CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
He should have brought a book.
Bonnie was not a reader, but damn, there was nothing to do in the cooler. Boredom was not the worst feeling in the world, as he'd so recently reminded himself. Being alone in a small room wasn't even all that worse than being shut up with others in the Vault, and knowing in advance it would only be for a few hours was a whole lot better than years, not knowing if this would be the time they never came out. It still sucked though.
He thought he might go black in the beginning and fighting against that at least gave him a goal that kept his mind occupied for a while, but the hours stacked up and there was no place to put them. Eventually, he quit trying to fight it. Why not go black, after all? He wasn't in Yoshi's flimsy workshop anymore. He could do it, vent his rage like hot air and if nothing else, kill a little time.
But he couldn't. Unbelievable. He'd been fighting against the blackness inside him for so long—a shorter, harder fight with each new battle, until it felt like he was always standing on that cliff with one foot over the void, even on his best days—but now that he wanted to jump, he couldn't find the edge. For years, all he'd ever had to do was stop trying, just let the rage swell around him and pull him in. Not this time. This time, he actually had to chase it, thinking of Ana crawling across the kitchen floor, slipping in her own blood, saying she was fine over and over. He made himself imagine the desperate fight there must have been, made himself see Mangle's teeth tearing into her, crushing her underneath that garbage-bloated body while the wind tore the screams out of her mouth and froze her bloody handprints on the wall.
That nearly did it, but Freddy picked the exact moment the world was going dim to knock on the freezer door, so he pulled himself clear (it was disgustingly easy), hoping he was getting out. No such luck.
"She's at the hospital," was all Freddy wanted to tell him, and sure, okay, that was a relief and good to know, but that was it. Nothing about how bad it was, nothing about Foxy, just that she'd checked herself in and was being seen. Awesome.
And after Bonnie spent hours and hours and fucking hours crawling his way back to the edge, Freddy knocked again, this time to tell him Ana thought she'd be released soon.
"I guess if they're letting her go, she must be okay, huh?" Bonnie called through the door.
"So she would have us think," was Freddy's less-than-reassuring reply.
He didn't want to be alone again, so before Freddy could walk away, Bonnie raised his voice a little more and asked, "Foxy ever turn up?"
"Not yet."
Bonnie nodded to himself in the dark, consulting his internal clock, then grit his teeth and said, "Even for Foxy, that's not like him. Maybe we should be looking for him."
No answer.
"Freddy?"
"I hear something…I think that's him…That's him," Freddy said firmly. "Hold on a little longer, Bonnie."
"Yeah, sure," he muttered, and found a place on the wall beside the door to lean while he waited.
It wasn't much longer. Which was to say it was, it took for-fucking-ever, actual measurable mountains of time, nearly two hours and each one breaking the laws of time and space by cramming thousands of minutes inside them and never mind what his stupid soulless internal clock said. But it wasn't much longer.
Third time's the charm, as they say, and the third time Freddy knocked on the cooler door, it was to ask if he was good to come out, and boy, was he.
"Foxy's in his cabin," were Freddy's first words as he stood, still holding the door and blocking Bonnie in with his immoveable body. "Leave him alone."
"Got it."
Freddy eyed him dubiously. "I want to trust you…"
"You don't have to, okay? It's fine. If it makes you feel better to give me an order, go ahead, but I'm not going to mess with him. How's she doing?"
After a short, assessing stare, Freddy brought out his phone and found something on it to show him. A picture. Ana in a small white room, framed in a mirror.
"She looks…" Bonnie hesitated. He wanted to say 'awful,' but he couldn't. Partly because he didn't need to. It was all right there in hi-def color. Mostly, he didn't say it because, while Bonnie had been looking for the edge of the black all night, Freddy was obviously already there and barely holding on. He didn't need much of a push, so Bonnie forced his ears up and shoved them into a jaunty carefree angle and said, "She sure looks pleased with herself, doesn't she?"
Freddy grunted affirmatively and with a shaky kind of humor buried under the gloom. "This is what she sent to accompany the news that they were releasing her soon," he said, turning the phone so he could share the screen. "If I had to guess, I'd say that smile has less to do with anything a doctor said and more to do with Ana's…"
"Fuck you, I'm leaving?" Bonnie guessed.
Freddy shook his head, but in an affectionate despair rather than denial. "That was some time ago. No further messages. She said she'd text when she arrived home…she might have forgotten, but I hope that means they kept her."
"Weren't you watching the road?" Bonnie asked and instantly regretted it. There was only person here who deserved to feel like he hadn't done enough tonight and it sure wasn't Freddy.
"I tried," Freddy said, ears low. "I thought it was more important to watch Foxy. To make sure he…I don't know why. Her battery case was smashed, her heart pulled out in pieces. Her CPU was broken open and drained. There was no reviving her, no way to recover her core data. It could have done no harm to let him keep a small part of her, but I made him t-t-take it all." Static softly washed out the silence at the end of his words. At length, he swallowed it and said, "I shouldn't have done that."
"It's okay," said Bonnie.
Freddy lifted his head with a distant, quizzical expression—their father's grief, painted across a bear's features. "Is it? Is it really? It doesn't feel like it is and I don't know how…how much more I can take. I was going to say how much worse it can get," he added, "but troubles…seem so infinite. And my strength is paled tonight."
Bonnie nodded, groping ineffectually for some way to bring him out of this mood. When it was him at his lowest, Freddy had been there, and even when it was the last thing he thought he wanted…
"Want a hug?" he offered.
"Very much, but please don't touch me. I might hurt you. I'm not…I'm not okay, Bonnie."
"Well, you know what Ana says," Bonnie said. "That just means it's not the end. Hang in there, big bear."
Freddy looked directly at him for the first time since opening the cooler door and gave him a small, tired smile. His eyes whined, the pupils contracting to let a little more blue show through.
"Want me to go get Chica?" asked Bonnie. "If you want to…do something else?"
"No, I'll go," Freddy said.
Bonnie didn't question it. He knew Freddy didn't want him to go even that far into Pirate Cove. Bonnie wasn't going to argue. He wasn't going to kick his way into Foxy's cabin and punch his lying face in either, but this was not about what Bonnie would or would not do. It was about helping Freddy keep it together. There wasn't a whole lot Bonnie could do to make Freddy feel better, but there were things he could do to keep Freddy from feeling worse and one of them was just to shut up and nod, so he did.
Freddy put his phone away and turned around, paused, and reached back his empty hand without looking.
Bonnie took it and gave it a little squeeze, pretending not to feel the tremors.
Freddy walked away, head down.
Bonnie guessed he should go watch the road then, but he only got as far as the dining room and the sight of that stupid stuff onstage—a box of parts and a couple extra bones, just sitting there waiting to be sorted. It should have looked like something someone was coming back to. It didn't. It looked like someone was never coming back at all.
He knew she was. He'd seen her on her feet and grinning (hard now not to see her father in her face when she smiled) and even though she did look awful in that picture, he guessed it couldn't be that serious if they were letting her walk around. His entire knowledge of how hospitals worked came from books in the Reading Room with titles like Tina's Tonsils or Danny Goes to the Doctor. He doubted everything was really all balloons and lollipops for being brave in the real world.
But whenever it happened, today or tomorrow or the day after that, she'd be back. She'd go home first and probably stay there as long as it took until she could fake being okay, texting Freddy every day so he wouldn't worry and maybe taking some more pictures for him, after she'd had a chance to cover everything over with makeup. And she wouldn't miss a day of work, if only so she could lie when she finally did come around and tell them this bruise or that scratch was really from the job and they were all remembering the bite as worse than it was. In a few years, the entire incident would be reduced to a few scars and a fun little horror story she only told when she got high.
He didn't know how long he sat there, not exactly thinking as much as feeling, but it was long enough for the camera to get bored following Freddy around and click on to check on him. Bonnie supposed he should do the mature thing and ignore it, but his tank of maturity was empty and his calm was running on fumes.
"Fuck off," he said.
It was way after closing hours for this time of year. The restaurant was dark and quiet. But now the speakers crackled and began to play the ambient back-up percussion and harmony to the Cheer-Up song.
Bonnie rolled his eyes and looked directly at the camera. "You're hilarious," he said flatly. "I better leave before I split my sides laughing."
The camera panned to follow him as he got up and went to the door, then jumped ahead to shine its light in his face as he walked up the West Hall, but at least it didn't play the music at him too. (He did not wonder, as Freddy may have and Chica definitely would have, how the music was being played at all. The Purple Man had access to the security cameras from the basement, but the greater Audio/Video controls were on an in-house system in the manager's office and could not be controlled through any other computer.)
Bonnie hadn't quite made it to the corridor that connected with Pirate Cove when he heard Freddy and Chica headed his way. Eerie not to hear their footsteps anymore, even in the echoing hall, but Freddy's low voice reverberated off the walls same as it ever did, telling Chica pretty much what he'd told Bonnie, and presumably showing Chica the same picture, since Chica's response was, "Do you really think they will? She looks so…so…"
"I know how she looks."
Then they were out in the hall, where the camera could see them and where they could see Bonnie. Freddy immediately looked back over his shoulder, ready to intercept if Foxy came charging out.
"Where is he?" Bonnie asked.
Freddy's ears tipped forward warily. "Still in his cabin, I presume."
"Good. I wasn't going to see him, I was just coming to meet you."
"Why?"
"I don't know," Bonnie admitted. "I just didn't want to wait alone."
Freddy's frown did not smooth out. If anything, it deepened. "Why not?"
Bonnie could only shrug, unable to sum up his reasons in words that didn't sound stupid. The camera had been shoving itself up somebody's ass ever since Ana turned the power back on. It was all he could do to entertain himself and it was usually Freddy who got the brunt of it when Ana wasn't there. How could Bonnie explain how intolerable it was to have the camera stare at him for one or two more minutes when Freddy had to put up with it following him around the building for hours almost every night?
It felt different tonight, that was the thing, only he didn't know how. The camera wasn't just looking at him, it was smirking at him. Playing the stupid Cheer-Up music the same way a playground bully says "Oh no!" after some little kid slips in the mud and maybe even extends a helping hand just so he can let go and laugh when the kid gets even muddier.
Yeah, that was it, that was the perfect analogy. The only thing funnier to a bully than seeing someone else get hurt was faking a little sympathy, extending that hand, genuinely wanting to them to feel a little bit better…because you and only you knew you were about to make it worse.
"I just don't want to be alone right now," was the best that Bonnie could do, and right after he finished saying this, the door at the end of the hall behind him banged open.
Bonnie spun around, Freddy swept a squawking Chica behind him with one burly arm, and even the camera swiveled as fast as its motor could go, and there, swaying against their stares like it was a strong wind, stood Ana.
There was a plastic bag dangling from the slack fingers of one hand. There wasn't much in it, just enough to weigh down one corner a little, and she almost seemed to have forgotten she had it as she shuffled forward, but when the light hit her, her hand clenched on it. In another moment, she'd raised her other arm against the light, and maybe it didn't even mean anything, but it struck him in a weird way all the same: when the light hit her, she defended the bag before she defended herself.
"Bright!" she moaned, and the camera shifted lower at once, illuminating her without blinding her. Another time, Bonnie might have spared a little more thought by how uncharacteristically considerate that was, but not now. Not when there was so much else to see.
"Oh baby," said Bonnie, all the horror and heartbreak bleeding out his speaker, because seeing a picture was one thing, but seeing it in right in front of him, that was something else. One eye was covered in tape and gauze; the other wandered, bleary and unfocused. Her lips had swollen so much, they couldn't quite close; he could see the track where she'd been drooling as a clean line through the dried blood on her chin. Her hair hung limp and matted to her waist, but only on one side; the other side had been shaved back as far as her ear, padded with more gauze, more tape, leaving bloody stubble like an ugly frame all around it. Her arms were bandaged from her wrists to the elbows, with one shoulder packed in gauze, giving her a hunchbacked appearance even when she stood up straight, which she was having trouble doing. She was still wearing the same torn, blood-soaked clothes, dried stiff by now.
So much blood, in all its ugly dried-up colors. Why hadn't they at least cleaned her up? Even Chica had changed her apron. Why had the damn humans with all their so-called human empathy let Ana sit all night in her own blood?
"What are you doing here?" Bonnie blurted, because of course he did. If you don't know what to say, why not skip straight to saying the worst thing? Big dumb bunny.
Hearing his voice, Ana lowered her arm, squinting in concentration. "What are you doing here?" she asked, only she didn't, really. All her words smeared together, like blood on a wall: Wuddaya doon eer?
Chica hesitated out from behind Freddy's shoulder and cautiously asked, "Where do you think you are?"
Ana blinked at her, stumbling back as if Chica had popped into existence right in front of her instead of standing clear back at the other end of the hall. "Whudda fuck!" she exclaimed and slowly rallied, her pale face flushing with weak indignant color. "Don't do that!"
"I'm sorry," Chica said, coming closer with her hands raised, moving slowly and speaking softly. "I didn't mean to startle you. Where are you, Ana?"
"I went home," Ana said, weaving. "I'm home."
Freddy's brows drew together, like clouds closing over the sun, thick enough to darken the entire sky. "They let you go in this condition?"
Ana barked out a laugh, immediately followed by a mild curse. She clapped a hand to the swollen side of her face, cradling it as she mumbled, "They were never gonna let me go, sons of bitches. But they left me alone," she added with a sly smile. Blood began to seep through the bandages at the side of her mouth. "Shouldn'a done that if they wanted me t'stay. And don't change the subject, sister! Whuddaya doing in my aunt's house?"
"We're not," Chica said. "You're at the pizzeria."
"No, I'm not." Ana looked around, surprise slurring across her features. "Yes, I am. Whudda fuck? What is the fuck," she corrected herself, lifting her chin as she carefully enunciated. "This fuck…that this is. It is what it is," she concluded and started walking.
The lurching, unbalanced look of her reminded Bonnie too much of himself when he was…full. He was there before he even knew he'd moved, holding her steady while she stumbled over her feet. "Oh baby," he said and she clutched his arm and looked around, leaning out to see around him as she hung from his hands, unable to find him. "Baby girl, what are you on?"
Her face turned crafty, drunkenly secretive. "They gimme something at th' hospital. So what?"
"Just something at the hospital. Is that all?"
"Maybe. I got some pills. I get to get them," she insisted. "Says so on the bottle. One or two for pain, as needed. I needed it! Okay? I needed it. Been a real fuck of a day and I needed it. Took a little drink to drink it down. Just a little one. Little tiny bottle. S'okay, I took a energy shot so I'm safe t'drive. But don't tell Freddy," she added, looking right at Freddy in a pinched, exasperated way that would be hilarious under other circumstances. "He can be such a puritanical pain in m'ass about self-medication."
Freddy's eyelids slanted downward. He started toward them.
"Your secret's safe with me," said Bonnie, patting her. "Come on, baby girl, let's put you to bed."
"Nnn-no! Leeme alone." Ana pulled away, fell against the wall and would have dropped straight down on her butt if he hadn't grabbed her. Oblivious, she groped at her hip pocket, her brows furrowed with concentration, and eventually succeeded in fishing out her keys. "M'Fine. Gonna get m'day pack n' gonna go home."
"Oh, hell no. Come here. No, no," Bonnie said, raising his voice over her protests as he first took the keys from her (she let him) and then that plastic bag (she tried to grab it back), and passing them both over to Freddy. Hooking one arm around her shoulders and another under her knees, Bonnie scooped Ana up, taking the choice away from her. "You're sleeping over tonight."
"Can't. Workin inna mornin."
"Don't worry about that right now. Come on, let's go to bed."
"I don't want her left alone," Freddy said. "Not in this condition. Chica—"
"I'll stay with her," said Bonnie, even as Chica stepped forward.
"Bonnie—"
"I'm calm," he insisted.
"I don't think I can keep…" Freddy checked himself, glancing back at the camera. Speaking slowly, picking his words carefully, he went on, "…keep him from coming for her once he knows she's here. Not without putting him in the freezer. As angry as I am with him, I don't want to see him go black. You say you're calm now. Are you going to be calm when he comes to see her?"
"We'll work it out," Bonnie said without looking too deeply into himself to see how much he meant it, but he didn't have to be any more convincing than that because Ana said, "No."
And now she was struggling, although she wasn't coordinated enough to do much and she quickly exhausted herself, moaning, "No, not him. No no no. Please don't make me. I can't. I can't, okay? Not him. Please, no!"
Freddy grunted again, his eyes narrowing like he thought Bonnie had programmed her to say that.
"You want to stay with me instead?" Bonnie asked.
"Wanna go home."
"Later, but for right now, who do you want, baby? Me or Chica? Or Freddy? Or Foxy," he added, since Freddy was still giving him the eye.
At once, Ana buried her face deeper in his fur, shaking her head and pulling at him like she was trying to climb inside him and hide.
"Okay, not Foxy," said Bonnie, petting her quiet. "But you got to pick somebody, baby girl. Who's it going to be?"
Ana sniffled, sulked, and finally said, "Can we watch a movie?"
"Sure," said Bonnie, looking at Freddy.
Freddy gave in with a growl. "Try and get her to sleep, but don't under any circumstances let her sleep on her back." He opened the bag she'd brought and looked inside, then fixed Ana with a severe stare. "We're going to talk about this in the morning."
She mumbled, incoherent, unconcerned.
"Chica, I'm going to need your help in the kitchen," Freddy ordered and walked away, his ears jutting low over his thunderous brows.
"Okay," said Chica at once, confused. "What are we doing?"
"Cleaning," Freddy said and punched the door to the dining room open.
Ana twitched in his arms. Bonnie looked down at her, then found an unbruised place on her cheek to nuzzle. She quieted and he carried her in to bed under the camera's watchful eye.
Foxy tried to be good. Oh, he'd be the first to admit he crossed the line more often than the rest of his family, and mayhaps he'd grown too accustomed to the view on the other side. He wasn't mannerly, he wasn't nice and he saw no point in pretending to be just to get along with those what were only trying to get along with him. 'Getting along' was a false comfort, a painting of calm seas hung over a window so no one could see the choppy waters and thunderswells. He'd rather be alone than stuck in a room with a lot of lies dressed up as manners.
Nevertheless, he didn't go out of his way to be an asshole and when he'd done wrong—really wrong, as opposed to merely rude—he tried to do better. If he came across at times as dismissive of the harm his thoughtless (or intentional) words or deeds had done, it was only because…well, it was already done, wasn't it? The past was a desolate, hopeless place where the sun never set and its cold stark light brutally illuminated the bones of every mistake. Why so many people chose to live there, Foxy could never understand. He himself preferred to look ahead, always ahead. He'd done things in his time, terrible things, both in and out of his control, and he could count on one hand how many times he'd ever said he was sorry for any of them, a fact that was almost a point of dark pride for him, and why not? The more you said a thing, the less it meant. If ever he did say he was sorry, for sure he meant it and it meant more (in his opinion) than those who apologized for every stupid little thing. Some things didn't need sorries anyhow, they just needed to be left behind. Not forgiven, because forgiveness ought not to be necessary between family, but buried. Forgotten. Swept away as by some timely wave, leaving a clean deck and fresh air behind. If more people abided by Foxy's philosophies, the world would be a far happier place.
But this…this was never going to come clean.
Oh, it would go quiet, sure. Freddy might never say another world on the matter. Freddy never said anything twice if he could help it, and he'd said it all tonight. Bonnie would give him some dirty looks and a lot of distance, but he'd stop well short of starting a fight and getting that pretty new face of his broken off. As for Chica, her efforts over the years to make a better man of him could be irksome, but at least it made her predictable. So he knew she'd natter on about it for a while…or maybe not. She hadn't had anything to say to him in Yoshi's workshop when the cat of his and Ana's relationship escaped its bag, and this was much, much worse than that.
Funny. After all these years of hoping she'd give up on trying to improve the quality of his character, the thought that she finally had…felt awful.
And maybe that was why he was really here in his cabin tonight, keeping quiet and out of sight after laying his pretty girl's bones in her grave and scrubbing the flydock clean of Ana's blood. Maybe it was nothing to do with anything Freddy had said (damn you…you made me think about it), nothing Bon might do, nothing in that picture of Ana all stitched up and smiling in the mirror, but only the fear of seeing defeat in Chica's eyes the next time she looked at him. What was there left to be when the last person who believed in you gave up? What, except the person everyone else already thought you were?
So he tried to be good, for one night, for Freddy and for Ana and even Bon, and especially for the small spark of hope that a 'good' Foxy was even possible that only Chica kept alive, but it was hard. He didn't want to be here and it only got harder to stay as the night wore on. It wasn't that he wanted to go anywhere. At the moment, he didn't care if he ever saw the world outside his cabin again. He just wanted to see Ana. He needed to see Ana. Not a picture, not a text, but Ana, alive and breathing and cursing in her sleepy way as she told him to leave her be and let her rest.
That was assuming they'd turned her loose at all. He didn't know much about doctoring, but he knew plenty about bites. The attack had not been quick, a shivering snap in the direction of some startling sound or movement. He'd had to melt all that red ice, scrub the concrete, wash the walls. He knew what kind of fight it had been. He knew of only one other what had gone up against the Mangle in the fullness of her fury and survived it, at least long enough for the ambulance to get there and haul the bloke away. Whatever happened to him after that, Foxy didn't know, but he thought he'd have heard something if the chap died, being an employee and all, and never had, so say he'd survived it. Ana had also survived it, but like that poor boy back at Mullholland, he mostly had to take that on faith.
Foxy didn't have that much faith. He had to see her, even if it was just for a few minutes to watch her sleep. He didn't need her to wake up. She never needed to know he was there (he'd rather she didn't, in fact, not until he knew what to tell her), but he wanted to see her face, hear her breathing, touch her hand and feel it grip his in sleeping trust.
He should go to her.
No. Freddy told him to stay in his cabin.
But that was just to keep him away from Bonnie. Foxy had no intention of crossing paths with the avenging loverbunny. He just wanted to see his girl. He could slip out now, run up the mountain to her house, sit with her awhile, and run back without anyone the wiser. And if she wasn't there, why then, he could come back secure in the knowledge that she was being looked after in the hospital, as safe and sound as a man could make her. He could live with either outcome. What he couldn't do was sit around his bloody cabin all night, knowing nothing, doing nothing, seeing nothing except that picture on Freddy's phone, not saved to his databank, but burned into his heart.
Foxy got up and left.
His feet made almost no sound when he leapt the rails of his ship to land on the stage. He crept to the curtain and peeked out at the dark amphitheater, ears twitching as he listened.
The thing about Freddy was, you always knew he was coming, but you never knew when. Fortunately, it wasn't a long wait before he glimpsed a blush of pale light growing in the corridor to the West Hall—the glow of Freddy's eyes. Foxy waited and soon enough could see him walking across the upper level at the back of the room, although he still couldn't hear him. Curse these new bodies. They were all so quiet now.
There was no camera in Pirate Cove any more, not since the summer night Ana had broken it, but there was one in both halls and neither of them were on. Lucky thing, that. He wouldn't put it past the Purple Man to signal Freddy somehow to turn around if he spied Foxy skulking behind him. And follow, Foxy did. Bon would be staring out the West Hall Exit, sighing at the road, or mooning around the stage, playing sad songs on his guitar, and Chica would be a sympathetic shadow close beside him. The store-room door made too much noise, so the safest way out was the emergency exit by the security room. As soon as Freddy went into the old theater, Foxy made a run for it through the maze of activity rooms for the back hall. The exit door was locked, of course, and he didn't have a key like Freddy, but he could pick a lock, even with his clumsy old hand. The only thing that had ever kept him in was his respect for authority, so obviously, Foxy came and went as he pleased.
But when he stuck his head outside for what should have been a cursory scan before he sprinted for the road, there was Ana's pick-up, parked in her usual spot by the loading dock.
She was here? How long…? And no even told him?
Right. He couldn't just stand here and fume. Freddy was plodding along behind him, slow and inevitable as the deadliest of snails, as soon as he caught sight of Foxy, it was back to the Cove for the night, for the year or for the rest of his animatronic life.
He locked the door again, had a short think, then ducked through the security room to the employee lounge on the other side. He did not look at the manager's window as he raced by. Why would he? The inner office was, for the moment, empty. The lights were off. The false wall that hid the elevator to the basement was back in place. At a casual glance, all seemed to be as it had been since closing day, years and years ago. Even if he'd gone right to the glass and switched on his eyes and really looked at the room beyond, would he have noticed that the chair had been pushed back? Drawer left slightly open that had been closed? The little dancing Fredbear figurine moved from one side of the desk to the other? The devil was in the details, all right.
He didn't think about where he was going as he ran. Nothing to think about, really. It was late enough by now that even if nothing else had happened, she'd still be headed to bed, so there he went and there, aye, there was the light of the camera, spilling out into the hall around the edges of the sign on her door. And when Foxy flung the door open (a little harder and he wouldn't have just bounced it off the wall, but perhaps imbedded it into it), there was Bonnie, sitting on one end of the party stage with his arm around Ana, curled small against his side. Watching a movie together, or they were, until Ana slapped the tablet aside and scrambled up, battle in every shaking line of her, eyes round and glassy and wild.
Bonnie caught her hand and held it, his own eyes seeming to flash as the lenses opened up black, shrank down to let the green in, and opened up again. He glanced at the camera, which was also looking at Foxy now, and got up, saying soft words in a calm voice as Ana stumbled herself into the corner of the stage, and when he had her sitting down there and mostly quiet, he just as calmly turned and planted a restraining hand against Foxy's chest, just two more striding steps from touching her. "Nope," he said. "Out."
Foxy smacked his arm with the round side of his hook, snarling, "I ain't going anywhere," except the last word came out somewhat clipped, since Bonnie picked him the bleeding hell up and threw him out in the hall with force enough that he hit the window. If that had been normal glass, he'd gone right through and landed in the parking lot, but it was the same stuff separating the manager's office from the rest of the pizzeria—four inches of tempered Lucite, made to hold sharks—and Foxy just bounced off and landed on his butt on the floor.
"Be back in a flash, baby girl," Bonnie said from what was now a considerable distance, but getting closer. "Watch the show so you can tell me what happens. I don't want to miss anything. No, no no," he said soothingly in answer to a querulous mumble. "Nobody's fighting. It's all good. Me and Foxy are just going to have a little chat and I'll be right back."
Foxy had made it to his feet by the last word and was ready to chat, all right. A gentleman would let the other bloke have the first swing, but Foxy was no gentleman. The very instant Bon came through the door, Foxy threw a hook at him.
Bonnie caught it, held it while he closed the door behind him, then said, with just a hint of edge, "Dude, you want to stop this shit right now before I decide to stop it for you."
"Don't ye threaten me, ye measly scab! When have ye ever come out the better of me in yer entire groveling life?"
Bonnie acknowledged that with a flick of one ear. "True, but you know, when Dad first made us, he was still figuring stuff out. So Chica was built a little better than Freddy, I was a little better than Chica, and yeah, you were built better than me, better than all of us. At Mulholland, you got upgraded and maintained while the rest of us sat in back and got scrapped out, and all we got at Circle Drive was new skins. So of course you've always beat me. As long as I've known you, you were more durable, more maneuverable, better balanced, better maintained—"
"Jealous?" Foxy sneered, attempting to shove Bonnie's hand away again.
This time, his hand didn't move.
"Well, duh," said Bonnie, ignoring his little struggles. "When I could barely walk, you were sprinting up and down the halls, even with your legs broken down to the bones. You bet I was jealous." His ears lowered, not in a hard snap, but a slow, almost graceful descent to lie flat down his back. "Was. But we just got the same upgrades, bucko. Me and you are on even footing for the first time in both our lives and your past scorecard means exactly nothing. Now I just told Ana we weren't going to fight, but hey, I'm not going to tell you what to do. All I'm saying is, you swing this thing at me again—" He lifted Foxy's hook, then released it with a shove that nearly sent him back into the window again. "—and I'll pull it the hell off and use it to gouge your fucking eyes out, and if you don't think I can, then step the fuck up. I don't honestly know if I'll beat you, but I figure the only one with an advantage here is the one who wants to knock the other guy down more. If you really think that's you, let's go."
Foxy didn't move.
"Cool," said Bonnie. He glanced at the camera mounted halfway down the hall—it wasn't on—then peeked around the edges of the sign on the Party Room door, and finally looked at Foxy again. "What do you want?"
"I want me woman, that's what!"
"Nope. Fun talk. Good night." Bonnie turned around.
Foxy grabbed his arm (but not with his hook) and spun him back around. "Who the hell do ye think ye are, deciding for her? Let alone keeping me on pins all night, imagining all-sorts, and her just walls away? Have ye no heart?"
"Hey, your guilty conscience is not my problem and nothing you could imagine comes close to what I had to see." Bonnie's ears shifted, hidden servos audibly whining with the strain as they tried to go even flatter than it was possible to go. "And what I wasn't there to see. I left her alone, you son of a bitch. We all left her alone because nobody knew she wasn't safe except you. And you left her alone, too."
"I'm here now," Foxy said, taking a challenging step forward, but toward the door and not Bonnie. "I'm here for her and I'm taking her. Don't make me go through ye to do it, mate."
Bonnie gripped the door's latch before Foxy could reach for it and looked at him with, of all things, a smile.
If it had been a different smile, Foxy would have swung that hook and let the Fates decide who was left standing at the end. But the smile was as honest as it was bitter and that gave him just enough pause for Bonnie to say, "I really hope you appreciate the irony of what I am about to tell you. I really do, because I am a petty son of a bunny at times and I take my happy where I can find it. You ready? Here goes. Irony." He pushed his head forward, still smiling, speaking soft and slow. "She doesn't want you. You don't get a reason. You don't get an appeal. You just get to deal with it."
"Oh sure, like ye even offered me up as an option."
"I did, actually. Twice. She said she didn't want to see you. In fact, if you must know, she said, 'Please no. No no no. Please, I can't. Not him. Don't make me see him. No.'"
Not even Bonnie's flat, dry delivery could take the sting out of those words. Foxy stared at him for an unknown span of time, but all he could say at the end of it was, "Let me talk to her."
"No," said Bonnie. "And do you know why?"
"Because yer a spiteful piece of shit."
"Nope. Because she said no," Bonnie said, giving each word its own emphasis. "And whatever I feel about that does not matter. I don't make her choices for her. She said no and for a change, you're going to respect that, whether you want to or not. You hear me?"
He could have hit him. He wanted to, and never mind all that jabber about who had what advantage or not in a fair fight, Bonnie couldn't get his hand off that door faster than Foxy could put his own through Bonnie's fat head. He could punch that smiling face clean off.
He didn't have a face when she met him, whispered that voice that lived in the endless black at the bottom of Foxy's heart. She loved him just the same.
"I hear ye," said Foxy.
"Before I go, there is something else I need to say to you. Like, I need to. If I don't say it, my battery may actually explode in my fucking chest. I need to tell you that I don't know why she doesn't want to see you tonight, but it's not because she blames you. She doesn't blame you. It is your fault," Bonnie interrupted himself, biting off each word into its own separate bullet. His voice grew no louder, but his eyes began to dilate. "You as good as bit Ana yourself, but she…she will never blame you, even if she knew, because that's just how love is with her. She thinks it's supposed to hurt. She thinks it's supposed to bleed. She thinks love is a book where everybody dies at the end and she'll never blame you." He stood for a while, air wheezing in and out of him while his eyes flickered on the edge of full black. At last, scarcely louder than a hum of static, he said, "But I do."
He wanted to say, to shout, that this wasn't his fault, that he didn't mean for any of this to happen, that all he'd ever wanted to do was spare a life and how was that wrong? How was he to blame? He hadn't abandoned Ana to die, damn it, he'd been trying to save them both.
But behind all that… Behind all that, he still saw Ana's blood on the loading dock, frozen wherever it had splashed, forming playful red icicles where it dripped and great glassy puddles where it pooled. On the ground, on the wall, on the eaves…on Foxanne's teeth.
He said, "I'm sorry."
"Yeah, right, sorry's just another fucking joke to you and I'm not your goddamn straight man."
He might have said more—he sure looked like he had more to say—but just then, the camera in the West Hall came on and brought its light around to shine on them. It began to blink on and off.
Bonnie shot it an irritated glance, then closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths, and finally opened them looking almost normal again. "I'm going back in now. I'm not going to slam this door and you're not going to barge through it again, because that would start a fight, and we're not fighting, right? She's hurt and she's high and the last thing she needs right now is the two of us at each other's throats. If you care about that, if you care about her, you'll walk away tonight. Just like…" Bonnie's hard voice faltered. He looked at the camera.
Being a camera, it could neither heave a sigh nor roll its eyes, but it was easy to imagine both in the terse way it switched off and returned to the Party Room.
"Just like I'll walk away tomorrow," Bonnie concluded, glaring at him, "when she goes back to you."
"I'm—"
"—sorry. Yeah. I heard you. You're mostly a song-and-story act, so let me give you a little professional advice: If you don't get a laugh the first time, don't repeat yourself. It's not that the audience didn't hear you, it's just not a funny fucking joke." With that, Bonnie turned his back on him, pushed his ears stiffly up, and went back into the Party Room. "Okay, he's gone. Where are we at?" he called, once more smiling that calm, easy smile. He closed the door. He didn't slam it.
Alone in the hall, Foxy waited, hoping for…something. He didn't know what. He'd forgotten, maybe, what hope felt like or how to do it proper-like. But nothing happened and he didn't really want to wait until Freddy inevitably found him, so before that could happen, Foxy went back to Pirate Cove. His cabin felt at once too big and too small. He couldn't stay there. He turned on the hated octopus just to have a little light and watched the colors change—red like blood, blue like Ana's eyes, yellow like Foxanne's, pink like the broken half of her heart he still carried tucked away inside him, and purple. Purple more than any other. Purple, filling up all the places no other color could go.
He heard a sound, a screech of noise only an animatronic could make, and didn't recognize it came out of him. His hook went out of its own accord and stabbed into the thick jelly-like skin of the octopus. With a swift, unsatisfying yank, it came free, dropping its mechanical guts on the deck and letting wires hang like intestines. Its last burbling laugh ended in a harsh electronic blat and a little puff of smoke, and left Foxy alone in the dark he'd made for himself.