CHAPTER TWO

July 23rd, 2015

As one door closed, another opened. The entire world rocked with the weight of a man swinging into the seat beside her, waking Ana with a start made doubly sharp by not having realized she'd fallen asleep. Disoriented, she could only wait for dream-memory and present perception to decide when and where and who she was.

Clues were surprisingly sparse. Her stomach felt pinched and empty, and her limbs were stiff and unreliable, as if she'd just come from the closet. Her body ached, but her bruises did not know or care whose hand had punched them into existence. The slight heat throbbing in her cheeks could have come by way of the winter wind as easily as the summer sun.

On the other hand, her feet were sweating inside her scuffed workboots, not barefoot on hardwood floors. Her adult-sized hands were gripping the steering wheel of her own truck, since Shelly didn't keep one for landscaping services. And sitting beside her with a big stupid smile on his face was Jimmy Morehead.

"Yup," he said, holding out a can of Monster Ultra Black and keeping a bottle of organic all-natural sugar-free apple-guava juice for himself. "You're still in Mammon."

"I never left," she said without thinking. "I mean, of course I did, but I was dreaming of being here before…if it was a dream. I'm not sure it was."

"Mammon," said Morehead, affecting a tone of blind pride that probably wasn't as feigned as he wanted her to believe. "The town that dreams are made of. But seriously, you were asleep. Whatever it was, I'm pretty sure it was just a dream."

"I know it was, but maybe not all of it. I really think it might have been a memory."

"Oh yeah? Of what?"

"Monsters."

"Hm. Well, no offense, but if I was a betting man, my money would be on dream. These—" Morehead gave the Ultra Black a gentle shake. "—are the only Monsters in Mammon. And it's hard enough to even find them."

She took the can. It was cold in her hand, waking her up a little more, enough to remember some of the morning's work, not that there was much to recall. Her wristwatch said it was almost four and judging from the fact that she'd been sleeping on the shady side of the gas station instead of at one of Mammon's many recreation areas, Ana had to assume she'd checked off all the boxes on her daily to-do list, but one patch of grass was much like another when you were mowing it. All she knew for certain was that she was sweaty, tired, and sore. She could remember last week better than today…

God, no. Why did she have to remind herself? It was like a scab she couldn't stop picking at and now here she was, bleeding again.

The ever-present stink of the quarry seemed to thicken as she remembered Bonnie dragging himself into the kitchen. God, that smell. She had never imagined how much worse it could be until she smelled it cooking on his battery case. Or how it would feel between her fingers as she tried to comb it from his fur, scrubbing until her hands were raw and his poor cracked body was as bald as his blue counterpart from the Toybox. And his voice…how good it had been to hear his voice…

…telling her he was alive.

"Are you okay?"

Pulled from her reverie, Ana raised her head from the unblinking, unseeing study she'd been making of her energy drink and looked at Morehead. "Yeah," she said after a moment. "Just tired."

"Maybe I'd better drive."

Ana unbuckled her seat belt and slid over while he hopped out, jogged around the front of the truck and hopped in on the other side. Full of energy, was Jimmy. Probably went for a ten-mile jog every morning and of course, he never touched coffee. Or soda. Or high fructose corn syrup.

"What's that look for?" he asked, settling himself behind the wheel and making all the little adjustments necessitated by the two inches difference between their heights.

"Just thinking how lucky you are," said Ana after a short pause to dredge up a polite lie. "Wife. Kids. Nice house, decent job."

"The Lord has blessed us," he replied. "And you're doing all right yourself, you know. You've got…uh…"

"Good health."

"Good health," he repeated without a trace of the irony in Ana's own tone. Opening his juice, he raised it toward her, saying, "To your health!" and drank.

Ana opened her energy drink and sat with it on her knee, reading the word 'Monster' until it lost all meaning.

"You are really out of it," Morehead observed. "Want to go back to the lake? It's real easy to look like you're working when you're really just hanging out at the lake."

"No. Let's just go."

"Your call, but Shelly isn't exactly going to pin a medal on us for finishing up early. Knowing him, he'll make me sweep out the parking lot and make you scrub the bathroom."

True. Right down to the division of labor. That man never passed up the chance to get her on her knees.

"You mind if we just sit here for a bit?" Ana asked. "I need to wake up a little, get something cold in me and put my head on straight."

"Sure. Late night?" Morehead asked cheerily. "Or just an early morning?"

"Both."

A sleepless night, in any case. The latest in a series of sleepless nights. She had driven away from Freddy's, but she had not gone home, not that night and not since. She had no home. She had a house, but Erik Metzger still owned it. She did not believe in ghosts, but she didn't have to, did she? Mike Schmidt had told the truth after all. Erik Metzger could be dead and still be walking, stuffed inside one of his own Springtrap suits, shambling through secret passages she had yet to discover behind the walls. And Plushtrap? Fredbear? Also alive, two of his many victims, murdered solely to make a fun little toy to give to his son. Maybe there were more of them—a baby Chica or a proto-Foxy she had yet to unearth among the boxes in the basement or the attic. Maybe David was even with them. Or in them. Hadn't Aunt Easter said he was with his father? Maybe she'd been telling the truth that day. Maybe they both had, Aunt Easter and her mother both. David was dead and with his father, who was also dead and still walking, still waiting for Ana to come home and make them a family.

No, she could not go home, so after driving aimlessly up and down the empty streets of Mammon, she had gone to the Sugartree Motel, only to discover she had left her daypack, wallet, phone, tablet, and pretty much everything but the clothes she was standing in back at Freddy's.

Another aimless drive took her out of town and found her parked for the night on a flat patch of ground overlooking the canyon. Seemed like an ideal place for the local teens to earnestly discuss the virtues of abstinence, but Ana was alone all night, staring at the stony teeth of the open mouth before her and trying so hard not to think about Bonnie or Mason or Mike Schmidt that she instead found herself wondering if this was the spot where her not-father, Joe Stark, had either jumped or been thrown to his death.

So, yes, a sleepless night leading unfairly to a Monday morning. She had to go to work. After narrowly escaping her own murder at the half-remembered hands of Mason Kellar, then hearing Bonnie tell her he was alive and had always been alive, and then sitting alone in the dark on the probable site of her not-father's suicide to contemplate just what 'life' really meant, Ana had to go to work like none of it mattered. After work, more aimless driving, bringing her back to a different curve on the same canyon for another sleepless night, another day at work. And so it went, ten more days and nights living off coffee and the doughnuts other people brought into the office and occasionally scavenging like a goddamn raccoon out of the gardens grown by the good Mormons of this quiet little town under the cover of a moonless night. Now here she was, sleeping at work on a Thursday when she didn't have enough gas to make it to the weekend, in a town where she had no home.

"Seriously," said Morehead, still smiling but with a crease of concern appearing between his eyebrows. "Are you okay?"

She nodded. "Just a weird dream. I'll shake it off."

He sipped his juice in silence while she stared out the window.

"Was it Freddy's?" he asked suddenly.

"What?" Her voice was too loud, more like a bark than a word. She tried again, but the resulting, "What do you mean?" came out as badly read as a line in a grade-school play.

"In your dream. If you were dreaming about monsters in this town, it had to be Freddy's, right?"

"Not necessarily," Ana argued, too fiercely. "It could have been hungry ghosts in the quarry or mutant military experiments out at the base. There's lots of monsters in this town. And anyway, it wasn't. It was just people. My mother took me to…someone's house. There was a man there. And he told me the worst monsters wear human faces…and you had to look them in the eye to trap them or…or make them look you in the eye. I don't know. Something like that," she said, turning back to the window. "I don't know anymore."

It was sort of the truth. The events of her dream were already receding and the parts she could remember left her with a fading certainty that it had ever been founded in memory. After all, what had she really seen? She'd dreamed of a house she'd already been in and a man she'd already met. Easy enough to sit here and find all kinds of ominous meaning in it, but short of driving up to Faust's house and asking him directly if she'd ever been there as a child, there was no proof.

And she didn't have to ask, did she? Shelly had as good as told her the first time he'd introduced her to the old man, when he'd said Faust wouldn't have known Ana's mother or father (except by reputation), but that he might remember Aunt Easter. And so he had. 'People tell me I look like her,' Ana had said, and he hadn't cracked even a pretend-smile, just nodded and said, 'You do. When I saw you, I thought I'd seen a ghost.'

It couldn't be a happy haunting, given what Mike Schmidt…and Wendy Rutter…had told her. And yet, he'd seemed to like her, in his own odd way. And, damn her, she'd liked him. She wondered, if she went up there right now, if she confronted him in his own glass house and demanded to know how he knew Aunt Easter—how he knew Ana herself—would he tell her?

Maybe, maybe not, but the real question was, did she really want to know? How much more of the truth could she take before it killed her? She used to roll her eyes at angsty songs that insisted you could die from a broken heart, but here she was, spending sleepless nights out at lover's leap, one rhyming dictionary away from the sappiest song ever written. She'd lost everything—her home, her family…her man.

And even that thought bled, the most trivial cut and the deepest, because that had really been the great romance of her whole wasted life. Bonnie. And maybe she'd been his. He had been writing her a song, after all. He'd even played it once, using her body for his instrument, and that had been exciting and strange and a little scary, but only like a movie could be scary, because it was all in fun. She could be silly and in love and risk nothing. He wasn't real.

Except he was. They were all real. The implications were enormous, so much bigger than her stupid broken heart, bigger even than Mammon and a few hundred measly little murders. The technology in the building alone was earth-shaking, and that was before factoring in the potential advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence, let alone the Tesla cosmic energy condenser in the basement, and how much did any of that matter to Ana? Not a goddamned iota. She'd lost her man. She was no one's baby girl. And her stupid heart was fucking broken and that was all that mattered.

'Stop thinking about it,' she told herself and then went ahead and twisted the knife some more. "Have you ever been to Freddy's?"

He responded immediately and with enthusiasm. "Heck, yeah. Me and my whole family pretty much had every birthday out at the one on Circle Drive. Us and everyone else, right? Between my family and my friends, I was going to two or three parties there every month for all my life until it closed. And I cried," he added with a careless laugh, "because they closed it like a week before my tenth birthday. My mom was mad. I guess she'd already reserved the party place. I'm sure she got a refund, but I remember her complaining anyway. I even went to the one out by the quarry when it was open. Kaya was pregnant with Kayla then and I was actually really excited that she'd be able to grow up with a Fazbear's Pizzeria like I did."

"Kaya and Kayla?"

His smile of reminiscence became a sheepish grin. "And Jimmy and Jami, yeah. I don't know what we're going to do for the third one. Jaya. Kimi. Kaja? I guess it could be a boy, but I kind of hope not, because I promised my mother I'd name my first son after her grandfather and calling a boy Meredith in this day and age is practically child abuse."

"You got a third one coming?"

"Yup," he said with a puff of fatherly pride. "Should be here by Easter."

That gave her a pang, but all she said was, "Congratulations, man. Tell your wife I said the same to her."

"Will do." He took a swallow of his juice. "So were you? Dreaming about Freddy's?"

"No. I've never even been there."

"You don't have to go somewhere to dream about it," Morehead pointed out, then looked at her in belated surprise. "You've never been there? Ever? Not even as a kid?"

"Not even."

"How is that even possible? Everyone goes to Freddy's!"

"I know. They're everywhere. And there's that one out on Old Quarry," she added casually. "I drive past it every day. It's got to be the biggest pizza parlor I've ever seen."

"Yeah, it was epic, all right. It had its own arcade and a little movie theater and a rock-climbing wall." His eyes look on a misty, wistful stare. "Jami would have loved it there. Kayla maybe not so much. She's more into hair and horses, but Jami would have loved it. She's just like that little ferret, whatshername. Tomboy."

'Tumble,' thought Ana, unable to keep the derisive tone out of even her inner voice. Aloud, she said, "Why did it close? People say it was only open for a week."

"Yeah, just the one week. I always figured the smell might have something to do with it, although once you got inside, it was fine. But that's just my guess, I don't remember the old guy actually giving a reason. All I can remember is being incredibly disappointed. Well beyond reason. Like, devastated. This actually led to one of the worst and stupidest fights me and Kaya ever had, because I guess I was going on and on about how disappointing it was and she let slip she was glad because the mascots were freaky, and one hilarious cartoon jump-cut later, the two of us are literally shouting at each other over whether or not we'd take kids that hadn't even been born yet to a restaurant that had already closed."

"Wow."

"Yeah. Married fights are different than any other kind of fight you can even imagine." He gave her another quizzical smile. "Why? What did you hear?"

Thinking back to Freddy's story, Ana carefully said, "Someone told me a kid broke in at night, jumped off the rock-climbing wall, hit the carousel and…and crawled off into the Parts Room and died."

"Who, the Porter boy?" he asked at once.

She was tired enough to show her surprise, actually thumping her head on the window when she rocked back to stare at him. She wasn't sure just when she'd decided that since one part of Freddy's story could not be true—the part where he'd claimed to not understand the seriousness of the boy's injuries as he was much too new—that it all had to be a lie. Yet this confirmation felt even more dangerous. "That really happened?"

"I don't know. You know how it is in this town. Anytime anything remotely unfortunate happens, everyone says it happens at Freddy's. Heck, I was there when Peter Quinn jumped off Devil's Iron Rock out in the Canyon Deeps and cracked his head open, me and a dozen other kids, and within a week, everyone was saying Foxy took a bite out of him. When his little brother left town, everyone said he got eaten at Freddy's, too, in spite of the fact that we all saw him pack his car, fill his tank, and drive off. People would talk about him giving the billboards the finger on his way over the bridge, then immediately turn around and start talking about how they found his body stuffed into one of the mascots, folded up like a pair of pants so he'd fit. It doesn't mean anything, it's just a game and everyone plays along."

"Everyone?" she echoed. "Including you?"

He signaled guilt with a smile. "Everyone loves a good ghost story. Haunted dolls, moving mannequins…there's a reason they keep making movies and video games about that stuff. And here we've got all these great empty buildings with all these great animal mascots rotting away inside them." He paused to take a drink, peeking at her boyishly out of the corner of one eye and blushing, then mumbled, "Not that I'd know they're still there or anything. Not personally."

"Law-abiding citizen that you are."

"Slater told me they're still in there, that's all. If you believe him." He shrugged hugely, drank some more and then had to muffle a burp for drinking too fast. His blush deepened to the color of anniversary roses. "To be totally honest…I did walk around some in the Circle Drive Freddy's after it closed."

"Was anything there?"

"Oh yeah, practically everything. Tables, posters, arcade machines. I mean, it was all busted up because kids are a thing, but it was there. Not Freddy and the band, though. Slater swears up and down that they're walking around out at the quarry place, still doing their thing, telling jokes and singing songs to empty rooms and rats and whatever, but they weren't there at Circle Drive." He shrugged again, just a twitch this time, smiling hazily into his juice. "That's the difference between reality and ghost stories, I guess."

"But a kid did die there during the Grand Opening? You can prove it?"

"What's proof?" Morehead countered breezily. "I know Richie Porter disappeared earlier that week. Some of his friends slipped away the same night and came back at three in the morning, kind of rattled. A couple of them admit they broke into Freddy's and tell the usual stories, but the others insist they were just hanging out in the canyon and none of them will cop to Richie being there in either case. As far as his folks knew, Richie just went up to bed and vanished. We all beat some bushes, but you know—" He indicated the great, wide world with a swallow of juice and a wave of one hand. "—kids have been leaving this town ever since there was a town to leave. And not to speak ill of the dead or anything, but that kid was getting to be seriously bad news. Sixteen years old and already mixed up with drugs and trying on the Sheriff's bracelets every weekend. Used to skulk around with Jacky Kellar and Arnie Campbell and that whole pack of rats and believe it or not, there were some who thought Richie was the worst of them."

"Until he turned up dead in the Parts Room at Freddy's?" Ana pressed.

Morehead shrugged. "I never heard they found a body, if that's what you're asking, but the kid definitely went missing during the Grand Opening. On Sunday, the Porters were absent from church. A week later, they pulled the rest of the kids out of school. A month after that, there's a moving truck in their driveway."

"Quick work."

"Not really. Nothing seems to stay on the market long around here. And I guess I can't blame them for wanting to leave. Small town, you know. Everything's a reminder."

"One week after your kid disappears is a little soon to cash in your chips, isn't it?"

"Just because I never heard of a body doesn't mean there wasn't one. Like I say, whenever anything happens in this town, like a car crash or an accident, everyone says it happens at Freddy's. But when bad things actually happen at Freddy's, no one talks about it. Because, you know…"

"Freddy lives," said Ana and shivered in the Mammon afternoon heat.

"But that's not what you were dreaming about," said Morehead, attempting an ironic tone, but too concerned to really pull it off.

"No," she said and promptly muddied it up with, "I don't know. Maybe. I never actually saw any monsters in my dream. It was mostly just me and this other guy. He told me monsters hide by wearing human faces. Maybe…Maybe sometimes it's the other way around."

"Like what? People wearing monster faces? What's that mean, that we're all monsters on the inside or that monsters can just be people too?"

"I don't know," she said again, rubbing at her tired eyes. "No offense, but I need to shut up about it now. This isn't the place or the time. And you don't want to hear me rambling on about this shit anyway."

"What are friends for?"

"Yeah, right."

She hadn't intended her tone to be quite so derisive, but she didn't apologize for it either. Being tired, like being drunk, had a way of taking the polish off honesty.

"You know," Morehead said after a moment, plainly uncomfortable. "You can, uh…You can talk to me. I mean, we're not just co-workers, you know? I do consider you a friend."

Ana looked at him, momentarily distracted from her own inner turmoil by this baffling declaration. "You do not. What the hell for?"

"I don't know, I just do."

"Oh come on with that Sunday School stuff. I'm not in the mood."

"It's true."

"It's true," she echoed, fighting an unreasoning flare of temper. After a moment's token resistance, she gave in and said, "You're from here, right?"

"Born and bred," he assured her. "As long as there's been a Mammon, there've been Moreheads in it. One of the miners and two of the rescuers buried in the quarry are Moreheads. And there was another one of us on the jury when, you know, that guy came back."

"So you know this town. You know what it's like."

Morehead's broad smile faded somewhat. He tried to shrug. "I think it's like a lot of small towns that are kind of tucked away from the world. Everybody knows everybody. You work together, pray together, make the same kind of money and spend it on all the same stuff. It's close, is what I'm saying. It's a close community, but that doesn't automatically mean banjoes and cannibals. Small towns can be good places," he insisted as Ana thought of banjo-playing Brewster in the lobby at Freddy's and herself digging out his plastic eyes to put in Bonnie's head. "If you're a good person, it can be a good place."

"So it only feels like a bad place if you're a bad person?" she asked without meaning to.

"No, that's not what I—"

"Everyone gets what they deserve in Mammon, huh? Let me ask you something. You said you went to the Freddy's on Circle Drive. You said you were ten when it closed? So you must be around my age, right? We must have gone to school together. Do you remember me from back then at all?"

He nodded, but looked away, pretending to read the label on his juice.

"Did we play together?" she asked, knowing damn well they had not. "Did you invite me to your birthday party? Were you my Secret Santa one year? Did you give me a Valentine, like, ever?" She waited in the stifling silence and then said, "Did you laugh when kids pushed me around on the playground?"

"Hey, I was a kid," he began.

"So was I."

He didn't answer, not that there was an answer.

Ana sighed and pressed the warming side of her can of Monster to her forehead. "Look, I'm sorry. I haven't been sleeping lately and I'm biting your head—"

Animatronic teeth snapping. Animatronic eyes leaking blood like tears. Three hundred and fifty-seven missing people and it was all real, all true.

"–off," she finished, pressing harder, until her head hurt and the can's side buckled slightly and still the images remained. She motioned toward the key dangling from the ignition. "Let's just go. I need some air conditioning."

Morehead didn't move. After a minute of extremely painful silence and a couple false starts, he said, "Can I tell you something?"

"Do you have to?" Ana asked sourly.

"Yeah. Yeah, I think I do."

She heaved a curt sigh and looked out the window. "Go ahead, then."

"Okay," he said with an air of uncomfortable resignation every bit as profound as her own. "Okay, listen. In the seventh grade, we had sex ed for the first time. We had a form that our parents could sign to get us out of it, and my mom signed it, but I kind of…you know."

"Had questions?"

"A few."

"And wanted to see some boob-drawings?"

"That, too," he admitted with a blush, this grown man with two kids of his own and another on the way to prove he'd actually done the big It at least three times. "Anyway, on the first day, the teacher came in with this plastic picnic cup and she told us to pass it around and everyone spit in it. So we did, kind of giggling and confused, not really knowing what this had to do with sex. And when the cup made it back to her, she dumped out the spit and poured in some apple juice from a bottle she'd just opened and then held the cup up in front of the whole class and asked who wanted to drink it. Nobody did, obviously. And she said something like, 'Remember this, girls. Once you pass it around and all those fluids get in there, no matter how sweet you are, no one will want you.'"

"'Remember, girls,'" Ana echoed. "Not 'kids,' just the girls? Jesus, doesn't that just say everything you need to know about this fucking town?"

Morehead nodded, wincing a little. "It does, yeah. Even at twelve, thirteen, whatever I was, that stuck out. I remember thinking, 'That's not fair,' but I also remember feeling kind of relieved that I was a guy and it didn't apply to me. It wasn't until a lot later that I fully realized, you know, that this teacher, a woman herself, a woman who not only taught secular school but also Sunday School, had just compared a girl who had sex with more than one guy to a literal cup of spit. And I thought it was wrong. And once I started thinking that, I started seeing, you know…some other stuff that I…I just thought was wrong. That whether or not it affects me directly, some things are wrong."

Ana bit back the first three bitchy comments that leapt to mind and said instead, "And this was the epiphany that led you to realize, long after I was gone, that bullying was wrong? Congratulations, I guess. Better late than never."

"That's the thing. I always knew bullying was wrong. I went to church and sang Love One Another, I went to school and took the champion-for-right pledge, and I stood up for my little brothers and sisters over so many petty occasions that one of them finally asked me to stop. I had no trouble identifying that bullying was wrong, I just didn't think it applied to you. Everyone made fun of you and that made it seem okay, you know?"

"Oh yeah, sure, I understand perfectly now. How silly of me. Of course it's not fucking okay!" she snapped. "You really expect me to agree? Maybe I'm supposed to apologize for making you feel bad about it now. Hey, here's a thought: If you've got a guilty conscience, maybe you goddamn well deserve one! I was a child! I did nothing to you, nothing! And you hated me anyway and why? Just because someone t-t-told…told you to…"

The steam went out of her all at once, leaving her cold and sweating in the cab of the truck, staring at Morehead, but seeing Mike Schmidt like a ghost under his skin. She wasn't exactly immune to peer pressure either, was she?

"You don't understand," Morehead was saying. "It wasn't just a couple guys. It wasn't even just the kids. It was everyone! My mom is the nicest person you ever met. Seriously. She loves everyone, and even she said things about your mom and about how…you know…how you were going to grow up. And everyone she said it to agreed, so…that made it seem true. That made it seem like…"

As the pause stretched out, Ana shot him an angry glance and saw in something approaching horror that he was fighting tears.

"This one time," he said finally, "I saw you take a kid's sandwich crusts out of the trash. My mom said you were dirty and probably stole things, and there you were. Now, I'd wonder how hungry you were, but back then, I saw you stealing and I called you out in front of the whole lunch room. Everyone started pointing and chanting at you. You spit it out and then you ran into the bathroom and the girls went in after you, so many the door couldn't close, and I could hear you in there, crying and throwing up while they teased you, and you know how I felt?"

"It doesn't matter anymore," said Ana, desperate now just to shut him up. "I don't remember any of this."

"I felt proud," Morehead said. "Like I'd done something heroic. Like I was frigging Superman, saving the schoolyard from a hungry little girl."

"Okay, we're done," she declared. "You need the magic words? I fucking forgive you. I shouldn't have brought it up. I don't even remember you from back then."

"But I remember you. I…" He glanced at her and away, then squared his shoulders and looked her in the eye. "I'm sorry about what happened to you when you were a kid. I'm sorry I was part of it. And I'm sorry, more than I can even put into words, that it's still happening. But that's not me anymore."

"I believe you. Jesus. Can we please go now?"

"I just want to say—"

"How many times do I have to say this?" she interrupted crossly. "I don't want to hear it!"

"Look, I have to say it!" he shot back, actually raising his voice to something that, if not actually a shout, was definitely a snap. "Every day at work, I hear guys razzing on you—still, after all these years—but even when we're alone, you never say a word about them, you never take it to their level. And when every other guy on the crew gives me a hard time about, you know, me and blood, you never do. You just tap me out and step in and never say a word. I have to live with that, knowing what I did back then. And I've got to say I'm sorry."

"You said it. And I said we're good. It's fine. And if you don't start driving, I'm getting out right now and walking."

Morehead touched the keys, but didn't turn them.

"Fine," said Ana, staring straight ahead. "Say it all then. Just don't expect a lot of blubbering and a big hug afterwards, because that shit ain't happening."

"I'm not…I don't…" Morehead took a deep shuddery breath and said, "I know there's people in this town who still say things about you. I just need you to know…whether you believe it or not…that I'm not one of them. I'm not. Call it a guilty conscience or whatever you want to call it, but I did finally learn to judge people based on my own observations and not just to blindly embrace other people's prejudices."

Ana opened her mouth to tell him for the third fucking time that it was fine, only to close it again with a frown. She'd done some of that herself, hadn't she? She, who had slept helpless as a baby at Freddy's for over a month and who had literally run for the door as soon as Bonnie admitted he was alive. She had experienced nothing worse at Freddy's than stolen t-shirts, stolen kisses, annoying kid's songs sung by an over-protective bear who didn't think she had enough self-respect. Yet she'd run, not just embracing Mike Schmidt's prejudices, but full-on fucking them. And if Bonnie was alive, with everything that word encompassed…how must that have felt?

"If you just want to be co-workers, I can understand why," Morehead was saying, miserably hunched over the steering wheel. "But I want to be friends. I mean it. I'm a better man than the boy I was, I swear."

"I don't remember the boy you were," she said again and sighed. "But you're a nice guy. I mean that. You're fine. We're fine. Okay? For real, More—Jimmy. We're good, me and you. You want to be friends, we're…friends."

"Do you…Do you want to come over for dinner?"

"What, tonight?"

"No, I wouldn't want to spring something like that on Kaya. But…Sunday? Seven o'clock?" He offered her what he probably considered a morbid smile. "We'll have lamb chops."

She blurted out a laugh. "Yeah, sure. Tell her to start marinating now. It'll need it."

"So you'll come?"

"Yeah, why not? I don't need to dress up or anything, do I?"

He assured her she did not, that dinners were very informal affairs and jeans were fine, but Ana was already thinking she'd have to either go back to Freddy's for a clean change of clothes or buy new ones, which also meant going back to Freddy's for her wallet. Either way, she'd have to go back.

But not tonight, she decided. Tomorrow, after work. There was something talismanic about the start of a weekend, just knowing that she had two days to recover from whatever emotional hangover was sure to follow a return to Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria; but she could not, and no one could expect her to, handle such a thing on a fucking Thursday.

'He's waiting for me,' she thought as Morehead finally started the engine and navigated the company truck out of the gas station lot. 'He's been waiting for me all week. He doesn't have to do the shows anymore. He's watching at the window. He's never left. He's waiting.'

She glanced at the tinted windows of the gas station, seeing late morning sun splash across posters advertising soft drinks, cheap chicken and cigarettes, but picturing a different building, windows boarded up so that only a glimpse of purple could be seen pacing behind the gaps…

'Fine, tonight,' she told herself, her silent words gradually roughening to take on Rider's voice so she could pretend she was only reluctantly following an order instead of doing what she wanted: 'Just go and get it over with, but don't kid yourself. You said goodbye loud and clear when you ran out of there. And when you leave that way, don't nobody want your dumb ass back.'

So. She was decided. She'd go. And when they threw her out or…or whatever…then she'd know it was over and she could get on with her life.