A/N: I'm not dead! I just ran out of motivation—and ran into writer's block. I know this chapter is short but I figured a small update was better than no update at all while I'm finding my feet again.

Now, Michael was not one to balk at the odd health code violation. These seedy little pizza joints ran on bellybutton lint and hopes and dreams, and couldn't afford such luxuries as 'windows' or 'ventilation', or the fabled beast, the 'janitor'. But when he found out that he would be working inside a bunker straight out of the Cold War, he had questions. A lot of questions.

"I might be committing treason," he mused while he entertained Funtime Freddy and Foxy with the security doors. Open, shut, open, shut. Because of course they needed eight-inch steel magnetically locked doors for this one room in particular. Was he the unwitting guinea pig for some kind of Russian superweapon? Eh. Unimportant. What was important was that when plugging in their weird pizza bunker, they apparently decided to hook it up to a battery instead of mains. Maybe he should stop messing with the doors.

He opened both with the remote switch he cobbled together from stuff he found in the drawers, and left them that way. "Any luck?" He said into the air, leaning back in the swivel chair he stole from the manager's office. He was right; it was much more comfortable.

"There is little of note," came Ballora's answer, sniffish. "The security records are routinely wiped, and that is all that is kept on this system."

"So you're saying I've got to get into Santa's personal computer."

"You must get into Santa's personal computer," she agreed.

Hmm. Michael chewed on another forkful of cold chow-mein while he considered his options. On the one hand, something was going on here and legally signing away his right to life in some dodgy fucking paperwork was just the first clue. And, well, he was curious. On the other, he was already comfortable, and walking down the hall to Santa's workshop seemed like an awful lot of effort.

Something crashed in the depths of the building.

"Mmf—the fuf w'tha?"

"Don't talk with your mouth full."

"Maybe it was a ghost," Freddy offered.

"Holy fucking shit, Fred, you do know where we are right?" Michael threw down his fork and stood. "Right, we're going on a sweep. Ballora, watch the cameras and call me if anything weird happens. Freddy, Foxy, you're coming with me because I trust neither of you with my life or with important equipment."

"Yaay!"

"Y'know, when you said 'everything' I didn't think you'd, like, go into a play by play of eating takeout in your office." Mac dunked a piece of cake thing into his coffee, eyebrows pinching together when the whole thing immediately disintegrated.

"Everything means everything, or do you want me to stop? Because I can go the fuck home."

"No, no, I was just like—nevermind."

Silence settled over the room. A prickly, uncomfortable sort of silence, like handling a rattlesnake with barbecue tongs, cut short only by the sound of a backfiring car—or maybe it was a gunshot, hard to say these days. Normally silence was a rare thing to be treasured for the short while it lasted. But this one overstayed its welcome, and Michael was just opening his mouth to talk over it when Mac cut across him again.

"So they were… really the originals? The first?"

Michael eyed him over his coffee. "The first ones that you'd recognise as a Freddy Fazbear's animatronic. There were… others, before that."

"What were they like?"

"Honestly? Big, chunky things that just kind of shuffled in place and waved their arms a bit. They were going through a 'less is more' phase." It felt… empty, to be referring to Henry—and to him—as nothing more than 'they'. As if they were merely strangers, and all they had suffered and caused others to suffer was just stories he'd heard through the grapevine.

He didn't like it, he realised. To be telling this story, his story, but with nothing of him in it.

"... What I wouldn't give to get hold of one of those," Mac was saying, gazing in doe-eyed wonder through the mists of time at what he presumably thought the classics looked like. He thought wrong. People always did.

"You just met one of the killer animatronics—did you learn nothing?"

"That…" Mac's face made shapes around the concept, pushing out into a pout, pulling into a frown. Scrunching up when it wouldn't fit, no matter which way he turned it. Until, finally, it did, and his mouth dropped open in horror. "Oh god, that—that was the real thing."

"Did you really just figure that out? Really?"

"Are there more of those things?"

"Mac, buddy, my man," Michael told him with a look of utmost pity, "why the hell do you think I'm telling you this story?"

"This is a problem."

Well, it used to be a spotlight. Maybe. If Michael squinted and turned his head. Now, though, it was just that: a problem.

The circle of his flashlight glittered over the floor, over confetti and foil party hats scattered from the tables. And glass, so much glass. It crunched underfoot as he picked his way over the remains; he tried not to think about how much it sounded like bones. Crunch. Reflected in every shard was the LED on the camera overlooking the room from the stage, a thousand red eyes blinking on and off, on and off, watching him. It was Ballora looking through those eyes, but that didn't explain the hair that stood on end on his arms and neck.

"... Maybe it was another ghost?"

"Only if ghosts carry baseball bats and chains."

Crack, crunch. The wandering circle came to rest on the stage and its occupants. Two pairs of eyes caught the light. And that, he realised, was an even bigger problem.

"You know," he commented, "I always did wonder when they were going to kick Bonnie out of the band."

Give a robot a pair of functioning legs and it's bound to walk off at some point. The issue here was that these ones were never designed to walk at all. He felt eyes pricking his back the moment he turned away from the stage.

His phone was out of his pocket and in his hand before it could finish one bar of the Imperial March. "Something up?"

"From the trail of debris on the cameras, Bonnie appears to be making his way to the office."

Fuck.

"Sit tight, princess, we're coming to get you."

"I am not a—"

Michael hung up before she could finish protesting and hopscotched back the way he came. Off went the flashlight—no use painting a giant target on his back—and he bent to pluck a fallen mic stand from the floor to serve as a makeshift weapon. Old, felt solid. Sometimes buying everything second hand had its advantages.

The west hall was empty. He hugged the wall, where he might be mistaken for a shadow, if oddly shaped. And he crept onwards, slowly, every nerve, every muscle straining to go. Patience. He'd done this before. That's why he was here.

A hulking figure lurched out of the office, swallowing the trickle of pale light in its teeth. Fat, segmented limbs, like a spider. A spider with a thousand red eyes glittering out of the floor.

GO.

He kicked off from the wall. It heard the slap of his boots before it saw him and by then he was driving the stand into the broad curve of its chest. It spun on its feet and he went with it, threw his weight into the turn. Pivoted, and its momentum sent it into the floor—and him through the open door of the office.

Clang. The door slammed down on his fallen weapon. He added a microphone stand to his mental tally of things broken on his first night on the job.

"That," said Freddy, "w—was AWESOME."

Michael threw himself into the office chair and shut the other door for good measure. He let out a shuddering breath, but not all of the adrenaline went with it. So he let his hands curl themselves into fists and he waited until he came down from the high.

"I didn't need rescuing," Ballora's voice came, huffily, from the computer speakers. "And that was dangerous."

"All the awesome things are." As Foxy chattered agreements in dolphin, Michael blinked the blood haze from his eyes until the monitors swam back, forth, and then into focus. Error logs scrolled without end—were they on screen, or behind his eyes? He blinked again. Definitely on screen. "Found something?" He asked, leaning forward to watch what Ballora was up to.

"I'm making necessary adjustments."

Live footage from every camera in the building tiled across one monitor. On the other, Ballora marked out reference points from the feed, measured them against each other, then marked again, until soon enough she had a map, to scale, of every room in the building that she could see. The whole place and everything in it, right here in front of him. He could kiss her.

"Bless you, you even included the toilets."

The west door rattled as something heavy and fist-shaped slammed into it from the other side.

"So that's what those are for," Michael observed as a rabbit-eared shadow limped its way past the window and out of sight. When the shuff-thunk of dragging feet faded into the dark, he flicked both doors open. There had to be a way to rewire this whole fucking system. He didn't know what bean-counting cheapskate thought a bigass battery was a good way of saving money when night tariffs were a thing, but that man had blood on his hands.

All these fuckers did.

He spun on the chair. That felt good. "We need a plan," he said, drumming his fingers on the arms as he stared down the posters pinned to the back wall. Freddy, the old Freddy, stared back.

Foxy chittered.

"I don't know where you're getting the idea that C4 is cheap, but I like your thinking." He spun again. "But we still need to get into all those juicy forbidden files before we go blowing anything up."

"I can mark their positions on the map in real time as I see them."

"That's a start." His eyes drifted back to the little red blip, flickering across the screen. It was pacing in the main hall. Back and forth, back and forth. Here and there it would jump, erratic, when it passed from the view of one camera and into another. "But all this takes power, which, as it turns out, is currently a finite resource. We need to get into the mains—and that means going back out there."

"A—and more fi—fighting?"

"Yeah," he said, watching Bonnie claw at his own face on the cameras, mouth open in a silent scream. "More fighting."

"So what do you know about them?"

"Huh?" Mac blinked.

Michael dipped one pinky in his coffee and licked it. "The missing kids. How much do you even know about them?"

And he had to think about that, really think. Neatly divide the fact from the fiction, the embellished from the raw, ugly truth. Michael could see on his face how little he had of the latter. It was interesting to watch him try, to deal it all out like poker chips—then justify to himself why his winnings were so small. "They were killed, right?" He said at last, slowly. Like he was waiting for him to scream 'WRONG' and stamp an F on his report card. "At one of the old places… the really old ones."

"Who doesn't know that?" Michael ignored the wince his words left. But ripping Mac's guilty little guts out and tripping him up with them stopped being fun a while ago. He sighed, watching the dregs spin in lazy circles around the bottom of his mug. Watching it all stain black. And when it was cold, cold as him, he turned his gaze back on the only other person in the room.

The only living person. There were others, yes, jostling for space in his head and a hard drive on his belt. And the ghosts were there, always there, shackled to his ankles.

"They were my friends."