#dsaf tapes

Dave dug through the files in the office with a wide grin on his face. He didn’t exactly know what he was looking for, but he could always find something to entertain himself in the files. Usually a photo from one of the court cases he could post around the restaurant or an annoying recording he could make one of the animatronics play.

On this particular day he found a couple cassette tapes inscribed with the word “Joy”. 

The tapes had an ominous feel to them, but surely they can’t be that bad, plus if they are, he could just use them to traumatize the children in the restaurant! Sure it doesn’t beat killing them, but a little chaos never fails to make phoney scream.

Dave inserts the tapes into his old cassette player. Whatever this is, it’ll be great.

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Jack comes into work 3 hours late. He didn’t sleep in, or sleep at all, he just didn’t want to come. He had been having a very good time not being at work dealing with annoying children, his even more annoying boss, and somehow more still annoying purple coworker. Unfortunately his contract meant that his previously mentioned annoying boss could call the police if he didn’t turn up for work.

He was having a lot of fun rampaging through the streets on a ton of cocaine. Sad it had to end so soon.

Jack came to the Saferoom (after having been yelled at by Phone Guy for 15 minutes straight for being late.), not intending to actually do his job. 

When he entered the room, the energy was far different from every other time he had done so before, and it wasn’t hard to tell why.

Unlike every other time Jack had entered the Saferoom, Dave hadn’t been there to loudly greet him.

For a moment Jack wondered if Dave has skipped. He, unlike Jack, could do so. Legally the man didn’t exist and while Jack didn’t either, Dave left even less of a paper trail than him, on top of that Jack could easily pass as a regular human if need be, but it’s kinda hard to tell the cops that they are looking for a large, long necked, bright purple, reptilian, crackhead with a New York accent.

Jack did however notice his “friendly” neighbourhood aubergine curled up in the corner. He wasn’t crying, but he was clearly upset.

Dave was upset quite often for an array of equally stupid reasons, but when he was upset he was usually melodramatic and exaggerated his feelings greatly.

Now he was acting uncharacteristically quiet and truly miserable.

Jack, noting the personality shift, rushes to his friend’s side.

Dave doesn’t respond, no matter how much Jack tries to snap him out of his trance, he just stares down at the cassette player in his lap.

After 10 minutes of silence Dave finally seems to realize Jack is there as the orange man stands up to leave as Dave was creeping him out in a new and horrifying way from his usual behaviour.

Noticing Jack, Dave lunges at the smaller, makeup caked man, and both fall to the floor. Dave glares at him for a moment, seemingly thinking Jack is someone else.

When Dave realizes it’s Jack, he immediately gets off, looking horrified. “Fuck… shit… sorry.”

“Are you ok?” Jack asks, despite the answer being more than obvious to the both of them.

“Can’t say I am, Old Sport.” 

“Is it something to do with that cassette-“ Dave throws the cassette player at the wall, it shatters on impact. “-player……….”

“Heh… w-what cassette player. I don’t even know what that is.” Dave says, before bursting into laughter, which quickly transitions to crying.

Jack checks the wreckage of the old cassette player, seeing the now shattered Joy tape inside. Oh. Jack had listened to those tapes, and had been tempted to show Dave a long time ago, to remove his allegiance to Henry, but realized it would be pointless as Henry isn’t even around anymore and it’d just hurt Dave, so he buried them deeper in the filing cabinet.

“Henry?” Jack asks, already knowing the answer.

“H-he took my FUCKING organs Jack! HE KNOCKED ME OUT AND STOLE MY FUCKING ORGANS!!!!!” Dave yells through his tears. “I thought I could trust him…” he whispers.

“Henry is gone now. He can’t do that anymore.”

“THATS THE FUCKING PROBLEM!!! HE’S GONE NOW! HE’S BEEN GONE FOR YEARS AND I’VE BEEN FOLLOWING HIS LEGACY, DOING EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED WHEN HE NEVER EVEN CARED ABOUT ME!!!!!!!!!! I can’t even actually yell at him because he’s fucking dead! He got away with all of it…….”

“Then stop.”

“I CAN’T JUST FUCKING STOP! He has me fucking trained Jack. I don’t even know what I can do if it doesn’t involve him and what he wanted. Plus if I don’t destroy Freddy’s what DO I do? Where do I go? Do I even have a purpose?”

“Dave… you need to calm down. Listen to my voice. Just breathe.” Jack knows he can’t talk to Dave when he is like this, so he needs the man to calm down. Unfortunately this seems to have an opposite effect.

Dave practically runs over to table in the room. On it is a box cutter. His breathing is far too fast, and the panic is clear on his face.

Jack is unsure what’s about to happen until Dave opens up his shirt.

The orange man tries to stop him, he’s usually stronger than Dave, but in this adrenaline filled panicked state Dave manages to throw him off. Jack watches as Dave slices himself open.

Blood pours out of the wound as Dave grabs his scaly skin and pulls it apart, fully exposing his insides, or lack thereof. It’s a strange sight. Dave is missing all of his organs aside from his intestines, but everything seemed to be functioning normally, even the blood seemed to be flowing through nonexistent veins, with a nonexistent heart.

Dave looks down in horror at his empty body, and shoves his own hands in, trying to find some way to prove to himself it’s not true, hoping he’ll touch something. He finds nothing.

In his distraction Jack manages to rip the knife from his hands, the tape mentions taking parts of his brain too, and Jack knows he’ll check there next if he lets him. He jumps into action, ripping Dave’s hands out o his own body and closing up the scaley flesh as best as he can.

He sees a roll of duct tape laying on the table, he quickly grabs it and uses it to close the wound. It’s not a good, or elegant solution, but Dave won’t die.

“Dave, it’s true, you don’t have any organs. But what does it matter really, you’re still working fine.”

“I-it’s not about that. It’s about how… how… he… how he… tricked me. I don’t care that they’re gone… I just care that he took them.” Dave slides down onto the ground, curled up once again. 

Jack picks Dave up, and rocks him slightly the same way he used to do with his sister when she cried.

“How about we get your organs back? I’m sure he kept them somewhere. I’m not sure they’ll go in you the way they were before, but at least you’ll have them back so you won’t feel like he stole them from you anymore.”

Dave looks up at him. “I wouldn’t know where to look… I remember his operation room in his old house, but I was never allowed in, and I doubt he’d just keep my organs loose in there.”

“Maybe there’s a secret room off that?”

“Well I did always feel like the floor had too much of an echo, but Henry always told me there was no basement. He must have been lying.”

“I’ll drive you up there, we can trash the place while we’re there.”

Dave nods slowly, clearly not exactly cheered up or anything, but definitely sure of what he wants to do.

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The drive to Reno was long, and gave a lot of time for introspection.

Jack was driving his best friend to his childhood home so he could put his organs back in his body because his father figure removed them as part of an experiment he was never aware of. His friend’s father just so happened to have also murdered Jack’s own sister, and left Jack himself to slowly die. Definitely something if you told him he’d be doing now even days before his death, he would have socked you in the face.

It also brought up questions. For instance how did Dave’s soul just… decide to come back. He wished he knew that was an option sooner rather than sacrificing his own to come back to life with the conditions that he had to free all the souls. Dave had basically accidentally found immortality simply so that he could stay with his father. Which would be wholesome, uncharacteristically so for his lizard-esque friend, if not for his father being Henry.

Part of him was happy Dave had come back, his presence helped to make Jack’s not-life more bearable despite how annoying he could be. The more rational part knew that if Dave had just let himself die back then, he would be better off. Dave was innocent back then despite all the tragedy he had already endured in his life, if he’d died then, chances were he’d already be having his happiest day. Although now it was likely too late.

Fortunately for Jack’s mind, they soon reached their location. It was an old house behind Fredbear’s Family Diner.

The building brought back bad memories for both of them. Jack remembered his sister’s death and his own, Dave remembered all the many times he’d died in a springlock suit, and of course both remembered Henry.

The house was long abandoned, but the door had been sealed shut, Henry’s death has been seen as a murder and the crime scene was never opened to the public, everyone had simply forgotten by now.

Jack wedged the door open with a crowbar for Dave, and smashed in a window for himself, an old habit of his that he’d never managed to break.

The house was broken down but Jack could still see remnants of what once was in the wreckage. Cigarettes littered the floor, overflowing from ashtrays. The walls and floors were marked with scratches that uncomfortably resembled Dave’s claws but slightly smaller. The walls were dented as if someone had hit them.

Dave froze up when he saw the state of the house. It seemed with his delusions about who Henry was now gone, he had started to remember how the man actually treated him when he had taken him in in his teenaged years, and how this continued well into adulthood.

He remembered the abuse he endured in Henry’s ‘lessons’. How Henry had blinded his eye and scarred his back and Dave had never seen this as strange. After all, Dave had never had a family, so how would he know that they weren’t supposed to be this way?

Dave retreated back to the car and took a beer bottle from the trunk. He couldn’t do this sober.

The two oddly coloured men approached the operation room, what it had originally been was unknown.

Both were uncomfortable when they saw the room despite neither having ever seen it before.

It didn’t take long to find a hatch under a dresser the two shoved over, and they descended into the basement.

It was larger than expected, and quite cluttered, full of jars of organs, belonging to various people, papers covered every surface detailing some of Henry’s many theories, and there were overflowing piles of more tapes, ones neither wanted to listen to.

They found Dave’s organs in purple lidded jars. 

They most definitely were not human organs which caused even more clear discomfort. 

No one had ever known what Dave was, not even Dave himself. He had always wanted to believe he was human despite everything. This seemed to confirm that even beneath his aubergine surface he still wasn’t human.

Neither said anything about this however, and neither wanted to address it, Dave simply opened up the jars and put his organs back in how he could only assume they were supposed to go, as he had never seen them before now and didn’t know his own anatomy. He used some leftover thread from the operation room to stitch his organs back in place. They amazingly started working again as if they’d never been gone.

The two of them set to destroying the house, breaking anything that could be broken, drinking the whole time.

Eventually it became clear to even an alcoholic like Jack that Dave was drinking way too much.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” Jack asks, trying to take the bottle away from Dave.

“Naaaaaahhhhh… I baaaaarelyyyy feeeeeeelllll iiiiiit……….” Dave slurs, before downing the whole bottle and throwing it on the ground and retrieving another one. “Thiiiiiiisss oneeeesss foooooorrr yaaaaa daaaaad… yaaa pieceeeee offffffff shiiiiiiitttt. Fuuuuuck yaaaaaaa! Yeeeeeerrrr nooootttt myyyyy daaaaad anymoreeeee.” Dave toasts, before downing half of the bottle. “Yaaa ruineeeeed myyyyyy liiiiifeee anddddd noooooowww yeeeeerrr deaaaad andddd nooooooooobodyyyyyy willllll eeeeeeverrrrrr rememberrrrr yaaaaaaa! Sooooo haaaaaahhhhh… I stiiiiiiiiillll gettt the laaaaaaasssst laughhhhh…” he asks drunkenly and then drinks the rest, throwing it at a picture of Henry.

“Ok now that’s definitely enough.” Jack says.

Dave still doesn’t listen and goes out to the car to retrieve another beer and a canister of gasoline which he starts using to douse first the diner, and then the house itself before lighting up a cigarette and throwing it into the puddle when he finished it.

“Dave… DAVE! DAVE THE BUILDING IS ON FIRE GET THE FUCK OUT!” Dave doesn’t listen and can’t be dragged out no matter how hard he tries. “WILLIAM AFTON GET THE FUCK OUT OF THIS BUILDING BEFORE YOU FUCKING DIE!!!!!!!!!”

“Whaaaaatssss theeee pooooooointtttt… I’mmmm alreaaaadyyyyy deaaaaaddddddd, pluuuuuusss eveeeeennnnn iffffff I waaaaaaassssn’ttttttt, I doooooonnnn’ haaaaaaveeeeee muuuuuuchhhh toooooo liveeeee forrrrr…” Dave says, responding to the use of his real name, but not even seeming to register that Jack had said it.

“Look, life sucks. That’s true. Everyone wishes it wasn’t like this all the damn time. But burning yourself alive in your childhood home isn’t going to change anything!!!” Jack says, finally managing to pick Dave up bridal style and carry him out of the house. 

Jack places his friend in the passengers seat of the car, and then gets in himself. Sure driving in the drunken state Jack himself is in is not responsible, but he’s never been a responsible man and never would be.

Jack starts the long drive back to Bakersfield. 

About half an hour later, maybe less, Dave started crying, sobbing about everything that had been done to him, and what Henry had turned him into.

10 minutes later, he fell asleep on Jack’s shoulder.

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When Jack woke up, his first thoughts were of his horrible hangover, his seconds of the night before, and then his third of Dave’s sudden disappearance from where he had been placed the night before.

He panicked when he noticed the aubergine was gone, jumping out of bed and running out of his room to find Dave in the kitchen, smoking.

Jack breathed a sigh of relief, Dave wouldn’t have been able to survive on his own after everything that had happened.

After his initial relief, a feeling of awkwardness filled the room. “So uhhh…. Hi.”

“…Hello.” Dave replies, just as awkwardly as Jack.

Neither one says anything for 3 minutes, neither knowing what should be said.

“Listen… Sport I-“

“Don’t worry about it, everyone makes drunken mistakes. In fact, I’d say some of mine definitely have a little arson beat.”

The room falls silent once more.

“…Do you ever think you’ll be able to move past what he did?”

“Do you think you’ll be able to move past what we did to you?”

Jack falls silent.

“Look Jack, I’m not as stupid as I look. I know who you are, and I also know what we did to you and your sister. It may have taken time, but I figured it out. The only thing I don’t get is why you haven’t tried to kill me yet.”

“…I always felt like he was the one calling the shots. I never knew how to feel about you. It didn’t feel like you wanted to be involved at all. Sure I still hated you for awhile, but when I heard the tape the first time… well I stopped blaming you entirely.”

“Well will you ever be able to recover from what Henry did with my assistance?”

“No… I don’t think I will.”

“Then that’s my answer too.”

The room once again goes quiet.

“What now?” Jack asks.

“Well part of me wants to spend the rest of my life undoing everything he worked for out of pure spite, but I know that it’d be a worse punishment to just let his memory die with me.”

“Yeah. The souls deserve to be free, and I’m going to try to do that… but Henry can rot wherever he ended up because I’m done with all his shit.”

“So I’m thinking I just want to spend the rest of my life hanging out with you. And maybe unfucking his fuckups along the way.”

“I think I’d like that.”

“Can we go in late today? I really don’t think I’m in the right headspace to go anywhere near a Freddy’s location today.”

“Neither do I.”

The room falls silent again.

“Jack I-”

“I know Dave… and I do too.”