CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

"See you on the flip-side, Captain," she said and that was perhaps the best way Foxy knew to describe what switching off and on was like. It wasn't like going black, where you usually felt yourself slipping and always knew something had happened, even if you didn't know what. There was no sense of loss, no sense of leaving. He was just sitting there and suddenly, the whole world flipped around him.

The truck was the same and most (but not all) of the things in it were all in their same places, but they all looked different because the light had changed, slanting in from a different direction with a different hue and intensity. Freddy had gone from sitting across from him to standing right beside him. Bonnie, who had been just a purple blur at the periphery of his vision, was now a huge face looming in from his left side, seeming to lunge at him even when Foxy knew he wasn't. Somehow worst of all was Ana, who had been looking into his eyes as she reached for him, and she was still reaching, but with the wrong arm, and her face caught all the wrong colors in this new light, hardly looking like her face at all.

The first thing that hit him, even before his CPU could process all the differences he was seeing, was the noise. It had been so quiet. Early morning, no traffic, no birds, nothing moving for miles. Ana's voice when she gave him her little goodnight had been soft and low, conscious of Yoshi just outside. And she probably wasn't shouting now, but it seemed like it in that first chaotic moment when she asked him if he was all right. Everyone was shouting. Chica's gladsome nonsense about being home screeched in his ear like a harpy with Freddy thundering on about stay calm and don't fight while Foxy himself bellowed about the clock discrepancy. He could hear it all and they were all words he knew, but it wasn't like understanding speech as much as being fucked in the ear with a dictionary. It was noise, all of it, just noise. Even the wind couldn't blow without howling and four hours? Four hours off? Four hours and seven minutes, according to his internal error drive, all wiped away like it didn't matter. Four hours (and seven minutes) that Foxy had not existed. He was and then he wasn't and now he was again, only was he?

"Back up, back up," Bonnie said sharply. "He's kicking."

Was he? Foxy looked down dazedly at the stranger's legs attached to his neural network jittering away, black furry heels drumming on the truck's floor, metal claws too damn close to Ana even after she backed away. He tried stupidly to grab his own knee and hold it still, but he couldn't. Why not? Bonnie had him by the wrist, he saw, and Freddy had the other arm, the one with the hook. Good thing, too. Foxy hadn't been switched off enough times to have habits, but they all had a tendency to come up swinging.

"What's wrong with him?" Ana was saying, her sweet voice like a metal hook scratching on floor tiles.

"Quiet," Freddy grunted.

"What happened? Did he hit his head? Do I open him up again? What do I do?"

"Ana, shut up!"

"You're making it worse," Bonnie said, struggling to keep his grip on Foxy as he thrashed harder. "Keep quiet and don't move. He's going black."

No, I ain't, Foxy tried to say, but couldn't, because he was going black.

Going…going…

…gone.

…and back again, and maybe it helped, because unlike switching off and on, going black was going somewhere, and coming back felt like coming back. He sagged against the truck's wall, feeling like he was breathing hard even though he couldn't breathe at all, letting his error log file the important information away and tell him everything was all right now.

"Look at me," Freddy ordered and when Foxy did, Freddy grunted and released him, although he stayed awfully close.

"But what happened?" Ana wanted to know, rushing over to get a look at him.

She did a lot of looking with her hands, did Ana. She touched him all over his face and his head, like checking for bruises, and then his chest like she was feeling for a pulse. Silly thing to do, but when she tried to move on, he caught her by the wrist without thinking and held her there, her palm to his heart. He couldn't have said why. It wasn't a particularly pleasant touch in the first place. Nothing was. Everything was still too loud, too bright, abrasive. All the same, he needed it. He didn't think it in so many words—fuck words and all their meanings—but if there was a pin stabbing through him and holding him fixed in the true here and now while all the untrue fluff blew away, it was her hand. Not anyone's hand, only hers.

"He was gone a long time," Freddy was telling her, one of his hands on Foxy's shoulder, invasive and unwelcome, and the other on Ana's. "He's disorientated. Give him a minute."

"It's because I switched him off?"

"Technically, it's because you switched him on. We don't register changes when our consciousness is shut down, but things certainly do change. The disparity can be a bit of a shock to the system."

"That's putting it bloody mildly," Foxy grumbled.

"Sorry," she said, taking all the blame and holding it closer to her heart than Foxy held her hand to his. "I didn't even give you time to brace yourself."

"Wouldn't have made a difference if'n ye had. It's the time and the distance…knowing it's coming don't make it any easier to come back from it."

"I should have let you try to ride it out."

"He'd have been gagging up his guts before we got two minutes down the road," Bonnie pointed out.

Ana nodded despondently. "Then I should have let him ride up front with me. People say that helps, being in the front seat."

Bon's ears went crooked, skeptical. "And nobody would have noticed that, huh?"

"I could have left earlier. While it was dark."

"Or you could have gotten a full night's sleep and let Foxy sit the drive out. He's fine. You fine?" Bonnie asked, glaring at Foxy.

"Fine as paint," Foxy replied, one of many bizarre phrases he'd been programmed to say, never understood, and had lived with so long he no longer cared enough to ask what it meant. Paint was fine, apparently, and so was he. But he kept a hold of Ana's hand.

"See? All good." Bonnie forced a smile, his eyes like daggers stabbing at Foxy's face, but his tone light and only a little strained as he said, "You going to help us move all this shit inside or you going to sit here and have the vapors all afternoon?"

"Not all afternoon, just until yer done moving shit inside."

"Typical." Bonnie shifted to stand, but paused before he did and gave Foxy the kind of friendly punch on the shoulder that probably hid the desire to punch the head right off Foxy's shoulders. "Don't push it. Take as long as you need. Okay, Ana, what can we carry in for you?"

"Don't worry about it," Ana began, because Ana would never ask someone else to carry what she deserved to struggle with, and Bonnie and Chica were game to convince her otherwise and Ana would argue and eventually Foxy would have to pick one side or other, but none of that happened because Freddy, who had stepped out onto the ramp, suddenly said, "Ana, have you seen this?"

Ana heaved a short sigh. "Yeah, the ice is crazy. Don't go out there yet. I need to put something down on the steps and we don't have…do we? Did I throw out the tread-mats from the kitchen or did I just roll them up and put them somewhere?"

"I don't mean the ice," Freddy said in an extremely mild tone.

Foxy reluctantly loosed Ana's hand so she could step out and see what Freddy saw for herself. Her posture changed immediately, not necessarily concerned as much as very alert. "Nope, that's new," she said, as careless in her tone as Freddy had been mild. "I guess someone came a'knocking while we were gone."

"And that," Freddy said, pointing somewhat downward.

Ana followed the angle of his arm, stared blankly for a moment, then rocked back, eyes wide. "Holy shit, what happened there?"

Foxy and Bonnie both turned, almost in perfect mirrored unison, and peeked out through the holes in the side of the truck.

It wasn't hard to see what the trouble was. There were a few goodish-sized dents in the loading dock door as if someone had gone at it with a heavy hammer, scuffing off some of the finish or scuffing on bits of black paint in places. On its own, worthy of notice, but nothing to fret over. However, there was more to see, or rather, to not see, and what Foxy wasn't seeing was the safety rail that flanked the right-side wing of the flydock. The posts were still there, with bits of metal to show were the rail ought to be, twisted up at the ends like a party streamer. Neither did the missing section of railing appear to be anywhere abouts, on the dock or on the ground below it, although that wasn't as easy to tell. It had been raining, for days by the looks of things, and in the freezing cold, icicles had formed on every surface that would grow them, bristling every which way the wind blew, including sideways and upside-down. However, this end of the building got the most of Mammon's unreliable sun, so the ice that grew at night came down by day, melting and freezing over again day by night by day, to the effect that while the eaves over the door were almost entirely clear of ice, there was a great tumorous lump of the stuff heaped up and frozen together on the dock itself, spilling over the edge and all around the asphalt where Ana liked to park. Easy to miss a few dents and a missing rail when a bloke had that to look at instead.

"Everybody take a seat," Ana ordered, striding swiftly back through the truck to her toolchest. "The likeliest scenario is someone came around hoping to score some scrap, couldn't get in, probably tore the bumper off their car taking the rail off, then gave up and left, but just in case, I'm going to go have a little look-see." She pulled a hammer out, hesitated, and took a screwdriver, too. "I'll be right back."

"We'll be right back," Freddy corrected, snapping his wrist compartment open in such a manner that it tossed his keys, and only his keys, into the air for that same hand to catch as the compartment snapped shut. Show-off. "I won't force you to wait with them—"

"Like you could."

"—but I am coming with you."

"I want you to objectively ask yourself, as someone who does what is best for his family and not just what he wants to do, if someone is actually in there right now, who do you want them to see coming through that door? Me? Or Freddy freaking Fazbear with his own set of keys?" Ana waited for a second, then plucked the keys from Freddy's hand. "That's what I thought. Sit down. I'll be right back."

Off she went.

Freddy folded his arms and watched her go, grumbling.

Foxy watched through the peepholes as Ana climbed the stairs and reached the door. Still locked, that was a promising sign. She tried to lift it, but it didn't budge, which was even more promising. A few whacks with the hammer broke some of the ice creeping in around the door's edges, but not enough, clearly. Freddy let her struggle with it longer than was probably polite, then went over, walking cautiously but easily over the ice in his new non-skid feet, moved a red-faced Ana aside with a bow low enough to let him slip his fingers under the frozen door, which he then heaved up in an explosive shower of broken ice (on the roof, unknown to any of them below, Mangle shivered and woke from her dark dreams, then turned her head blindly on her long neck, ears twitching as she listened). Freddy tipped his hat and went inside, leaving Ana outside on the dock. She had a quick peek around the store-room, then headed back to the truck.

"All's well," Foxy told Chica, tapping her fingertips. "Door were froze in the tracks. If anyone did get inside, they've long gone."

"What he said," Ana agreed, coming back up the ramp. She tossed the screwdriver and hammer back in her toolchest and shut the drawer. "Nothing in the store-room's been touched and I've got a pneumatic arm in there. That's obscure enough they might not have known what it was, but if they're scrapping rusty old railings, they'd have taken anything that looked like there was money in it. You might as well go inside. Leave all this shit here. I'll take care of it."

She picked up Freddy's old head and carried it out. Bonnie picked up his own old head, faked a shudder (sort of faked; there was real unease in those ears) and put it down again. He picked up a box of used parts instead and followed after Ana. Chica hovered for a moment, torn between helping and keeping a friend company, but Foxy waved her off and she went, her arms full of loose odds and ends, and her wee crest tall with eager cheer, flashing bright pink against all this grey winter misery.

Foxy shrugged out of his travel restraints and got up, wandering out of the truck just like he were a real flesh-and-blood bloke with legs that needed stretching after five hours of sitting. He did not, however, gather up some empty skins and go inside. Ana didn't want help and he wouldn't force it on her. Once she'd settled in some and had time to realize just how tired she was, he'd offer a hand and a hook and maybe she'd be grudgingly grateful. As long as he was daydreaming, maybe they'd even get to unload the truck without Bon wedging in between them. Maybe they'd get to talking some. Maybe go back to his cabin after. He still had a bottle of something back there and some of the prepackaged crap she called food tucked away in his cupboard. They could sit together a while, she could eat, they could talk. Failing all that, he could at least give her a proper homecoming cuddle and a decent sleep after. In his cabin. He couldn't imagine his bunk was more comfortable than the bed she kept in the Party Room (he had only the dimmest notion of what 'comfort' even was, beyond the black and white definition of the word), but the thought of her sleeping in it had a deep, almost painful appeal to him.

Stupid thought. Bunk was barely big enough for him alone, much less two. Couldn't even lie in it without his knees drawn up. Ana seemed to sleep well in small spaces, but in light of what he'd learned about her and closets in these last days, there might not be much good feeling behind the habit.

There wasn't much good feeling in anything the two of them were doing, and he wanted to change that. Her sleeping in his cabin instead of creeping back to her bed like a thief in the night felt like the start of that—a change. He would not deny a certain squeamish discomfort at the idea of having someone else underfoot all night. Parts of that were fun, sure, but then she'd be sleeping, passively forcing him to sit still and be quiet and do nothing except tick off the time until she woke up, and all so that he could…what? What was the point, really? They didn't give out prizes just for being there.

But even as he thought this, he was thinking something else, remembering all the times he'd stolen a glimpse of Ana tucked up under Bon's arm while he watched whatever there was to see on her tablet. Not moving, apart from maybe his hand moving up and down on her arm, petting away her dreaming fits. Not talking, apart from maybe telling her in hushed tones to go back to sleep when she halfway roused. Doing nothing except being there. Doing it just because…he thought she needed someone to be there.

What did Bon know anyway, him and all his long-eared, lovey-dovey shit. Ana didn't need someone to look out for her, she needed someone who believed in her strengths and didn't insist on vulnerabilities just to make himself feel chivalrous for bowing to them. Foxy could give her that. He could give her plenty that Bonnie couldn't.

Well…now he could. Maybe. But still not as well as Foxy.

The thought was not as triumphant in his heart as it sounded in his head, making it seem as though all they had together was sex and that wasn't true. It wasn't.

It wasn't.

What an ugly day it was, Foxy decided fiercely, staring out across the wind-blown landscape of the parking lot. Mammon could never be beautiful, but it was never uglier than it was in this time of year. All the autumn colors and Halloween fun was over, but it was too soon for Christmas lights. Ice could not hide the landscape, only make it wet and grey and gloomy. All the garbage was still right there, frozen to the ground so you couldn't even pick it up if you got sick of looking at it.

Although…now that he was thinking on it…there didn't seem to be as much garbage as there had been. Some broken glass and cigarette butts, sure, but none of the biggish junk he was used to seeing strewn about. Even the chokes of weeds were fewer and less brushy, not as if anyone had come along and trimmed them down, but more as if someone had come through and ripped them out.

And there, Foxy's thoughts, flurrying lightly through his mind like the little flecks of snow sneakily riding on the wind, came to a cold stop. Across the parking lot, where his gaze had been restlessly traveling while he waited for someone to come out and tell him the building was empty and all was well in the world, he saw something. Small, submerged in a frozen puddle so that only one small piece protruded, just a little pop of color in a grey weed-choked wasteland.

Pink color, in a most particular shade of pink.

Couldn't be what he thought it was.

He ran. He didn't even think about the ice frozen over the ground or the gripping power of his new textured foot-pads. He just ran, dropping to skid the last distance on his new knees with no more thought for his fur than he'd had for his feet, bashing through the ice that trapped it with his hook so he could reach his hand into that murky water and pull out—

A piece of plastic. Pink plastic, even brighter now that it was in his hand, a color that had never been touched by the sun. Full and round at one end, tapering down to a blunt point, rough all along one side where it had been broken, like half a heart.

Like half of Foxanne's heart-shaped breastplate.

Impossible, but there was nothing else it could be. Here…Here was the little fasten, scored by all the hundreds of times he'd slipped his hook under it to pop the plate off and show the whooping customers the goods they'd paid for. It was hers. And it had been in the box with the rest of her when he'd buried her.

Foxy yanked open his thigh-case and shoved the plastic piece inside, already looking wildly around, but there was no sign of her now. No sign, apart from the torn-off railing, that was. No sign but the clumps of weeds torn up and the missing trash. No sign but the potholes full of ice that had broken and frozen and broken again as she dragged herself back and forth across them night after night. Now that he was looking, the signs were everywhere.

He followed the most obvious tracks to the playground and stopped, staring at the carnage she'd made of it. The piece of fencing that Bonnie had ripped down chasing after Ana that mad long-ago night had been crumpled up like a paper ball, steel links frayed apart and conspicuously missing. If that wasn't enough, the climb-upon sea monster, a monument of resilience that had weathered storms and hordes of bored teenagers for over a decade, had been erased, each loop of the thing smashed flat to the ground, leaving a few splinters of plaster and shreds of reinforced rubber behind, but not many. Not just vanquished then, but devoured. The swings still stood, somewhat the worse for wear, but the rubber seats and the chains they hung from were gone. The monkey bars had been toppled, two legs bent back like paperclips, two bitten through. He found another piece of Foxanne's broken heart in the hollowed-out hold of the pirate ship, but nothing more. She wasn't here. She had been, maybe as recently as last night, but she wasn't here now, which meant she could be anywhere. She had to be close though, she had to be, because…because she had to be.

His ears swiveled, straining to hear anything at all beyond the wind, but all he heard was Ana's voice, broken and indistinct, followed by Bonnie extending an invitation for Foxy to get off his ass and help them. Foxy waited tensely, but they didn't sound that upset as they discussed his disappearance. They just set about unloading the truck without him. Ana called out his name, but just once. No one came peeking around the corner in search of him, and likely no one even questioned his reasons for running off in the first place. They had no idea…

They didn't have to know. He could still fix this.

Foxy checked around the playground again, making sure she wasn't huddled up by the doors in the shadowed place under the overhang, then dashed around the gym to the entrance and all the way along the front face of the building to the emergency exit at the end of the West Hall. He saw another heavy dent and a lot of scratches on the main doors (and when Freddy saw that, he'd know; there were tooth- and claw-marks scoring deep into the steel), but not Mangle. She had to be here, she had to be close, but where?

On the other side of the building, by the loading dock, he heard a sudden burst of short, sharp metallic sounds, like the vicious barking of an animatronic dog.

He had no heart, but it stopped. He ran, feet scarcely touching the ground, leaping potholes two and three at a time, careening around the corner to the back lot and only then slipping on the broken ice, falling, tumbling, rolling, and bounding up again, hook high and ready, to see—

—Ana in the back of the truck, yanking on her mammoth-sized toolchest, its wheel-less metal stumps scraping on the metal floor of the hold to make that skruunk skreee skronk sound. And the longer he stood here listening to it, the more it soothed his frayed nerves, because it was loud and it was so similar to the attack cry of an animatronic, and if Mangle were close enough to hear that all, she couldn't help but come roaring out to fight. Therefore, he thought with all the illogical confidence born of rising panic, Mangle wasn't here.

But she was close. Every sign Foxy had seen pointed him to the promise that she would come back. She had circled the building several times, with particular attention on the doors. She was trying to get inside and that wasn't likely to change. If she were gone black, she was out in the desert or up in the mountain, hunting, but she wasn't always in the black. Once she came back, if she were lost in her head and operating strictly on her protocols, she'd be drawn backstage to await service and repairs. If she were dreaming her waking nightmares of this life, she'd be trying to get to Pirate Cove in time for the start of the show, forgetting she wasn't part of it anymore, or perhaps just trying to find him. And for all those blurry moments between madness and oblivion, she'd want to den down. She liked small dark spaces and silence—a culvert, a crevasse, maybe even…

Foxy wheeled about and ran back all the way around the pizzeria to the southern edge of the parking lot, past the sparse row of mostly dead trees to look down the crumbling slope at the place where he'd buried her. This side of the bluff got most of the sun, so there wasn't any snow and hardly any ice, nothing to conceal or distract him from seeing the gaping black hole in the ground by the big rock that he liked to lean up on when he visited with her.

She might be back in it. His heart, cold as the empty grave below him, knew she wasn't, but she might be. If not…

'If not, I'll keep looking until I find her,' he told himself roughly, climbing down the side of the bluff with a reckless speed that he never would have dared in his old body, but he took no pride or pleasure in the ease of it. He heard a distant clattering crash from the dock and he did stop and listen, but that was all there was. None of the electronic feedback and static that was Foxanne's voice, no animatronic screaming, no human shouts. Just Ana dropping a box of parts too heavy for her stubborn self to be shifting, and he supposed he'd catch an earful later from Bon for running out on the work, and that was fine. Foxy would take his scolding and say his sorries later, but finding Foxanne was the real work that needed doing (and he would find her, he had to find her, so he would, because any other outcome was unthinkable, literally unthinkable; every time he tried to think of it, his mind wiped dangerously black). He couldn't even think of what he might do after that, if he would try to box her up again or…or whatever else he might do, he only knew that he had to find her.

It never occurred to him, not even in the worst of his wordless imaginings, that if she couldn't find a way into the building, she might still find a way on top of it. So Foxy climbed down from the Edge of Nowhere, into the wind, further and further away from his target. He didn't hear the second crashing sound from the dock, which, to be fair, was not as loud as the first. There wasn't much to hear after that and Foxy missed it all.