinrich Trent did not look amused. He did, however, lean back in his swivel chair and regard him as a predator would prey. That probably wasn't supposed to be funny. But Michael's razor smile was increasingly becoming more of a squiggly line, and god, he wouldn't be able to hold out much longer if the man kept trying to play shark in the kiddie pool.

"He l—looks like Santa C—Claus!" Freddy offered helpfully, and he lost it.

It seemed that fortune smiled upon him that day, because Santa chose that exact moment to take a Very Important Call. One minute went by, then two, then five. Michael spun round and round on his own swivel seat, though his didn't have a high back and wasn't nearly as cool. And then he returned a sombre man, paler too, and there was a tremble in his hands as he eased himself back into his chair.

"Well, it appears you're in luck," he said, echoing Michael's sentiments, and wrestled a limp corpse-smile onto his clammy lips, "I find myself short of staff to fill the night shifts, and need someone to plug those holes—soon."

"I can start today. Now, even," Michael said, his lips curling back into a feral grin. "But I have some… concerns."

Santa wet his lips with his tongue. "Oh?"

"You see, while you were monologuing and pacing dramatically behind the desk, I noticed that you left my contract in plain sight and decided to skim through it."

"W—well, it was my intent to go over it with you regardle—"

"Do you realise that there are three pages of fine print alone?" Michael smiled, sickly sweet. "How kind. It warms my shrivelled little heart to think you'd take the time to read over every last point. Look, if you're running a front or something, I don't fucking care. But you and I both know you were going to lie to my face and tell me it's all just legalese and not to worry my pretty little empty head."

Santa wasn't even pretending to smile any more.

"Now this here—" he circled a clause with the pen he took out of Santa's breast pocket. 'I accept that any injury to my person is my responsibility and not that of Fazbear Entertainment.' Because apparently 'injury to his person' was something he should expect from a family pizzeria? "—Concerns me a whole hell of a lot. Is there any reason you feel the need to prevent my nonexistent family from suing you in the event of my gruesome demise?"

Ballora coughed pointedly in his ear.

"How many armed robbers are you expecting to raid a dying kid's restaurant, Heinrich? Can I call you that? Of course I can. There's exactly twenty three dollars and thirty cents in that till. I know because I looked."

Santa sat up straighter, emboldened by the knowledge, the satisfaction of knowing something this troublesome asshole didn't. That maybe if he played his cards right, whatever danger he was trying to conceal would remain just that. Michael would enjoy wiping that little smirk off his face later when he proved him wrong. "It's simply a precaution, Mr. Schmidt," he explained, not quite smoothly. "We have hired individuals in the past who demonstrated a lack of responsibility when alone on the premises, and injured themselves playing with the animatronics and equipment."

"I see," Michael said in a tone that quite clearly said no, he did not see, and if Santa expected him to believe a word of that then he needed to spend more time outside of the North Pole.

"Do you have anything else you'd like to address?"

"Yeah, I fucking do." He flipped the contract, all thirteen pages of it, back to the very first and slapped it back down on the desk with a bang that made Ballora, Freddy, Foxy and Santa all jump. "I don't see minimum hours written anywhere in this and if you expect me to work a zero hour contract, I am walking out of that door right now."

He waited. Santa didn't move. So he stood, throwing down the pen, and was halfway to the door when the man reached out with desperate fingers.

"W—wait! We could start you off on a part-time contract. A—and if you're a good fit for the company, we could look at… keeping you on full-time, sometime in the future? How does that sound?"

Michael flashed him a crooked little grin. Who's the shark, now?

"S—Santa Claus put you on the naughty list, Mikey."

"I'm sure he did, but that's okay because he's also on mine. You know, I thought all the secrets went with dad to the grave. But it looks like these assholes have a few of their own."

It turned out that cellphones were a great cover for when he needed to talk to the animatronics without rousing suspicion—much. It was an ugly old brick thing he could've used as a mallet in a pinch—Afton Robotics mastered touchscreen last decade, but he wasn't about to tell anyone that—but it did the trick, and the scattered handful of parents only looked at him with malice instead of forming a mob right there and then.

He couldn't blame them for their distrust, given the restaurant's reputation. But he also couldn't fathom why they were even here. All the other kids decided that Candy's Burger and Fries was the Cool Place To Be the moment that damn cat grinned his way onto the Saturday morning ad slots. Of course their precious darlings had to be the oddballs that actually liked the murder pizzeria.

"Are you sure about this?" Ballora said, uncertainty in her voice. "Something feels… very wrong here."

"That'll just make it so much more satisfying to bring it all crashing down on their heads."

"Unlike you, I am not motivated solely by spite."

"It grows on you."

In Freddy's heyday, Michael would've had to fight tooth and nail and elbow to get anywhere near the main stage. The patrons, young and old and somewhere vaguely inbetween, were once packed in like sardines, jostling to see it all up close and personal. To witness for themselves something that was once a marvel, something that captured the imagination of a nation, animals that walked and talked and almost seemed to breathe. Now it was a stroll across a barren floor, without even tables to block his way. Those were over by the entrance, set well back from the stage and its unsettling, glassy-eyed performers. And the smell.

Yeah, they were the originals all right. The Fredbear and Friends animatronics. A half to a whole that could never be, saved from the scrapper by men too cheap to invest in current models, without care for their legacy and all the horrors that came with it. Something crawled in his heart like a snake bearing its fangs, but he crushed it underfoot before it could strike. He was done being sentimental.

God, the things reeked like rotting flesh. They could've at least dry-cleaned the costumes before opening day.

"Hey," he said to Freddy, as if to an old friend. "Long time no see."

The bear's speech hitched, which was odd, really, given that all the audio was played from a reel somewhere behind the stage. And maybe it was just a trick of those tasteless rainbow lights they had set to strobe overhead, but he was sure those lifeless eyes rolled in their sockets to stare at him.