Timeline note: There are multiple points in time, but anyone familiar with the movies will recognize them.
Rating: T for slight references to torture. (You know when that happens.)
Dedication: Dedicated to Julia451 because she loves monster world exploration.
General note: I love to see patterns and Mike loves to hang on to inanimate things. The result seemed obvious to me.
Every monster knew about Scream Cans. Their world was powered with them. Or, more precisely, with what was inside them.
Little monsters did not know about that latter fact. All they saw were the pipes on the walls of their homes, and the yellow canisters they got to see on the mandatory elementary school field trips to the nearest power plant. To kids, Scream came out of Scream Cans the same way water came out of the wall.
Of course, they got to know the explanation for the perceived magic on that other mandatory trip, the one to the nearest Scream Factory. After weeks of doing special projects on known Scarers and toxicity safety measures, they got to enter those huge buildings to see with their own optical organs that gathering Scream was hard work, difficult, and most decidedly dangerous. What was held in those cans was a valuable treasure, and the kids were all implored not to waste the energy inside them.
What Mike remembered most about his own field trip to Monsters Inc. was, of course, his front-row seat to one of "Frightening" Frank McCay's awesome Scares, and he treasured his new idol's gift to the point of annoying his family with it. But he remembered the Scream Cans, too. Not only did they hold the precious Scream, no, they had even provided him with the opportunity to see how it was gathered. Had it not been for the cart being pushed onto the Scare Floor, the one full of empty Scream Cans merrily clanking against each other, he would never have gotten close enough.
That made them a little cooler in his eye, and he did not exactly care that no one shared his enthusiasm about them.
That enthusiasm faded quite a bit, of course, when he was forced to study them day in and day out. He would much rather be sitting in one of Professor Knight's classes, testing his own Scaring knowledge and practicing his Scaring skills. But instead, he had to let himself be lulled to sleep by Professor Brandywine's voice retelling what was written in the books.
Part of it was his fault, he knew. He should have ignored Sullivan like Randy had said. He should have concentrated on his exam, should have taken the chance to show off his abilities, but instead, he had gotten sidetracked with competition and had paid for it, dearly. He had chosen Scream Can Design in a small bout of fondness for the little, yellow buggers in the hopes that the positive associations would carry him through a course of studies he did not want - and he had a sinking suspicion that Sullivan had chosen it solely for the chance to continue staring at him - but in reality, all he wanted was to get rid of the subject. The Scream Cans were keeping him from what he was meant to do.
They even threatened his life.
Of course he knew that they were dangerous, with all that energy packed inside and their valves not one hundred percent secure. But that they could be overloaded to the point of exploding was news to him, even with all the reading he had done on the subject. Dropping one, yes, that was disastrous in most cases, but filling them with energy was what they were built for.
Maybe it was just Sulley's natural talent, or maybe it had been the fact that the two of them had scared adults - or maybe, just maybe, his own Environmental Enhancement had upped the amount of energy gathered. Regardless, though, the entire lab had blown up. He knew from Hardscrabble's testimony to the CDA that the Scream Cans had already overloaded before the big explosion that had destroyed the lab, rendering them useless for both research and field work, but the Door Station was a smoldering mess of metal now, so any cans which had been spared the overload must have joined their companions in uselessness at that point.
He could not help feeling that as indicators for the magnitude of what had happened, they had had a part in him getting kicked out of school. But had they crushed his dreams? Or had they gotten him started on a new adventure, gotten him out of a dead-end and sent him on the right path?
Feeling Sulley's presence beside him, he was inclined to believe that the latter was true.
And indeed, they got him much closer to the Scarers than he had ever been in his life.
Sure, he had been in that kid's room with "Frightening" Frank McCay on that one day that was still so prominent in his memory. But that had been closeness in terms of locality. Now, the Scarers actually knew him, even talked to him.
Him and Sulley, both, because they were both can wranglers, and that was another closeness he associated with them. He did not owe his friendship with Sulley to them, no, but the shared work definitely deepened their bond.
Sometimes, when he carried one, he hugged it a little tighter than he probably should have.
It got even better when Sulley became a Scarer, and he became Sulley's assistant. The Scream Cans were a measure of his performance, and the swiftness with which he handled them was proof that he was damned good at his job.
Sulley knew that, and even said as much, frequently. His friend had to know, of course, that it was difficult for him to deal with the fact that someone else was doing his dream job right in front of his face, so Sulley never forgot to drop the occasional bit of praise about how quickly he had switched out the Scream Cans and exchanged the doors.
Of course, he could argue that the Scream Cans were keeping him away from Scaring yet again. But how he felt about them was a conscious decision, he knew. He was happy being with Sulley like this, so why should he mope about the fact that this life had not been his first choice? It was a good choice!
After Randall had used them to harm him, their little clanking sounds haunted his nightmares.
That was nonsense, of course. The Scream Cans on that particular cart had been stationary to form a hole in the middle, so they could not have clanked against each other. But he still vividly remembered being trapped in that yellow box, the slight vibrations of the cart being pushed around the factory, and especially the overwhelming apprehension about what would await him once he got out of there - or if he ever would. The space had been so tight, so confined, that by the point at which Randall had let him out again, he had been close to passing out from lack of oxygen.
He had been afraid of developing claustrophobia after what had happened, and that would have been completely unsurprising given the circumstances, but it was not the issue. When he had first gotten back onto a Scare Floor, he himself had been surprised when, upon someone accidentally pushing two Scream Cans against each other and causing that clanking sound, he had jumped at least a meter, screaming.
It was not the narrow space he had grown afraid of, it was the Scream Cans that had been the border between it and the outside world. And in all of those horrible dreams, those that ended in Randall gleefully going through with the torture and no Sulley around to pull the plug, there was the modified cart in the background, and, for some reason, the Scream Cans' clanking sounds filled the air around him as he felt his screams being forcefully ripped from his lungs.
It was understandable, in that regard, that being tasked with redesigning them scared him to the point of paralysis.
Of course, he was the logical choice. Sulley was way too busy with running the company, their resident tinkerer had yet to return from the human world, and other than Randall, no one really knew anything about Scream Cans. Their design had not been changed in years, so the company had always just bought them off the manufacturer and had had surprisingly few accidents due to them - what did threaten people's safety was mostly just toxicity stuff, and even that, he knew now, was way less dangerous than anyone but him and Sulley suspected.
Scream Can Design was a mandatory course for Scaring Assistants in school, sure, but he knew from experience that no one really paid attention to it, and most of the former assistants had come from different careers, anyway - it was not as if anyone aimed to be an assistant. So with all that, of course he stood out as the only one who had both taken the subject and put in the effort of actually studying it, and that made him the best man for the job.
He could not bring himself to tell Sulley no, or even tell his friend why that would have been his preferred answer. But he did confide in Celia, and it helped him build up the courage to approach the things. After extensive acclimatization and a lot of purposeful clanking on Celia's part, he was still a far cry from worshipping the things as he had used to, but at least he could do his job.
The problem was that the Scream Cans, in their current design, were incapable of handling the new form of energy. Laughter was several times more powerful than Scream was, so putting the same amount of each into a can was fine for Scream, but would cause an instant overload for Laughter. Monsters Inc. had seen a lot of accidents for that reason, and as they could not just stop gathering energy with the crisis looming over their heads, they had to press on by making the kids laugh just a little, and filling only a fraction of the canisters. But that was like walking through a mine field, and certainly no long-term solution. It was only a matter of time until someone died from being too close to an explosion.
So now it was up to him, he supposed. He knew he did not have Randall's knack for technology, or even Sulley's never-ending patience, but someone had to do this. Those Scream Cans were not just threatening him any longer; they were threatening everyone around him, including Sulley, Celia, and the guys. It was time to come up with a design for Laughter Cans, so that they could all get rid of the dangerous Scream Cans for good. It did not matter what they symbolized for him. What mattered was that they did not kill anyone.
It was not even just what they symbolized for him. It went way beyond that. They held energy gathered by brutally mistreating adorable, little humans. And after meeting Boo - cheerful, heartwarming, little nuisance that she was - he wanted no part in that any longer. Sure, the other companies might be stubborn and campaign against a paradigm shift they were secretly just afraid of, but from this company, if he had any say on the matter, the Scream Cans needed to vanish.
Even though he knew, of course, that part of him would miss them.
Note: In case anyone is wondering, yes, there is a Mike angst story coming up on the topic of Randall's attempted torture (among other things). Keep an eye out for Fragments. If you're interested, just put me on author alert or follow UntoldStoriesMU on Twitter, so that you won't miss it.
Constructive criticism is always welcome, especially this time, because this story is quite experimental.