He was almost there.

With one last pained grunt, Huggy Wuggy hauled his mangled body over the sharp concrete edge. The swollen, bare pinkish flesh, from which the fur had been ripped off in his fall, brushed lightly against the cold, serrated edge, and his red lips let out a frustrated hiss of pain. His giant floppy body collapsed on the stone, and he lied there for a while, completely unheeding of his own surroundings. Dust bunnies jumped in the air as he let his body fall to the ground before swirling back gracefully, scattering his blue fur with grayish dots.

The building was silent. Huggy could hear nothing, absolutely nothing, beyond the locked corridors that he knew were crisscrossing the entire belly of the metallic beast he had been instructed to protect.

After a while he finally lifted his heavy head and forced his bruised arm to drag him back toward the edge he had managed to climb. His bulgy, black googly eyes looked down, his yellow paw coming to rest on the stone, and he scanned the darkness he had emerged from.

There was nothing but pure black beneath him.

His googly eyes swept quickly and efficiently the gaping abyss and the pipes, hanging like metallic guts, twinkling faintly under the dying light of a crushed fluorescent light above. They came to rest on the wall his paw had climbed, slipped, climbed again. He saw, very far down, blotches of blue fur still stuck to the concrete surface, sticky in their small puddles of blood. Huggy glanced at his own body, saw the gash now displayed fully to his side, still oozing some shy drops of dark red. His arm ached. His legs ached. His bones ached.

He let out a long, painful growl.

With a dejected hiss, the mascot swung all of his weight on his good leg and turned away, resting his torn yellow paw carefully on the ground, taking a step, then another one, before dragging his monstruous, heavy, painful body in the soothing darkness of the factory.

The recovery never came.

It hurt all the time. His jaw hurt. His joints were sore. His leg kept dragging behind him, like a useless lump of fur. His right arm throbbed from to time to time. His left arm burned brightly each time it brushed a wall. Huggy discovered this as he wandered meaninglessly in the crumbled parts of the factory, far away from his own territory, which had been at least close to the light above. Everything smelled of rot and decay, not that he cared or minded. He was hungry too. Often he turned and checked the gash on his side, twisting his head again and again to get a better look at the patches of ripped hair remaining and the crusts of blood drying on the inflamed skin. His fur never grew back.

Small toys began to appear as he made his way further and further into the factory. He had no idea where he was going, but his mind was sharp, and his eyes kept looking around, looking past the shattered remains of the various chambers, the exploded pipes, the crushed corpses. He was focused on a single idea, a simple one, but which had been enough to drive him out of the abyss.

The small toys were welcome as they helped Huggy regain some of his strength. Despite his pain, hunting wasn't very difficult. He simply had to scoop them up into his paw, or smash them against the walls. Eating felt good, after staying so long down there, and feeling nothing but the harshness of the cold on his suppurating wounds. It felt good to have something to crush between his teeth. It made him in control of his state again, brough him a little bit closer to what he was meant to do, his original purpose.

As he progressed through the ruins of the factory, even Huggy came to notice that the silence was too thick, too heavy. There was always something scuttering, something screeching, something munching something else somewhere. Dismay crept over his mind while he neared the Game Station. He couldn't hear anything.

The room was quiet as Huggy bent his giant, wobbly body to cross and step over the remaining pile of rubbles that used to be the door. A Bobby Bear fled hastily through a hole in the dirty walls, but Huggy paid it no mind. At this point, he was almost hoping to find another toy, another strong one like him, perhaps Mommy Long Legs. He knew the Game Station was her area, but she had made no move to approach him yet, which was odd. She was almost, if not more territorial than he was.

Huggy glanced at the hole where the Smiling Critter had sought shelter in, wondering if he could maybe hope to dislodge it with his paw, when the television screen hung loosely in a corner flickered and sputtered, hissed and flashed. Huggy looked up, curious. He hadn't heard that noise in a long time.

The eye blinked a flew times, its huge blackish iris darting around, locked within the corners of the television screen, before it finally settled on him. Huggy felt no fear nor shame. He felt no recognition. He simply waited, his yellow paw absent-mindedly cradling what was left of his arm, which had begun to throb again.

"There you are, 1170."

The voice was ugly, grinding out painfully each sound and syllable against each other into a mesh of garbled words. Huggy's fur bristled, and he stared at the screen. The eye paid it no mind. Its iris, swirling in a pool of sickly white, looked over the gash, the limping leg, the tufts of blue hair on his stump, and it rested on his head again.

"I was wondering where you were. For some time, I even thought you were dead, but you always proved to be incredibly resilient."

The voice added this with a touch of smug pride, in a tone dripping with condescension, but Huggy didn't care. To him this was nothing but a meaningless flow of words gargled and mumbled into an incoherent and uninteresting mess. It wasn't something worth listening to. It wouldn't bring him closer to his goal.

He was about to turn away, his shoulders slumping disinterestedly, when the voice rang again.

"I can help you find him. I've seen him, you know. Scuttering along like a miserable pest."

Huggy stopped.

"I'm very surprised he got the better of you, to be honest. I expected more."

Huggy was close to smashing the screen.

"But don't blame yourself too much. He got the others, too. Surprisingly."

Huggy stopped again, the same dismay he had felt near the Game Station crawling back under his skin. The others were dead?

"I can help you find him. I won't do anything to stop you. Find him and kill him. That's all I ask."

The eye died in a flicker of gray and purplish sparks, and the television screen went completely black.

Doors opened. Vents closed. Huggy crawled and walked, slithered and climbed. The chase was endless, without any respite, but the mascot knew he was getting close. The eye had kept its promise. As he got further into the factory, he could glimpse tiny clues of a fleeting presence, quiet but always there. Two human-shaped footsteps in the dust. A fallen shelf. Cardboards that had been knocked over. Crushed plushies. The print of a Grabpack-hand. The clues were small and discreet, but they were undeniably there, and they took more substance as he made his way deeper and deeper into regions he didn't even know had existed within the crumbling building. His eagerness grew each time he caught a faint whiff of human scent lingering somewhere in a forgotten corridor. His rage, toned down by his carefulness, was there as well. It exploded sometimes in his mind, especially when he leaned against a wall, the stump of his left arm screaming fiercely in searing pain. During those moments Huggy felt nothing else; not the cold, dusty air hitting his torn skin, not the tightened wires biting mercilessly in his flesh again and again. There was nothing else but pain.

The eye flickered from time to time on the screens that were left, to open the path for Huggy. It talked a lot, to Huggy's great annoyance. The mascot had no time to listen to its garbled, senseless ramblings, speaking of past events that were forgotten, of names that had long faded away. It was just a picture, stuck and locked within the confines of a television screen, craving, in its own way, for freedom. In that sense it was no better than Poppy had been, in her case, and that comparison brought a sense of deep disdain to Huggy. He carried on, his pain fueling his ever-growing rage. He had thought about the human when he had fallen. He had thought about it when he lied alone on the cold floor, below, some Smiling Critters trying to take a timid bite out of his damaged and inefficient body. He had pictured the human when his body stopped responding, when his arms refused to lift, when his legs refused to walk. He had seen the human, as clear as day, when his arm had ripped itself off in his long and difficult ascension, back toward the known grounds to the factory. Huggy had watched as the piece of blue limb had fluttered away like a blue feather, bumping and colliding lightly against walls and pipes, lost forever within the darkness. He had watched with a sour, burning fury that had rotten like spoiled meat in his mouth. His googly eyes had searched and wandered, desperate, already imagining the sounds of munching and crunching as smaller, unsignificant toys would undoubtably take their fair share of flesh. The thought that a piece of him could forever disappear within others was something that strangely revulsed and scared Huggy to his core, without him being truly able to understand why. He just knew that a part of him was lost and would forever be. He would never be complete again, not without any humans around.

These thoughts kept haunting Huggy while he learned at his own expense to now depend on only one arm. He wasn't as quick as first, wasn't as efficient. He felt odd, heavy and unbalanced. He felt, for many times, the need to reassure himself, to ensure that his body still belonged to him. Often it didn't seem to want to obey him anymore. His legs collapsed without any reason. In the beginning, he often leaned on the ghost of his left arm, before falling shrieking to the ground as only a ragged stump came to support him. However, to the Doctor's delight, his mind stayed undamaged. It fed itself daily, festering on the now familiar throbbing pain and the bubbling fury that accompanied it.

He had been so close!

Huggy shrieked furiously as the last of Kissy Missy disappeared quickly into a vent. Her pink fur slipped easily inside, followed by the sour smell of burning fur. Her yellow paws grabbed the heavy metal lid, and pulled. It closed in an agonized grinding sound, and Huggy's jaws closed on empty air. The mascot slammed against the lid, seething in frustration, his right paw furiously banging against the rusty surface while he screamed at the closed vent. Finally he stepped back, and let out one last irritated shriek. There was nothing more upsetting for him than the interruption of a hunt and his arm had begun to throb again, sending violent lightings of pain throughout his body. He glanced at the tufts of pink hair caught in the lid, the tiny droplets of blood mixing within the orangish rusted metal, and felt a small surge of satisfaction, knowing that he had at least inflicted some damage.

He wandered back near the entrance of the elevator, staring at the circle of metal which had closed on the tiny human and Poppy.

He knew he had been getting closer and closer, but he hadn't expected it to be so sudden. Huggy had briefly glimpsed the gaudy colors of the GrabPack and the dark, crimson red of Poppy's hair before the elevator went down, and that had been more than enough. All that had been left behind them was Kissy Missy, her pink head bent over the large round hole carved in the ground, designed specifically for the elevator, her shoulders slumped with a mixture of anxiety and a faint hope. She never even registered Huggy's presence, not until he collided into her with his full strength, his jaws already aiming for her arm: they closed satisfactorily over her right one. Huggy felt his teeth sink in her fur, break the skin beneath before sinking further, as if she were made of nothing but easy, malleable clay. His crooked rows of teeth crushed her fragile veins, cut through her soft tendons, tore her already aching muscles. They sank deeper and deeper until they met something solid. Huggy applied more pressure, and felt a satisfying crunch between his jaws. All of it had happened in a mere fraction of seconds.

The shriek that followed was terrible. Kissy roared in pain, surprise and absolute terror. She flung her paw at his head in a desperate, frenzied blow and he was sent back, his jaws forcefully ripped away from their target. The flesh slipped between the rows of teeth, catching tufts of pink fur in the process, and his female counterpart screeched even more, her fear doubling with the pain. Huggy landed clumsily on the ground, his left arm scratching uselessly at the ground, but he quickly got up, his body already pumping with the adrenaline of the fight. His gritted his teeth as he caught a glimpse of Kissy Missy already fleeing. The teeth pierced his gums, and blood trickled between his red, glossy lips. He lunged himself at her, screeching.

Kissy Missy had never been one of them. They had all known that, well before the Hour of Joy, and long after it had happened. Despite the carefully constructed campaign the company had built around their supposed bond as mutual companions, guardians of Playtime Co., Huggy had never felt anything for her. He was vaguely aware that she had been made to be his splitting image, but that was it. In fact, she irritated him more than he was able to recognize. She was weak, despite her height. She was cowardly, despite her strength. Worst of all, perhaps, was that she could feel, and she knew what to make of it. She disdained each and every single one of them, she always did and that irked him even more than he thought was possible, for feelings were reserved to humans. The Bigger Bodies had never known how to word it, but they had always taken this ability to properly feel as some obvious flaunting of her superiority over them. She clearly understood more than they did, and had been careful never to mingle with them. Her feelings were remains of her humanity, something that they had all lost in the process they had been forced to undergo, and even if some did not remember it, there was a constant, floating resentment lingering at the back of their minds, longing for a thing they had permanently been cut off from, something that Kissy Missy was lucky enough to have kept in her transformation. They hadn't.

He went after her easily, his body scurrying over the ground, hers cradling her broken arm in her flight. He collided with her once more. She went stumbling backwards. Somewhere, far down, he thought he heard Poppy's shrill cries, but he paid her no mind. His focus was entirely on Kissy Missy.

He slammed her roughly against the damaged walls. Pipes broke and hissed as her weight fully crashed against the old material. Flakes of rust twirled gracefully to the ground. An electric cable snapped. Sparks flew among the flakes of rust. Kissy's fur caught fire. The sparks were gentle at first before they grew bolder, feasting eagerly on the bloodied pink fur. Kissy shrieked. Huggy stepped back.

In a way, the fire had been her salvation. Huggy was too mesmerized, his googly eyes watching with a new kind of awe the flames, akin to writhing snakes, crawl mercilessly over Kissy's arm, her forearm, her shoulder, her head. Her eyelid closed instinctively as the fire rippled playfully on her skin, before reaching her face. The flames danced, swirled and the acrid, stinging smell of burnt hair and scorched flesh bloomed all around him. It was all so new to him, so new to his senses, that he didn't react right away. He could only watch the flames come to life, akin to writhing, yellowish parasites on Kissy's body, eating and gnawing at her already damaged body, much like his jaws had done. Then she shoved him away, and he woke up, but it was too late. She had already darted toward the vent.

The smell of poppies was overwhelming. It curled gently in the air, mingling its own sweet, almost sugary scent with the sour, repulsive smell of burnt fur that kept clinging to Huggy's own torn hair. The rows of poppies nodded joyfully their plump petal-adorned head as he went by, blissfully unheeding of him and his monstruous, mutilated figure. Huggy paid no attention to the flowers either. They smelled vaguely like the Red Smoke, but that was it. He was too focused, all of his concentration centered on one lead, one smell barely there, almost drowned by the suffocating perfume of the thriving poppies. A smell of blood, of injuries, one he knew all too well. He knew the Doctor has fulfilled his promise when the shrieking sound of the alarm exploded all around him. Red beams of light flashed on the poppies, who nodded even more eagerly. Huggy kept on limping, his eyes falling on the closed door and the small, round window adorning its center. Then he saw it. The two eyes, set in a hairless, flat face, peering out at him from behind the dirty glass, widening in a fearful recognition while he limped slowly, his blue fur drowned within the flashes of red that sliced through the half-light of the abandoned laboratory. The sight of those small, frightened eyes, slightly distorted by the accumulated grayish dust, immediately triggered all the rage, the fury fueled by the constant, nagging pain that had taken over his body since his fall. It came over his mind like a sudden freak wave of absolute, unadulterated wrath, and before he knew it he was already speeding toward the door, all throbbing forgotten. He violently slammed his own body against the thick panel of metal, the only thing separating him from the human who immediately shrank back, its two tiny eyes widening even more, its hands locked firmly on the colorful handles of the GrabPack. Huggy screeched and shrieked, roared and screamed furiously at the dirty glass, his teeth aching to reach and tear, to inflict the same kind of pain he was now stuck with. The Doctor had fulfilled his promise. Now it was time for Huggy to fulfill his.

Huggy didn't believe in the journey anymore. He had walked away dejectedly from the vent, feeling that he had missed an opportunity too great to be passed. Kissy Missy was gone. Poppy was gone. The human was gone. No doubt it had scuttered away as soon as it had heard their shrieks. Huggy he had a chance of encountering it again.

The accident didn't deter Huggy. If anything, it made him more relentless. He was slower, heavier, his head sometimes dizzy, still feeling the lingering effect of Kissy's blow, and the smell of burnt fur kept clinging to his own torn hair, but he kept going. He always did. That was what the Doctor liked so much about him. Through his own distorted vision of dirty, grayish television screens, he could easily catch glimpses of 1170's huge figure bent in the shadows, always looking, always advancing.

A/N: It is my headcanon that Huggy is the one who attacked Kissy, and it will remain so until proven otherwise.

Next in the Poppy Playtime series will be Doey the Doughman!