⎣House of Wolves⎤|| Sig & Foxy
“Yeah, I dunno if I wanna do this anymore, Clara.” Sig lingered just beyond the reach of the shadow cast by the dilapidated building in the early afternoon sun, squinting up at the crumbling sign with no small amount of trepidation. Her friend, already fumbling with the keys several paces ahead, stopped and turned back to Sigyn with a frustrated sigh.
“You promised you’d help me with this—and I’m not paying you to laze around my apartment all summer.” Clara planted her hands on her hips, tapping her foot impatiently. “D’you want to start paying off those student loans of yours or what?” Sig’s defeated huff was met by a grin from the other woman. “Just come in and look around. It’s actually a pretty cool old place. Kinda weird, but I think you’ll see right away it has so much potential…”
Clara’s commentary faded to static as Sigyn took her first hesitant steps into the remains of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria—and her entire body immediately went rigid, muscles tensing and joints locking up. The space around her became a vacuum of heavy silence, pressing down as if it meant to crush her as unblinking blue eyes slowly moved across the room to settle on the stage. Three shadowy figures stood there, and she could swear the bear’s head twitched in her direction. Sig felt her own heartbeat all the way to her fingertips, the instinct to run swelling in her gut as five sparks seemed to burst alight at the fringes of her mind.
Five terrible, no-good, very bad feelings.
“It’s not safe here.” The words came out with unnerving steadiness. Her eyes were still fixed squarely on the animatronic bear she could feel staring straight back at her. Fingers twitching, Sigyn took a step backward, intending to make a break for the car, but Clara caught her arm before she could escape and dragged her further into the room.
“Don’t be silly, Sigs. I had a contractor come in and give the place a once-over before deciding to invest and it’s completely safe! Just needs a little TLC, ‘s all.”
Blinking as her senses started to return, Sigyn bit back the instinct to disagree: I’m not talking about the building, I’m talking about whatever’s waking up inside it. But she couldn’t say that out loud. Years of intensive therapy had taught her it was best to keep her mouth shut and pretend nothing was wrong when she felt and saw things nobody else could.
“Of course you did.” Attempting a smile, Sig laced her words with fake enthusiasm to cover up the churning in her stomach. Perhaps if she ignored it, it’d go away. That had worked before. Once or twice. “Hey, what’s back here?” Eager to keep her mind running somewhere other than places that made people brand her insane, Sigyn skipped forward, sweeping aside the curtain cordoning off a place labeled “Pirate Cove,” only to find herself freezing up again. “Oh.”
“That one’s broken. The others might still work, though. I think…”
Yet again, Clara’s voice seemed to fade right down to nothing as Sigyn felt herself yanked back down into a deep, heavy silence. Staring at the animatronic creature with its lopsided jaw and lanky, rusted frame filled her with some sort of penetrating, undeniable sadness she couldn’t explain. The sound of her own breathing rushed in her ears and she felt the flicker of something—a presence there, reacting.
“—but if we can’t get the wolf working we’ll just get rid of it.”
“Foxy,” Sig corrected, only just realizing that there were tears on her cheeks. She hastily wiped them away, before Clara could notice. “His name is Foxy.”
Clara looked at her with a raised brow. “How do you know that?”
Sigyn merely shrugged. “Just a lucky guess.” Her go-to excuse for knowing things she couldn’t—shouldn’t possibly know. Not without insights that had all the best psychiatrists scrambling to medicate her as a child, anyway.
vaporwave
2087
theartofmadeline
