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The next time Mike checks, Chica is gone. This is good, because he can leave one door open, and bad, because he has no idea where she is. Bonnie waits a few more seconds before stepping back as well, making his meandering path back to the hall with the drawings. At least, Mike assumes that's where he's going. He's not risking battery life to find out. Not with Foxy's wrath hanging overhead. He needs to stay focused and conserve power if he wants to make it. No matter how concerning the shadows outside the room are.

Check the Monitor. Flinch back as Foxy glowers, then slams the curtain closed. Turn off the Monitor. Wash, rinse, repeat. Tonight is less nerve-wracking than yesterday, but no less stressful. And his fingers are beginning to ache.

Come on, he thinks, you can do it. Only two hours to go.

But a lot can happen in two hours. Five minutes nearly killed him. And as the seconds stretch on, with nothing but the soft whir of the fan to distract him, Mike finds himself overcome with the urge to do something stupid.

He's not going to stand up. He's not. That would be actual suicide. But his eyes keep drifting to the doors and it's all he can do to stay seated. His fingers hurt. His neck hurts. Everything hurts. But when his uninjured hand drifts to his throat and begins to scratch at the abused skin, he can't make himself stop.

This is the kind of thing his therapist warned him about, when he was young and still shaken from the accident. The kind of shitty coping mechanism that should be clamped down on before it becomes a habit. But the concentrated deliberateness of it is reassuring somehow. It's not that he wants to hurt himself. It's that causing himself pain somehow makes the world more stable.

He jerks his fingers down and scowls at the desk. Damn it. He hasn't slipped like this high school.

“Why'd you stop?”

The words drift into his head like smoke.

“I don't want to hurt myself.”

“Then why'd you start?”

“I don't always listen to what I want.”

...he isn't talking to himself, is he. Mike raises his eyes slowly to find the plastic surface overlayed with a blurred mirage. Static-filled columns, crossed like legs. An eye-searingly pink splotch. The impression of a bright and cheerful smile.

Except there's nothing there.

Mike jerks his head up to find the desk empty, save for the fan and the cupcake. He stares blankly at them for a moment, then shakes his head. Oh good, he's seeing things. Again. At least this vision didn't do anything more threatening than talk at him.

Time to check the Monitor. Foxy's just stepping out from the curtain when Mike catches him, and he leers at the camera for a second before retreating. In the moment before he does, the rest of Pirate's Cove is visible. It looks like a nice place. Fun, even. Row upon row of painted plastic waves, a frame for puppet shows, lots of props that must have been brightly coloured once. But every single surface has been slashed with claws. If Mike didn't know better, he might say the gouges form a pattern. But before he can register more than a few recurring shapes, the curtain is shut, and he moves on to the next screen.

Bonnie's not in the hall, for once. He appears to have found his way to the dining area. Someone else has taken his place in the hallway. Someone taller and stockier, whose arms twitch uselessly at his sides every few seconds. Someone whose skin has a metallic gleam in the dim light.

Hello there, N. What did Scott say about this guy again? 'He's the only one who's not playing their game...' or something. The exact wording has slipped his mind, but Mike's pretty that was the gist of it. N is supposed to be the one harmless android. The question is: does Mike believe that?

A burst of static. When it clears, N is slowly making his way toward the office. His steps are odd, like a wind-up toy with something off about its balance. Mike glances at warily at the door, waiting for the android to come into sight. The first thing he sees, as always, is inhuman eyes flashing eerily in the dark. N seems clumsier in person, lacking the others' preternatural grace. His feet make shuffling sounds as he lurches forward and the black plastic wrapped around his silver limbs squeaks when he moves. His face is wide-eyed and expressionless. The lack of malice is startling.

Mike's been prepping himself for another plunge into the uncanny valley, but it doesn't happen. If the rest of the androids are too human for comfort, N isn't human enough to disturb. There's something kinda cute about the rivets at his joints, the wiry stiffness of his black hair. And up close, Mike can confirm that N really does seem to have been wrapped in several garbage bags, which is genuinely hilarious. Also a bit sad. Did someone try and throw him away?

N tilts his head, the motion creaking softly. His face is still blank, but his body language has shifted to questioning.

Ah, shit.

“How much of that did I say out loud?”

N stares wordlessly, still making his way down the hall. Mike eyes his progress with growing concern.

“I was told you weren't planning to kill me.”

A slow nod.

“Yes, you aren't planning to murder me?”

Another nod.

“Kind of you to clarify. I'd still like you to stay on the other side of the door, if that's all right. It's been... stressful the last couple of days.”

No nod this time, but N does slow down obligingly. He stops a few feet outside the door, just before Mike's twitchy fingers grab for the button. Once in place, N spends a few seconds examining the office before lowering himself to his knees with painstaking care. Mike watches, wobbling between concern and confusion.

“What are you doing?”

N pats the floor with one trembling hand, the other pressed against the wall to keep his balance. It's definitely supposed to convey something. Can this guy not talk? Looking at his mouth, Mike's inclined to suspect he's mute. His face is more of a solid mask than anything. Doesn't seem like it has moving parts.

“Yeah, I don't know what that means,” Mike admits after a minute.

Another pat. It kinda looks like a gesture a kid he knew in high school used to make when she saw a cat and was trying to get it to sit with her. But there's no way it means the same thing. That would be ridiculous.

Pat, pat.

“...I'm not a cat, you know. And I'm not leaving the office.”

N's broad shoulders slump for a moment.

“Sorry. But I don't really wanna die tonight.”

The cupcake wobbles behind him, and it sounds like laughter.

“Sure about that?”

Yay, more voices. Mike sighs, picking the Monitor up again.

“So maybe I'm not that attached to being alive. Doesn't mean I'm going to go out of my way to get dismembered.”

N winces. It's so unexpected that Mike almost drops the device and scrambles to grab it before it falls. When he looks up, N is gesturing again. This time, it's a lot more complicated to untangle.

He gives up after five minutes. Mike's always sucked at charades.

“I seriously have no idea what you're trying to say.”

N lowers his head. He could be depressed. He could be thinking deeply. He could be tired. With that face, it's really hard to tell. Then, he raises one hand to his neck and lets the fingers settle around his throat. Mike finds himself mirroring the motion and slams his hand back down. The marks on his own neck burn.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

The android removes his hand and puts both arms beside his head, where – with great difficulty – he raises one finger on each side. Neither of them will straighten fully, but that's fine. This isn't something Mike could mistake.

“You're asking if Bonnie did this?” Mike gives the other doorway a nervous glance, but it seems empty. “Yeah. He did. Last night.”

N dips his head, nearly overbalancing. His hands go back down, grabbing at the walls. Mike's out of his seat before he realizes that the robot's successfully caught himself. He sits back down, feeling a bit awkward.

You wouldn't have been able to lift him anyway. And didn't you just say you weren't going to leave the office?

The night guard looks down at the Monitor to distract himself. As soon as he turns it on, Foxy screeches loudly. Mike nearly tosses himself out of his seat again. At least the curtain is closed now.

“Sorry about that,” he says uselessly. “Foxy doesn't like me much.”

The shrug N gives him feels sympathetic. Mike decides to interpret it as such.

“So, what brings you down here? I'm... not exactly the best company.”

N stares him for several seconds, unblinking, then slowly shakes his head.

“I am the best company?”

Nod, nod.

“That. Uh. That says terrible things about what you're used to.”

If he's going to be playing host, he should probably find something to talk about. What sort of things does one share with a mute, surprisingly non-malicious robot at – 5 AM already? Wow. Mike flips through the screens to confirm that Bonnie is still winding his way slowly through each room and Chica appears to have disappeared entirely, then puts the Monitor down.

“Can I tell you something? It's not that important. I'd just feel a bit better if someone else knew the story. That way, she won't disappear with me.”

There's a moment of deeply awkward silence in which Mike seriously considers walking out the other hallway and letting Bonnie rip him apart. Then he hears the creak of N's agreement and meets those curious white eyes. He can't back down after that. Lissa would make fun of him. He takes a shallow breath and counts to three.

“Until I was twelve years old, I had a sister. Her name was Melissa.”

After that, the word just flow. He talks about her cheeky smile. Her awful taste in floral shirts. The way she drove him utterly insane just by existing. The sheer rage that overtook him every time someone made her cry. Mike knows he wasn't the best brother – he learned how to sibling by trial and error, and being a good example was an uphill trudge – but Lissa was something special, even at her most irritating. He was always trying to be better for her.

One rainy night took all that away.

“It was my fault,” he says. “There was a sleepover – not sure what that is? Don't worry, that's not important either. I was out of the house, and I got scared. Couldn't stand it anymore. Had to call my parents to come get me. But it was late, and the place I was staying at was on a very busy street. And Lissa – Lissa begged to come with them. She wanted to see me. I was – I was dreading it. I knew she was going to tease me. She never got the chance.”

Memory isn't perfect. The details of the crash have probably warped and twisted over the years. But the numb horror he felt watching, the sensation of his heart falling into a bottomless abyss? That part has stayed with him these eight years, perfectly preserved. A butterfly on a cork-board. An insect in amber.

The words “There was a truck, and it hit them.” are laughably false in comparison to the truth of that experience. He says them anyway, looking down at his lap so he doesn't have to meet N's gaze. “I couldn't do anything but watch.”

His hands are all twisted together, nails dug into the skin. The bruised one is bleeding. He didn't even notice.

“It was my fault,” Mike repeats. “If I hadn't been such a coward, she'd still be here.”

Something shifts behind him. Probably the cupcake again. Mike looks forward instead, staring past N and into the dark. N lets that slide for roughly five seconds, then taps his twitching fingers against the linoleum floor. It's sudden enough to be mistaken for a gunshot. Mike jerks, eyes wide.

“What?”

The android makes sure he has Mike's attention before he moves again, holding one hand in front of his mouth and slowly moving it down. His hand isn't quite flat and his wrist ends up tilting, making the gesture more diagonal than directed at Mike, but for all that it's recognizable.

Thank you.

“Who taught you sign language?” he asks, smiling weakly back.

N does reply, but Mike can't make any sense of the gesture at all. Another failing on his part, he thinks, but it doesn't have the weight it usually does. He told his story. Lissa's not just his personal ghost anymore. Nothing seems as quite as final with her continued existence assured.

Even if Bonnie broke into the office now, he –

Bells. Bells everywhere.

Something must be wrong. The night can't be over. He's just been talking with N for – he checks the Monitor – almost an hour? How is that even possible.

“Did the other androids just disappear?”

Movement. N is levering himself upright. Once he's steady on his feet, he makes the thank you sign again, this time to something over Mike's head.

A flash of purple.

Bonnie is standing in the other doorway, lips curved in a small, pleasant smile. He's made even more sylph-like by N's grounded presence, a tracery of bright colours and impossible grace. And yes his eyes are dim. So dim they barely seem to be glowing at all. The light pours into them as Mike watches, bathing the room in crimson.

“Hi,” the guard says stupidly. “How long have you been there?”

The rabbit says nothing. He glances at Mike, unreadable, then melts back into the shadows.

Description
The next time Mike checks, Chica is gone. This is good, because he can leave one door open, and bad, because he has no idea where she is. Bonnie waits a few more seconds before stepping back as well, making his meandering path back to the hall with the drawings. At least, Mike assumes that's where he's going. He's not risking battery life to find out. Not with Foxy's wrath hanging overhead. He needs to stay focused and conserve power if he wants to make it. No matter how concerning the shadows outside the room are.

Check the Monitor. Flinch back as Foxy glowers, then slams the curtain closed. Turn off the Monitor. Wash, rinse, repeat. Tonight is less nerve-wracking than yesterday, but no less stressful. And his fingers are beginning to ache.

Come on, he thinks, you can do it. Only two hours to go.

But a lot can happen in two hours. Five minutes nearly killed him. And as the seconds stretch on, with nothing but the soft whir of the fan to distract him, Mike finds himself overcome with the urge to do something stupid.

He's not going to stand up. He's not. That would be actual suicide. But his eyes keep drifting to the doors and it's all he can do to stay seated. His fingers hurt. His neck hurts. Everything hurts. But when his uninjured hand drifts to his throat and begins to scratch at the abused skin, he can't make himself stop.

This is the kind of thing his therapist warned him about, when he was young and still shaken from the accident. The kind of shitty coping mechanism that should be clamped down on before it becomes a habit. But the concentrated deliberateness of it is reassuring somehow. It's not that he wants to hurt himself. It's that causing himself pain somehow makes the world more stable.

He jerks his fingers down and scowls at the desk. Damn it. He hasn't slipped like this high school.

“Why'd you stop?”

The words drift into his head like smoke.

“I don't want to hurt myself.”

“Then why'd you start?”

“I don't always listen to what I want.”

...he isn't talking to himself, is he. Mike raises his eyes slowly to find the plastic surface overlayed with a blurred mirage. Static-filled columns, crossed like legs. An eye-searingly pink splotch. The impression of a bright and cheerful smile.

Except there's nothing there.

Mike jerks his head up to find the desk empty, save for the fan and the cupcake. He stares blankly at them for a moment, then shakes his head. Oh good, he's seeing things. Again. At least this vision didn't do anything more threatening than talk at him.

Time to check the Monitor. Foxy's just stepping out from the curtain when Mike catches him, and he leers at the camera for a second before retreating. In the moment before he does, the rest of Pirate's Cove is visible. It looks like a nice place. Fun, even. Row upon row of painted plastic waves, a frame for puppet shows, lots of props that must have been brightly coloured once. But every single surface has been slashed with claws. If Mike didn't know better, he might say the gouges form a pattern. But before he can register more than a few recurring shapes, the curtain is shut, and he moves on to the next screen.

Bonnie's not in the hall, for once. He appears to have found his way to the dining area. Someone else has taken his place in the hallway. Someone taller and stockier, whose arms twitch uselessly at his sides every few seconds. Someone whose skin has a metallic gleam in the dim light.

Hello there, N. What did Scott say about this guy again? 'He's the only one who's not playing their game...' or something. The exact wording has slipped his mind, but Mike's pretty that was the gist of it. N is supposed to be the one harmless android. The question is: does Mike believe that?

A burst of static. When it clears, N is slowly making his way toward the office. His steps are odd, like a wind-up toy with something off about its balance. Mike glances at warily at the door, waiting for the android to come into sight. The first thing he sees, as always, is inhuman eyes flashing eerily in the dark. N seems clumsier in person, lacking the others' preternatural grace. His feet make shuffling sounds as he lurches forward and the black plastic wrapped around his silver limbs squeaks when he moves. His face is wide-eyed and expressionless. The lack of malice is startling.

Mike's been prepping himself for another plunge into the uncanny valley, but it doesn't happen. If the rest of the androids are too human for comfort, N isn't human enough to disturb. There's something kinda cute about the rivets at his joints, the wiry stiffness of his black hair. And up close, Mike can confirm that N really does seem to have been wrapped in several garbage bags, which is genuinely hilarious. Also a bit sad. Did someone try and throw him away?

N tilts his head, the motion creaking softly. His face is still blank, but his body language has shifted to questioning.

Ah, shit.

“How much of that did I say out loud?”

N stares wordlessly, still making his way down the hall. Mike eyes his progress with growing concern.

“I was told you weren't planning to kill me.”

A slow nod.

“Yes, you aren't planning to murder me?”

Another nod.

“Kind of you to clarify. I'd still like you to stay on the other side of the door, if that's all right. It's been... stressful the last couple of days.”

No nod this time, but N does slow down obligingly. He stops a few feet outside the door, just before Mike's twitchy fingers grab for the button. Once in place, N spends a few seconds examining the office before lowering himself to his knees with painstaking care. Mike watches, wobbling between concern and confusion.

“What are you doing?”

N pats the floor with one trembling hand, the other pressed against the wall to keep his balance. It's definitely supposed to convey something. Can this guy not talk? Looking at his mouth, Mike's inclined to suspect he's mute. His face is more of a solid mask than anything. Doesn't seem like it has moving parts.

“Yeah, I don't know what that means,” Mike admits after a minute.

Another pat. It kinda looks like a gesture a kid he knew in high school used to make when she saw a cat and was trying to get it to sit with her. But there's no way it means the same thing. That would be ridiculous.

Pat, pat.

“...I'm not a cat, you know. And I'm not leaving the office.”

N's broad shoulders slump for a moment.

“Sorry. But I don't really wanna die tonight.”

The cupcake wobbles behind him, and it sounds like laughter.

“Sure about that?”

Yay, more voices. Mike sighs, picking the Monitor up again.

“So maybe I'm not that attached to being alive. Doesn't mean I'm going to go out of my way to get dismembered.”

N winces. It's so unexpected that Mike almost drops the device and scrambles to grab it before it falls. When he looks up, N is gesturing again. This time, it's a lot more complicated to untangle.

He gives up after five minutes. Mike's always sucked at charades.

“I seriously have no idea what you're trying to say.”

N lowers his head. He could be depressed. He could be thinking deeply. He could be tired. With that face, it's really hard to tell. Then, he raises one hand to his neck and lets the fingers settle around his throat. Mike finds himself mirroring the motion and slams his hand back down. The marks on his own neck burn.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

The android removes his hand and puts both arms beside his head, where – with great difficulty – he raises one finger on each side. Neither of them will straighten fully, but that's fine. This isn't something Mike could mistake.

“You're asking if Bonnie did this?” Mike gives the other doorway a nervous glance, but it seems empty. “Yeah. He did. Last night.”

N dips his head, nearly overbalancing. His hands go back down, grabbing at the walls. Mike's out of his seat before he realizes that the robot's successfully caught himself. He sits back down, feeling a bit awkward.

You wouldn't have been able to lift him anyway. And didn't you just say you weren't going to leave the office?

The night guard looks down at the Monitor to distract himself. As soon as he turns it on, Foxy screeches loudly. Mike nearly tosses himself out of his seat again. At least the curtain is closed now.

“Sorry about that,” he says uselessly. “Foxy doesn't like me much.”

The shrug N gives him feels sympathetic. Mike decides to interpret it as such.

“So, what brings you down here? I'm... not exactly the best company.”

N stares him for several seconds, unblinking, then slowly shakes his head.

“I am the best company?”

Nod, nod.

“That. Uh. That says terrible things about what you're used to.”

If he's going to be playing host, he should probably find something to talk about. What sort of things does one share with a mute, surprisingly non-malicious robot at – 5 AM already? Wow. Mike flips through the screens to confirm that Bonnie is still winding his way slowly through each room and Chica appears to have disappeared entirely, then puts the Monitor down.

“Can I tell you something? It's not that important. I'd just feel a bit better if someone else knew the story. That way, she won't disappear with me.”

There's a moment of deeply awkward silence in which Mike seriously considers walking out the other hallway and letting Bonnie rip him apart. Then he hears the creak of N's agreement and meets those curious white eyes. He can't back down after that. Lissa would make fun of him. He takes a shallow breath and counts to three.

“Until I was twelve years old, I had a sister. Her name was Melissa.”

After that, the word just flow. He talks about her cheeky smile. Her awful taste in floral shirts. The way she drove him utterly insane just by existing. The sheer rage that overtook him every time someone made her cry. Mike knows he wasn't the best brother – he learned how to sibling by trial and error, and being a good example was an uphill trudge – but Lissa was something special, even at her most irritating. He was always trying to be better for her.

One rainy night took all that away.

“It was my fault,” he says. “There was a sleepover – not sure what that is? Don't worry, that's not important either. I was out of the house, and I got scared. Couldn't stand it anymore. Had to call my parents to come get me. But it was late, and the place I was staying at was on a very busy street. And Lissa – Lissa begged to come with them. She wanted to see me. I was – I was dreading it. I knew she was going to tease me. She never got the chance.”

Memory isn't perfect. The details of the crash have probably warped and twisted over the years. But the numb horror he felt watching, the sensation of his heart falling into a bottomless abyss? That part has stayed with him these eight years, perfectly preserved. A butterfly on a cork-board. An insect in amber.

The words “There was a truck, and it hit them.” are laughably false in comparison to the truth of that experience. He says them anyway, looking down at his lap so he doesn't have to meet N's gaze. “I couldn't do anything but watch.”

His hands are all twisted together, nails dug into the skin. The bruised one is bleeding. He didn't even notice.

“It was my fault,” Mike repeats. “If I hadn't been such a coward, she'd still be here.”

Something shifts behind him. Probably the cupcake again. Mike looks forward instead, staring past N and into the dark. N lets that slide for roughly five seconds, then taps his twitching fingers against the linoleum floor. It's sudden enough to be mistaken for a gunshot. Mike jerks, eyes wide.

“What?”

The android makes sure he has Mike's attention before he moves again, holding one hand in front of his mouth and slowly moving it down. His hand isn't quite flat and his wrist ends up tilting, making the gesture more diagonal than directed at Mike, but for all that it's recognizable.

Thank you.

“Who taught you sign language?” he asks, smiling weakly back.

N does reply, but Mike can't make any sense of the gesture at all. Another failing on his part, he thinks, but it doesn't have the weight it usually does. He told his story. Lissa's not just his personal ghost anymore. Nothing seems as quite as final with her continued existence assured.

Even if Bonnie broke into the office now, he –

Bells. Bells everywhere.

Something must be wrong. The night can't be over. He's just been talking with N for – he checks the Monitor – almost an hour? How is that even possible.

“Did the other androids just disappear?”

Movement. N is levering himself upright. Once he's steady on his feet, he makes the thank you sign again, this time to something over Mike's head.

A flash of purple.

Bonnie is standing in the other doorway, lips curved in a small, pleasant smile. He's made even more sylph-like by N's grounded presence, a tracery of bright colours and impossible grace. And yes his eyes are dim. So dim they barely seem to be glowing at all. The light pours into them as Mike watches, bathing the room in crimson.

“Hi,” the guard says stupidly. “How long have you been there?”

The rabbit says nothing. He glances at Mike, unreadable, then melts back into the shadows.