#mango writes

Somehow, it always came back to the taste of pizza for Michael.  Given his history and choices in employment, it was bound to happen, but as it stood the cloying taste of tomato and cheese grease clung to the back of his rotting throat as the temperature rose ever higher, reminding him of simpler if not equally as terrible times.

He couldn't even tell if the grease on his tongue was from his last, shitty meal or simply from the fire cooking him alive.

[When Officer Vanessa had asked the Glamrock Animatronics for help clearing out a sinkhole discovered under the indoor go kart tracks, Freddy was uncertain about her request.  Upon being actually lead there and traversing down carefully, however, he knew immediately why the animatronics were called down.]

He briefly wondered what exactly had led him to being here, but the answer was fairly obvious.  He'd seen a help wanted advertisement about the Fazbear Entertainment's franchising scheme and had applied, immediately getting it.  From there, he'd heard Uncle Henry on the tapes for the past week, and had been guided by a small assistant animatronic dubbed Helpy who also watched over him in his tiny vent-exposed office and assisted with testing out all the games.  Michael had been fairly certain he was the one and only franchisee  and that assumption had been more than confirmed at the end of the week, when Uncle Henry finally spoke up as the fires started.

This is where your story ends , he'd said.  And Michael was honestly alright with that.  He was tired .

Whatever the case may be, it wouldn't matter soon.  He'd made the absolutely bright decision to clamp the small figure of Helpy on top of the computer to his chest where the metal and plastic warped and melted to fuse with his already mutilated flesh.  He couldn't stop the tears from boiling tracks into his face as the roaring barely missed drowning out the pained and enraged howling of the animatronics trapped with him.  He pressed his lips into a thin line, enough that he might never open his mouth again from his decaying adipose tissue and muscle melting and melding shut, not that he would otherwise anyways.

The heat, the pain, the volume, it all reached such a cacophonous crescendo that it was genuinely difficult to parse when it all just... stopped.

[The pizzeria below the sinkhole was far beyond repair, according to Freddy's assessments.  Mold on top of scorch marks on top of general food debris made him almost wish he had a stomach with which to retch at the stench. He supposed that was why Officer Vanessa asked them to help clean up some. He didn't know why they were cleaning the abandoned and long buried place, but when asked all Vanessa would tell him was that they were 'salvaging'. For some reason that word made him feel uneasy, as if they were robbing a grave.]

Michael took a solid thirty seconds to register the fact that things had gone deathly silent and the pain had passed.  It took him another thirty for his grilled grey matter to process where exactly he'd been dumped.

He found himself somewhere completely black with some strange, fuzzy lines to sect reality into what resembled television scan lines, granted even more prominence with the odd red trees trimming his line of sight short.  He looked around the area a bit, brow knitting in confusion as he realized he had no idea where he was.

[He had picked his way around the debris carefully, melted wires fused into broken fractals as he maneuvered his way down into the oddly spacious vent system beneath the main building. The room he'd entered into seemed like it was full of debris. He shook his head and moved chunks of metal out of the way, gritting his plastic teeth with the effort as he excavated what looked like a strange, small office.  Freddy froze at what he found.]

"Michael."

The sound of someone calling his name made him jump as he whirled to look behind himself.  There sat a bleedingly red lake, and a darker red figure seemingly fishing in it.  The figure was vaguely humanoid, if not a bit fuzzy at the edges, and Michael couldn't help but be a bit on edge.

"Come have a seat."

The figure seemed to be wearing a long duster and a massive, wide-brimmed hat not unlike the Spanish La Catrina was often depicted with.  They turned their head, revealing a long, flat snout and jaw characteristic of cartoony alligators, and a piercing white pupil shone out of the otherwise pitch black eye from behind a pair of circular glasses.  Whatever this thing was, it wasn't human.

Michael was getting quite a bit sick of things that looked human enough to throw him off.  Incredibly so.

[It looked like someone had been in the office when the old pizza place had burnt down, unfortunately so.  All that remained was a mummified, torched corpse with its face trapped in the rictus of a fearful scream, some kind of melted mass of metal and burnt plastic practically hugged to its chest.  It seemed to sit in front of what at a glance resembled a desk with an ancient CRT computer monitor that must have run MS-DOS at the most up to date.  The chair under it was warped and drooping, but not fused to the flesh of the body at the very least. It looked utterly gruesome.]

"We have much to discuss."

Not quite knowing how to respond, he tucked some hair behind his ear as a reenacting of a long-dead habit.  "I'm... sorry, what ?  W-who-?" he cut himself off as he realized he's in the state he'd been in right before he got scooped.  Small mercies, he supposed, but it was enough to stun him into silence. He fought the urge to double check himself over to confirm this, keeping his eyes trained on the unknown variable instead.  Ignoring such urges was what kept him sort-of-alive, after all.

The gator person chuckled, and something about the sound was familiar as the figure in front of him turned fully towards Michael, looming yet sheepish.  "I guess you wouldn't recognize me like this."  The face seemed to warp and contort, as if a glitch had chased its way to reality, and Michael couldn't hold back his gasp that interrupted the next sentence he hadn't caught.

"Uncle Henry?" Michael hated how small his voice sounded, despite the sad yet warm smile that crossed the other man's face.

"It's nice to see you again, Michael." the engineer greeted with a mournful smile.

[For a brief moment, Freddy scanned the computer for anything useful, but it was beyond salvaging.  It was a wonder it was recognizable at all.  There was a flicker of  red on the screen for a brief moment, but Freddy discarded the idea as simply a glitch.]

The Afton recoiled a few steps.  "What is this?!" he snapped despite himself.  Henry's smile dropped, as if too tired for the facade.

"Most have a choice, to roam the earth for atonement or sit with the old man of Consequences Lake - with me - for a time until they're ready to brave either the forest or the lake alone.  The just are guided through the woods to greener pastures, the wicked are dragged into the lake, and the lost are trapped like the ones neither evil nor pure.  And yet you, Michael, are all and none of these."

"And how-how did you end up as the... the old man Consequences ?" Michael challenged, confused and scared.  The look Henry leveled him with was far more chilling than any haunted animatronic could dare recreate.

[Freddy hesitated, taking in the peculiar sight beneath him.  It could have been just the lighting or scorch marks, but was the person... literally purple?... It really should have been impossible, yet here he was staring down at what looked like exactly that.]

"I always have been.  Always would have been.  Would have always destined to be."  Henry pinched the bridge of his nose.  "Which is... confusing, I know.  But imagine if the boatman of the underworld hired a substitute to learn what it felt like to be human.  Only to have that human life ruined by a man becoming a self-made monster.  That's the long and short of... well, me."

His eyes softened at Michael.  "I hadn't even known until being back here brought me back to myself.  If I had known, I'd have told you much sooner."

Michael swayed on his feet, rocked by the knowledge that his father's former best friend had secretly been a ferryman of death in the afterlife this whole time living life as a human as a vacation trip.

Michael had seen and felt his fair share of strange things - being a ghost haunting his own corpse would do that to a person - but this felt like almost too much .

"Then this is it.  I'm really dead for good." Michael thinly mumbled.  "And my father is too, finally.  And I'm going crazy and imagining that death is my honorary Uncle and has been all along."

Henry nodded slowly, a small smile perking the corners of his lips.  "Yes.  Now, you can finally rest as you deserve to, Michael.  Sound of mind, may I add, as I very much am your Uncle Henry despite the apparent secret double life not even I knew about."

[For a moment, Freddy's curiosity almost won out over his directives as he reached down for the strange corpse, but was halted by a ping by the guard, freezing as if trapped between two warring sides of himself and unsure which set of orders to follow.]

Michael bit his lip.  "Do I really deserve it?" he asked.  "With the blood and ashes on my hands, am I really deserving of a peaceful rest?"

Henry ambled closer to Michael, looming over him in a way he had never done before.  "Does a single act of cruelty in a long lived life doom a soul eternally, Michael?" he asked softly.  "Does the mistake of a child permanently condemn the old man he becomes later?  Or is life too complex a tapestry for one single action or moment to define a whole life?"

"But-"

"What happened to your brother was by all intents and purposes an accident.  The mechanisms of the animatronic were far too strong for their intended purpose, and they should not have been capable of doing that.  And I know I wouldn't have overkilled the hydraulics like that."

[Freddy conducted a scan, looking for any reason to stay that Vanessa would approve of. There was still some usable circutboards and data in the lump of mangled material pressed into the corpse's chest, miraculously.  Perhaps that can be used in the Pizzaplex or for Vanessa's side project! Ignoring the more insistent pinging, he pushed aside the metal to move it out of his way and approached the corpse with intent, still scanning to satiate his curiosity.]

"I know." Michael basically whispered.  "I just... I ignored the way he begged, I ignored his fear and tears and just wanted to make him struggle .  And he died because of that negligence."  His vision blurred with tears.  "I've done my best to atone for it and fix my mistakes for the rest of my life, but can any atonement outweigh my guilt?"

"What will you do now, though, with your father gone?" Henry probed.  "With no clear purpose in mind?"

"I don't know." Michael whispered in admission.  "I've spent so much of myself on fixing my mistakes and my father's sins, I don't know what's left of me.  I thought I was ready to move on, but-but faced with having to make a choice about it, I don't know if I feel like I can take it without feeling like something's left behind."

Henry seemed to appraise Michael, expression grim and searching.  "You got such a rotten hand dealt to you, Michael," he eventually sighed.  "Cosmologically, you've done enough good to earn yourself a fresh new life to lead from scratch.  You've freed so many trapped children's souls, including your siblings, and brought your father to justice."

"There-there's a difference between doing good and being forgiven." Michael responded, voice getting wetter and more wretched by the moment.  He sniffled and wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand.

"Your brother forgives you." Henry quietly responded, words weighty as if he knew the emotional load of his very diction.  "He's seen how hard you've worked, how much you've given up to try fixing your mistakes.  How much you suffered at your father's hand."

Michael couldn't stop the increase in his tears, fully descending into a blubbering mess while subconsciously hugging himself and curling to double over and drop to his knees as if gravity had become too much for him to bear.  Henry knelt down and pulled him into a hug into which Michael let himself break down fully for the first time in who knew how long.

[On the more in-depth scans, Freddy found himself noticing even more metal interlaced throughout the human's body as if several surgeries had been performed, and a complete lack of bones or organs, and hadn't had any for so long that the whole body was completely gangrenous. How had this person survived that long enough to die here?]

"You can't let yourself rest, can you Michael?" Henry asked mournfully.  "No matter how much you do, you'll never feel worthy enough to rest like the others?"

Michael simply whimpered back, half wanting to sink into the lake as he substituted that with his uncle's comforting embrace.  Henry pulled back a little to look Michael in the eye.

"If you cannot rest yet, then..." Henry cut himself off with a sigh, a sad twinkle in his eye.  "Charlie, um..." the older man's voice noticeably cracked, and he cleared his throat.

"Charlie had a gift for you.  For a scenario like this.  Where she wouldn't be able to help." He smiled fondly for a moment.  "She'll be apprenticing with me soon, actually.  But that's besides the point.  She gave me the task of offering it to you."

Henry pulled a large if still pocket-sized present out of his coat to hand it to Michael.  "It's as small as it is because she didn't need to also call your ghost.  It's just meant to guide you where you need to go."

Inside innocently sat... something, clearly a plush toy of some kind that frazzled and changed shape now and again.  Rabbit, bear, canine, gator, like it couldn't decide.  A roulette wheel of animatronics.

Henry matched Michael's curious if wary gaze.

[Freddy gently cradled the corpse in his arms, easily prying it from the remains of  the drooping office chair.  He pinged Vanessa back with the signal that he'd found something interesting, and she finally relented.  He didn't notice the wires in the corpse's head and neck slowly drawing the corpse's face up slightly, or the release of the slightest final exhalation.]

"It's your choice, Michael."

Michael grimaced.  "But is it the right choice?"

Henry's eyes crinkled fondly.  "Hell if I know."

Michael hesitated a moment longer.

He reached into the box, grabbing the plush as it spasmed for a moment and froze on the sunny orange bear marked with bright cyan lightning bolts.  He lifted the doll to stare at it with a squint, utterly baffled by the character choice Charlie had made for him.

"... Freddy ?"

[Freddy froze.  Did someone say his name?  He could have sworn, somewhere in the back of his head where his code didn't quite reach, he felt a sort of strange sensation.]

"Freddy Fazbear ."

[He looked around in confusion.  Who was calling for him?  What sat in the back of his head was an odd pulling sensation, trying to draw his attention to something and away from the programming guiding his actions.]

"Uncle Henry, I-I don't-" he looked up to the reaper only to feel a sudden sensation of vertigo as the color bled out of the world.

[Freddy stumbled backward a few steps when he'd turned completely back towards the office as his sense of balance suddenly bucked as if his internal gyros had done a backflip, his vision glitching out suddenly with bright streaks of red.  He ended up hugging the corpse tightly to his chest, almost as if to swallow it into his body.  All at once,

He

knew

something

was

very,

very ,