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Michael’s palm slaps into his forehead with an echoing sound, quickly shushed by Elizabeth as though her constant meddling makes any difference.
“Don’t pull that shit, you British bastard,” Charlie snickers, punching him in the shoulder hard enough to knock his arm away from his face. “You and I both know you’ve never cared about safety a day in your life.”
Only in moments like these does Michael wish he’d left for the night guarding job without a single word to his siblings or cousin-in-all-but-blood. The moment he opened the envelope addressed to him in his father’s disgustingly consistent handwriting those two weeks prior, was the exact moment that he signed himself up for a fate worse than death.
“Are you sure this’ll be safe tonight?” Evan mutters, sounding almost frustratingly anxious. Like he’s somehow tired of the situation and simultaneously pissed off at how often it pulls him in.
Yeah, worse than death.
“Probably safer than last night, that’s for fuckin’ sure,” Elizabeth snorts, bumping their shoulders together in comfort as the elevator doors come to a creaky close and they begin their descent.
Michael sneers at the vivid, panic-filled memory from the past night’s shift. Of course, he’d obviously been careless enough to allow more than enough light to infiltrate their crawling radius in Funtime Auditorium. Foxy, their eyes locking onto brightness alterations in any form, took the golden opportunity when the flash of their light decorated their skin and uniforms. A part of him still thinks they should’ve thrown that shitty light out and felt around helplessly on the floor until they got there, the flashlight was more trouble than help in all situations, anyways.
He remembers the tight grip Foxy's teeth had on his arm, how it bled inside of the springlock suit and made him fear the worst. Everyone seems to forget about the problems with springlock suits and moisture, and when he realized that moisture included blood, there was an added rush of adrenaline in his veins that he voiced just as quickly. They were able to help him to a certain degree when it came to Ballora's Minireenas, but none of them knew how to break open those kinds of springlock suits.
Top ten worst moments of his life, and yet still number ten.
As he clears his throat and banishes the memory back to the farthest part of his mind, he rubs his hand gently over the small slice the springlock mechanisms had made on his wrist when he’d been shoved inside of that old suit. Charlotte must notice his movements, cause she looks at his face with her lips drawn into a small comforting smile. All he can do is smile back to show his genuine appreciation for her concern and lower his hands once more.
The Handunit model folds out from the wall and clicks into position at Michael’s waist, the stupid googly eyes that Elizabeth glued to it flying around with the motions. It’s always been enough to pull a small smirk onto his face, his sister was annoying but she could definitely be funny.
Their instructions for the night line up slowly in bright green text, as though being typed out from afar and loaded up onto the screen in front of his eyes. The name ‘Circus Baby’ floats onto the screen in chunks of letters, and he hisses without even looking at the following words.
Once he reads those words, however, he decides to speak to the group about his findings. “Uh, guys? We have a problem.”
Elizabeth turns her head, curly ponytail flying into Evan’s face at speeds he didn’t expect (as can be seen by his flinch backward and his hand covering his mouth). Looking into her older brother’s eyes with one eyebrow raised, she responds, “If you’re talking about the hammer over there, I don’t know if you know this, but that was the solution to yesterday’s problem.”
Michael slowly lowers his gaze and glowers at the crack in the Handunit’s screen, “Yeah, I’m aware, Liz.”
Without clarification, he turns the Handunit around on its stand, the words typed up clear as day on its display: “Perform maintenance on Circus Baby in the Main Power Module, and send her down to the Scooping Room to be dismantled and repaired correctly tomorrow morning by our technicians.”
Elizabeth grimaces, crossing her arms in response to the reminder that such an animatronic existed. William had constructed it just for her, after all, and it was a manifestation of all the things he loved about her, and the things she loathes about herself.
Evan sets a hand on her shoulder and squeezes to pull her out of her tense stance. Charlie grabs the top of the Handunit model and turns it directly to her, confirming the instructions with a frustrated sigh, “At least it’s our last day. I can’t stand this place, not when I know he was the one who made it.”
Michael hums, “No kidding, it absolutely reeks in here.”
Evan snickers against his better judgment, waving a pale hand in front of his face like he does when he hides his smile and tries to stop laughing. Michael grins, pushing the Handunit back into the wall, the sliding door locking behind it and blending into the remainder of the elevator interior.
The elevator opens to a wall covered in police tape, cautioning people not to enter through the vent opened up on the side of the wall right against the cold, metal floor. Grabbing a headlight and wrapping it around his forehead, Michael kneels down on the floor and waves everyone else down with him, “Well, let’s get it over with then, shall we?”
The Handunit's voice immediately begins reverberating through the crawlspace the moment they all piled in a row and the vent cover slid shut behind them, “Before I forget, there are two technicians currently on site today. Try not to interfere with their work, but if possible, ask them why they’re still here and tell them to go home.”
Michael shakes his head, muttering under his breath, “Why are we fixing her then…?”
Charlie pushes one of his feet forward and shushes him with a giggle. Mike nearly trips over his own leg in a crawl, cursing under his breath and whispering Charlie’s name in a disgruntled tone.
Ultimately, Michael shuffles into the primary Circus Control, leaning back on his feet with a small uncertain wobble as his ankles regain the feeling they lost along the small trek. He counts the others as they, too, crawl out of the vent. It closes behind Elizabeth, who followed after Evan the entire week because of his fear that there’d be something behind him, hunting him.
Michael slips off the headlight and shoves it in his front pocket without care for its quality.
“Well, let’s check on these two shites,” Elizabeth happily exclaims, despite the frustration bubbling up on her face like a burn. She steps up to Ballora’s control panel, the buttons flickering brokenly as though five seconds away from complete destruction. Pressing her fingertips to the dusty light button, the auditorium slowly fills with a dim glow.
Illuminating a limp human figure hanging from the archway Ballora should be twirling under.
Their faces fall slack with shock, the button continuously, unintentionally being kept pressed down, creating a mechanical buzzing noise that seems to fill the entire underground facility, and even possibly up the elevator amidst their obvious silence.
A type of nauseating guilt seemed to fill Elizabeth’s body, pooling at the bottom of her stomach and reaching up desperately to squeeze at her heart. Michael steps forward to grab her wrist and pull her shaky fingertips from the button, covering them once again in darkness and suffocating silence. He wraps his hand around hers, pulling her back so he can wrap his arms around her fully instead.
She spins around and squeezes Michael’s torso so tightly that the shaky inhale he’d taken before is forced back out. Her cheek presses against his polo shirt, her fruitless deep breaths flowing against the soft fabric. Michael peers back to his left, observing Evan’s nearly identical reaction. Turning his head to the right to gaze at Charlie earns a terrified, tearful look in her wide eyes.
He opens his arms and grabs the sleeves of their jackets, pulling them in and pressing a kiss to the top of their heads in a row. He stares into the darkness and blinks back tears, hoping that maybe he’d see the telltale sign of a flashlight from the technician, alive and well, looking for a way out of Ballora Gallery.
“What happened here…?” Evan’s question was anticipated by Michael in particular, the kid was curious since birth no matter how many tears plagued his eyes and raced down the rest of his face.
Michael shakes his head with his lips pursed, reaching toward his face with one hand as quickly as physically possible to wipe the tears from his cheeks and wrap his arm back around their backs.
“Dammit,” he curses, pressing his forehead to the top of Elizabeth’s hair, allowing his vision to be obscured by orange curls sprinkled with dust from the dirty-ass place where they work. He has his phone in his pocket, it would be an easy call for the authorities. However, the animatronics were still assumed to be active, or at least Baby is, and the officers would be torn to shreds in an instant if he allowed them access to the vents at this time late in the night. With a slight shake to his voice, muffled by Elizabeth’s curls, he insists, “We’ll call his death in as soon as our shift is over. If we can get this task done and get the evidence against William as quickly as possible…”
His sentence trails off, giving silence a home again, his face lifting from Elizabeth’s hair to look off into the darkness of Ballora Gallery again.
“Mike?” Charlie nudges him, unwrapping her arms from around his waist and trying to catch his rapidly moving eyes. She knows what that look means when showcased on his face, and when Michael puts thought into something that intensely, someone’s going to get hurt.
“Mickey…” Elizabeth backs up from his embrace as well to see where Charlie’s concern is coming from. “What are you debating, Mike?”
She flicks his nose and crosses her freckled arms in front of her chest, leaning on her toes to tilt her face a bit closer to him. He yelps and flinches, grey eyes blinking back into focus only to be half covered by a hand hovering over his abused nose.
“The fuck, Liz?” He huffs out a small laugh, crinkling his nose a bit to rid it of any remnants of pain. His smile falls with a sigh, as well as his hand. Michael gives one last squeeze around Evan’s shoulder and releases him entirely.
He leads himself silently over to the corresponding Funtime Auditorium control panel, hesitating to press his hand to the light’s button if he can anticipate the same horrifying view.
Michael’s almost glad he expected it, as another limp technician’s body hangs from Funtime Foxy’s archway, superseding their typical waving, singing self. A breath rushes to his lungs in a painful gasp, and he ceases his pressing of the button and turns his head back around before there can be another image burned into his retinas.
“I think we should split up in Funtime Auditorium,” he holds up a hand as soon as all three mouths open and three pairs of eyebrows furrow in frustration. “Hear me out. I go finish Baby’s maintenance, you three investigate William’s old office for any and every piece of evidence or research that incriminates him. I join you after I send her down to the Scooping Room.”
Charlotte swallows her nerves, licking her lips to wet them before responding, “He’s got a point.”
Elizabeth throws an arm up to gesture in a mocking way, “Him? Got a point? He hasn’t had a single point in his life!”
“Alright now…” Michael frowns and holds his hands up, palm out, “I’m not that bad.”
“You definitely are that bad, but…” Evan sighs and lowers Elizabeth’s arm manually, “We could be out of here in two hours, max.”
Michael places a soft hand on the top of Elizabeth’s head and looks down at her so he can meet her green eyes (ones that he wishes he had gotten instead of William’s), “I know you worry, and I appreciate you for doing something William couldn’t do if he tried.”
She chuckles breathily, “You’re a fuckin’ plonker, you know that?”
Michael raises an eyebrow and bends down to envelop his arms around her waist and lift her up against her will. She yelps and clocks him on the back of his head with the heel of her fist, “Oh, fuck you!”
“You might be tall, but you’re still weak!” Michael swings her from one side to the other.
She gasps and presses two fingers into his neck, right where pressure points lie under the skin. He drops her and places his two hands over the sides of his neck with a shiver down his spine.
“You’re such a cheater,” he wheezes, punching her in the shoulder with his first free hand.
Elizabeth tilts her head and walks to Charlie with a knowing smile plastered annoyingly on her face, “Not my fault you decided mechanics and art were your two specialties. Maybe you should’ve gone to college for something more important! Huh, Mighty Mike?”
He knew she'd take any possible route in conversation if it allowed her to make fun of his art degree compared to her's in medicine, and even if it never quite bothered him, her smug look always made him want to seek some form of miniature vengeance. Michael points at her and looks at Evan, who has been covering his mouth to keep in laughs and failing miserably the entire time, “Well, because of her, I’m leaving to help Circus Baby alone whether you guys want me to or not.”
She scoffs playfully and pulls two levers on the back wall, opening up the Funtime Auditorium vent.
He rolls his eyes and grabs the light from his pocket to slip it over his forehead, kneeling down to the cold ground and nearly falling on his ass. With a bang of the side of his fist on the side of the vent to catch himself and a cackle from Evan in response to his mistake, he shuffles into the vent and begins the smaller trek to the auditorium, listening intently to the other shuffles from behind him for the sake of his own peace of mind.
The suffocating darkness from Funtime Auditorium may be useful, but will forever and always be the worst thing Michael has ever experienced. Foxy requires absolute darkness while not active during the day, responding violently to bright lights and hounding like some sort of crazed moth that somehow got rabies.
Probably from Elizabeth, to be honest.
As Michael attempts to breathe as slowly and carefully as possible within the large room, he feels choked up regardless of the actual air quality. He counts his siblings and cousin by the sounds of their steps and the small glints of metal rings and rims of glasses reflecting off the arch at the end of the auditorium.
He places a finger to his lips and reaches out to the first hand that touches his, finding Evan’s easier than he anticipated. Michael slips the headlight from his head and places it in his hands, whispering, “Just in case.”
Evan clenches the light in his fist and wraps his arms tightly around Michael’s torso, “Please be safe.”
His small mutterings are felt more than heard against his shoulder, but regardless of how understandable they were, he kisses Evan’s temple and smiles.
“I promise,” he grabs the boy’s pinky with his own, shaking it once before letting go and disappearing into the void-esc auditorium.
Evan was quick to reach for Elizabeth’s hand after Michael disappeared from his sight, albeit not great in that room particularly. She grasps it and squeezes it thrice, pulling both him and Charlie forward and to the left a substantial amount. The blueprints Michael had found before they left to get these jobs were incredibly useful, hidden in one of the many organized drawers in William’s at-home office.
They found an unlabelled room, one that looks like an office that’s off-limits to typical employees. Typical employees, that is, meaning anyone that isn’t William Afton. Elizabeth remembers rolling her eyes at the wording on the blueprints, nudging Michael, and pointing to it with a laugh from her seat on the arm of the couch.
“Does he think we’re idiots? This is the most obvious thing he’s ever left behind.”
She smiles at the recent event, all of them sorting through evidence already gathered on their townhome floor. The cat, Truffle, sniffed around and scared herself whenever she stepped too heavily on a sheet of paper. She’d always run to Michael, the infamous cat mom of the house (a nickname that he pretends to hate).
There was one blueprint she was perturbed about, she thinks as she runs her hand along the left wall and waits for a dip in the paint indicating a door. The Scooper, a machine made to take endoskeletons out of animatronics by force, and inject remnant into their metal in the process. Remnant, a substance that no one had even a hint of knowledge of, something that eludes them every time.
Her hand dips into the wall, nearly throwing her off balance amidst her thoughts.
“Ackk-!” Elizabeth feels Evan run into her left side and stumbles into the door, grabbing onto the handle with one hand while the other is shoved on the doorframe for balance. After the initial shock leaves her without adrenaline running through her veins, she allows a quiet wheeze to get past her lips.
She knocks on the door to alert both Evan and Charlie that she found the very room they’d wanted to investigate since day one.
At least there were no more active animatronics. Except for one, but she’s with Michael for maintenance which Elizabeth believes to be unnecessary considering how sentient she seems to be, and she would rather not think about that anyway. A sentient animatronic with violent tendencies and a stature of seven feet? Currently with her brother on the other side of the auditorium? Fuck that.
The door clicks and allows light into the room, which makes her rush a bit too fast into the office under the impression that Funtime Foxy was rushing across the room to leap into them as they lept into Michael the day before. Evan and Charlie seem to have the same instinctual reaction, breathing a sigh of relief when the door is shut safely behind them.
When they gain control of their heart rates and a key understanding of their surroundings, a few details lay around that have nothing to do with the research William had been conducting. Unusual for the man who’d murdered in cold blood, children dead under his hands and placed in robots he used to love.
Before any of them can get a word out about that fact though, the Handunit’s voice makes them jump with its terrible echo that makes the room seem so big but far too small at the same time.
“It seems that you have accidentally wandered into a restricted area. Due to the sensitive nature of the materials that you may be exposed to here, you will not be allowed to leave until the clean-up crew arrives at 6 AM,” Evan’s eyes widen in fear, and he’s only calmed by the calmer look that Charlie and Elizabeth seem to carry with them. More annoyed than horrified at the concept; Evan believes that maybe he can be the same. “So hang tight. Rest assured that you will be promptly rescued, fired, and sent home. Thank you for being an employee. We hope your experience has not been as regrettable as ours.”
Elizabeth scoffs, her laughter layered in disbelief.
“What an arse,” she clears her throat and goes on to mock him as she opens the first drawer in the desk, “‘We hope your experience has not been as regrettable as ours!’ The only regrettable thing you’ve done is existed.”
Charlie whistles and pats Elizabeth on the back, “Alright, honey. The machine’s already been through enough, especially with us.”
Evan shrugs and stares at the Fredbear plush that used to belong to him, “I don’t know, I would’ve liked to hit it once with the hammer too!”
Elizabeth snaps and points a corresponding finger gun back towards her brother, “That’s the spirit, Ev.”
Charlie follows Evan’s gaze and pauses in her motions as well, “Oh, Ev. Is that…?”
Evan nods regrettably with an anxious bob of his throat, “William must’ve taken it back… I remember it talking in his voice but I never thought he was actually…”
Evan’s hand grazed the top of a walkie-talkie, sitting right beside the ever-glaring plushie, a gift from William on his fifth birthday that he never let go of for years.
Elizabeth takes a deep breath and crushes one of the crumpled pieces of paper further in a fit of anger, releasing it with a breath like a bomb ticking and detonating in quite an anticlimactic way. She unfolds the paper and stretches the wrinkled corners out fiercely, “I never think I can despise him more, and then he just does shite-”
“Agreed,” Charlie fumes, grabbing her empty, flat backpack and setting it up against the desk. “Alright, anything you deem important, pack it up. Then we get Mikey.”
Evan smiles, slightly forced after the confirmation of one of his worst fears, and adjusts the loose, unfitted glasses on his face, “Sounds like a plan.”
Papers shuffling on desks, hitting the ground with small thuds, being crumpled back up and shoved further up the desk or toward the vent up on the wall - these things fill the silence that they left behind. Michael was always there to fill them in with some stupid story on the car ride to work, down the elevator, to the vents, and especially at home. So silence in any capacity is alarming, and unfamiliar after so many years of living with him as the only adult figure they have.
They just didn’t think he’d ever fill the silence with anything else.
“HELP! PLEASE-” a distant voice, familiar.
Evan and Elizabeth’s heads lift from their respective places of search.
“What… was that?” Charlie asks uncertainly, hesitant to suggest that it was their missing member screaming desperately from another end of the auditorium.
“LIZ,” the voice cried out, sounding panicked, “EV, CHARLIE, PLEASE-”
Elizabeth throws herself toward the door, pulling it open hard enough that the hinges could’ve easily bent off after years of rust. Evan and Charlotte trip over themselves into the darkness, not even bothering to close the door to the office behind them. The light that leaks through in a slowly increasing stream helps them see the closing door in the distance, right across the auditorium from their preceding location.
The Scooping Room.
Fuck.
Charlie, a former track runner, slams into the door at a high speed. With adrenaline coursing through her veins so strongly that it felt as though her body was ice and flame at once, grabbing the handle and tearing the door open should’ve been an easy feat. However, when she attempted to press down on the handle and push the door open, she was met with force pushing back from the other side.
“STOP, PLEASE-!”
Elizabeth fumes, bellowing expletives under her breath as she rears back and slams her shoulder into the creaky metal with every ounce of strength in her body. If Michael is going to be an asshole and get hurt after convincing them that he’d be fine, she’s going to need to have a few words.
The door’s top hinge snaps with a booming clack, leaving Elizabeth hissing in sympathy for her soon-to-be-bruised shoulder and backing away from the pure force of the movement. Evan steps forward and gently moves Elizabeth back, slamming his elbow and shin into the bottom of the door to finish the job. As the door disconnects from its rusted, ancient hinges and falls to the ground with a bang that resonates through their ears, Evan nearly falls into the room and doesn’t catch the exact same glimpse that Elizabeth and Charlie are cursed with, in an attempt to catch himself before falling.
A bundle of wires, spare animatronic eyes still blinking and moving, claws from Freddy and Foxy positioned at strange angles, and a single clown mask that Charlotte swears she threw out. Wires from the main bundle run out and through the door to the actual terrifying piece of remnant-infected machinery, holding their line of hope by the neck and arms in front of it as he screams and writhes in an attempt to get out. There are tears glistening in the white fluorescent light, shimmering on his reddened cheeks, presumably from the grip the wires have on his neck.
“The Scooper only hurts for a moment,” a rhythmic beeping sound with a flashing red light from the top of the room accompanies Circus Baby’s voice, or at least what remains of her voice.
Charlie has a few seconds to react, and she convinces herself to move forward and use them to the best of her ability. Stepping into the room and shaking herself of her frozen state in one split-second, she leaps towards the wires and wraps her arms around the space right below the white clown mask, then pulls.
The angle of the push and sudden pull to the side that Charlotte planned before jumping in creates difficulty for the bundle of spare parts to keep their grip on Michael steady. He’s swung to one side and then the other, and with one more swing he could be just far enough not to be-
CLANG
…
The grip on Michael’s arms and neck finally gives, leaving the scooper on its own to fling forward through Michael and throw him back-first into the wall.
The clown mask turns to Charlie, but before it can make a move with one of the many groups of claws it possesses, Elizabeth steps forward and cracks it with her boot. She sneers at the whimper-like noise it makes but takes pride in the way it skitters out the door like a wounded animal the minute it notices that it’s outnumbered.
When Charlie grabs Elizabeth’s hand and is helped back up to her unsteady feet, with extra support, they remember what called them here. The thud of Evan’s shoes slamming into the metal floor is followed quickly by two other pairs of heavy footsteps and the fall of glasses from his face, shattering on the metal.
As they struggle with the door a second time, through the window they’re able to catch a glimpse of a heavily wounded Michael shuffling up to stand with his back against the wall. He swings on his feet with one hand shakily making its way to the wound, the other hovering further away in fear of the incoming pain that pressing on the chasm the scooper created will incur.
Just as Charlie finally gets the door to swing open, Michael falls forward onto the floor, catching himself with the hand formerly hovering in fear and yelping at the sudden pressure. He collapses forward atop his arm, the hand curling into a fist as it falls beside his face, forehead pressed to the ground. There’s sweat beading on his face, his cheeks puffy from the tears and lack of air from before, his eyes and eyebrows are scrunched further together, and his teeth are clenched tightly as he heaves breath into and out of his lungs.
Charlotte’s eyes peer blurrily at the crimson stains covering the chipped black nail polish on Michael’s fingernails, and screams his name with everything her throat can give.
She tears across the floor and falls to her knees so harshly that she’s sure they’re bruised and cut up from impact alone, turning him over onto his back and fearfully taking in the dark blood pooling around her knees. She surveys the damage as Elizabeth and Evan join her in helping Michael, her vision nearly turning bloody itself just from the sheer amount of it her retinas burn into her memory for future nightmares.
Charlie sees a glimpse of a lighter, pink object in the blood. Intestines, perhaps. She feels bile rise in her throat and fall right back down when she sickeningly swallows, throat bobbing with anxiety and a new river of tears pouring from the corners of her eyes and over her shivering chapped lips.
Michael looks up at her with glossy gray eyes, body convulsing as he flinches.
Evan, sharply taking in gulps of air, shrugs off his jean jacket and bundles it up into a smaller, thicker shape of denim. He sputters, “I’m so so sorry, Mikey-”
When the denim presses deeply into his side, shoving past the pools and near waterfalls of blood (not to mention the organs that were possibly hanging behind it all, Michael screams.
It was as though the scooper itself had also scraped and mutilated the vocal cords in his neck. The noise that left his agape mouth was spine-chilling, more of a grating rasp than anything else. It trails into a heavy, chest-heaving sob as he turns to the other side in a failed attempt to get away from Evan’s hands.
Failed, because Charlie catches him with a hand placing intense pressure on his shoulder and pushing him back to the ground below. Directly impacted once more by the jacket pressing into him, into ribs ripped apart and dismantled, into lungs pierced and torn like balloons after a party, he hazily reaches a hand up to grasp and pull at Charlie’s wrist. His strength fades too fast to have any large impact on his position, at just as fast a rate as the blood from his side pooling far enough to be staining the tan of their dress pants.
Elizabeth unfastens his hand from Charlie’s wrist and grabs it in her own, interlocking their fingers and shaking it around gently as though that’d bring him back to full consciousness, a naive hope, “You’re safe, Mike-”
His head turns and rocks on his neck in her direction, but his mouth is still agape enough to be making smaller noises and reminders of pain known, and his eyes are growing duller and hazier as he stares distantly into nothing. His hair is splayed out below him, frizzy curls covering parts of his face in ways that should be uncomfortable, but he makes no move to fix that easier predicament at all.
Michael jerks in pain with a cough-like noise, and then actually begins to choke, his back bending with the force of each one from what’s left of his lungs. Charlotte pulls the hair from Michael’s face and angles his head further towards the floor by his chin as though he were simply sick and nauseous. “It’s okay, Mike, just let it out. It’ll all be okay.”
She still isn’t sure what he’s choking on, but each gulp of air sounds desperate enough to be choking, and she can’t do anything about it because there’s barely any chest left to do compressions. His head and chest finally relax, melting into the cold ground below as his head flops lazily once more in Elizabeth’s direction.
Charlotte grasps gently onto his cheeks, pulling his head back up only to let out a sob of her own at the blood staining his teeth and tongue a scarlet red, running down from both corners of his lips as though splitting his skull in half. It falls into his hair, only really showing on the few stress-gray hairs he’s gained over his younger years.
He's doomed to his fate, Charlie knows there's nothing she can do to actually help him. She can let him know that he'll be okay, even if not in their plane of existence, but she can't let his siblings know that she's already pushed the idea of stopping the blood flow away.
“Mikey?” Elizabeth runs her fingers up through his bangs with gentle caresses to get them off of his forehead, “Can you hear me?”
She bawls, her face a puffed up rose-tint as she sniffles and speaks through tears, “We’re trying to help, Mikey, you have to let us help you-”
Michael desperately shakes his head, cheek hitting the floor when he can’t hold it up anymore. Now facing Evan, who still presses into the wound with tears on his own cheeks and his teeth grinding together, he begs.
“Ple-Please… Make it stop-” Blood bubbles and curls over his lips with each word spoken through them. Charlie folds the sleeve of her jacket over the heel of her palm and wraps her hand around his jaw, pulling it up so she can reach the streams of blood. With the denim, she attempts to clean his face at least slightly. A desperate, last chance at comfort.
“Shh…” Charlie hushes his sobs like a mother would, ignoring her blood-drenched clothes sticking to her skin and reminding her of Michael’s tear-filled dull eyes and his paling face as all the blood he has streams from the wound that William’s machine made.
That William made.
Charlotte snivels, “I know, I know… I’m sorry…”
Evan presses deeper still as the blood finally flows from one side of the jacket to the next. He keens and angrily bellows a noise from deep in his chest, “No, fuck-!”
His eyes meet Elizabeth’s, the same color as his own, and without a single word she nods and shrugs off her own jacket. She tosses it over Michael’s body and watches as Evan quickly presses it over the bundle he made of his own jacket, almost laying it around the wound and pressing it all over instead of in one place.
Like he’s hoping the denim will melt into Michael’s skin and his brother will make fun of him for worrying so much like he always does.
Michael barely winces, only whimpering through lips that once nearly matched the tone of the blood paving its way down his cheeks, now a faded blue.
With his remaining strength, he clears his throat and coughs up the smallest amount of blood making its way into his lungs and not out onto the floor of the Scooping Room. “S-Sorry… Wanted to protect you-”
“No, Michael. No, you don’t have a single thing to apologize for,” Elizabeth grows louder and more desperate as she begs and pleads to a god she doesn’t believe in. “It’s okay, you’re okay-”
Mike simply smiles with his blued lips, “Love you gu-guys, so much.”
The syllables become longer, consonants and vowels inconsistent and dragged out as though the control over his speech has been lost in his brain for good.
Evan wails, a rumbling in his throat as he can only observe blood making its way through both jackets, dying them a scarlet red.
And while the jackets’ colors morph from blue to the red of Michael’s blood, his lips and fingertips go from a warm pink that they’re familiar with to the blue on the edge of the jacket sleeves.
Charlie’s chest caves inward with the force of another cry as she takes in the color of the siblings’ coats.
She whines in sympathy through her sobs, “We love you, we always will…” She places a hand on his wrist, comforting him with any lie she can possibly spew if only for her own peace of mind, “But you can’t leave just yet, you can sleep in a couple of hours, I promise you, Mickey-”
He throws her hand off his wrist unknowingly to wrap his cold fingertips around her cheek and wipe as many tears away as he can with a shaky thumb. He weakly smiles without his teeth, drifting his hand to cup Elizabeth’s cheek and pushing her more prevalent curls from her face. It’s as though he’s soaking in the last bit of warmth before he submits to the cold will of death’s mistress.
With a slow movement of the arm closest to his gaping wound, he whimpers brokenly and grabs Evan’s hand, thumb trailing around the grooves in his knuckles with a sigh.
“Be safe…” He whispers, his voice raspy and kind as always. His eyes drift off heavenward as the last of his blood falls from his lips and into his hair, “Please…”
His last of his tears fall, leaving behind glimmering, quickly drying tracks on his cheeks.
“No, no no Michael-” Elizabeth begs as Mike’s hand falls off his cheek and to the ground. She places his head in her lap and places her hands on the sides of his face.
“We’ve got you, it’s okay now!” She cries hysterically, wailing into the skin below and replacing his own past tears with hers, “Just wake up and we can make everything okay, I promise-!”
She moves one hand from his face to the left side of his chest, the side missed by the Scooper when it initially made contact. The lack of his formerly unstable pulse against her palm brings the sound of her own blood rushing into her ears. At least he had a pulse then.
Charlie leans forward with jittery movements and pulls both jackets from his side, tossing them like wet laundry toward the remaining pieces of animatronic shells. Evan presses his lips to Michael’s forehead, face scrunching up in agony as he grips the lapels of Mike’s ripped jacket between his fingers, just like he used to do when he was too young to understand that his shadow wouldn’t harm him. Not quite tall enough to even reach Mike’s waist, but still clutching at the bottom of his shirt anyway.
As Elizabeth crosses her arms on his chest and allows her ponytail to fall into the blood-soaked wound, Evan covers Michael’s open eyes with tears still falling from his, closed as tightly as possible. Charlotte’s sobs lay heavy in her chest and rupture her throat with each one that is able to pass through and out her lips.
She knew he wouldn't be okay. Charlie knew that Michael wouldn't make it. From the moment he opened his mouth and blood poured down his chin she knew he was too far gone.
So why does it hurt so badly?
Within her mind, she continues to silently ponder that pain. And as the rest of Michael’s body becomes just as cold as the metal below, blood spreading slowly through the grooves of the floor, she bows her head close to his chest and screams.