Rating: T for graphic violence and gore, perilous situations, psychological trauma, mild swearing and mild sensuality

Setting: 1983, Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rentals, immediately after the events of the game

Summary: Back on the job after a hellish night shift he can't fully remember, Eggs Benedict rescues his one remaining coworker from his twisted father's control. The two friends soon find themselves at the mercy of malicious forces stalking their every move.

Author's Note: Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location and all canon characters, settings, etc. are the property of Scott Cawthon. This is a non-commercial fan tribute and was not written for profit.

Some lines of dialogue from the game were used; these are also the property of Scott Cawthon.

You are free to use any original concepts, headcanons and characters from this fanfiction in your own work (fanfiction, art, etc.) if you'd like.

Views expressed in this fanfiction do not necessarily match the writer's.


"Can't anything go my way for once?" Eggs Benedict snarled, leaning with his forehead pressed against the cool glass panel of the vending machine. Alone as always in the lobby of his workplace, he stared down despondently at the cabinet. Behind the smudged glass, the noodles and chicken broth that were to have been his makeshift dinner gurgled down the drain where they had been dispensed, moments before the foam cup had dropped into place. He had only fed the quarters into the machine out of habit anyway, as he had yet to feel any true pangs of hunger.

Still bemoaning his lost meal, the young man peered back at his own reflection, his face inches from the glass. His deep sigh produced two mere wisps of condensation on the panel, one below each nostril, which struck him as vaguely strange. From under the wayward locks of hair he had teased into his favored punkish style, two eyes, glistening with their usual earnest blue, gazed back at him.

Blue. Right, they'd always been blue, hadn't they? he shakily tried to reassure himself. Whatever he had seen looking back at him in the hazy reflection of his bathroom mirror that morning was now as foggy as the air in the small tiled room itself had been.

"Hello. Hello?" The voice from down the hallway interrupted his thoughts. Familiar in the midst of a confusing night when all around him felt anything but ordinary, Clyde's tone was a soothing balm to Eggs's jangled nerves, and despite himself, he found a smile creasing his face.

Landing a retaliatory kick against the vending machine with his leather boot, the technician found his coworker in the spartan room that served as the company office for Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rentals. Clyde raised a hand in silent but enthusiastic greeting as he listened intently to the phone receiver clutched between his chin and shoulder, all while he rustled through the coffee-stained folders scattered over the surface of the desk.

Eggs smiled warmly, though he was concerned to see his usually stoic friend visibly upset. Perennially clad in button-down work shirts and wire-framed eyeglasses, Clyde presented quite a contrast to Eggs's devil-may-care style, which consisted of shredded clothing embedded with studs and spikes, the more the better. Visitors to the rental outfit's office frequently mistook the businesslike young man for someone in a much higher position, while nobody would have guessed that Eggs, with his jokester personality and far more casual work ethic, was actually the eldest son of the company owner and stood to inherit the enterprise someday. Yet despite their differences, Clyde was the only one among the skeleton work crew at his father's business that Eggs could not only tolerate but actually like.

"I'm sorry to inform you at such late notice, but Circus Baby is no longer available to entertain at your church festival this weekend," Clyde said, resting a hand on his furrowed brow as a distressed squawk echoed over the line. "What? Uh, there's been some technical difficulty and she's, uh, out of service until further notice. Funtime Freddy? Nah, I'm afraid he's also out of commission."

Funtime Freddy has already been here today. Circus Baby has already been here today. Eggs shook his head, trying to remember how it could be that he had already known about the loss of the animatronics.

His agitation growing as he tried to placate the indignant customer, Clyde twisted the phone cord around his fingers and looked up pleadingly at his friend and coworker, who could only shrug at the inexplicable situation that he had walked into.

"Okay, Eggs my man, what gives?" he demanded after he had finally ended the call, giving an exaggerated shrug in a gesture of surrender. "Just between you and me, I always thought your old man was a little off, but would you believe it, he sent the entire cast - all of them! - to the scooper last night, I guess after your shift." Clyde's winged hair swayed as he shook his head over the senseless destruction. "I went down there to see the aftermath for myself, and they're all goners. Guess that's gonna put us out of a job, huh?"

"Wow," muttered Eggs, his mind frantically scrambling to recall exactly what had gone down during his shift the night before. There remained gaps of time he could not account for, but he did remember gazing down in stunned silence at the sight of the ruined animatronics, the remnants of their steel and fiberglass shells scattered across the floor like the carapaces of so many dead insects. The scooper itself, a brutal instrument resembling a miniature backhoe, had been tucked back in its idle position, poised above the fearsome aftermath of its work, and Eggs had stood transfixed before it for what had seemed an eternity. What the hell happened to them last night? What happened to me?

"He...didn't clue me in ahead of time that he was going to do something that drastic, since I already know that's going to be your next question," the technician began, feeling it was best to conceal the fact that he had arrived to his previous shift to find the animatronics already destroyed. "You've known the guy almost as long as I have," he added, cracking a forced smile. "Though even for him, this was a rather extreme way to tell us he's had it with the business and we're all fired."

"That's the thing, though," Clyde said, gesturing to the folders spread across his desk. "William may have made the terrible business decision to destroy our entire inventory, but believe it or not, he's keeping us on, and I'm supposed to stall the customers on the phone. Guess he's got some sort of plan to give 'em what they want."

"Sure he does!" Eggs assured his friend. His black leather jacket, dripping with a few select lengths of chain, crunched as he made himself comfortable on the desktop, earning a vaguely disapproving look from Clyde. "It turns out, animatronics were a short-lived fad, and what kids really want at their birthday parties are good old-fashioned clowns performing tricks. What do you say? You and I could get some greasepaint and ruffled collars, maybe do some juggling, throw a few pies..." Brandishing an imaginary pie-pan, he rushed his hand at Clyde's face, amused by his mortified expression.

"Not on your life!" Clyde yelped, seizing his friend's arm by the wrist. "I shouldn't speak ill of the dead and disassembled, but I was never a huge fan of our own resident clown, Circus Baby, or any others for that matter." Reddening, he admitted, "let's just say some joker at the circus years ago singled me out of the audience for some mistreatment with his seltzer bottle and leave it at that." He smirked at the memory, while Eggs doubled over in laughter, nearly sliding off the desk.

"Sorry to make you relive such trauma, mate!" he quipped. "Okay, so no clowns, but maybe we can still salvage the family business despite my father's apparent efforts to run it into the ground. I feel bad for letting that church group down, so let's send over our bouncy castle and dunk tank for their festival, and we'll throw in the sno-cone and cotton candy machines. Along with our sincere condolences for not being able to provide the requested entertainment, I'd also say a half-off discount is in order." His eyes fell to Clyde's hand, which was still gripping his wrist.

"Curse it, what have you been into?" Eggs asked, noticing for the first time the dried and crusted red material under his friend's fingernails. The receptionist quickly withdrew his hand, studying it dumbfoundedly.

"Hydraulic fluid, no doubt," Clyde answered flatly as though he was trying to convince himself as much as Eggs. "You know the drill, it's just part of the 'endless janitorial opportunities' that come with this line of work. There wasn't much else to do earlier, so Old Man Ass-Ton called up and asked me to muck out the scooping room after he'd used it for his own private demolition derby. It fell on my shoulders because Derrick and Marv haven't shown up for two days now." He shuddered in distaste at the memory of peeling off the drenched and slimy company-issued jumpsuit after the task was done, of frantically washing his hair in the maintenance room washtub. In his state of extreme sleep deprivation he blessedly couldn't remember the rest, although he was certain it had to have been beyond unpleasant.

Letting out a guffaw at Clyde's uncharacteristically irreverent nickname for his father, Eggs was left wondering if the stress of the job had left him unguarded enough to utter it aloud. Although Clyde could be irritatingly deferential to his boss and often gave the appearance of being the quintessential "yes-man," when only Eggs was around he tended to loosen up, voicing his vague disapproval of some of the company's more dubious practices.

"So Derrick and Marv bailed on us, huh? No great loss there, but now that things are slow anyway, howsabout we pick apart last night's episode of The Immortal and the Restless? You know you're the only guy besides me who'll admit to watching that schlock, so 'fess up! Did you honestly see that one coming? Vlad and Clara got back together, just because he bought his rugrat a fast-food meal?"

"Nope," admitted Clyde, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head. He and Eggs were both unabashed fans of the campy, late-night vampire soap opera. "Vlad slays me, though. He only thought of that after Clara burned down the house and left him. Think they'll actually stay together?"

"I'm sure they'll keep up their love affair for at least another season, just for the ratings." Eggs chuckled, remembering the over-the-top scenarios the lead characters had found themselves in over the course of recent episodes. "But really, Vlad's a class-A jerk for rejecting his own kid."

Keenly aware they were no longer talking about television drama, Clyde felt a lump form in his throat.

"I-I'm really sorry your dad doesn't care much for you," he blurted out before briefly falling into an uncomfortable silence. "You stuck by him through it all, and you're a great guy." You don't deserve that.

Eggs turned sharply away, feeling something twist in his stomach as he did so. As much as he had tried to suppress the pain from his father's brutal coldness, at times like now it still stung.

"'S'okay," he muttered. "I mean, thanks. That means a lot, coming from you." At a loss for words, he leaned across the desk, folding his arms around his startled coworker and clutching him to his chest. "But hey, if we two chumps are the only ones still aboard this sinking ship, at least we should stick together, right?" He released him after hearing a muffled reply from somewhere under the tangle of leather-clad arms, and Clyde wriggled free, blushing fiercely while rubbing his forearms as if warding off a shudder.

"As nice as that was, you're as cold as ice! And I didn't want to bring it up, but you're looking a little peaked as well, not that I should talk," said Clyde with some concern, staring down at his own pale arms. Though it was the start of what was shaping up to be a sun-drenched summer, neither man's work schedule allowed for much time lazing around outdoors.

"I'm just trying to look more like your hero Vlad, dark ruler of the night," hissed Eggs jestingly, holding an imaginary cape before his face as his impersonation of the vampire soap opera lead earned a chuckle from Clyde. "I vant to scoop your blood!"

"You're a riot, but take it from me: the night shift can be a killer. The swing shifts and total lack of daylight down here will really throw you off, and I never could have hacked it myself if it hadn't been for your dad."

Eggs allowed Clyde to drone on, unheeded, about how William was admittedly a brilliant nutritional expert who could prescribe the optimal vitamin formula for any night-shift worker to maximize his productivity, and a lot of other mumbo-jumbo that sounded as though it had been absorbed and then parroted back without much thought on Clyde's part. Afton did have a persuasive, even seductive personality that Clyde was hardly immune to.

"Wait, he's giving you daily shots?" Eggs croaked in disbelief, suddenly listening raptly.

"You betcha." Clyde prodded his bicep with a finger. "Myself and all the other long-time night owls, and now that you're starting your second week you oughtta see him so he can hook you up with what you need. There's Vitamin D to combat the darkness, melatonin to fight mood alterations and even some compounds to boost energy levels so working a double shift's no big deal anymore. I guess it's better than nothing, since the Afton Robotics health plan leaves a bit to be desired."

Eggs's hand reached up instinctively to his arm, running over flesh that felt tender even under the thick leather of his jacket sleeve, and his eyes narrowed in suspicion.

No wonder everything last night was such a blur! For the second time, he felt an uncomfortable twisting sensation, deep in his gut.

"I'm heading down to the scooping room," he announced, no longer sure he could trust even his closest friend. "You wanna come with? There's something weird going on here, or my name's not Eggs Benedict."

"It's not," Clyde countered under his breath, making a snap decision to join him in the service elevator. He shuddered at the sight of the deep shaft they were about to descend, visible through the metal grid below their work boots. "I never could figure out how you could drop into this hellhole every night like it was nothing...Mike."