(Part II)

Chapter 5: Reborn

Ennard. That was what I called the creature – a portmanteau of "endoskeleton" and "innard".

Maybe I thought it up. Maybe the thought came from him.

I shouldn't have been able to think at all. I shouldn't have been moving, either, but that came down to Ennard.

Ennard was inside me, controlling me. My body and life weren't my own anymore… but I could still think. To some extent.

A lot of what happened during those days, during my time with Ennard, I only realize in retrospect. My thoughts at the time were fragmented and frantic, and I had to piece them together to get even a broken picture.

At the time, I knew only pain and fear and bewilderment – which is actually the opposite of knowing things. I had no context to understand the events around me, or even accept them as real at first.

I already knew that animatronics could think and act and communicate in some cases. The Fredbear suit that used to visit me was proof of that. It wasn't, as I'd told Detective Burke, a form of artificial intelligence. It was the Remnant of human life animating machines.

I did notknow that my father would inject Remnant into several animatronics, that those animatronics would coalesce into one thinking creature, and that creature would hide in my body and move me like a puppet.

I did not know that the Scooper would inject Remnant into me and reanimate my body even as I bled out, just as it had animated metal robots before.

It kept me alive, though I wasn't aware enough or strong enough to counter the monster inside me.

I felt Ennard's triumph as he learned to walk in a human body. He used to slither and scramble, but now he put one of our feet in front of the other. He marched proudly into the sunlight with our head up and our chest puffed out.

He picked very specific times to walk – when the most people would be outside. He wanted to be seen… needed to be seen. When the humans waved to us, he reveled in the completeness of his deception.

Police cars occasionally dotted the neighborhood, no doubt sent by that detective. Detective… Detective… What was his name? Ennard laughed at the police and at me.

Then our body slowed, and he stopped laughing. The Remnant kept me alive, but it didn't keep me whole.

Our limbs weakened, and our skin grew greenish patches. Our eyes darkened.

Fewer neighbors waved. Some shied away when we approached, and others held their noses. Some still tried to be friendly.

Ennard and I slumped as we walked, then straggled along. Our mouth sagged. The whole canvas of our skin turned purple. So did our eyes.

The neighbors stopped smiling. We forced ourselves forward in jerky steps, inch by inch. Our body still decayed.

"Useless," Ennard hissed in my mind. He might've insulted me more. I couldn't concentrate as we ambled along. "I'll have to hide in darkness again," he hissed. Several times.

Hide in darkness… Hide in darkness…

The world was full of light, and he shuffled our body along, racking our brains for inspiration. He wanted darkness, but not confinement.

"I won't go back inside," he told me.

At last, we both found our salvation in a storm drain. The sun shone hot overhead, but everyone was hiding from us now, so Ennard had just enough time to slip out of me and into the grate without being seen. Ennard was very good at compressing and contorting himself.

He wriggled around to get into position, and our body shook. He coiled himself and shot up and out of my mouth, to land directly in the storm drain.

As for me… the less said about that, the better.

There are three things that I refuse to think about: the Scooper attacking me, Ennard entering me, and Ennard leaving me.

In all three cases, I couldn't physically comprehend the pain anyway, so I wouldn't be able to describe it.

Suffice it to say that I woke up face-planted on the sidewalk with the taste of blood and metal coating my mouth and the back of my throat.

At some point, my head cleared, and I was able to wriggle my fingers and toes. I forced myself to stand right away, perhaps unwisely, but I remained on my feet. In fact, I stood straighter than I had in those last few days with Ennard.

My body had been decaying, it was true. My purple skin bore the proof of that. However, I felt stronger without my metal passenger inside me. Go figure.

I glanced at the storm drain, and shining eyes blinked out at me through the bars.

I turned my back on the creature and walked away. I didn't care that I was letting him out of my side. If he wanted to attack me, I could do nothing to stop him. So I kept walking.

My extremities tingled, and I shifted around, trying out all my limbs and joints as I moved. I stretched my arms high above my head, then dropped them to my side with a sigh.

I was me again. I could think for myself. Move for myself.

I returned home, still with a slight lurch, and drew the curtains all around me. I didn't want to risk anyone seeing me as I was. It was hard enough to see myself.

When I dared examine myself in the bathroom mirror, bruised skin and violet eyes greeted me. I was purple head to toe, and the color didn't recede no matter how long I waited and watched.

So I stayed indoors, ordering delivery pizza and soda. I didn't know if I had to eat and drink, but I liked to, and it helped wash the metal taste from my mouth.

I must've spent weeks trapped in my house, and I still didn't know how long Ennard had been in me before that. I was afraid to look at the date.

I tried to convince myself that nothing else around me mattered. That my time with Ennard and those nights underground were all in the past. Except… no. Not quite.

Something still burned inside of me. Something that wouldn't let me sit still forever.

It drove me underground first. I had to visit the place of my demise one last time, now that the animatronics were all dismantled. They'd all been Scooped and merged into Ennard, and Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental was the one place he wouldn't go.

Once I made up my mind, I returned to the shed with almost a spring in my step. True, it was a jerky step, but it evened out as I made the trek. I found myself breathing out of reflex, but I didn't pant. My body worked differently now. Now that I was… what? Undead?

I went through something no one could survive, and the Remnant sustained me. It held me together in my new purple form. I got the feeling the worst of the decay was over, and I was stuck like this now. Maybe I would be forever. With the Remnant inside me, would I ever die?

As I walked, I held my breath. Then I kept holding it. I stopped that after half a mile and said, "Huh."

Then I laughed.

A weight was off my shoulders. Literally, now that Ennard wasn't weighing me down, but metaphorically, too.

I'd wondered for so long what was true and what wasn't. My father was insane, but he was right about this. Being able to sort fact from fiction made all the difference in the world.

Although… It didn't seem right to call him my father anymore. Not now that he'd had me killed and experimented on my body. Now he was just William Afton.

I entered the purple shack for the last time and rode it all the way down. Then I turned on every single light in the facility. I had no fear of light or sound anymore. I had no fear of the bosses that may or may not be watching me, or even of William Afton himself.

I found some cardboard boxes full of robot parts and pieces. I shook those out and started filling up the boxes with blueprints. There were blueprints for the Scooper and its Remnant injector. There were blueprints of each of the animatronics in the facility, and I skimmed through the lineup before packing them away.

They described Circus Baby's ice cream dispenser, Foxy's light sensors, Ballora's audio sensors… and Freddy's ability to mimic voices. I didn't know about the others, but clearly, that last ability was absorbed into the amalgam creature that was Ennard. Freddy's blueprint also showed a hollowed-out space in his chest that was just the size and shape of a small child.

I couldn't linger on that, or discoveries about the other smaller animatronics that had been hunting me before. Those blueprints went into the boxes.

There were other recent blueprints – working drafts for something called an "illusion disc". These were hand-drawn, with my father's signature and the date on each draft. These went in the boxes, too.

I searched every room, plundered that place of its secrets. I made myself enter the Scooping Room, which had been left untouched. Broken animatronics and a coating of dried blood all covered the floor.

I made myself stare at it, and my hands clenched into fists. I needed to keep going. I needed to stop the man who did this to me.

I found a private room of his, which held three working security monitors. These needed a code to access, and I got it on the first try: 1983.

"You're getting predictable, William," I said almost dispassionately. My voice came out slowly, and it sounded very much like his when it was drawn out and lifeless like that. I needed to practice.

I grabbed the phone, but I didn't dial immediately.

First, I checked out the monitors. I switched the cluster of screens through a series of images. They all had feeds from security cameras. Those cameras showed rooms in the house above. So, this was where William had hidden away to spy on us all those years ago.

"Predictable," I repeated.

I dialed William's phone number. He expected a report. I intended to give him one.

William didn't pick up, and his answering machine prompted me to leave a message. That was alright. William didn't deserve to speak with me anymore.

"Father," I said. It was the last time that word would ever leave my lips if I could help it, but I wanted him to feel the irony dripping in it now. I wanted him to remember what he did to his son. And just in case there was any confusion, I added, "It's me, Michael."

I chose my words carefully as I made my "report" about the facility. "I did it," I said. "I found it. It was right where you said it would be. They were all there. They didn't recognize me at first but then they thought I was you. And I found her."

Circus Baby. Well, not Circus Baby anymore. What should I say about her? "I put her back together, just like you asked me to. She's free now." That was just a guess. Circus Baby no longer had eyes, so I couldn't check the color. She wasn't moving, though, so I didn't think Elizabeth's Remnant was animating her. Either it had passed on to Ennard, or Elizabeth's soul truly was free. I had to hope for the latter, but that was where my hope ran out.

I told William Afton the rest of it. "But something is wrong with me. I should be dead. But I'm not. I've been living in shadows." My hand tightened around the phone. "There is only one thing left for me to do now," I said. "I'm going to come find you." I repeated it one more time, in case he didn't hear me. "I'm going to come find you."

Then I hung up the phone, collected my boxes of plans, and returned to the elevator. I couldn't help sneaking another peek at them on the ride up. I gravitated toward the Scooper blueprint, and it fluttered in my hands the way the posters fluttered on the walls, all caught in the breeze of the giant fan.

The blueprint talked about Remnant, and how to work with it. Apparently, William had distilled it into some kind of substance in order to inject it into me. The notes said that it needed to be kept warm to stay malleable, but if it got too hot, the effects might be neutralized.

In other words, if the Remnant got hot, it would be destroyed. It would set those spirits free.

I froze for a moment, thinking of Circus Baby one more time. Was any Remnant left in her scrap? If so, I might have a way to eliminate it for good.

The elevator stopped, but I didn't get out. Instead, I rode it back down and prepared to overload every system in the facility. I programmed a timer to set it off in ten minutes and checked in on Baby one last time before returning to the surface. She was still there. Good.

I left Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental for good and took my leisurely time strolling away.

A little voice nagged me in the back of my head, asking if all of Baby was really down there, except for the parts in Ennard. I'd uploaded her memory card into my Hand Unit. If someone found it, they could put her murderous programming into something else. Then Ennard and Baby would both exist.

I shuddered at the thought, but I was pretty sure I had the Hand Unit with me when Ennard attacked. It had to still be there. I didn't remember seeing it just now, but it must've been. Nothing had been cleaned up.

"I'm worrying over nothing," I told myself.

The ground trembled and even heated beneath my feet. The shed erupted in a shower of sparks and a column of smoke. In the distance, more smoke rose from the direction of my old house. They were connected, after all.

I shrugged, smiled, and carried off my booty, which was far more precious to me than pirate's treasure could've been.

After all, these boxes were going to help me destroy William Afton.