Work Text:
The photoreceptors in an animatronic's eyes are not what one would call sophisticated . It had been a lot of work getting them to function at all, and even then most of his creations seem to have fairly poor vision. Possibly the addition of a soul does something for the sense of sight, but it's not something he'd ever had the chance to really test.
But old habits die hard, and when consciousness filters back in on a blaze of fluorescent light, Springtrap squints.
This is nowhere he knows.
This is brightly lit, crammed with large, standing tools, and conjures a phantom smell of machine oil and metal dust. A humped, oblong shape under a dust cloth hints at auto shop, and a rolling tool cart sits tantalizingly close. He's very familiar with what such a thing as a socket wrench can do, both its intended purpose and, ahem, extracurricular uses. There might even be a saw blade lying around somewhere…
His bulky, cantankerous form twitches, tries to reach out–
–and comes up short.
There are chains clinking as he tries to move, thick, greasy links that belong in a hoist crane criss-crossing the suit's torso and binding him to– something, something either very heavy or bolted to the floor, his arms are tied back far enough to make the servos creak and one leg is folded up limply beneath him and the other is gone–
Something pokes the exposed wiring of his ear.
Slowly, with a sound like a crumpling soda can, Springtrap's great mechanical head twists up. The bent end of a tape measure hovers in his vision, taps him squarely between the eyes, and retracts like a tongue.
Holding it, is a teenager.
"Hey. You awake in there?"
This is undoubtedly a teenager, sitting hunched over on top of the workbench. Springtrap knows what they look like, even after– too many years, the basics haven't changed. Stained sweatshirt, DIY haircut, insolent expression… teenagers never were his favorite. Too mouthy.
Tooled-steel vertebrae scraping, the great mechanical rabbit head grins . Then its intact ear flips up and waggles, charmingly, as both hands splay in the sort of gesture he'd used while singing, 'Hey there, kids!'
The teenager blinks, once. "Oh, wow." Was that– a smirk? "That's… cute? I guess?"
This face leaves much to be desired where emoting is concerned, but Springtrap still manages to drop into a flat scowl. The teenager, possibly some species of girl, seems undeterred.
"You're pretty beat up, you know." She's fidgeting with the tape measure, pulling it out by a few inches and letting it snap back into the reel. It's distracting. "Chassis all rusted through, wiring's a mess, leg fell off, dunno if you noticed that – hey, hey, I kept it, chill out. Wasn't gonna just leave bits there, c'mon. Dunno what happened to your ear though, didn't find any of that."
No response. Springtrap has frozen mid-affront and is now too busy trying to wrap his head around what this is.
The buffoons at Fazbear Frights had thought he was empty and dead, a bona-fide prop for their little charade. Michael might've thought so too, at first… but that's not important, it's not. What's important is that this teenager, this brat , is talking to him like– like she knows.
How could she know? And, more importantly, if she knows why isn't she screaming?
Something in him– itches. Craves. Fingers twitch, spasmodically, and Springtrap decides he hates the chains keeping him from reaching up there and seizing the girl by her insolent face. He stares at her, his neck tilted as if broken, and waits.
"Well. Okay then." The tape measure whizzes and snaps again. "Can you talk?"
That's. A good question. He'd fitted the Spring Bonnie suit with a speaker, eons ago, but the original voice tape is now glued in place by decaying plastic and utterly useless. And as for his vocal cords…
Static coughs once, twice, falls silent. The sound that drips out of the speaker in the suit's neck takes a few tries to resolve itself into something like a human voice, tinny and warped like a bad recording – but it's his voice, unmistakably.
"...no."
The Kid– laughs. Just once, a short exhale through the nose, but there's a giddy sort of disbelief sneaking onto her face. "Holy shit."
Springtrap elects to ignore that. "Wh-at. Is this."
The teenager blinks. "Huh? Oh, uh, my uncle's garage. He said I could come in and mess around with stuff so long as I don't break anything and keep the place clean, so like. I wasn't gonna stash you in the kitchen or something, that'd be stupid–"
"No," Springtrap growls, and rattles the hoist chains. "Thi-s."
It is apparently a universal constant that teenagers, when they sense an opening, can't resist making bad decisions. "Chains, dummy– hey!"
Springtrap had lunged, lurching against his bindings with a snarl of blown-out speakers and rattling whatever he's tied to – and the Kid springs off the workbench like a cat, stumbling on the concrete and landing on her ass. " Why am I here."
"I– I found you!" For the first time, she seems afraid; eyes huge and locked onto his wretched form, scrambling back as far as the space allows. That itch intensifies; he might be salivating, if only he could. "I knew you were real, I knew it–"
"R-eal," Springtrap rasps, "yes. I'm real. I c-came back…"
"Yeah– yeah." The Kid doesn't back up any further. She doesn't get closer again, either. "You were, uh. Behind a dumpster. I couldn't believe it, I guess they just. Threw you out or something?"
Not what happened, but he's not going to correct her. The huge, terrible rabbit suit twitches, involuntarily. "So y-ou. Took me? Why…" And also how, he weighs a ton…
The Kid barks out a laugh, hysteria-edged. "Everyone knows the stories!"
"...ev-eryone?"
"Well– okay, weirdos know the stories." She says this with a kind of stubborn pride, a jut of the chin that declares her indisputable membership in that illustrious group. Springtrap is unimpressed.
"A-nd what. Stories… do you– weirdos kn-ow?"
"You killed people."
There’s a long moment of silence. Then the crackle of water-damaged speakers; a chuckle. "So. What?"
"So." The Kid is breathing hard, furious; intent. "You… you can do it again."
Springtrap… absorbs this. Then his voice wheezes out again, stronger than before; a proper laugh, punctuated by the rattling of chains. "I– see," he hisses, through his mirth. "I see! C-lever girl, who knows the s-stories, who found a p-et monster and thinks she’ll just f-fix him up, hap-py day…"
Happy day, happy day, it’s your birthday…
The Kid looks– angry, disquieted, but stubbornness is locking the doors and flooring the gas. She scrambles to her feet and spits, "Shut up. Shut up, you don’t know anything about it – and I can fix you! I’ve got the battlebots trophies to prove it, and I’d have more if fucking Ethan didn’t throw a fit about creepy shit and sending the wrong message!"
She’s seething now, which is rather fascinating to watch, and stalks tantalizingly close as she goes on; "Unless you wanna be scrap , I’m your only option. You need me."
That’s. Cute. Springtrap’s great and horrible grin stays fixed as ever, but his eyes narrow as if in anger. Or thought.
"What. Are bat-tlebots," he rasps, at the end of his long consideration.
Some of the brittle, hair-trigger tension seems to dissipate out of the Kid. She smirks. "You."
And just like that, it's apparently settled. Not that he, ultimately, has much choice in the matter. She's chained him around a scrap rag drum, one of the large metal ones with the locking lids, and it's not heavy but it puts his arms at such an angle that the servos can't get any leverage at all. The chains are clipped to an anchor in the cinderblock wall, and he begrudgingly admits that the whole setup is remarkably clever.
Even the part where she hides him under a tarp.
~~~~~
Do animatronics dream of electric children?
No. No they don’t.
~~~~~~~~~~
"These things would probably work better if you didn't get all this. You know. Blood all over them." The Kid scrubs vigorously at a hydraulic piston with a wire brush, flaking off crusted ooze in a small cloud.
"C-ouldn’t be avoided," Springtrap says, dryly.
His left arm is numb from the shoulder onward, bits of wiring and pistons visible where she’d dug into the torn and rotted foam to expose his innards. If he looks closely, he can see the paler glint of splintered bone among the metal.
His other arm flexes slowly. She’s still cautious, still keeps him chained – but after a day of work his wrist rotates in a way it hadn’t in years, and he’s starting to feel tentatively optimistic about this whole thing.
The Kid gets fed up with the inadequacy of the hand brush and reaches for a pneumatic polishing wheel.
"D-ust mask."
"Pff, it’s fine." She waves the steel bristles at him. "I’m not new at this you know."
The painted rabbit face doesn’t change. "Dust. Mask."
Henry would call this rank hypocrisy, in that elevated way of his, after what passed for occupational safety in their shop. But he can't help it. Something about the Kid doing things wrong makes him want to needle.
Maybe it's because she's old enough to needle back. Picking and sniping and sassing, ready to dig her heels in over the stupidest thing and never caring when she crosses a line. No good child is ever like that, Michael was never like that, not after–
Michael . Did you escape? Did you get out alive– well, a given value of alive. Are you searching, even now, for a charred and blackened endoskeleton, proof that your nightmare is over?
Or are you searching instead for something to bury.
Ten feet away, the Kid squints at the piston she’s been cleaning and snorts in disgust. "It’s gotta soak," she declares, sourly. "They all should soak, and the whole leg too – god. We should just dunk you in rust remover all at once, it'd save time."
She’s getting frustrated. Springtrap, distracted from his maudlin musings, can sympathize. This is one giant patch job and they both know it; there’s nothing left in the suit that wouldn’t be better off replaced entirely, and once you started with that, well, why bother cleaning the grime off at all? Fittings fused by nameless, fetid fluids, hydraulics run painfully dry, cabling cracked and shredding from age… no sane mechanic would understand how he can still move at all.
All the same, the Kid seems to take it personally that she can’t work miracles.
"Tr-iage," he says in his cracked and synthetic voice, growing stronger with use; though not by much. "Address– the w-orst of it. Leave the rest… not i-important."
"Ugh. I know ." Her shoulders are hunched, surly, in a way that makes his huge plastic eyes narrow. "You don't have to nag you know."
"Ap-parently. I do."
She throws the piston at him.
~~~~~
Sometimes, in the long stretches of silence in between the Kid's visits, Springtrap hears the world outside. The sounds of cars and nighttime animals are familiar, a dull, nameless droning that makes him work his jaw just to feel the hydraulics scrape against bone. Sometimes there are voices; the shrieking of distant children, which causes his fingers to twitch spasmodically. The lower voices of adults, which he mostly tunes out.
"–respectable trade, just like you wanted."
"What I wanted was something she could put on a college application, not– not playing with trash all the time."
"You calling my Camaro trash?"
"I just want her to make something of herself, Rob! Not go squandering her chances like this. She could be on the debate team if she'd just clean up her act for six hours!"
Springtrap rolls these words around inside his hollow skull as the voices grow distant, and then vanish with the slam of a door. He prises their meaning out like marrow from bone, chews it thoughtfully, and spits; he's found it wanting.
They don't know he's here. The large, grumbling man rarely occupies the garage in which he's made his den, and no one cares to look under one more canvas tarp. Whoever else exists outside this space… Springtrap doesn't care.
He is biding his time.
~~~~~
The Kid is putting off opening up his chest. The tells are obvious, as she hasn’t learned as much subtlety as she thinks she has yet; she’ll crouch and squint through the mildewed holes in his body, as if trying to decide what to address next, and then get up and pivot inexplicably to some irrelevant task. Springtrap watches her with his usual eerie silence, long enough for the atmosphere in the shop to become suffocating, and then decides to take the initiative here.
The barrel of the suit's torso was originally built in two parts and bolted together, the aluminum frame covered with foam and fluffy polyester and snug as a bug in a rug to fit a human body into. Now the outer skin is tattered and sloughing off, letting each rusted bolt rotate slowly in its socket until it drops to the concrete with a musical little tink, and Springtrap's hollow, luminous eyes rest fixed on the Kid until she can't ignore him any longer.
"Ugh," she says. "Fine. That’s creepy." Then she hauls over her borrowed tools and starts to pry the suit open. His frayed, synthetic flesh tears along the seam between front and back, feeling startlingly like nothing at all, and there's one stubborn bolt she's got to soak in WD-40 to budge it at all, but at last the framework panel pops free and reveals the charnel house beneath.
It’s not as bad as it could have been. Thirty years ago he was all meat and viscera, the mortal remains of his genius, his ambition slowly turning to agonized slime under the depredations of rats and rot… but now all that’s left of him is dried, desiccated, dead. Even the flies have long since departed.
The Kid stares at what’s inside him for a long time. Then she says, in an almost admiring tone, "Gross."
"El-oquent," Springtrap says, dryly.
"Well it is ." She takes a screwdriver and pokes experimentally at the endoskeletal mechanism that had frozen where it'd punctured his lung in three places. "Why’d they even build you like this…"
Something like bitter amusement rises, and fades. "Had to be… ve-ry skilled. To operate the sp-ring locks."
The kid makes a noncommittal noise, and shines a pen-light on the ruin of him. "You were good at that, huh?"
"The b-est."
The Kid seems reluctant to dig right in, as she’d done with the smaller repairs he’d allowed her to make. She chews her lip and frowns a lot, trying to take stock of the damage without actually touching what she can’t deny are human remains. And she keeps glancing between the manic, fixed grin of his Spring Bonnie face, and the withered carcass caged by hydraulics and gears. Her discomfort amuses him, even as he’s irked by the feeling of being on display.
But there’s thoughts happening behind those young eyes, and at last the Kid surprises him. "Are you… this?" she asks, tapping the worn yellow chassis with the penlight. "Or… that?"
Springtrap blinks, once. "……yes."
This does not appear to comfort her. Maybe she’d expected a different answer. "…did it hurt?"
Why lie? "Yes."
The Kid’s face does something unreadable, and she shivers. "Why… why did they do it?"
Springtrap’s head tilts, one ear listing to the side, and he says nothing. As usual, the Kid fills in the gaps.
"I mean, there– there’s got to have been a reason, right? Like, did you catch them in the act or something?"
"Catch… who?"
"Whoever disappeared those kids."
Aha . He’d wondered… and for a moment the temptation to correct her misapprehension is strong indeed.
But he only turns his head, creakily, and says, "Something… like that. Yes." Is this part of her fascination with him? The belief that he has some shared state of victimhood, some call to sympathy?
The Kid makes an unreadable noise, and chews her lip some more. She seems to do that a lot; the skin is chapped, peeling. Does she wonder about it, about what it was like? Does she linger over his imagined last moments, the fear, the pain…
"Well," she says after a moment, "I think we’ve, um. Got a problem." She hesitates, uncertain of her footing, and gestures in where he can’t see. "The leg issues, I think they mean something’s gone screwy in your spine. And I thought I could get at it like this but, uh… I don’t think that’s happening. I’d have to take your… body, out of your suit. To fix it."
Springtrap doesn’t even need to think about it. "No."
"But we don’t even know if it’s a wiring issue or if the joints themselves are rusted through, if I can’t get in there–"
The animatronic– snarls . A vicious tangle of speaker feedback and his own synthetic voice, as his endoskeleton seems to writhe around his mortal remains. The cables and hydraulics piercing his body, the struts and crushing gears… it all shivers and clenches tighter, possessive and unwilling to part with its kill.
The Kid jerks back from the sight, gasping and suddenly pale. "Alright! Jeeze! I won’t– I won’t touch it."
For a heartstopping moment it doesn't seem like he believes her. Then the mess inside him seems to relax, slowly; as close to an exhale as he's capable of now. His speakers growl, softly, then clear. "Ha-tch… on my back." He shifts, a clinking of chains. "You’ll ha-ve to move– all of me."
The Kid chews her lip uneasily, but nods.
The solution they come to is not the most expedient one, but since the Kid isn't yet willing to unchain him, that leaves the shop crane as their only real option. It's even a model he recognizes, which means it must be very old indeed, but to hear the Kid talk it gets plenty of work hauling the ends of cars in the air so that work can be done on their undersides. That doesn't sound like a recommended use to him, but he's never been very interested in cars, so what does he know.
This also requires some rearranging of his restraints. Springtrap is obliging, letting her close him up again and dance around him in circles, winding hoist straps around his scratched and dented bulk to create a net that can take his weight. It’s… amusing, almost. Endearing.
She doesn't know how loose the chains binding his arms have become.
She doesn't know just how far the servos in his wrists can stretch.
She doesn't know how deep his appetite has burned.
It would be… so…. easy…
But the moment teeters, tips, and is gone. She’s hitched his arms to something else, shifting their position but leaving them just as immobile, and with a grinding lurch of machinery he's lifted aloft.
It's as undignified as he'd feared. Trussed and swaying, feeling phantom nausea that has more to do with the absence of his stomach than anything like motion sickness, Springtrap glowers as the Kid buzzes around him with tools and stepladder and incessant, running chatter. He's heard more about her petty social dramas than he ever cared to, and now it seems that he's hearing it all over again while she pries at the service hatch on his back.
That running monologue falters, though, when she finally gets the thing open. He's not any prettier from this angle, and he can guess she's getting an eyeful of the way the endoskeleton's spinal column had pierced and shattered his own. Seven springlocks arranged in a line, all failing one after another in a chain reaction… consciousness was not meant to persist after such violence.
But she draws a steadying breath and clamps a worklamp to the hoist chain and sets herself to work. It feels like a dentist got very, very lost; lots of pulling and poking and small, irritating pains scattering up and down what remains of his nervous system. She has him wiggle his remaining leg this way and that, charming rabbit toes just barely brushing the concrete floor, to test her evolving hypotheses.
It takes most of the night before she's satisfied. Her eyes have gone red-rimmed and heavy with fatigue, and there's another hypocritical lecture on the kind of sloppy mistakes that happen at 4am on his leathery tongue– but he wants this done, and an argument will only prolong the ordeal. He's let down, his remaining leg holding his weight enough that he doesn't crash to the ground in the process of sitting, and if he thought exhaustion would dull the Kid's caution, he's disappointed. She lashes him back tight, his whole endoskeleton protesting such treatment after the work she'd done on his spine, and all Springtrap can do is growl in sulky, mechanical tones as he's trussed up again like cargo.
"I don't know if I can come back tomorrow," the Kid tells him, sweeping the scattered bits of scrap and wire away so they won't look so suspicious. "It's– there's stuff happening."
What manner of stuff isn't something he gets to know, apparently, but he also doesn't much care. Springtrap makes a statticky grunt of acknowledgement, and suffers the indignity of the tarp once more.
His spine bends now, in creaking, acerbic ways. The leg still attached to him, not lying on a back shelf wrapped in obscuring rags when the Kid's not working on it, that leg holds up.
He is, he finds, rather pleased with her work.
~~~~~~~~~~
Two days later the Kid returns, and the fluorescents gleam off the fresh shiner blackening her left eye. Springtrap tilts his head in that eerie, doll-like way of his.
"Wha-t. Did you d-o."
Her scowl could give a bulldog envy. "Nothing."
"No?" His mechanical grin never changes, but somehow it takes on the quality of a dry leer. "We-ll. M-ust be… the fashion, th-en."
"Shut up."
She clomps around the shop, making an entirely unnecessary amount of noise apparently out of pique, and decides to take out her frustrations on the servos from his mangled leg. Springtrap wonders if this isn’t, in fact, some attempt at a bespoke Hell.
It must be, because the Kid isn’t content to stay quiet. She grumbles, gestures, toys with a false start or two. "It's this– fucking–"
"Lang-uage," Springtrap says automatically, and the Kid makes a gesture that momentarily paralyzes him with rage.
Unaware of this, the Kid goes on. "Fucking normies… fucking– no one understands , you know? None of them get what I’m trying to do here. None of them have the first clue…"
The servo casing pops apart, like a crab leg, or a broken toy. A rogue drive gear goes rolling past him, and Springtrap makes a staticky feedback sound of irritation.
"Be c-areful."
"Shut it. I am." She’s not cowed, not deterred. "I know what I’m doing, alright?"
Something in Springtrap’s jaw grinds together, corroded metal scraping against bone.
"It– it doesn’t matter," the Kid spits. "It doesn’t fucking matter, we’ll– we’ll get them."
"W-ill we, now…" the rabbit’s speakers hiss, and the Kid bares her teeth at the mess of gears and wires in her hands.
"Yes."
~~~~~
The next day the Kid comes back, pokes at his detached leg for an hour, and declares it fit to be reinstalled.
"I still don't like the wiring though," she gripes, tallying and accounting for every point of contact in his hip socket. "I don't know if it'll even move, nevermind hold weight."
"Doesn't– matter." Springtrap's metal fingers play slow, scratching tunes against the concrete. "Focus on the hyd-raulics." The legs and hips of any mobile animatronic are always the hardest part to design, and the springlock suits even moreso. Hours, years of his life spent devising ways to make machines stand, walk, dance…
Now the Kid lines up his sundered leg, joint end exposed and trailing patched wires and cables, and Springtrap shudders within himself from how badly he wants to be whole again. His femur, miraculously, is intact, and he can see the stained and rat-chewed end of it as a cruel mockery of the steel supports it’s caged by. His pelvis was crushed long ago, there’s nothing fleshwise for the bone to slot into, and yet…
"Right. Okay." She's nervous, as though a wrong move here could ruin all her hard work. Nervous, too, because he’d talked her into loosening his chains enough that he can prop himself at an angle, the better to expose the hip joint. Dirty yellow polyester hangs in shreds like gnawed gristle, and those cold, plastic eyes have fixed on her, unblinking. Expectant.
The Kid blows out a breath, squints down into the gap between chassis and joint, and, without ceremony, shoves the ball joint into the waiting endoskeletal cradle.
Pain whipcracks through his body, metal and flesh alike, and Springtrap jerks like a live wire and screams.
It's a small scream, as these things go, but it's harsh and staticky and makes the Kid shriek in answer and jump back from him. "Shit! Shit, did– did that hurt?"
It shouldn't have. This was just– just the base mechanism, dead metal slotting into place; the electronics aren't even hooked up again, there's no reason…
"...yes," the wretched thing grunts. One blunt, three-fingered hand touches gingerly at the joint, slides down the worn yellow fabric in a startlingly human gesture. Like a man rubbing an arthritic leg. The Kid swallows, uncertain.
"Should we stop?"
"No."
She looks like she wants to object; then shakes off the feeling and nods, decisively. "Okay."
It hurts the rest of the way, too. Each wire twisted together and capped, each hydraulic hose snapped together, it all sizzles with pain like blood rushing back into a numb limb. He supposes that's what it is, really; his soul reaching out and reestablishing the connection with the lost bits of itself, what he'd called remnant. He shudders with it all, speakers hissing wordlessly as the Kid works with wire snips and vicegrips.
At last the Kid sits back on her heels and scrubs her fingers with a rag, her face tight from squinting and futzing. "Alright," she sighs, "alright. I think– that's the last of it." She glances up, as if searching his face, but of course all she gets is that fixed grin and empty, plastic eyes.
"Well?" she asks, shoring up her nerves with bravado. "You gonna sit there till it falls off again?"
In response, Springtrap's leg lifts with the smooth, deliberate motion of machinery – before spasming and slamming his foot down flat with a crack.
The Kid yelps and jumps again, but just as quickly bursts into a delighted whoop. "H-hey! Fuck yes, it worked! Knee's working and everything!"
"Lang-uage," Springtrap rasps, but he sounds– pleased. Satisfied. The Kid can tell, and grins at him with all the insolence of prodigies.
"You like it," she gloats. "I'm a genius, I'm the best that ever lived, I'm gonna put pistons in your feet so you can jump over cars–"
She stops, as one clunky, furless finger comes up under her chin, shockingly dexterous. Just the barest brush against tissue-thin skin.
"Lit-tle– genius."
There's a bright and breathless moment where she just– stares at him. Then she's gone, scooping her tools up and cackling like an escaped hyena. Gleeful, triumphant, the sound echoes down the long hallway after her, and audible even after the shop door swings closed. Springtrap blinks once, and leans back to flex his ankles with slow deliberation.
The chains draped round his shoulders are loose, and clink gently as he moves.
~~~~~~~~~~
The Kid hardly waits until the coast is clear to return, less than a day later. Racing footsteps herald her arrival, and she careens into the shop with a panted, "Listen, listen I’ve got an idea– oh, what."
This what is because there’s glass under her sneakers, thin and crackling, and a glance upwards reveals its source; one of the shop’s fluorescent floodlights, broken and dangling by one end. Three more have suffered the same fate, casting deep pools of shadow by the shelves and the perpetually covered car that her uncle swears will be worth twice what he’s put into it any day now. There’s tools and bits of junk scattered about the place too, the chuck jaws off the lathe she’s never been allowed to use lying disassembled on the floor, and her skin prickles with the wrongness of the scene. Had the door been locked when she opened it? Had something gotten in…
Gingerly, the Kid steps over the scattering of broken glass, glancing about and edging towards the humped, covered shape she’s grown accustomed to against the side wall.
"Hey," she whispers, reaching to pull the canvas back, "hey, what happened–"
Her eyes widen; the tarp drops from suddenly numb fingers. Beneath it is all the scrap metal and trash scavenged from the shop, stacked up neatly in place.
Her prize project is gone.
She’s got maybe a full second to process this before some infinitesimal, animal sense says drop, just as a clanking arm lunges overhead. The Kid shrieks and scrambles and is gone from under Springtrap's feet before he's locked on again. "You– shit! What'd you do?!"
The junkyard rabbit laughs. "Di-d you like it?" his speakers growl, one huge hand swiping down at the decoy pile and scattering it onto the floor with a deafening crash, making her flinch. "I th-ink its– a f-fetching likeness…"
The Kid’s found her feet but not much else, backing up a step at a time as she stares in a dumb shock that Springtrap finds almost sickeningly cute. Pale, so pale, the bruise still livid on her face standing out like rotten ink as gleefully, triumphantly, in the flickering light of a cracked fluorescent, the old monster spreads his arms wide.
"Look-k-k what you've m-ade!" he crows in a voice like radio feedback given teeth. "Lo-ok what you’ve– r-esurrected."
He walks. Step by shuddering step, Springtrap advances. His right leg jerks and trembles, the repaired joint unhappy but holding, and the Kid’s inexpert wiring sends out small sprays of sparks here and there under the strain. Fear is thick in the air, egging him on, and the rabbit head’s jaw gapes in a mocking, delighted grin. Look at her, not even fully understanding yet! Look at her, trying to muster her fury!
And fury she’s got. "Stop it! Stop it, alright, this– my uncle’s gonna kill me for this! It isn’t funny!"
"No?" A sputter of canned, eerie mirth fills the shop, then dies. "I'm la-aughing."
"Fuck you!"
Springtrap’s head tilts slowly, jerkily, from side to side. "Y-ou asked me… if I could k-kill– again…"
"I didn't mean me!"
"No." His feet dig gouges into the concrete floor as he lunges , seizing the Kid bodily and slamming her around, hard, against the top of the workbench. "B-ut I did."
The impact knocks the wind out of her, scattering a row of allen wrenches to the floor, and the sharpening of pain in the air draws a low, ravenous sound from him – too dry and throaty to have come through his speakers. The Kid’s thrashing like a rat in a trap, clawing shreds of moldy fur from his arm, but there's two hundred pounds of hydraulic pressure behind the tendons of Springtrap's hand, all threatening to clench and crush her sweet and tender viscera– oh, the fear in those eyes is intoxicating.
"My, m-y," Springtrap leers, bloodlust fizzing in his throat, the palms of his hands, like life, remnant, so close– "How ti-me does fly… play's all done, the t-oys are away, now– we say– goodby-e…"
Freshly filled hydraulics hiss as his painted, perpetually grinning mouth gapes open, the hinges straining to stretch wider, wider than it was ever made to. Stained and cracking teeth like tombstones, an arc of descent proscribed by angle and proximity; enough crushing power to reduce the cervical vertebrae to pulp.
In the epileptic light of the remaining fluorescents, the Kid can see what looms out at her, eyeless, mummified, and maimed, from within.
There’s not much strength in a struggling child. Springtrap knows this, knows it well. But a teenager is a different beast, and, driven by panic and rage, one of the Kid’s desperate kicks lands just at the exposed joint of his right hip–
–which buckles like a folding chair.
Springtrap screams, losing his grip on the Kid as he goes down, and an instant later the full weight of a wrench crashes into his temple.
His whole head snaps sideways with a crunch of gristle, and fury washes his vision red. Servos whine and strain for speed to catch her, throttle the brat– but there’s nothing. Bruised, gasping, tear-streaked, the Kid has fled – clutching at her hammering heart and scarcely able to breathe for raw, seething betrayal.
Springtrap– does not follow.
He hisses, and groans, and drags his rotting shell to its feet. It takes a few tries to make his right leg hold his weight again – one kick, she’d undone days of her own work with one kick rather than just letting him have his due–
The shambling, rotted thing snarls and sweeps the contents of the workbench to the floor in a great and crashing arc, before making short work of the lock securing the back door.
He doesn’t hurry. He doesn’t rush. The limp his right leg inflicts on him is no worse than it was, and several other joints move with an ease he hasn’t felt since Spring Bonnie was new. His convalescence is done, his physician fled like the modern Prometheus in horror at what she’s made – and if the carcass of William Afton cannot satisfy its hunger here, then it will do so elsewhere.
And may his absence here be but an undeserved mercy.