totally blanked that i never posted the second chapter here! it's probably the last one i'll upload here of this series, anyways: i'm going to try to keep additional chapters contained to its Ao3 upload, found here
✏️ commission me, or just support me, over on ko-fi ☕
He Wants to Chase, They Want to Run, Pt. 2
Previous | Next
word count: 10.3k
warnings: mild injury
notes: no pronouns or names for reader
SPRINGTRAP / THE ANIMATRONIC
“They’ve just completely cut me out of the equation,” Dale says to you as he marks long, dramatic lines across his thumbnails. He’d amassed quite the pile of concepts at this point, a pretty impressive stack balancing next to his keyboard, every inch of paper occupied by thoughtful work in pen. Now, he’s going through them all and striking through the illustrations with red ink. You watch the lines swell and bleed through as he moves onto the next.
“They don’t want a diorama anymore–they wanna use the new fancy 3d printers and just do it that way, so they went and got one of the modelers to work on it and were just waiting around to tell me, I guess,” he continues, voice surging as he marks a particularly long and intense strikethrough. This is the maddest you’ve seen him, a man otherwise impossible to irritate and good-natured in all scenarios. Just a handful of months after he joined you had vomited on his sweater after questionable food served at a company dinner, and he hadn’t stopped smiling through him and a female coworker cleaning you up and him walking you to a taxi. He hasn’t worn the sweater since, stubborn remnants of that night seeped into the fabric, but he’s also never mentioned it afterwards. He’s the frustratingly, no matter the weather, good-natured type.
“They’re always pulling shit like that,” you say, paging through still uncontaminated by his red-ink rage. When the idea was first brought to your department, no one had seen a point, just another pointless exercise taking needed hands away from more important work. You know already that the under-funded high school, only notable in the district for having the fastest teacher turnover rates, isn’t going to be paying the company anything worthwhile for a booth in their gym.
Dale mumbles something else as he swipes his pen across another page with furious passion.
When you’ve gleamed all you can from the stack of remaining, unmarked papers, you drop it off by him and hum. You don’t realize he’s looking at you until you turn and meet his ready stare, already turned your way.
“You’ve been so sedated lately, everything alright?” Dale asks, suddenly composed, and it’s probably the most genuine you’ve been asked that within these office walls.
“...Sedated?” you ask after a thoughtful pause, and quickly realize that yes, your voice is quite flat. Your mind has just been everywhere else but where you need it, tethered only to your wrist by the thinnest string and resistant to being lassoed in however hard you try.
“Not the right word. You’re just a little… off?” he offers, his hand hovering above the next page to be subject to his angered marks. His rampage is stalled only in wait for your response.
You do feel like you’ve had a sickness steeping in your system, but you know that’s not what he’s referring to. You want to tell him. You want to tell him just to get it out there, he doesn’t even need to believe you, you just want to be able to say it—but you’re waiting too long, his face is warping with increasing concern and you’re unable to grasp for any words in your frenzied stream of consciousness. There is no lack of things to say, in fact it’s a torrent in your brain, straining its seams with the raw mass of things you’ve been needing to say, rolling and rolling and rolling into a looming knot of consciousness.
Not a word of it comes to your tongue.
“The roommate situation is just exhausting,” you sigh, deciding this analogy has been working fine enough. It doesn’t alleviate a thing, no, not a single swipe off the mounting weight you’ve come to wear like a lead drape, but it lets you think you’re releasing something you’ve been holding onto.
“You’re a good person,” Dale comments as he turns back in his chair, “it’s noble. But you don’t have to keep doing that for them if they’re this much trouble. I’ve been there and done that. I’ve been the couch surfer, going from friend to friend, and I knew to be grateful.”
Ah, yes, even though Dale is only a smidge older than you, and so not terribly far along in adulthood, he’s been through the works. His to-be ex wife had had it out for him for quite a time now, and for a while had made a habit of kicking him out for any minor argument—work hours, when to pick the kid up, what’s for dinner, him walking you to your car. Somehow, he never took a day off of work, showing up even when he had no reliable place to shower or sleep. You don’t want to say it’s commendable, it certainly didn’t get him any thanks from the company, but his work ethic is unmatched and fierce.
You drum your fingers along the back of his desk chair and give a halfhearted hum sort of sound. You don’t mean to be dismissive, you do appreciate the concern and from someone you know gives it authentically, but it’s just a subject you don’t know how to broach yet. Staring at the back of his head, you hope to transmit the message unspokenly, but he’s resuming his red ink tirade( now a little more thoughtfully).
Molly does her midday round and doesn’t ask once about the matter. Her smile seems restrained today, but you can’t blame her; she’s garnered the ire of much of the department for her enthusiasm over their participation in the career festival, and while you feel similarly, you know it was a decision made several levels above her.
Lunch is spent in the campus cafeteria for once, a location that might as well be new to you, who has come to be so accustomed to forking down lunch at your cubicle or anywhere but the main building.
The last stretch of hours creeps by on stubby, inefficient legs. The oily orange of sunset doesn’t seem to dim at all as it spills through the windows and the clock ticks on above your desk. You have to check it every so often to confirm time is passing at all—the office seems suspended in time and space, an ethereal, infinitely spanning series of cubicles lit in unchanging evening.
You’re spinning in your chair as you stare at your computer screen, wriggling the mouse now and then to keep the screen on. They want you to organize a line of swatches for the career fair booth, a selection of various materials like the lineup you would propose to a client for them to choose from. As you pluck and drop various samples of oversaturated plastics and repurposed rubbers into a lineup, all you can think is how dreadfully boring playground design must be to high schoolers whose minds are much more likely occupied with oncoming finals. You’re still unsure if this is the type of job people aim for. Truly, if you were being honest, this was very much an “ok, sure, close enough” job that you hadn’t expected to stay in for so long. This was Dale’s plan B when he hadn’t landed his dream job designing shoes, and even Molly has just taken the role as a way to branch out from putting together product manuals.
A no-one’s-first-choice place. Your heart still longs, disloyal, dreaming of your passion that resides elsewhere, of multicolored pizza parlors and confetti-dappled arcade carpets. You still fervently draft out sketches of logos that’ll never have a sign to occupy and the layouts of party rooms so familiar to your childhood.
Clocking out comes with a taste of sour apprehension. Home has still yet to feel like home again since its newest addition, and especially after yesterday’s display, there’s an extra layer of uncertainty that’s spread especially thick on your subconscious. He’s been restraining it to a degree, but he has a hellish sort of strength and an animal sense of morality, if you want to think he has one at all. You’ve welcomed something wicked into your house with open arms.
The drive home, the long drive home, gives you a good while to let that anxiety brew and bubble, a nauseating stew that weighs in your belly like white-hot lead. You look frequently at your rear view mirror like your own face, cropped just to your narrowed eyes, will offer you some sort of guidance not found internally. You flex and loosen your fingers on the steering wheel.
Your unoccupied driveway is not familiar, and the stairs up your porch are alien. You stand in front of your house like you’re meant to knock and wait.
Some part of you expects a scene of some sort as you unlock the front door. Great, wide tears across the wall and upturned furniture, every last of the knives in your set stabbed through various surfaces, maybe punctured deep into the cotton innards of your beloved woven throw pillows, some on the ceiling, others plunged into paintings to draw colorful, gouache blood. You were never entirely sure if you wanted kids, but now you get a nice sample of just the boons of them–a domestic tantrum.
Everything is in its place, but your heart doesn’t settle: you go straight for your room, only letting yourself exhale when you confirm the security and contents of your gun safe.
You feel like you’re toddler-proofing your own home, and yet the reality is not as innocuous as that image would suggest—you’re reorganizing your life to accommodate a violent, mechanized rabbit-thing. How far are you gonna go in restructuring your life for the beast? When is the price tag and the brief, novel sentimentality of it not worth the burden he continuously demonstrates himself to be? You know it’s not that, you know it’s because you’re lonely. That’s why you’re eating dinner with him.
It’s not the best description of the arrangement—the garage is open to welcome the late spring evening air and relieve the chemical stink baking while you were away. You’ve wiped off your old radio and are letting it cycle through whatever palatable-enough station you settled in. And yes, you’re sitting next to him, picking at your food with a fork as you think.
“Yesterday was a bit rough, huh? For both of us,” you finally say, stirring the salad around on your plate. You’re thankful you spent the time to dig up that old radio so that its ambiance can bleed through the unforgiving silence.
You take a bite and don’t chew.
“Do you want to hurt me?”
You don’t think so, or you don’t think he wants to kill you—you’ve given him ample opportunity you realize, thinking to the many nights now asleep, trusting that two locked doors will provide some semblance of protection. Just two wooden rectangles and the five meters it takes to get from the garage entrance to your bedroom.
“I just want to help you,” you continue, fork clinking as you set it down. You look in his motionless eyes for direction, but the colorless chasms that you find in return offer nothing.
“Let me know if I’m not doing that, I don’t know, I’m just not sure what you want.”
Suddenly, eye contact, even if seeming unrequited, feels too hard, and you’re staring down at your feet against the black peppered concrete floor. Your eyes trace up and down the cracks that cut across it like little networks of tree roots as the silence in the room thickens and curdles.
You retrieve your fork again to click it against your plate and look up at the rabbit-thing.
“How about some music?”
You stand and pretend not to steal a glance at the hole in your stool, at the way the metal curls around the exit wound like weeping flesh.
There’s a ‘70s station, and you contemplate it as you twist the dial of the radio past the selection of many, many country variants. Is that like trying to rouse nostalgia out of someone by playing nursery rhymes? It seems distasteful, so you scroll past and settle on classical. That’s what they’re always playing for animals and what seems to garner a universal, interspecies appreciation.
It doesn’t last a minute after you leave the garage to set the dishes in the sink, so you stand there, sigh, and stare, dead-eyed, out the kitchen window.
Another standstill.
The water stings hot relief on your skin. You hold your arms out and rotate them under the spray of the shower head, watching water unfurl over your forearms and disperse in various trails. The rest of your body, naked, blooms with goosebumps. You step into the spew of water and soupy steam.
It’s all trust now, that’s what you’re putting your everything in, some misplaced and questionable notion of trust.
Slowly, you crane your head forward and let your forehead rest against the milky shower tile, suds trailing from your face like frothy tears. Behind the wall, you hear the slight shuddering and groaning of the pipes, but beyond that, you listen. The hum of the air conditioning in the living room, the skittering of the squirrels you’re still trying to rid from your attic, the silence of the garage. You listen long and hard even as the shower beats down noisily and splatters on the porcelain bathtub floor. Your skin is hot, but the tile is as cold as a corpse, nipping—it burns somewhat, but you can’t tell if it’s a frigid or broiling sensation. You close your eyes. Water catches on your eyelashes and beads, fatter and fatter until it slips and wets the porcelain under your toes.
You stand like that for much longer than you think. Slowly, you turn yourself over, letting the wall of the shower cool your back. You’re so lonely. What were you expecting? Was he supposed to join you?
Around this time, Smudge would’ve been pawing at the door, and then you’d have to step out and grab blindly for the handle to crack it open enough for him to slide through. He’d jump up onto the sink and lay in the basin as you showered, only getting up when he heard the turning of the shower knob.
Like you might will it just out of hope, you listen for the approaching pitter-patter of careful paws.
The next payday, you’re at the shelter before you’ve even checked to see if the paycheck has been processed. You’ve done a good job not checking your bank account at all, this past week, still in recovery from your concerning purchase.
It’s cold and unwelcoming, the entrance resembling something of a prison visiting room with its oppressive, concrete walls and dim artificial lights. The rows of bars and foggy glass partitions do it no service to deviate from this image.
You’re at the very end, looking into a mostly undecorated room of cats lazing about. You’re looking for spots, for timid blue eyes.
You feel weird—you’re not drawn to any of them, and then you wonder if that’s an inappropriate thing to think, like you’re browsing shelves of products rather than animals. Then you wonder if this is just a bandage for your ache, if you’re attempting to smooth a band-aid over an open and throbbing cavity as it spits blood.
Your eyes finally settle on one, perched in the corner on a sad, single-story cat tower. He’s old, undoubtedly, white blooming in his otherwise gray fur like flames bursting across a field. One eye is brilliantly yellow, deceptively bright and youthful, but the color doesn’t reach the other eye: it’s milky, like deep-sea substrate, the pupil capped by a cataract. His fur, a mottled gray, appears cropped oddly in areas and thick and wild in others. It looks weirdly patchy before you realize that’s exposed skin, marked by trails and ridges of scabbing. His tail, which you note is crooked, is cropped at a length that would be odd if it were intentional, certainly not for cosmetic purposes.
“She’s been through so much,” a voice rings from behind you as you see a figure step into your peripheral vision. You jump. It’s the attendant that you were certain, a moment ago, was tending to the front desk, but now she’s standing next to you with her hands clasped in front. An oversized button hanging loosely off the breast of her sweater declares that she’s a volunteer. She turns to you and you’re a little uneased by how intensely green her eyes are. A disarmingly gentle expression calms you quickly. Your intent stare is her confirmation to continue.
“We think she’s in her early twenties, outlived her first family in a house fire, and then just kinda rotated through a series of tragedies. She’s made the most of those eight other lives, for sure. Hit by a car—twice—bookshelf fell on her, I think another car—that took her tail…” She trails off, but you see her counting on her fingers as she mouths the rest silently.
“How long has she been here?” you ask, hands on the glass. You know the fate of most senior cats.
Her smile turns a little strained, but you both understand.
“Four years.”
You nod like you already knew and turn back to the glass, scratched and foggy from excited hands.
“Her name is Mothball,” the attendant continues after a pause, turning to you with another comforting smile.
That finally gets you to crack one of your own. You drum your fingers along the frame of the window.
“…I could show you to the other section with all of our younger cats, if you’d like.”
You’re quick to shake your head.
“Oh no, she’s perfect.”
You don’t take her home that night, as much as it aches to imagine that frail old lady in a concrete box, sleeping on a cot no thicker than the typical spring morning’s delicate sheet of frost.
It’s an investment you can’t make right now, emotionally, mostly. There was an undeniable life to her eyes despite a tattered appearance, but you don’t know if you’d be ready to say bye again so soon. There’s selfishness in that, you know, but your heart is a little too tender to see a life so briefly step in and out of your life.
At home, you stand in the side alley of your house, leaning against the exterior wall of the kitchen. Overhead the outdoor light burns a sedated orange and moths flutter around it incessantly in a flurry of dark-colored wings. You wonder how they can spend so much of their short, quaint life seeking something never in grasp, then you have to wonder if they can even conceptualize what a short life they live at all. Some being out there must think the same of you.
You hold the cracked knife over the open mouth of the trash can, studying the series of little fractures that fan out across the blade like veins. Your glossy reflection blinks back at you, unsure, segmented into a million little splinters.
It was from a good set of knives too, a housewarming gift from a friend before they moved several states away and communication waned. You run your thumb down its spine.
Somehow, you’ve found yourself more troubled today by the regression of progress rather than the reinstatement of his innate danger.
You toss it into the trash can and wheel it out to the curb.
You dream of killing someone, plunging some manner of bladed weapon that your mind doesn’t care to distinguish into the throat of someone you don’t know. You don’t feel anything, and it seems like they don’t either. Their wide eyes strain to look at you, irises swollen by the white of their sclera and given color by branches of little pink veins. Sweat pills on their face and makes their skin glossy. Your hands are slick with your own. And yet they’re silent. Their mouth is closed but unobstructed, and yet it might as well be fastened tight with stitches. You search desperately for a reaction, you feel like a voyeur. There’s no distinct emotion felt, but you are disturbed by your fixation on their wound, the swelling of ruby blood around the inserted blade. It glitters under a light whose source is unclear. You press it further into the bulge of an artery and watch the liquid surge and run down the sides of their neck as it flexes with their heartbeat.
You swallow, expecting pain in your own throat. You try to apologize, still confused by it all, but someone else laughs from out of your mouth.
You wake with a start. Your hands fly next to you for Smudge but only feel your pillow, cold with disuse.
You let your heart rate settle and wipe away the thickening sweat from your forehead.
Your shower has seen double the use since the onset of these troubling dreams, though this one is distinctly more grotesque. You stand anyway to make your way to the bathroom, and in your journey finally notice your bedroom door left open, swaying slightly on its hinge. Although things have settled down enough for you to forgo always locking it, you never leave your bedroom door open, it’s certainly something you would’ve noticed.
For a moment, you just stare at it, still not fully alert and still swatting away the fog of sleep. And then you dash, essentially lunging for your closet, tearing the door with such force that it sounds like, and it probably does, rip from its track. It's a loud sound of defiance. Not even the sight of your gun safe, pristine and safely bolted shut, appeases you; you run through the series of locks and wrench the door open. The knife block with its one empty slot, and your Walther PDP, lie untouched, awaiting you. It doesn’t placate you as much as you’d like.
If you were any reasonable person, your unease would be you acknowledging that your little comfort handgun would do all of nothing against a supernatural force like the rabbit-beast, but you know well you’re not reasonable. Your circumstances are purely self-imposed, and your disturbance lies elsewhere.
You’re unsettled because there’s strife in the connection you’ve been tending to so fiercely.
Progress is not linear, and you can acknowledge this, but it feels like you’ve been at a standstill with the rabbit-thing. You’re stuck in a perpetual one-step-forward, two-steps-back tango, and it’s driving you mad, the constant whiplash between these periods of growth and the instances of mistrust and fear. Hiding in your own home, white-knuckle gripping a knife in sleep. You want out.
You’re confused when your vision starts to prickle with areas of fuzz, blooming rapidly across your waterline. When you try to blink the haze away, it disperses into tears, falling and wetting the back of your hands as you sit, defeated, on your knees in your closet. You didn’t realize you were crying, maybe because it’s soundless, distinguished only by small stutters in your breath and the dampness as it collects on your cheeks. It’s just been mounting and mounting you realize as you hang your head forward and let the tears fall freely, just so you don’t have to feel their descent down your face. Everything’s been piling up, and for a while now.
There’s no obligation to keep him. Yes, the price was astounding, and you’re still in recovery, but it’s apparent now that the distress he’s causing is amounting to a much steeper toll. You can give him away, maybe just roll him down to the curb and call for a junk pickup, maybe put him up for any pitiful asking price on a second-hand market. Immediately, you think this must be the same course of events to have led to the initial listing you stumbled across; it doesn't necessarily make sense when you consider the steep price tag (if Kurt were in such a rush to free his hands of the rabbit-thing, you imagine he would’ve taken anything) but you bought him, did you not? He knew someone would see the Fazbear branding and skim through all the other details, just as you had. Maybe he even explicitly divulged somewhere in the scrawling mass of paragraphs that hey, this thing is alive, dangerous, and is intent on making your life hellish, and the blame can only be on you for not taking the time to read up. You knew this was a massive undertaking, but this isn’t something someone could ever really expect, and now you need out.
Finally, you weep openly, a cracked cry splintering from your mouth. It’s just one sound. You can’t force any more out, even as the tears keep raging on. You try and try to claw it out like snaking a drain but your sobbing remains noiseless.
In your wet sniffling, you’re startled by the sudden and distinct smell of charred death burning hot in your nostrils. It’s so alien in the bedroom you keep obsessively clean that it startles you out of your tears. You sniff again and the scent stings your eyes worse than your tears do; in your dreams, the sensation is a uniquely spectral cold, but you know this one belongs to him still.
You lift your head slowly and turn it, just as measuredly, to the open door.
Tall and imposing, even with his head cocked to the side, he consumes the entirety of the doorway. His stance is leisurely, unbothered, weight borne on one of his great metal feet so his posture is uneven and relaxed. White pinprick pupils
“Hey,” you start, not quite a whisper, as you rise slowly. You’re not sure what you’re doing, what you’ll do when you stand, but you lift yourself carefully like approaching a cat and not like he’s three times both your height and weight. You let him see your hands, stretching your palms out in front of you.
You have to wonder if you’ve stepped from one dream to another, but everything is too precise and distinct, not the typical formless, indeterminate mess of distantly familiar shapes and muted color gradients that characterize your dreamscapes. Each sensation is sharp and exact; you feel the slow descent of stray tears saturating your cheeks, the twitch in your fingers, the fading ache in your knees from the wooden floor.
You know it has to be intentional, this appearance has to be at his discretion. Fully facing him, you step forward. He disappears at once.
You go to chase but stop yourself.
The next time you wake, it’s properly light out and late. Your hand flies up to your face to wipe away the wet of snot on your upper lip. A challenged inhale confirms that you’re sick. It’s almost a relief because at least you can try to reason that these recent bizarre nighttime scenes can be attributed to your brewing fever, whether or not it’s realistic for the spread of time.
You’re already half an hour past your usual wake-up time but still spend an extra ten or so minutes staring at the ceiling, suddenly interested in the arbitrary paths of the floaters as they dance in your vision.
You swallow a mouthful of sour disgruntlement and finally dig out your phone to make the dreaded call out. Realistically, there’s no need to stress—you don’t think you’ve even touched your paid sick time in over a year, but you’ve always been the restless type and the idea of being bed-bound for the day makes you fuss around in the sheets. This is good for you, you scold yourself, you need the rest. You still get up anyways.
The kettle clinks as you place it on the burner cap and click and twist the knob onto medium. You rake through your drawer of loose tea bags that you’ve been intending to organize for forever until you find something mild and comforting. The flame beneath hisses to life and settles to a steady flow of heat.
As you stand, leaning against the counter, your eyes wander to the garage door.
He’s back in his place in the chair, and for whatever reason this infuriates you. Your instinct is to race over and confront him—I know you can move, we both know, stop playing this game—but your next thought, the rational one, can understand this is part of the problem that keeps this cycle infinitely perpetuated; you’re treating him like a toddler or a misbehaving dog, you’re scolding him and wagging your finger and completely ignoring the reality that is the unbalance in this dynamic. It’s not all that unlike the people who pluck wild animals from their environments, put them in domestic settings, and then reprimand them like you would a small dog when they inevitably revert to their natural behavior. He’s no rebellious child and he’s demonstrated this repeatedly.
You feel stupid and small again, knowing all the while that that is your undisputable reality, the one you’ve been dancing around like you know no better. Your gut twists, already unsettled by your fever and now further gnarled in a knot of horrible doubt.
“Hi,” you call out, just so he hears your voice before he sees you. You wipe your nose again even while it burns with irritation, hoping your sickly appearance isn’t taken for emotionality (even while there is, pooling and swelling beneath the surface—both of you know this).
As you walk around him to come around to his left, you catch sight of your workbench. Atop, the white thread is placed centermost.
The tea streams hot into your ceramic mug, the one stubbornly kept alive through various moves and fractures as denoted by puffy epoxy scars. You tap the tea strainer twice to coerce the remaining drops down and set it in the sink, and then you’re scattering back to the garage to reclaim your seat on the stool.
You bite your tongue to force down any smart remarks that you don’t trust yourself to hold—You finally came around, huh? If this is him extending an olive branch, you should accept it gracefully. You’ve been too lackadaisical about your quips and jabs, too used to these interactions being one-sided, consequenceless.
Retrieving your needle and threading the white through the eye of it, you avoid his fixed stare.
You draw the stool forward (it still works for its intended purpose, so you make no note to replace it) and place a hand on his upper chest to stabilize yourself. Your marks are still visible on the darker fur of his chest, and so you produce the first button and go ahead with aligning it in the center of his sternum. You pause before you make the first puncture, finally looking up at him, looking at him entirely, searching for signs of discomfort that are too human to be found on him.
You know he could resist, and so his stillness is permission; the needle goes in with some resistance but clears the exterior fabric and wriggles free to the other side. Retrieving it from the other end is a little more of a hassle, as you have to loop your other hand through the opening of his arm socket so you can maneuver the needle back around to pierce the chest again. This is by far the closest you’ve been to him, your nose grazing his fur as you lean forward and back, the needle following your movements. You’re pleased at least how clean the fur looks this close up and that his smell has been made quite mild, though it still lingers. Flesh brushes against fur and fingers glide along mechanical bones as you fasten the second button some inches lower than the first.
It’s odd to be fiddling around in his chest cavity knowing life thrums in it—yes, you’ve sifted around many robotic intestines, but wondering how much he feels of this makes you feel queasy. You don’t worry that it’s painful, you know he wouldn’t permit your rummaging if so, but it’s too close and too intimate, not clinical like it typically feels. You swallow a hundred times and focus so intently on the appearing and receding needle to avoid those dark eyes.
By the third button, your face is pressed up against the length of his chest, and you’re now hurriedly weaving the needle in and out, drawing each loop tight before plunging it back into fabric skin.
You’re delicate with your efforts, all the while not convinced you could even get him to stagger if coming at him with full force. Just hauling him up and into the bed of your pickup truck the first day had done a number on your back.
Whether your gentle approach is out of wariness or some tender sense of responsibility (all your projects are very dear to you), isn’t entirely clear to you.
Is this the only taste of intimacy you’ll get? That thought stops you completely, and then, hurriedly, you complete the last few loops and snip the remaining tail of thread with your embroidery scissors. Going back over, you wriggle each button to make sure it’s fastened securely and tight against his chest. None of them give, so you’re satisfied.
You pat his chest and look up to him as confirmation.
“There you are,” you hum out, running a finger over the column of fat, shiny buttons. You use your pad to rub away a grayish smudge and then push back on the stool.
Then you’re up, cramming the needle and thread relatively back into place and snapping the sewing set closed. You don’t take the time to find its rightful place on the workbench and instead hurry out of the room, still holding it, slapping it down on the countertop and exhaling for what feels like the first time in an hour. You’d think you were drowning just a moment ago with the desperate ruckus of gasping you’re making now, gulping down the lighter, thinner air of the kitchen like it’s a taste of something you won’t get anytime again.
What is your problem? you wonder, picking back up your sewing kit and turning it over and over in your hands. Neither side offers an answer, so it goes back onto the counter shoved behind a misplaced cereal box.
The hand on the countertop, initially just to balance yourself, curls into a claw, knuckles flaring with strain.
Breakfast is prepared to the audio of a podcast, just to fill the kitchen space with a voice besides the one crying out in your head, calling you desperate, desperate, lonely, horrible.
You thumb the volume button up several levels until the back and forth of the two hosts drowns out even your own internal voice reading off the back of your pancake mix.
You hope your sickness doesn’t stick around too awfully long.
Your fever rages on in your sleep, and so you toss and turn throughout the hours, opening your eyes every so often to watch the headlights of cars swim across the gaps of your window blinds. Whatever sleep you manage is dreamless, but this is no relief; those dreams of yours have no chemical rationale, and so you have to wonder if your loneliness is so profound that you envision stroking the head of a mangled animatronic beast.
The third time you wake up, sheets clinging to you with sticky sweat and a wicked cough that rattles your ribcage, you don’t try to force sleep again. You fetch a can of tomato soup and heat it in a saucepan, and when it’s done and ladled into your last remaining clean bowl, you sit with him and eat. The radio crones blues and you pull up the garage door to let the night seep in.
The next day, still fending off the fog of a fever, you’re starting efforts in constructing feet for your rabbit friend. The mechanic, skeletal feet left behind in the wake of prolonged decay are quite jarring when compared to the relatively cartoonish proportions emphasized elsewhere in the body; they’re almost anatomical, a little too bone-like in their design, and once again you have to shiver off the image of a corpse behind the fabric exterior.
Spread out across your workbench are an array of grainy photos you’ve grabbed and printed from the internet of his likeness in his heydays, fully skinned and with charming green eyes now found nowhere in his appearance. Scattered as they are now across the tabletop, it looks like the scene of a frenzied detective rifling through evidence, but you’re just snatching one every so often for reference as you outline the sole of the first foot.
You’re still frequently wiping at your nose, and an insistent headache thrumming behind your eye refused to be alleviated by any of the painkillers in your cabinet–additionally, the approaching heat of nearly-summer makes your ailment a particularly miserable affair. You can’t even have the fan on you in worry that it’ll aggravate your condition, so you down full mugs of water like peasants would ale.
“You had a little bow, huh?” you muse between sniffles, tapping on an image of him taken from the side as he performs on a stage, soaked in grayscale stage light. It’s hard to imagine that the beast that sits next to you is the same one that appears pristine and lively in the photograph. The rotting smile you know is here full and fitted with bright teeth, a sparkle to the lovingly painted eyes and animation to his posture that is distinctly pained now. You’re still quite bitter that such a lovely piece of work was besmirched by some cheap pop up haunt who hadn’t a clue what a nostalgic treasure they were working with, and now you’re stuck scrubbing out blood stains from tacky fur )still with no idea how you’ll go about dismantling the bloated body inside).
You empty the remaining contents of your mug and set it down next to the radio, currently playing an audio documentary about the decline of play places in America. You’ve been listening on and off, genuinely interested in the topic but also closely invested in the math demanded of your current endeavor. This is always the part you dread the mouth—there are only a margin of artists who enjoy the mathematical aspects of their craft, and though you have profound respect for them, you’ll never be one of them. You want to get to the color and the frills and all the loving flairs. Your eyes just glaze over as you jot down a list of values.
You get an outline you feel pretty confident in, so fetch and uncap your X-ACTO knife to start sawing it out from the rest of the roll of fabric. In the background, an older man’s voice recounts the early years of the inclusion of playplaces in family restaurants.
The ache of thirst remanifests in your throat, along with a new burn that throbs like an open wound. You sigh—time for another pot of tea, this time drowned in honey to soothe your agitated throat.
When the narration fades out for a segment of restaurant ambience, children’s shrieking laughter and the pitter patter of hands and feet on playplace tubing, you take the chance to stand and move back to the kitchen. There, you find your pot of chamomile has run out, so you chuck the cold dregs in the sink and fill the kettle with water. You rifle through your drawer of teas and decide some peppermint tea will do your tender throat good.
You know to keep an attentive ear when in the kitchen, and it can’t be too much of a surprise when you hear movement out in the garage. The ring of salt has long been discarded as a preventive measure, but that old cheap chair has worked well on its own in alerting you to any stirring.
You stand there listening as the whining of the kettle rises and rises. Slowly, you turn the stove knob back to low, and the hiss of the kettle dies out with a sad little whimper.
When you peer through the doorway, caped by that uncomfortable feeling of voyeurism, he’s standing. The light of the garage makes his appearance no less startling, still towering and angular, all sharp edges. There is a weight to his stance, not just of his hulking suit and its mechanisms, but as if he’s bearing some spectacular, unseen load that renders the simple act of standing terribly laborious. He’s staring at your workbench, ears up and alert. His clawed hand hovers over the radio, the pointed metal digits extended and curled slightly. Ridged silver talons glimmer, a series of little fine scythes. It almost appears like he’s feeling the warmth of a radiator. From its speakers bleeds the joyful clamor of children and playful arcade jingles. Initially, you have to assume he’s moving to switch the station, maybe even crush the device entirely, but quickly the connection glimmers in your mind. The sounds must be familiar. At one point, it must’ve been the regular soundscape of his everyday, encapsulated in a little box and now recited through its speaker.
You’re not sure if his apparent reminiscing is charming, but a part of you feels for him nonetheless. Whether or not you could imagine such an existence as desirable, it was his reality for so long, possibly since inception. Maybe it’s that hot, fuzzy film cast by your fever that keeps you from recognizing the rancor that someone sober would have to recognize rolling off of him; it’s a chill so thick it sinks instantly to the floor and creeps down into the cracks like a surge of oil. You just shiver it away.
You step aside like you’re giving him privacy and press your back to the wall next to the door, listening. The clamor of playing children and the squeak of shoes on playplace tubing fades to a segment of music and resuming narration. Even here you can make out the dialogue of the droning narrator, tinny and coarse through the speaker, but the garage itself is silent.
You think you have to be exaggerating how long you’re standing there. You hear the water slow back to stillness in the kettle, hear the rhythmic tick tick tick of the kitchen clock assume its place, watch the bubbles dissipate, and when you turn to look at the stove clock, it has indeed been four minutes.
The distinct and undeniable sound of a long, dry inhale creeps across the open air of the doorway and instantly chills the kitchen like a plume of thick, fat fog. Hot, acrid air unrolls onto your neck, and though blistery, sets goose flesh blooming fast across the skin there.
You don’t scream, but it doesn’t matter–as you move to lunge away from the door, you feel the wood of the floor slip from beneath your feet and air takes its place as you tumble violently forward. The kitchen mat placed a little too far forward to have stabilized your steps at least works to pad your fall slightly, although your knees face the brunt of the wood boards and the sound of your fall still resonates with embarrassing force, nearly thunderous in the silence of the kitchen. You scramble forward, fingers sliding pointlessly in search of purchase over the glossy wood and finally finding stability on the fabric of the mat so that you can push yourself upwards. The door is empty. Steps recede inside somewhere beyond where you can see.
Three short huffs sound from the garage, like some sort of strangled animal braying, but it’s not quite pained–it’s very much a laugh. He’s laughing at you. He laughs not like a hyena but like some hellish dead thing, like his lungs are tight and rotting and his throat blisters with decomposition. But it is a laugh, undeniably.
Oh, so he has a sense of humor.
You stand, little recognition for the throbbing of your knees as the pain makes its initial round. No other sounds come and the house stands quietly again. You laugh, a careful and controlled, small sound, chuckling through tiny whimpers as you massage your calves.
Is this bonding?
That night, you pull up your chair again and eat dinner beside him. You hope, through the establishment of this little ritual, that you can start sawing away the tension that remains. Not even vaguely is this what you envisioned
You suppose you’ve given up on taking a break, your most persistent condition; you just can’t set things down, unfinished work haunts you insistently, worse than any phantoms patrolling your house.
You’re just that excited, it seems. You’ve long foregone the camera–the situation’s just changed far too much, and now you have to consider some atypical intricacies, most centrally, the matter of recording something that is to some metric living but unable to communicate in most standard manners. You had attempted an ouija board a little earlier on, but it was never so much as touched, laid out a set of block letters that were similarly ignored, and even a pencil and paper–it was dented and creased with the application of pressure but did not bear a single mark of graphite.
You did have to wonder how much of his refusal to employ these tools was just out of defiance or disapproval over their often childlike nature. Your not taking him seriously has appeared to be the biggest contrivance so far, so today you go back to the basics.
That fat sack of salt had come in handy for cooking, especially with all the pasta you’d been relying on for quick, weekday dinners, but today you retrieve it to revisit its initial purpose.
The rabbit thing watches unblinkingly as you, on your knees, shuffle about the garage floor to lay down a blanket of salt. Powder chalk, a brief alternative you hoped could save you some money, was also refused by him, and only made an even more troublesome mess to clean up after going undisturbed for two days. He seems to insist on being a hole in your wallet. Patience appears to be the name of the game for now, and though he is so uncommunicative, he at least makes it clear what he will and won't permit. Even in the absence of speech, these lines are drawn stark and distinct.
When you’ve amassed a solid foundation of salt, you go back over just with your hands and smooth out the pile with your palms, raking it to form one wide rectangle. You stand and wipe your hands off on your pants, depositing a fair amount of salt onto the fabric in the process.
You pull up the battered stool and take a seat, smoothing your hands up and down your thighs as you think. Even as these questionings become routine, the silence that backdrops them only gets so much more comfortable.
“Evenin’,” you begin, tilting side to side in your seat.
“I hope some questions are okay. We’re doing the salt again, ‘cause it seems like you prefer it, right?”
You already know there will be no response when you look up to his teeth-bared face.
You ask, looking back to the floor, if he was always alive, or aware, or possessed, or containing some measure of consciousness. The question had been itching more incessantly at you as you’d been browsing photos from his early years on stage and intact, a likeness that remains distantly but is so trace that it’s hard to imagine this is the same creature. He bears a degree of devastation and disrepair that is not wholly explained by years of neglect, too sinister. Yes, you have to imagine his location saw some volume of looters after its closure, but any person knowledgeable on animatronics would have taken him rather than a handful of parts. Had his makeover at the haunt really done so much damage?
You look up again. The question is too open-ended. You revise it.
“What’s your earliest memory?” you ask, leaning in. You want to continue with “when did this start?” but it sounds clinical, like you’re probing him about the details of some ailment and not this miraculous instance of improbable life. It’s no disease, you don’t believe, but it is your search for answers that has you questioning the chronology of the beast’s consciousness; for all you know it may have been some insidious pestilence, just incubating throughout the years.
You decide that you’ve worded it fine enough and in a way that can be answered much more simply. He’s not dumb by any means, but communication is limited and even more so by his selectiveness in what methods he approves or rejects. Some days you get no responses at all even when using approaches he had previously used, like the salt.
You leave quietly and shut the door behind you. By now this song and dance is familiar, and while the time between your question and his response has become increasingly elapsed every time around, it’s still a frustratingly long affair for an answer that may not amount to anything meaningful at all. You’d be more forgiving if you figured he was shy, but that’s far from the truth. He’s smart, he toys with you, maybe you’d even call him strategic, but it’s utterly false to attribute such innocuous words to him.
You have to remember that.
Again you find yourself standing in your kitchen like you’re a stranger. This glimmer of (strained) companionship has only reiterated how profoundly lonely you are; here, you stand, giving the robot his privacy but fervently awaiting his response. You’re not old, you’re not past your prime, the dating scene is by no means dry, what are you doing?
Somewhere in the house, your phone buzzes. You pass into the living room and see the spray of artificial orange light from its screen on an end table, grabbing it on your way down the hall and scrolling past a notification, catching Dale’s name before the message dissolves into your home screen. You try to swipe back to read the message but it’s already gone, and so instead you navigate to call for a taxi.
A twenty-minute ride through 9:00 pm empty roads set to the worst, most oppressive silence you’ve felt in years, worse than dinners in your cramped apartment, you at the kitchen table, boyfriend at the couch.
You push past the clouded glass doors of a closet-sized bar on the side of town you’ve never ventured to, too far off from your usual commute to work and the direction of your usual stores to care to explore. It’s a brick of a building and mostly barren on its exterior, marked only by a towering neon pink sign of a pinup lady swigging beer (which would’ve given it a nice, retro charm if the motif didn’t start and stop there).
You don’t care to take in the details of the interior; it’s another one of those over-perfumed, modern minimalist fake-leather couch lounges with no real soul or character. Its menu offers the standard array of American drinks and unadventurous cocktails. None of this matters, just that there are people, there are voices other than your own, and that you’re out of the house.
Your eyes are already bleary before your first drink. You just keep thinking about how you haven’t done this since college as you finally force down the first one, somehow equally biting and bitter as much as it is overwhelmingly sweetened. It sticks to your throat all the way down and has a lingering coat, like cough syrup.
It’s enough to get you dancing, conservatively, off to the side of the mass of most bar-goers. You eye the crowd, scanning faces in search of someone equally lonesome. It takes another downed glass, this time something strong and malty, for you to approach someone. You barely meet their gaze but match their feet, drawing forward and back with their own body. Light bleeding from overhead provides a mask that offers unfamiliar confidence. Another drink helps you feel invincible. You can’t describe its taste, lost as soon as it leaves your tongue, and neither can you remember the person's face. Your dancing is sloppier and looser
They shoulder their way past other patrons, and nervous to show too much interest, you fumble your phone out from your pocket and check the time. 9:40 pm on a weeknight. Your cough is gone but congestion still lines your ribs like collecting detritus. Work demands an early wake, and you envision your rabbit friend drawing lonely spirals in the tablet of salt in the garage.
You throw back another drink, not even knowing the name of this one, just knowing that it’s slick and salty, hoping it’ll burn away the remains of your apprehension. It persists stubbornly, a furious growth of mold on your subconscious, resistant to the sting of alcohol. Your dancing is sloppier and looser.
You wade your way back over to the bar, sliding past bumping bodies to take an unoccupied seat at the counter. This time you just ask for a water, room temperature, and nurse on it as you wait for your nerves to settle. Somehow your eyes meet theirs multiple times. Again you reach for your phone to look busy, swiping past an empty lock screen, your stomach fried with nervousness all the while.
You thought you could do this, but when you see them work their way in your direction you’re quickly clearing the last inch chug of water from your glass and cramming your wallet and phone back into your bag.
It’s only 10:10 when the taxi pulls up to the battered curb and you shuffle your way into the back. You slur an address that you have to go back over in your head even though it’s your own, and the taxi stirs to life and rattles forward. He’s driving slow enough that you’d get fussy if you were sober, but right now every crawl to a halt at a stop sign and careful turn right feels dizzying.
It’s weird to come home so late, dark enough that the porch light can be fully appreciated as you stumble up the driveway. You wouldn’t think you were such a lightweight, but an occasional can of beer to accompany Friday dinners hadn’t done much to reinforce your tolerance.
It’s not too late, you can salvage some sleep and drown your morning hangover in water and espressos. It really has been a while since you lived like this, and you feel dysfunctional—you just can’t let yourself relax, it seems.
You want to shower to rinse away the bar stickiness, but the struggle of just unlacing and shimmying out of your shoes makes the idea of lurching to the bathroom, undressing, and showering seem like an entire ordeal. You brush your teeth quickly and dose the alcohol bubbling in your belly with more glasses of water that now taste like menthol. You shed your coat and decide that’s enough to get comfortable, flopping down on your bed and tugging the sheets just over your shoulders.
You toss plenty before you find a position that you decide is passable. Closed eyes don’t block the bleeding of color that shouldn’t be there from blossoming on the back of your eyelids. You feel like you’re being tilted this way and that, and subconsciously, you shift with it, trying to stay centered on your bed as the scene of your bedroom swivels slowly on a lopsided track.
The sheets burn with a nearly venomous prickle. It’s too hot. Fussing, you kick off the covers to free yourself of their oppressive heat.
You breathe out hard and stand up, marching through pins and needles to your bedroom window. The air that rushes through when you struggle it open is equally warm and dry.
Too hot.
You’re then pushing back out of your bedroom and trailing down the hall. You pop open the hallway closet to fetch a blanket and cram it as compactly as you can under your arm. It trails behind you still as you walk to the kitchen, catching on your heels. You retrieve a throw pillow and tuck that under the other arm, and then you’re trodding down the stairs into the garage and throwing out the blanket onto the concrete floor. You bend down to sit on your knees and from there lay fully, pushing the pillow somewhere comfortable beneath your head. The garage is cold and dark in a way that would otherwise be uninviting but is heavenly on your heated skin and blooming headache.
“Hi,” you say through heavy, nearly numb lips. You watch his silhouette, looking for movement in the dark but knowing you’ll get no acknowledgement. You never do. You shuffle and draw your blanket further up your body and up to your chin. The distant orchestra of crickets croak somewhere outside. It must be far, but right now it sounds like angry rainfall raging on the roof.
You murmur some goodnight to your rabbit friend and let your eyes flutter closed. How long ago were you sleeping with your door locked and a knife under your mattress? A few drinks had seemed to render it a distant whisper.
Mint oil swirls with grenadine in your stomach. The cold floor seeps through the fabric of your blanket mattress, but it’s quite the pleasant chill to diffuse the heat of your drunkenness. You let yourself groan in relief.
You hear the long, scraping strides of metal talons but apparently can’t make yourself care enough to pry open your eyes, thickly sealed closed by drowsiness. The air around you gets colder, and then frigid and heavy. You mumble, drool pooling on one corner of your lips. You should go turn on the fan, but it’s all the way in the corner, and you’re not sure your legs are ready to stand.
You almost swat away the hand that drags down your arm. You have to hiss when its fingers dig suddenly down and draw shallow lines of prickling blood.
“Cut it,” is all you can spit, not very impassioned, nuzzling further into your pillow.
It’s not a dream. His breath is hot, not the frigid fog of cold it is in your dreams. You don’t care all that much, gently wiping the scratches that rise on your exposed arm, murmuring something pained but ultimately unbothered.
You lay there in a limbo of death’s hot air and the cold of the unheated garage. When his heat becomes unbearable, you finally turn over and come to stand on wobbly legs. Of course, he’s in his chair and unmoved. You pass by, eyes squinted and adjusting, searching for the fan.
You nearly jump when you feel something grainy and coarse warp under your feet, pulling back suddenly like you’ve stepped on glass. The pearly-blue glimmer of light speckling the floor beneath you makes you think so as well, but there’s no pain as you lift your foot to examine it. Salt.
Now you wobble over to the garage door to feel for the light switch. It clicks and the overhead light blinks on with an electric hum. From there you walk back over to the pile, rubbing at your eyes against the glare of fluorescents. Salt. The salt, you remember. It’s still clinging to the fabric of your blue jeans from your escapades with it earlier today.
You almost rush past him, and indeed, you can see immediately that it’s been rearranged. Making out the picture he’s assembled is the much more troubling task, because he’s opted not for words but for some sort of simplified illustration, perhaps applaudable despite its quality just for the use of such a precarious medium.
You walk around it clockwise to see if any other angle offers a more coherent interpretation, but they’re all equally nonsensical. You round back around to where he’d face the salt from his seat and suppose this is your best guess.
A chessboard, or tile, or something checkered, slanted so that it ends at a horizon line. That you can decipher easily, but the rest is lost in large, swooping lines. A body of water or an oil spill, something stretching outwards from your feet like a large splatter. An arrangement of seemingly random rectangles on the sky or wall above where the checkered tile ends, with even less coherent scribbles contained inside. It represents something, but you have to wonder if it’s deliberately packed, a little visual goose chase for you. You don’t know the extent of his vocabulary, but he knows words and has offered you fragments of sentences before. It’s odd. There’s fury in the hurried lines he’s drawn.
It takes too long for you to realize that what you initially assumed to be the plane of a chessboard is likely the checkered tile of the Fazbear Pizzeria, a staple across all its locations. With that foundation, you can presume this is the interior of one of its facilities, and so the sky is more so a wall and the squares that decorate it in some manner of decor, posters or drawings. The rest is no more than chicken scratch.
Something else burns a hole deep in your stomach, and it’s not the settling gin and tonic.
You crane your head to look at him and wonder if your eyes are crazed and your irises swollen. You mumble a question in reference to his drawing.
Your hand goes up to cradle the scratched arm, where little beads of blood fatten into bright red pearls, finally acknowledging the sting there. And still, somehow, you go to turn on the fan, angle it somewhere in the direction of your makeshift bed, and stumble back over to fall into a sudden and all-encompassing sleep.
You count jumping rabbits in your sleep, little blurred bodies hopping over a fence in one neat, repeating line.