Chapter Text
The door – or at least, one of the doors – to the boiler room burst open, in the usual, characteristically Maggie-esque way. Freddy Krueger took a deep breath – some habits died hard – and wondered if he had time to grab a beer or some whiskey or something before whatever was about to happen began. Or I could always pretend I’m not home.
But it was too late; Maggie was stalking into the main “room” – not angrily, to Freddy’s surprise, but giddily triumphant. Aoife followed in her wake, looking just about the polar opposite – the young woman’s face looked pale, or at least lighter, than usual; she was using her walking stick; and her movements were shaky, jerking. She’s gonna lose it. Soon.
“I’ve got him!” Maggie crowed, voice reverberating off the pipes so that Aoife flinched hard, and Freddy felt his teeth start to grit themselves. “I’ve finally got that greasy bastard! He thought he could just kick me off the premises and forget about me, but I’ve got photographic evidence!”
Freddy didn’t bother to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “What the hell are you yelling about?”
Aoife spoke up for the first time. <She suggested we take Hel to a place she knew,> she began darkly, and Freddy wasn’t oblivious to the death glare she was shooting at Maggie. <It’s one of those places that Crys says you see around on Earth for kids, with arcade games and a ballpit and pizza. It was called…> She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to recall the name. <“Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza.”>
“It’s the predecessor to Chuck E. Cheese’s,” Maggie interjected. “It’s a chain; they’re all over the country. But this one franchise, I’m familiar with,” she added darkly. “Really familiar.”
<We got there, and things seemed fine. Hel seemed to be having fun, and everything. She liked the ball pit,> Aoife continued. <Maggie left our table, but I just assumed she was going to the bathroom or something. Then, a little while later, Hel told me she was going, too.
<The next thing I know, the manager is leading Maggie back to our table and telling me she was sneaking around in ‘employees-only’ space, and before I can deal with that, there’s this giant scream and Hel comes running back out, crying and with red – with blood – all over her hands!>
One of the smaller pipes behind the three of them burst. Uh oh.
<You used my daughter!> Aoife roared at Maggie now. <She could have di – well, she could have been injured and traumatized!>
“She was never going to get hurt!” Maggie snapped.
<How the hell do you know that?>
“Because I was never going to let it happen! And besides, I know this place!” Maggie was nearly yelling herself now, and Freddy watched her take a calming breath.
“Okay,” she began. “Back when I was doing internships, before I got my degree, I worked at a daycare place for low-income kids down in Bangor for a little while, because they had this great program for out-of-state students. It was one of those things where the university ran the thing and we got to observe the kids…anyway, one day…” She swallowed, and for a minute, she actually looked slightly less than in control, which for Maggie was unusual. “It was my fault.”
“I said we should take the kids there,” she explained, and Freddy realized belatedly that he was probably supposed to say something comforting and fatherly at this juncture. Whoops. “I got a coupon in the mail…just some crappy junk mail, I was going to throw it out when I first saw it…should’ve thrown it out.” She shook her head. “But no, I said we should take the kids for pizza. It would be fun for them, I said. We even had a craft sale to raise some money so they could all have enough arcade tokens.”
Again, Freddy guessed he should maybe say something. “Want a drink?” He held up the bottle. Sure, it had his germs on it, but hey, they were related. Besides, alcohol sterilized stuff, right?
“I don’t drink,” she snapped.
“Since when?”
“Since I noticed my biological father drinks like a fish and realized it might be genetic,” Maggie replied sourly, shooting a glance at Aoife, as if the girl was supposed to be keeping Freddy on the wagon somehow, despite being just a few months sober herself.
“I’m dead,” he pointed out. “Not like I got my liver to worry about.”
“Well, I’m not,” she countered. “So no, I don’t want any booze.”
<Tell us the rest of the story, Maggie,> Aoife said quietly. Even through her mama bear rage, she looked intrigued.
Maggie nodded, as if to herself. “We brought the kids in, and everything seemed to be going fine. The animatronics creeped me out a little, but that stuff always does with me, and the kids didn’t seem too bothered. Everyone was having fun.
“I guess one of them found his way backstage, though. Kids…you know, they get curious. And they wander. And…one of the animatronics was back there. For maintenance, I guess. And somehow…it got turned on.” Maggie paused, and Freddy waited, a little bit interested despite himself.
Maggie’s voice got quiet. “It bit him.”
A brief silence followed as Freddy and Aoife both processed this.
Freddy was the first to break it. “How’d it do that?”
“I don’t know!”
“How’d it get turned on?”
“I don’t know!”
<What happened to him?> asked Aoife. <The child?>
Maggie turned back to her. “He lived.” She looked down. “A lot of people don’t know this, but…you can live without your frontal lobe.”
Another pause. The steam whistled in the pipes.
“We tried to sue them,” Maggie muttered. “They had some bullshit legal mumbo-jumbo for why we couldn’t.
“But don’t you get it?” she burst out now; Aoife flinched again. “Hela heals! They don’t let the things just wander around anymore, and even if…even if something did happen, Hel would be fine! Nothing hurts her. And they weren’t just going to let me in without a kid. They probably hand my picture out to all the new employees, at this point.” She laughed wearily. “But I’ve got pictures too, now.”
<I don’t care how safe you thought she was!> Aoife was regaining her mojo now. <You can’t use my daughter as bait just because of her…her physical abilities! You always wanted to protect kids – what about her?>
“Aoife, with the evidence I’ve got, I can put this fucking thing out of business, which means saving a bunch of kids’ lives!”
<You had no right to use my child!>
Freddy sat back and watched the women go at it. If he’d been forced to give an opinion, he’d probably have sided with Aoife on this one, as a parent himself (gross) and because Bob Gray’s kid probably meant at least marginally more to him than some random brats he didn’t know at all. Luckily, though, no one had asked him to weigh in, so he drank, and kept his thoughts to himself.
Aoife came to him after putting Hel to bed back at the house, like he’d known she would. As always, he was only too happy to press his weight down on her and open blossoming red ribbons in the silky skin of her back, until she was crying and coming (and so was he, minus the cry-gasming, of course) under him.
“You want me to go kick their furry asses?” he growled in her ear as she went limp with satisfaction, her body warm and pulsating with life against his.
She laughed, sounding tired, and didn’t answer.
He knew he was going to check it out even before he saw the ad in the paper. Anything that pissed off his little Kathy that bad had to be worth a look, and besides, he had to see these kiddie show animatronics that could bite off people’s frontal lobes.
And now, once he lasted the whole week, he was going to get paid for it.
Who knows? he thought later, as he prepared for his first shift with some good old liquid courage. Maybe I’ll even learn a thing or two.
“Uncle Freddy?”
Gah! Freddy jerked upright in his chair, knocking over the empty Jack bottle in the process. It clinked to the metal floor. “I was not sleeping!” he growled to the Boiler Room in general, on instinct.
Hela Gray didn’t respond. She just stared at him – one eye normal (for her species) and yellow, the other a cloudy pale blue; what was the name for that? Hetero-something, right? – and looked bewildered.
How did that brat get in here? Oh right, the bending-reality thing Bob had used to do sometimes. How the fuck am I going to childproof a lair against a fucking baby spider-clown-alien-thing? Should she even be able to do this shit yet?
“What’s up, kid?” he asked, as calmly as he could.
“Are you going after the Fazbears?”
“Those robot fursuit things? Yeah.”
Her brow puckered. “What’s a ‘fursuit’?”
Oh, shit. “Nothing,” Freddy said quickly. “Anyway, yeah, that’s what I’m gonna do. Tonight. Why?”
“You have to save the kids,” Hela told him.
It was Freddy’s turn to look puzzled. “What kids?”
She was staring at him again, but this time as if she just couldn’t believe how dim he was being. “They stand right behind the Fazbears,” she said at last. “They’re so scared, Uncle Freddy. They’re really hurt.” She looked down at her sneakers, and her right hand started picking at some of the Chüd-scarring on her left. “I know you don’t like kids, but…they really need help.”
He had no idea what she was talking about, and he resigned himself to not knowing. “Your mom told you you’re not supposed to come here without a grown-up, right?”
“Yeah, but you’ve got to help those kids” –
“I’ll see what I can do.” God, he was going to need more booze before this shift started, especially if it was six hours long. “Get back home, now, or your parents are going to kill both of us.”