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Mrs Afton couldn’t keep her family her flowers alive, so how was one particular patch of poppies still holding on- no, thriving? She couldn’t grow flowers or anything, really, and everyone knew. If she had a dollar for every time one of her neighbours asked how her plants were with that twisted fakenice “It’s just a joke!” smile on their face, she’d be able to hire a bloody gardener. But she couldn’t. Her husband would sigh, rub the bridge of his nose between his eyes and tell her that they didn’t need a gardener and if she didn’t mess around in the front yard it wouldn’t be such a wilted mess as if he’d forgotten how much their Lizzie had loved flowers. That’s why she was going to dig up those poppies. If one patch could survive, she was doing something right and she was going to find out what that was. If she couldn’t use her mystery writer detective knowledge to solve her daughter’s kidnapping, at least she’d be able to grow nice flowers for her instead of drowning dirt and hoping something beautiful would come from the mud.
Breathe in, in goes the shovel, heave it upward, throw the soil onto the grass. Repeat. Breathe in, in goes the shovel, heave it upward, throw the soil onto the grass. Repeat. Breathe in, in goes the shovel,
snap
her heart stutters
Mrs Afton pushed the dirt away from the hole, widened it, widened it, widened it, brushed the earth off the pale grimy stiff thing under the poppies. She looked at it. She looked at its face and let all the threads connect.
With a trembling hand, she brushed her daughter’s still-ginger hair off her blood-and-dirt-caked brow, feeling the slight abrasion between her gardening glove and her spongy- oh god, her corpse is spongy-
Her tears plip plipped down her chin, dripping into the dirt. Lizzie was lying on her back, unburied to her knees. Across her muddied, fading rose-pink blouse were bloodstains coming from both sides. It looked like someone had cut her with a giant pair of scissors. Mrs Afton tentatively pulled the slits in the fabric open, revealing swollen puncture pounds in a line across the side of Lizzie’s chest. Not scissors then. A spiky clamp of some kind, but why-
Years and years and years ago, before everything died, Mike ran over to Mrs Afton and her husband, nearly frustrated to tears with the claw machines at Freddy’s. “They’re made to let the toys go!!!” he squealed. Probably not in those exact words. Her memories slipped from her grasp more and more each day. He said something like that, though, since her husband had chuckled and said Yes, they’re designed to get people to put as much money in them as possible or something like that, she didn’t know. Mike had been furious though, only calming when she suggested making up a claw machine that was fairer.
Mike came back grinning with a crayon drawing of what looked like a torture device, a steel octopus that had spikes for suckers.
No toy was going to escape that.
Mike’s inescapable claw - that only confirmed what she suspected even more. Only two adults had seen it: her and William. She wondered if William even remembered it. Mike would’ve only been what - five? - when that happened. Maybe the idea stuck with William for so long he didn’t realise it wasn’t his when he used it.
So this is what she had - Lizzie disappears at the grand opening of Circus Baby’s Pizza World after slipping away, William ‘panics’ and lies to the public about a gas leak being the reason why they all had to leave right the hell now (He assured her afterwards that he hadn’t been thinking. Lying was his first instinct. How had she been so blind??? ) and Lizzie turns up months later under the poppies with horrible wounds and… and a thin silver chain around her neck.
Mrs Afton pulled it into view, uncovering a little heart pendant with a clasp on the side. With another tug it came loose from Lizzie’s neck, the pendant flipped open and inside the locket an engraved message was revealed. The words were large enough for her to read without her glasses.
Poppies are red
Her face was blue
(Oh no…)
If you tell a soul
Then this will be you
Mrs Afton choked on the pained wheeze that her heart forced up her throat. Why the hell would William do this? Why would he kill their daughter with a giant claw, of all things, and hide her body somewhere he knew she would be able to find it? By the message, he probably wanted her to. He wouldn’t have bothered with the engraved locket if he hadn’t. So he was threatening her with the death of her daughter which she didn’t know about up until this point.
Why-
When she made the connection she snorted bitterly, wiping her eyes. William overestimated her. He thought she was onto him, that she had seen through his painful lie and hadn’t accepted it after the agonizing period of denial she went through.
He was right about one thing. Now that she’d found a trail, she was going to follow wherever it led. She’d dive into hell to make William Afton get what he deserves. She pressed the locket to her heaving chest with a hand that held it so tight it dug into her skin through her glove. She’d made the mistake of trusting William far too many times.
Never again.
Not while she was above the poppies and Lizzie was under them.