Chapter Text
He couldn’t remember when it was that the nagging feeling in the back of his mind first reared its ugly head. No, he just couldn’t recall. He couldn’t remember ever acknowledging as that feeling spread about his body throughout the day. Brain, throat, veins, fingers, torso. It became apart of him. It stayed apart of him even after the clock struck six. Stayed apart of him even within the time frame he had to contemplate his temporary freedom from that damned pizza chain.
This feeling, if you could call it that, remained persistent in his being. Stubborn and a sight for sore eyes it was, but the man, never quite having a sense of ‘better logic’, refused to deem it an annoyance. It became something more akin to a guilty pleasure. Not even a ‘guilty’ pleasure. For a dead man, he’d never felt so alive with it, and god be damned, he wasn’t about to let it go.
Hell, it almost felt like having a heart.
William Afton could never be David Miller. William Afton could never be Henry Miller. He knew that. ‘Dave Miller’ was the closest William ever got to truly embodying Henry, a pathetic attempt to be the son he once had, but even then, it never rocked him to the core to realize it just wasn’t possible.
He was his own person (to a certain extent), with his own dialect, his own persona, definitely not just a purple version of hit antihero deadpool, so on and so forth. Henry served as an inspiration. A beacon. His science was no less than genius, his morals no less than those of god.
The greatest feeling in the world is to simply feel indefinitely. That’s what Henry had taught, or at least what William had learned, what he had gotten out of those terrible rants.
Those sickening rants.
Those blasphemous tangents with the twisted scalpels, the bloody wrenches, the sharp wires, the
Purple digits graze over scarred, battered skin. Hollow eyes glance over in question to meet his own cold stare. The suspicion that immediately clouds those dark pits, over such a small gesture, shouldn’t be as funny as it makes itself out to be.
A shit eating grin is cracked, violet fingers becoming more confident in their movements as they glide across the man’s arm, winding their way down to snake loosely between their orange counterparts. His smirk grows wider, and is consequently met with the held hand swatted away, the perpetrator deciding to instead spin around and busy himself with the disengagement of suit springlocks. The springlocks of spring bonnie.
The springlocks of the wrong suit.
That orange bastard couldn’t fake indifference for shit, not when it was just the two of them. A hint of a smile was all the purple man needed to see, and a hint of a smile he saw. And that feeling roared in his mind and his empty chest once again, ever so gloriously present in his subconscious. The best feeling in the world. But it couldn’t be. Surely there’s been better feelings.
Maybe Henry had been wrong?
Dave landed with a heavy thud on cold concrete floor. Glowing irises snapped awake as his brain was forced to whip itself back to reality. From his position on the ground, he was able to partially take in the presence standing over him. He opened his mouth, completely prepared to make some grand remark. A pathetic whine of discontent escaped his lips instead. Ah. Maybe closing his mouth was the better option. Maybe it was smart to keep shut this time. According to the black slacks in front of Dave’s face (they seemed to glaring just as hard at him as he was at them), the man was about to get a harsh lickin’ thrown his way.
Luckily enough, the man standing over him was just as, if not more, unwilling to strike up some extravagant conversation.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d assume you were planning on staying the night, Dave.”
The usual robotic drone of Scott’s voice was even more dead and dreary than Dave thought previously possible. It held no malice, and even the sarcasm that was clearly trying to be presented was no more than half assed.
The purple man finally flipped his body around to fully gaze up at the figure addressing him. How a rotary phone could hold such a hopeless expression was beyond him. How that rotary phone could quickly notice Dave’s curious gaze and fix itself info a more closed off, serious expression, was even further beyond him.
Sometimes it was hard to tell what was plastic. What was human, and what only appeared to be. When it came to that red receiver, that manufactured capitalistic piece of shit, the illusion of humanity behind it was, occasionally, almost too realistic.
Dave didn’t like it. So he scowled at it. Stupid phone. “Doors need to be locked till the evening shift can come around.” The violet man still didn’t provide a verbal answer, instead turning his furrow towards the bench he’d tumbled from. “Neither of us want to deal with each other,” continued the phone, taking on a certain crack in his voice, presumably caused by this new lack of interest on Dave’s side. One could only speculate.
The distinctive clatter of keys fell by his head, that of which was still glaring fiercely at the lopsided bench.
“Why don’t you lock up for a change, Dave? Do something useful around here for once.”
Right. Bitter and curt as always. When it came to the two of them, at the very least. Both of them were rather difficult personalities, the mismatch didn’t quite come with much surprise.
His palm closed itself around the cold metal of the keyring. He pushed himself to his feet slowly, dusting the grime off his clothing. Not out of hygienic purposes, but anything to avoid the plastic cube that could only, at this point, be sporting a look of something wicked. He really ought to have started talking, but the bitter impatience forming a cloud over his boss’s head only seemed to serve as some sort of sick challenge to him.
Dave shoved the palmed keys harshly against his boss, who stumbled back as the metal pieces fell from his chest. Lightly tanned hands fumbled so as to not drop them. The purple man brushed past his phone headed companion. If it hadn’t been for the harsh physical response to the phone man’s taunting, it would’ve seemed almost as if he’d never even acknowledged his presence. He threw open the door of the safe room, quite ready to leave that damned pizzeria before his freak of a superior could open his trap agai
“Why can’t you just forget about him?”
Dave petrified on the spot.
Henry.
His head rotated slowly, (a perfect 180 degrees, to be exact) finally with the intent of looking his supervisor in the eye, but the man was still frozen from where he’d stumbled back.
His shoulders were slumped, and he seemed to hesitate before continuing to speak. “I don’t even know why I care.”
He knows about Henry.
“Maybe I’m just trying to excuse my own guilty conscience, who knows?”
Do I have the physical advantage here? ..fuck no, I don’t, what are ya even thinkin, you twig?
The phone guy paused again, as if trying to piece his next few sentences together in a way that sounds even remotely coherent.
I need my hands back on those keys, probably.
“My point is, just leave him alone.”
Jump him and wrangle the keys from there?
“Leave all of us alone”
Could just ask for ‘em back, right?
“Everyone and their great aunt knows you intend to sink to the very bottom of this company, to get to its roots. For the record, I could care less about what you plan to do when you achieve that.”
What are the technicalities of stabbing a symbol of corporate power to death?
“But you don’t need to drag the kid down with you”
Dave’s train of thought halted as quickly as it started. Henry can’t be dragged down for shit.
Finally, his boss turned and pushed past him, and through the door he’d been frozen into holding open. Ain’t no kid either, for that matter. So then who-
Scott glanced back at him expectantly, clearly not actually willing to lock up with someone like Dave still in the building. Again with the uncanny expression that someone of his type shouldn’t be able to convey, the purple man was hit with a stare of pure disgruntlement.
Just like that, the man standing in front of him was a carbon copy of a much more cherished coworker of his. Suddenly, a few puzzle pieces clicked together in his mind. Of course he wasn’t talkin ‘bout Henry, ya dunce. The annoyed tapping of the foot and everything, how had Dave never noticed the similarities? Fazbenders has a knack of dragging in birds of a feather, so it wasn’t the most surprising revelation, he presumed.
The main doors closed behind them, Scott only stopping to bolt them shut. 7 o’clock, it’d probably only be a half an hour longer till the next group of contract bound cretins arrived, but thirty minutes is more than enough for the barbarians inside to break out and cause some nasty damage to the surrounding streets.
“Maybe that’s my deal. I need to actually stop caring, instead of just saying I don’t,” Scott sighed mostly to himself, snapping Dave out of his internal rant over Freddy’s. “You two are so similar I might be sick, phoney,” the purple man cracked an ugly smile. “Always the biggest stick up ya asses, always pretendin’ like you too good to give a shit ‘bout shit, ya followin me?”
The phone man stiffened slightly. “N’ the sarcasm. The depressin as shit sarcasm!”
“What does that have to do with-”
“Always goin on mysterious rants ‘bout ya life failures-”
“Dave-”
“The speech patterns, the deadbeat n irritable mood-”
“I’m not-”
“Hell, if you weren’t ugly as shit, I’d bet you were twins-”
“Excuse me?”
Dave turned to leave, still grinning. “I won’t be leavin your soul-brother alone, Scott, so I won’t even give ya the false hope.” He glanced back, unaware that the man was no longer listening. “But I’ll treat him right, pinkie promise,” he stuck up and wiggled his smallest purple digit. “G’night, bossboy!”
Just like that, Peter Kennedy was left dazed on the spot, his mind going millions of miles per hour.
Anger, because Dave doesn’t know when to shut up. Horror, because Dave has newfound analytical capability.
Fear, because Dave had caught him utterly vulnerable.
Despair, because Dave had completely unknowingly sent him down a rabbit hole and solved his problem at the same time. Dave broke his whole fucking code just by talking.
Brother. He had a brother. Who this brother was, he didn’t know. It was too unlikely to consider Jack as Dave had implied, so he let the thought die. It didn’t matter. Peter Kennedy had a human family, with human memory. Scott Cawthon is a program. The purple bastard didn’t even realize how accurate his joking was.
’Where do I even go from here?’