Guest: Thank you! I'm glad you like it!
Fantom Knight: Well, there actually hasn't been any canon information about the Afton Family Mother, but right now I'll be tying in some ideas I have of her. She's not really going to pop up too much, but I have some future ideas for her... Inevitable fate. ;)
None of the chapters are very long, I'm sorry about that. And yeah, the story has a slower pace, but, I mean, that's kinda purposeful... Kinda.
I feel like the uploading schedule for this story is that I update with a new chapter when I at least have a new one written or something. I don't know- I'm not really too keen on actual schedules.
Anyways, the majority of this chapter is Mike taking a shower. I've never written anything like that before, so I hope it turned out pretty alright.
Enjoy!
Mike didn't forget. At least, he hoped he wouldn't.
His mom came. She refused to enter Evan's room when her eldest son offered. Instead she gave Mike a hug and handed him a backpack full of his necessities and the Fredbear plush. She gave him a kiss on the forehead and then left. Mike wished he was surprised, but he really wasn't.
Early the next day, a group of nurses came into the room. They kicked Mike out temporarily, but he insisted on one thing. Especially when they began to get Evan prepared for his fixing.
Michael handed a soft-spoken nurse the plushie. "Please make sure it watches over him. Fredbear is his best friend." The nurse looked at the little yellow bear with the look including raised brows, but she didn't say anything. Just nodded and joined her fellow nurses as they vanished into the surgical suit of the hospital, wheeling Evan with them.
He wasn't allowed to go into unauthorized areas. The surgical suit was definitely an unauthorized area, and even if Mike did want to visit Evan, they wouldn't allow him. He didn't question why they wouldn't. Mike was positive he didn't want to see the remains of which were his little brother's head.
To distract himself, Mike decided to take that stupid shower. Picking up his pack, he took the directions according to the arrows on the walls to find them. Maybe guests weren't allowed to use them. He paused, standing in front of the door leading to the men's section for the shower's. Would he make a fool of himself, walking into a room full of hospital employees?
Mike took the risk. He expected the room to be heavy and thick with steam, but the mirrors were crystal clear. None of the showers were on and all of them were unoccupied. He sighed with relief, glad for the privacy.
Skimming past the large mirror, Mike picked the shower at the very end of the room, farthest from the door. The inside of the stall was hidden behind its door. Eager to be clean, Mike opened the door-
He screamed. Quickly, Michael shut the door. The sound echoed around the empty room. His breath was labored, heads shaking, legs in a tremor.
Slowly, the stall door was opened again. The blood and the dripping suit was gone. Mike's fear was replaced with confusion in record breaking time.
Nothing was there. Correction- nothing that wasn't supposed to be there. Mike could swear he saw it. The golden fur of a mysterious Freddy suit. It was slouched against the wall, arms laying next to its side. Legs were somewhat bent, one foot over the metal drain of the shower. And there was so. Much. Blood! It pooled out from the chest of the suit, soaking into all of the other pieces. The blood was everywhere all over the floor and the walls. Smeared handprints everywhere. A crime scene.
They're really easy to find, Cassidy's void spoke into his ear. You just have to look. He hid them in plain sight.
Coming to that conclusion was now easy. His father had hid the children's bodies inside the animatronic suits. But which ones? Well, he knew one already. The golden bear was one of them. Mike had never seen that suit before though. It almost looked like Fredbear. Wasn't Fredbear- Fredbear was a spring lock, and spring lock suits normally had all five fingers. The bear that previously stood before him looked old, as old as Fredbear. Was it from a different location?
Although the suit inside the stall was gone, almost like it had never been there to begin with, Mike couldn't take a step forward. He closed the door and shuffled over to the next stall. Before he opened it, Mike squatted and took a peek underneath. Nothing awaited him. He rose, then checked through the gaps of the door. He opened the door reluctantly.
Nothing was waiting for him. Mike laughed at himself. He was being paranoid. It was the lack of sleep. It was the stress of everything that happened and that was happening. He was just imagining it all. But still...
Inside the stall was a little cubby, constructed for bags and clothes. A plate of transparent plastic was the protection for whatever was going to be placed inside. Mike locked the stall door, then began stripping. After he was done peeling off the bloodied clothes he'd been wearing days, he shoved them down in the bottom of his bag. The smell of the dried blood hung in the air. Mike coughed. He pulled out the bottles of shampoo his mother was kind enough to pack for him. Those went on the floor in a corner. His change of clothes went on top of the bag after he zipped it up and stashed it into the cubby.
The warmth of the water washed over Mike. It ran along every section of his skin, automatically relaxing him. Wet now, his hair flattened down against his head. He sweeped a chunk away from his eyes.
Mike's body was relaxed, but not his mind. His paranoia faded away, but not the rushing train of thought of what he was supposed to find. The bodies of the children. There was still a problem with all of that. How many bodies? How many children were killed? Had Afton participated in some sort of genocide, trying to drag his family down in the pits of hell with him?
Only thirteen. Mike was only thirteen. Normal thirteen-year-olds weren't surrounded by death in every corner. Frankly, normal thirteen-year-olds didn't have to worry about one of their parents being a murderer. They didn't talk to possibly dead children in their dreams, nor were given instructions by said spirits to find the corpses of other dead children. All because, like said prior, one of the thirteen-year-old's parents was a murderer. One who didn't want to be caught.
Mike settled with the fact that he wasn't normal like all the other kids his age. He didn't need to be normal. The knowledge of what happened behind the scenes of one of the country's favorite industries was really too much for normal kids to handle. Mike was now genuinely surprised at how well he handled everything. It was his normal. He wished he'd noticed that much sooner.
He opened one of those bottles of shampoo and squeezed some of the liquid into the palm of his hand. The strong scent of sweet oranges filled the air, cutting through the smell of dried blood. Lathering the liquid between his fingers, there was a consideration. Cassidy was a ghost, right? It seemed to be that way. Would that mean Elizabeth was a ghost as well? Michael knew she was killed by an animatronic. Afton and Henry were working on some very specific animatronics for a new idea. The only thing he remembered was that there was once an animatronic that was over seven feet tall and that it looked like a clown. Mike didn't really like clowns. It was funny too, how often Afton didn't want Elizabeth near it. And the last time she was alone with it, she had died.
Was her body ever found? Mike couldn't really recall. It was all too fuzzy when those days commenced. If her body was found, there was a casket. If not, there was still a casket. Body or no body, the casket gave the illusion there was one. Even if all was buried was an empty coffin.
Days later, the plans for the new location was scrapped. However, the animatronics were already made. It was a waste of time and money to take them apart, so the idea of using them for rental means was brought up. Other places could use them for private birthday parties or meer celebrations. Who would want a creepy clown animatronic watching them from a small stage? Mike wasn't sure if the rental idea had worked. It wasn't like he saw any of those unusually shiny robots anywhere yet. Yet was the key word in that sentence.
He wasn't really a big fan of any of the robots that were built. Most of that were too heavily built and stiff and too human-like. It wasn't even cute in the way they looked anthropomorphized. It was scary. They could cause nightmares. For Evan, they did cause nightmares.
After Michael finished washing himself with the contents from both containers, he turned the shower off. Bubbly water seeped down the drain, murky with dried blood and the natural grossness from his body. Mike felt clean, feeling good. He'd never liked washing himself before, always stepping in for about ten minutes, sitting on the floor in a huff of disdain. In the end he would pad himself with the bar of soap to pass off as "clean". Elizabeth would try to lecture him like their mother, but he shrugged her off. Something changed with Mike since the incident, and he found himself different. In a good way.
Not having anything to dry himself with, Mike shook as much away away from his physique as he could before putting those clean clothes on. They didn't stick to his frame like the other had so stubbornly. All the stiffness that crawled around his back was now gone. He felt so free. Thank the gods he finally made up his mind about taking that shower. He definitely needed it.
The floor of the shoser was dripping wet. Mike didn't have a towel. He dealt with it, the water dripping down from his sopping hair onto the back nape of his neck. Droplets trailed down his spine, criss-crossing between every vertebrate. It got him thinking about Evan, oddly enough.
His mother had prodded the doctor with how they were going to reassemble his little brother. The explanation itself was vague, and possibly in a purposeful manner. Michael knew his mother would freak about the details, even if she didn't seem like that kind of person.
"We'll be using special techniques to remold his skull." Like clay.
"We'll be using a specific medium to salvage the rest of his nerves and brain to recover and fix what he lost." Like a faulty machine, being scrapped for reasons outside of its control.
"His hair? That will come last. We'll be using extensions." That was something Michael didn't know how to think about.
He gathered up all his things and opened the stall. Right across from him he could see his reflection, but he simply didn't dwell on it for too long. Although his hair was several shades lighter and his face more round like his mother, Mike looked like Afton. Too much. They shared the same smaller eyes and nose. Evan had Afton's blue eyes as well, but he didn't share the same coldness they could cast. Mike did. People could easily mistake Mike for his father. If they ignored the different hair color, face shape and shorter height.
The mirror was stripped with lines of steam. Very subtle but still noticeable. He wiped his fingers along the surface as Mike made his way out of the showers. Steaks showed themself as he left. They faded back into the foggy background not long after.