CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Foxy spent the night in a bad mood, for which his own arse-headedness was only partly to blame. Cards had just not been a good idea. On the rare occasion that they played back at the pizzeria, whichever pizzeria that was, Freddy was always dealer (and, coincidentally, always won). His absence now cast a gloom over the good time they were supposed to be having. They didn't fight, exactly, but there was some bickering over rules, sore losers and sore winners, and a lot of silence.

The quiet made it possible to listen through the thin walls that separated Yoshi's workshop from the office where Ana thrashed and moaned in her sleep. Foxy was no expert, having only sat up with Ana on two previous occasions, but it didn't take an expert to know that she was having a bad time of it tonight. Worse than usual? He didn't know. It seemed to him that she'd done some twitching and mewing the other times, but she hadn't exactly been sober then either. Maybe it was something to do with the smoking, maybe not. He didn't know enough about Ana's sleeping habits—or anyone's sleeping habits—to have any kind of intelligent opinion on the reasons or wherefores. He only knew it was hard to listen to, and worse even than that was knowing Bon was listening too, and taking it just as hard. Maybe harder. Just like he had some kind of personal stake in the girl's well-being.

"Just friends, me fuzzy arse," Foxy muttered and tossed a few bolts in the poker pot.

Bonnie flicked an ear and looked stupidly around. "Huh?"

"I said, I see the lady's bet and raise three bolts. What's yer move, mate?"

Bonnie focused on the cards in his hand with obvious effort, frowning like it was the first time he'd ever seen them in his life. "Right," he muttered, picking through the loose bolts in front of him. "So what are we up to? Three plus…? Did you call or raise, Chica?"

"Ye might find it easier to follow if ye paid attention," Foxy remarked.

"I raised three," Chica said, looking fretfully at her cards. "But I really should have folded again. This is a terrible hand."

Foxy groaned.

"I haven't had a good hand yet," Chica complained. "That doesn't seem fair."

"Ye dealt 'em, luv," Foxy reminded her.

"That's not what I meant. And it's not that I'm not having fun," she added with earnest apology. "It's just that the best I've done all night was that stupid pair of threes. I don't have anything in this hand!"

"Then why did ye raise, ye featherhead?"

"I was bluffing!"

"Oh, good on ye, luv." Foxy rolled his eyes. "Had me proper fooled. What about ye, Bon?"

"Uh huh," Bonnie said vaguely. His ears—and his attention—had shifted to the office door again.

Foxy scowled and tapped his cards against the table as loud as he could, for all the good that did. In the other room, tired springs creaked as Ana rolled herself around some more. If he listened close, he could even hear the little sounds she made as she dreamed, faint but desperate, like the death cries of a rat caught in Foxanne's jaws.

The image hooked on Foxy's anemic conscience. He hadn't thought about her in a while. Should have at least climbed down to visit with her the night before leaving on this trip. He'd meant to, planned to, but Ana had changed the departure date from "maybe this weekend" to "tomorrow" so fast, he hadn't had time. And sure, maybe he could have made time. There'd been enough hours that last night, even after waiting up for Ana to come creeping in looking for her dashing captain to put her sails up for her, but hell, it weren't like Foxanne were pining away for him. She slept most days, raged the rest, and only sometimes knew he was there even when she was calling out to him.

And for the first time, Foxy found himself wondering…What kind of life was that?

'One worth saving,' Foxy told himself brusquely, but the doubts remained. Was that even what he was doing? Easy enough to believe it when the only other choice was putting his hand through his pretty girl's heart and watching the life bleed out of her poor, broken body, but was that saving her, to instead bury her alive and leave her in the lonely dark? Was he truly comforting a friend when he went to sing to her on his (less and less frequent) visits? Or was he tending a grave?

Foxy's wandering thoughts snapped back to the here and now as Bonnie abruptly set down his cards and turned away from the table.

"Oh, can't ye leave her alone for one bloody night?" Foxy snapped, then had to force a derisive laugh to dilute the venom in his words into mere scorn. "Have some dignity! And if'n ye can't do that, have some common sense. She don't need anyone fretting over her, she just needs some damn sleep."

Bonnie's ears briefly flattened, so it couldn't be said he ignored him, but he limped on.

"Ye leave the table and ye forfeit yer hand!" Foxy warned, which was exactly as effective as he thought it would be. He put his own cards down—two pair, aces and eights—and flipped Bon's over. "Straight flush," he said loudly as Chica tried to hush him. "Best hand o' the night and ye threw it away, for what? So ye can make a damn fool o' yerself over a girl what ain't even yers!"

Bonnie opened the door and ducked through. The room beyond was dark, lit only by the dim red, blue and yellow glow of various sleeping equipment, and Bon's own eyes, of course, but that was enough to see Ana tangled up in blankets and bad dreams. As Foxy fumed from a distance, the big lummox struggled down onto one knee beside the couch and reached out for her shoulder. "Wake up," he said softly. "Come on, baby girl. You're okay now. Wake—"

Ana came up swinging, her wee fist smacking straight into the side of Bon's muzzle hard enough to crack the shellac. Bon's only response was to catch up her hands and hold them both together between his as he said soft words that Foxy's mic, presently aimed at his own head under a flat ear, could not bring in clear. Didn't much look like Ana heard them either. She stared at Bon, ice-blue eyes huge in her pale face until, right in the middle of whatever cozening crap he was nattering at her, she suddenly burst into tears.

Nothing in it. She'd broken down much the same just the other night. Only difference was, when the storm came on, she'd hid from Foxy, but she hugged on Bon's neck.

And he hugged her back, big git.

"I killed you," Ana moaned, her voice shaky with tears and muffled against Bonnie's chest. "Oh God, I'm so sorry! I killed you!"

"You're dreaming, baby," Bonnie crooned, rocking her safe in his arms. "I'm right here and I'm fine."

"I know it wasn't you, but it was you," she insisted sensibly. "It was you and I did it! I killed you!"

"Baby, I'm fine!" Bonnie said and even laughed a little. "Kind of hard to kill me when I'm not even technically—"

Ana shoved herself back (but still clenched her tiny fists in the seams of Bonnie's shoulder casings, holding on to him). "Yes, you are!" she shouted into Bonnie's big stupid face. "You are! You're alive and it matters!" Her anger wavered, crumpled into pain. "It matters," she whispered and off went the sprinklers out'n her eyes again.

Bonnie wrapped her up in his arms, folding his ears low over her shaking head, closing her off from the big, bad world into a smaller one that had only room for her and him.

Foxy watched them, thinking after all these years hearing the phrase, saying it, he himself finally knew how it tasted to eat his bloody heart out.

It was Chica who put an end to it, toddling over to gently shut the door. "Let's give them some privacy," she whispered, returning to the table to gather up the cards since the game was good and over. "He knows how to get her to talk, but it'll be much easier if we're not listening. Don't listen, Foxy," she admonished, since Foxy's ear was in fact aimed at the wall, filtering out the little rise and fall of Ana's voice from Bonnie's. "If she wants you to know, she'll tell you."

"She tells me plenty," Foxy grumped and took himself to the window. Not much to look at. Cloudy night, no stars, just a smudge of light on the horizon to prove there were people out there somewhere, living their lives without him.

Chica joined him, resting her fingertips on the dusty sill and tap-tap-tapping in her restless way. She looked at all the same things he looked at, but he'd wager she saw it all differently. He was tempted to ask, to give her a chance to divert her out of this dark pit in which he'd sunk himself, but before he could muster up the energy to do it, she had to go and say, "Gosh, I hope they get back together soon."

"Well, they ain't!" he snapped. He recovered himself in the few seconds it took Chica to shush him and anxiously check the closed door, and when she came back to him, he had his poker face on again. "Never were together and ye know it," he told her gruffly. "If Bon were dumb enough to let himself believe they were, that makes him half the halfwit I always thought he was, but it still don't mean there's a 'together' to get back to. Ana were only funning around with him, precisely," he emphasized, "because she didn't think he was real! So don't ye go making this some grand romance where they dance in and out of each other's arms until they falls in love again, because that ain't happening."

"No, it isn't," Chica agreed. "They're not falling in love 'again' because they never fell out of love in the first place, either of them." When Foxy glared at her, Chica merely shrugged. "I hate to say it so bluntly, but you're never around, Foxy. You don't see them together, not like I do."

That stung and without thinking, Foxy fired back: "Maybe not, but I sees her, and plenty of her at that, and she sure don't act like a girl in love with Bonnie when she's with me."

The meaning of those words made a near-audible whooshing noise as they passed clean over sweet Chica's innocent head. "She loves him," she insisted sadly. "She just…has intimacy issues. I'm sure it's easier for her to pretend she never meant any of it, the same way it's easier for her to fight with Freddy than to let him take care of her. Her whole sense of self is founded on not needing anyone for anything."

"More o' yer armchair psychobabble," Foxy muttered, raking his hook down the side of his muzzle.

"Don't do that, please."

"What, call yer therapeutic credentials into question?"

Chica met his scorn with her most potent weapon—sincere sympathy. "Please don't cut yourself."

"Why the hell not?" he challenged, although he was sure that if he had not deliberately broken the bulbs on the insides of his pointy cheeks years ago, they'd be lit up now and blushing bright as a maiden having her first kiss. That he carved on himself from time to time was not much of a secret—for certain, there was no hiding the scars—but he didn't do it in front of others. Not on purpose, anyway. "I ain't hurting meself."

He could see Chica trying in her unhappy way to find some non-confrontational response, and bless her, she found one.

"Yoshi took pictures. He'll know it's new damage."

"Lots o' ways crusty old animatronics can get banged up," Foxy countered, but he folded his arms and went back to looking out the window.

In another few minutes—and long minutes they were, full of oceans of time and no wind at all to fill the sails of his thoughts—the office door opened again and Bonnie backed himself through it. Foxy scarcely got a glimpse of his girl's pale arm flung out over the side of the sofa before Bonnie closed the door and turned around, his ears as low as a lop's.

"Is she okay?" Chica ventured, tapping her fingertips.

"I don't know. I mean, yeah," Bonnie said, giving the door behind him a troubled glance as he returned to the card game they'd all abandoned. "She's already asleep again. She wasn't exactly awake in the first place."

"Did she say anything?" Chica wanted to know next.

Bonnie shook his head. "Nothing that made much sense. She had a bad dream, is all. Something about the guy she…met on Halloween. I guess she dreamed it was me or something. I don't know. She was half-asleep. And stoned," he snapped at Foxy, misreading Foxy's flat ear and narrow stare.

"Well, thank God ye were there to comfort her," Foxy snapped back. "Don't know what she'd do without ye. Ain't like she's been getting high and managing her own bad dreams all her damn life."

"And you don't think the situation here is a little special?"

"Oh, everything yer one and only does is special, according to ye."

Bonnie's ears rotated away from their melancholy droop and locked into an irritated, incredulous angle. "You're seriously this pissed about a lousy card game?"

"I don't give a toss about the bloody game!"

Bonnie rolled his eyes, blissfully unaware of how close he was to having a hook run right the hell through his stupid bunny face. "Okay, it's going to be one of those days again. Awesome. Are you going to be like this the whole time we're here? Oh wait, I forget. It's obviously my fault. Do you mind telling me what the hell I did this time?"

Nothing. He couldn't even rightly say Bon was flirting up Foxy's girl, in lesser part because Bonnie's brand of comforting had been perfectly above-board, and in greater part because as far as Ana had let it be known, she was no one's girl. But on the other hand, Bon had gone tiptoeing into the lady's room in the middle of the night and didn't the bloke who had the job of lighting her powder get to say something about that?

Never mind. Bonnie hadn't gone in there with any romantical notions, but only to fuss over a little whimpering. She'd been half asleep and buzzed besides. She probably wouldn't even remember Bon's snuggles in the morning, so what was Foxy working himself up over anyhow? All Bonnie had given her was a hug, which was all the gelded git could give her, so never mind.

But he minded. He could not have said exactly what he minded or why, but he minded it.

Elsewhere in the world, Chica was smoothing out prickly feelings and Bonnie was at least pretending to go along with it, but Foxy wasn't in the world anymore. He wasn't in the black either. He was in someplace new, someplace pale and far distant where even his own thoughts and feelings might as well be a stranger's.

"Look," said Bonnie now, opening his hands and lowering his ears in a pissed-off-looking peace gesture. "I'm sorry. Whatever it is you're up your own butt about—"

"Bonnie," Chica sighed.

"—I'm sorry. Whether I did it or not. I don't even care. Can we please just put it the hell behind us? Or if you don't want to do that, can we wait until we're back home to get into it so we don't have to spend the next two weeks just soaking in your bad mood?"

Chica opened her beak for another peacemaking effort, only to close it again. She tapped her fingertips, peeking at Foxy from the very edges of her unhappy eyes, and didn't say anything. That had all been said, too. Almost everything had been said, in fact, except the teensy tiny questions of just whose girl lay sleeping in the other room, whose job it was to wipe her tears as needed, and who'd better keep his goddamn bunny hands off her.

In the end, Foxy said nothing, but only because he didn't trust himself to say anything at the moment. Not when every word wanted to turn in his mouth and come out as, of all things, the truth.

But Bonnie couldn't see the mercy behind his silence, only the flat shine in his eye and the black humor in his smile (because it was funny, damn him, and Foxy could never help but laugh when the joke stabbed itself in and twisted).

"Come on, man, what the hell is your—" Bonnie broke off there, venting his cooling system hard, then pushed his ears upright (not without a low creak of strain) and said, "Look, I'm willing to agree that I'm the asshole here if you'll agree that this stupid trip is harder on Ana than any of us." His eyes cut aside and turned slightly chagrined. "Except maybe Freddy. But Ana's the one who's got to spend the time and money to be here, not to mention whether she'll still have a job when she gets home, in addition to whatever else she'll find at home once the postcard-writing jackasses in town realize she's not there to defend it if they decide to break a few windows or, hell, burn the place down. Okay? She's got a lot going on and she doesn't know what to do about it, so she's doing what she always does and pretending it doesn't matter, but it does. She's worried, okay? And if she doesn't feel safe being worried, then I'll be worried for her. I don't care! I'll be obnoxiously, laughably, stupidly worried and if you want to call me out for it, fine, but don't tell me to just leave her alone, because she's not fucking alone," Bonnie spat with sudden furious intensity. He took another short pause to cool and collect himself, then went on, almost calmly, "She's not alone and she shouldn't have to act like she's okay all the time just to make you happy."

Foxy bristled. "I never said she did!"

"No, you never say anything, you just make fun of me because I won't sit out here and play fucking cards while she's in there, miserable and alone. And what do you want to do about that if I'm out here pretending that's fine? Are you going to go in there and comfort her?"

Foxy kept his ear up, but couldn't quite filter out the growl in his voice when he said, "Ye say that like ye don't think I could."

Bonnie snorted. "Let's just say that, seeing as you don't even think there's a reason to try, I have some doubts."

"Shows what ye know, don't it?" Foxy made a conscious break on that line of thought before he could say something he didn't mean, or worse, something he did. Instead, and hopefully without a discernable pause, he said, "I've been there for her plenty. When she really needs it, I'm always there."

"You're there?!" One of Bonnie's ears twitched. He tried to laugh and only spat static. "You're there, huh?"

"Bonnie," Chica pleaded.

Bonnie ignored her, exploding, "Dude, you're never there for anyone! We've been literally locked up together in one place or another for something like fifty fucking years and even I barely see you!"

"Did I say I were there for ye?"

Bonnie rolled his eyes savagely, nodding. "You're right. You're absolutely right. I forgot you're only there for the ones that need you."

"Bonnie!" Chica snapped.

"Don't get yer feathers in a ruffle, luv," Foxy drawled. "He's just speaking his mind, ain't he? Truth hurts, is all."

"Oh, cry me a fucking river!" Bonnie swung around to point at him—one of Freddy's habits when he was good and pissed. "You've gone out of your way for years, for decades, to show us you don't give a rat's ass about any one of us, and now I'm hurting your feelings?"

"Out o' me way, eh? Since when have I even been considered part o' the family?"

"Since forever, fuckhead!" Bonnie shouted. "You're the one freezing us out!"

"Oh sure and it's all me," Foxy sneered. "Separate acts, separate stages, separate ends o' the bloody building—"

"I didn't design the fucking restaurant!"

"And if ye did, I wouldn't be in it at all, would I? Ye fucking hate me!"

"No, I don't, you fucking tool! Because despite how hard you've worked at it all these years, you're still my fucking family! I don't always like you, but you're my brother and I love you!"

"Oh fuck ye!"

"Fuck you, too!"

As if some invisible white flag shot up between them and meekly fluttered down again, they both shut up at the same time and stood, each silently fuming, avoiding one another's eyes while Chica's nervous fingers tapped out the time.

At last, still without looking at him, Foxy growled, "I'm sorry, mate. I am. I ain't been meself."

"Yeah. Must have been a rough…shit…lifetime. But especially the last few days." Bon stopped himself there, vented some more heat, and then offered up his empty hands. "Just tell me we can please move on now."

Foxy nodded, then shook his head, then laughed—that black bite of humor had him again in its teeth—and said, "I can't, mate. I wish I could. Ye've no idea how much I wish this whole mess were settled between us, but it ain't and until it is, we can't be friends. Brothers, sure…but not friends."

"We can't even pretend? For two lousy weeks? Come on, man, meet me halfway on this."

Foxy shook his head again, not without real regret. "Believe me when I say that'll just make it worse."

Bonnie rolled his eyes and raked a hand over the bald top of his head, then glanced at Freddy lying so still and in so many pieces on the table in the other end of the room—a tangible reminder of all the ways this was not the time to thrash this out. His ears lowered, then rose. When he looked at Foxy again, he was smiling. "Okay," he said and put out his hand. "Here's to holding grudges quietly until we can get home and fight 'em out."

"This is so unhealthy," Chica murmured as Foxy offered his hook for a shake of confirmation.

"You want to play another hand?" Bonnie asked, nodding at the cards.

"Aye, why not? Passes the time. Ye want in on this, lass?"

Chica tipped her head back and loudly sighed, "Men!" at the ceiling, but then she waddled over and joined them, and the rest of the night passed quietly, as it so often does just before the worst storms come.


Yoshi's stuff was nowhere near as strong as Rider's, but Ana had been living with too much stress and too little sleep long enough that it didn't take much to push her deep out into Sleep's waters and let her drown. She dreamed of Blue and Bonnie and the narrowing differences between them as she killed him over and over, but even that was preferable on some level than dreaming of eleven-year-old David in his bloody t-shirt and torn paper Freddy mask, or the Puppet combing her hair with its long claws, or the purple ghost haunting her house leaning over her for a goodnight kiss. Those dreams had a way of blurring the lines of reality, bringing phantom sensations of touch and smell that seemed to linger on even after she woke up. Killing Blue—killing Bonnie—was bad, but even her subconscious self recognized it was just a dream, and when the violins of her phone's alarm woke her, it all melted away like the nothing it was.

It took a few fuzzy moments to orient herself, but by the time Ana had dragged herself into a sitting position, she knew who and where she was, what she was doing here and why, and most importantly of all, how little time she had to do it. She fumbled at the wall until she found the lightswitch and as soon as her eyes had adjusted to its unwelcome brilliance, she got up and limped over to the coffee maker.

Her head hurt. Well, everything hurt, but her head hurt the worst, which was weird because it wasn't a sharp sort of pain at all. Yesterday, her headache had felt like a wild animal, biting and scratching at every sight and sound, intent on escaping a skull two sizes too small to house it. This headache was smaller…but smaller wasn't the right word, was it? The pain still barely fit in her head. She could feel its pulse behind her eyes, threatening to push them right out of her sockets if it flexed just right, but it didn't. It just sat there, swollen and sullen, chewing on its claws to keep them sharp and muttering just loud enough to make itself heard. Not like a hangover, but almost like it thought it ought to be.

And as the smell of hot coffee filling her mug woke Ana up a little more, she became gradually aware that the rest of her hurt in much the same way. Physical pain was no stranger to her. She'd been taking beatings for as long as she could remember—longer, even, since some of those beatings had affected her ability to remember them. She knew she wasn't all that badly injured (especially considering who she'd gone up against), but she hurt anyway, much more than she knew she should. Her joints were understandably stiff, but also oddly restless. Her muscles ached more like a cramp about to happen rather than bruises on the mend. So there was pain, but there was also a strange echo of an idea of pain, something she instinctively wanted to stretch or rub away, only that didn't work. If anything, fidgeting only fed the beast, making all the hurts both real and imaginary that much more intense, and the urge to keep moving that much harder to resist. She shuffled from foot to foot as she watched coffee trickle into her mug, rubbing her shoulder, cracking her knuckles, rolling her neck, and all of it hurt but none of it helped. What was wrong with her?

"Nothing!" she told herself crossly. "You got beat up by an animatronic a few nights ago, that's all. Did you really think you were just going to walk that off?"

No, but…hell, she'd fallen through the roof this last summer and gotten banged up way worse than this, but she couldn't remember dealing with this phantom-prickly sensation crawling under her skin afterwards.

"You were medicating then," she reminded herself. "You're straight now."

That made sense, in an irritating way. And if all it took to shake this off was a shot of whiskey…

No. She'd dumped her bottle on the drive down.

Yeah, but she could always get another one. It wasn't like she really needed to prove a point. She knew she wasn't an alcoholic. It was medicinal. She didn't want to drink for the fun of it, she just wanted—

To numb the pain. To steady her hands. To drink until she couldn't feel her feelings. And if that wasn't the definition of an alcoholic, what the hell was?

Scowling, Ana seized that entire train of thought and shut it all away in the deepest, darkest quarry in the back of her mind. It was all horseshit anyhow. The only thing she needed to drink was coffee.

She drank some, grimacing at the taste. No creamer. She had another swallow to prove she didn't need that either and went to check on the others.

She could sort of remember Foxy or Bonnie or someone saying something about playing cards last night, but if they ever had, they'd cleaned up the game and returned to their places, so that everything looked the way it had when Yoshi left, as far as Ana could recall.

"Morning," she mumbled, limping over to check on Freddy, not that he needed checking on. It gave her something to do with her hands anyway.

Chica greeted her with her usual sunny cheer, Foxy grunted, and Bonnie's ears came to troubled attention as he asked, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, it's just early, my man."

He nodded, but his ears stayed up, broadcasting his concern. "You had kind of a rough night."

"Did I?" Ana shook her head and drank some more bitter coffee. "Strange places give me bad dreams. Whatever. I don't have to get used to it. What about you?"

"Strange places," Bonnie echoed, looking around. "They always feel kind of weird at first. We don't get them very often. And this place is nothing like any place we've ever been in before, so…yeah. Safe to say we were a little on edge last night," he concluded with a touch of ironic understatement in his tone and a sidelong glance at Foxy.

Chica also glanced at Foxy, so Ana looked at him too, only to find that Foxy was ignoring them completely in favor of using his hook to pick dried gunk out from under his clawed metal fingers.

"Apart from that, it was a quiet night," Bonnie went on, bringing his ears up and folding them forward in a relaxed, cheerful manner. "No unscheduled inspections, no one peeking in the window—"

"Nobody here but us chickens?" Ana guessed, tossing a lackluster smile in Chica's direction.

Chica rolled her pink eyes and vented her cooling system. "Oh, very funny."

"Sorry, sister, that's as funny as I get at this hour." Ana indulged herself in a yawn, taking advantage of the accompanying stretch to massage at her neck, which did not soothe any nerves but only agitated them even more. She forced herself to stop before her twitchiness became obvious. "It wasn't terrible, was it? You weren't too bored?"

"Oh no," said Chica at once. "No, no. We were fine."

"It was pretty bad, not gonna lie, baby," Bonnie drawled. "We played cards for a while, but when there's no stakes, there's not a lot of point."

"There's always strip poker," said Ana.

"No, there isn't," Chica said with a prim little sniff.

"None of us are wearing clothes at the moment," Bonnie added. "We're in disguise, remember?"

Ana glanced at Foxy again, waiting for one of those ribald remarks with which he was always armed, but Foxy wasn't in the mood to play along. Turning back to Bonnie, she said, "I'll make sure my tablet's charged up tonight so you can at least watch some movies or something. And it's all temporary, ruh—right?" she finished around another yawn. "Ugh. You know, I like a cinnamon-hazelnut-vanilla-soy-milk coffee as much as the next guy, but there is not enough actual caffeine in this candied-up shit."

"Don't blame the coffee, baby, it's just really early," Bonnie said, nodding out the window at a sky not even a little bit touched by the sun. "Seriously, you could go back to bed for another hour, maybe two. If Yoshi shows up, I'll glitch out and sing something, top volume."

The suggestion, and the devil on her shoulder that urged her to consider it, was the last motivation Ana needed to turn away from Freddy on the worktable and find her work belt in the mess of parts and tools she'd brought with her. "Yoshi said we were starting at the crack of dawn," she said sourly, loading her belt for battle. "And by God, dawn has cracked. I'm going to head over to the house and fuck around until I passive aggressively wake him up. He might want to eat or whatever, I don't know, but then I saddle him up and put him on the track and that boy better be ready to run. I won't be able to squeeze sixteen-hour shifts out of him every day, so I need to take advantage of his enthusiasm while I can. Sorry," she added to Foxy.

His expression, what there was of it, did not change, but his gaze shifted from Bonnie to her. "For what?"

'I don't fucking know, whatever it is you're pissed off about,' Ana thought, but didn't say it and didn't let it show on her face. She couldn't blame him for being worked up. The situation was all risk with no guarantee of reward, and while they were all feeling it, Ana at least could step out and blow off some steam if the pressure got to her. "Another sixteen hours of standing still and keeping quiet," she said instead. "I may not know how that feels, but I know it sucks."

Foxy shrugged off her sympathy. "I don't have to get used to it, as someone or another once said. I just has to live with it awhile."

"That's the spirit." Ana got her safety goggles, wearing them high on her head until she needed them, and tucked a pair of gloves into the back of her jeans. "All right, here I go. I may run to town later, get some better coffee if nothing else. Anyone want anything? Chica? Sudoku book?"

"Oh, I'd better not, but thanks for asking."

"You sure? I know there's not much to do. You don't have to be bored all day and all night."

"I'm not!" Chica assured her.

"Plenty to think about," Foxy added.

Something in the way he said it—quiet, absent his usual sarcasm, but edged all the same with some kind of indeterminate emotion—caught her attention.

He did not respond to her quizzical frown, just stared her down.

Oh. So that's what this was really about.

"Well, all right," she said slowly, holding his gaze without flinching. "If you're telling me nothing has to change, then nothing will."

Foxy's ear twitched.

"Just remember, we agreed," she continued, looking at nothing and nobody but him. "You don't get to come bitching at me later just because you changed your mind."

"Got it," said Chica.

"No bitching," Bonnie promised.

Foxy said nothing.

"See you in a bit," said Ana and walked past him (the space between her shoulder blades tickled, the same way it did when she turned her back on a gun) and out the door. She put her mug back by the coffee maker but didn't start another cup brewing. If she had to stand around for another sixty seconds while the machine pissed into her cup, she was going to end up marching back into the workshop and letting her headache say things she did not want to say. There was no room in her schedule to pick a fight today. She had real shit to do and it was time to get to work.