Chapter Text
Nobody was going to come for them. Nobody was ever going to come back to repair them and put them back on a stage again. The realisation probably should have come quickly, but instead it slipped up on Roxy, slowly becoming more and more real as the weeks crawled past. She was in pieces, Monty was so feral he attacked anything in front of him, and Chica was so lost to her hunger she hadn’t even been able to hear Roxy in forever – and she hadn’t even found the others. Honestly, she hadn’t wanted to, reassuring herself that someone would come for them; if not for her, then at least they would come for the others. They would find Freddy and the others, and maybe they would even deem her worth rescuing along with them. She had been bracing herself to learn that she wasn’t worth bothering with any more, but she hadn’t been expecting to learn that none of them were.
Useless as she was, there was one problem even she could solve, Roxy eventually realised. Last time she had stumbled down to cold storage, she had found almost all freezers were still running — nobody had even bothered to turn the power off when they abandoned the building — and working freezers meant stored food. No doubt it would be long past its use-by date by now, but animatronics didn’t need to worry about food poisoning, and she had heard Chica digging through garbage long enough to know that she was eating far worse things. At least Chica’s systems were actually designed for food, and it might give her a moment or two of relief from the desperate hunger that had long ago overtaken her.
Remembering the way to cold storage was a challenge by itself; failing drives struggled to pull up data that had once come easily to her, and everything seemed like so much more of a maze when she was feeling her way blindly down once-familiar hallways, but she had plenty of time. In fact, time was the only thing she had now – endless, agonising time stretched out before her, all alone with nobody else around her, no rescue, no way out. All she had left was time.
It took a day and a half to find her way back to the cold storage where she remembered finding all that frozen food, and then another four hours to fumble around until she found the kitchens. The box of what was hopefully pizza went into machines at random until one of them turned out to be an oven, and after a bit more prodding, one of the buttons switched it on and heated it up. By now, Roxy was increasingly confident that she had found a pizza – and she did at least remember the way to get back up from here to where she last ran into whatever was left of Chica.
“Chica?” she called uncertainly when she heard footsteps that might have been her old friend. “I found a pizza, Chica. It’s for you.”
The footsteps came closer, accompanied by a garbled electronic sound that was definitely the only voice Chica seemed to have any more. Chica opened the box and took a slice with so much desperate urgency that she nearly knocked it right out of Roxy’s hands, but it sounded like she was having trouble eating. Roxy waited, listened and tried to work out why that might be, until Chica finished the slice, then made another garbled sound, grabbed one of Roxy’s hands and lifted it to her face. Chica’s casing was completely gone, leaving only her twisted, dented endoskeleton. Roxy kept feeling, exploring with her hand, and found that Chica’s lower jaw and beak were also missing, leaving only a few twisted pieces of metal behind and a spongy mass of what felt disturbingly like rotten cheese matted over half of the space.
“Is there a problem with your voicebox, Chica?” Roxy guessed.
She felt Chica nod, then she took Roxy’s hand and moved it to her throat. Roxy felt around nervously, finding loose joints on the bare endoskeleton and more of what felt like crush damage – and then her claws went right through a space where Chica’s voicebox should have been. A moment later, Chica gently tapped on the side of Roxy’s head, next to her eye sockets.
“It was Gregory,” Roxy muttered. She reached out to put a hand on the side of Chica’s face again, feeling her nod. “You too, huh? Look, just... keep eating. And don’t worry, there’s more food where that came from.”
Chica took another slice, ate it with just as much difficulty but less desperate urgency as the first one, then reached out to squeeze Roxy’s hand again in what was presumably a thank you. She hesitated, then pulled Roxy along for a couple of steps and sat on an abandoned crate full of long-forgotten merchandise to finish eating the rest of the pizza. Roxy waited patiently the whole time, just letting herself bask in the fact that she had company again after so long of nothing but crushing loneliness – even if that company couldn’t talk to her at all. The pizza vanished slowly, slice by slice, until Chica tossed the empty box aside and threw herself at Roxy in a tight, urgent hug. Roxy hesitated, but pushing her away just felt like cruelty now, so she awkwardly wrapped her arms around Chica and hugged back. There was only one arm around her, so after a moment’s hesitation, she felt around where Chica’s left arm should be and found it missing, not cleanly snapped off at the elbow or shoulder but sheared in half partway down her upper arm, leaving only broken wires and twisted metal from whatever cruel fate Gregory must have put her through. Chica didn’t push her away, instead hugging tighter with her remaining arm, so Roxy kept going, hesitantly feeling around for more damage. Fragile scraps of crushed casing clung to Chica’s body, bits of trash tangled up around every exposed part of her endoskeleton, more mouldy strings of probably-cheese tangled up all around Chica’s torso and her remaining hand, enough of it to make Roxy really glad animatronics had no sense of smell; as far as she could tell, it was a minor miracle Chica hadn’t shut down just from whatever had originally done this to her.
Chica interrupted Roxy’s horrified exploration by gently pulling herself out of the hug and pushing herself to her feet on wobbly, damaged legs. She grabbed Roxy’s hand and squeezed it, but there was no way to tell what she might be trying to say. After a moment, she brought the hand to her face, asking for a yes/no question in the only way she could.
“Do you want to go somewhere?” Roxy asked. She got a nod. “Lead me there, then.” Chica shook her head, and Roxy thought about that until it made sense. “Do you know where you want to go?” Another no. “Just somewhere that’s not here, then? My green room’s still intact. We could go there,” Roxy offered, trying not to feel awkward about the idea of taking Chica back to her room like that. Once, it would have been something to worry about; now, it was just a room, and she didn’t want to be alone any more.
She got a very quick nod in response, so she led the way back to her green room, picking her way through the piles of trash and rubble until they got back to Rockstar Row, only making one short detour to find some cleaning supplies on the way there. She ended up sitting on the floor of her green room, leaning against the wall with Chica slumped weakly in her arms. Roxy tried to talk a little, but the one-sided conversation just ended up awkward and stilted, so she just ended up holding her and trying to clean her up as well as she could while working by touch. Of course, Chica had never been able to sit still for more than about five seconds at a time; that had annoyed Roxy before, but now it was just a relief to have to deal with Chica squirming around while she tried to clean her off, because it was a tiny fragment of normality that she suspected they both desperately needed.
Roxy worked as carefully as she could, feeling her way around and trying not to cause any worse damage to Chica’s already fragile body as she cleaned off the stringy mould and picked out as much of the trash as she could reach. She almost felt wrong checking Chica over for more damage, but she wanted to know what state she was in, and the only way that was going to happen without eyes was by manually feeling her over for damage. Roxy almost wanted to apologise for that, but Chica reached out and started doing the same thing back to her, even though Roxy knew she could see just fine. She stopped questioning things at that point, just holding Chica close and wishing they could communicate properly while they ran their hands over each other in a way that was definitely nowhere near appropriate to the expected standards of behaviour of two Fazbear Entertainment animatronics but just felt right at the moment.
The more she checked, the more damage she found, bits of exposed endoskeleton twisted around so badly Roxy wondered how she could walk at all, broken wires that sparked dangerously every time she moved, casing pieces that were so badly damaged they were barely hanging on at all, and even more mould and trash caked into every body part. With so much damage, it was a miracle Chica was functional at all; Roxy almost asked what had happened, but she knew there was no way Chica could actually communicate the answer to her, and right now, it felt more important just to keep cleaning her up. Besides, Roxy knew the answer was ‘Gregory’ anyway, even if she couldn’t quite work out how he had done it just yet.
Roxy stopped bothering to count the time passing as she stayed in her green room with Chica, pulling out the trash and cleaning her up as well as she could. Chica showed her gratitude as well as she could when she couldn’t talk and Roxy couldn’t see any gestures she tried to make, nuzzling into Roxy’s shoulder and being even more cuddly than she had always tried to be before. Not only did Roxy avoid pushing her away this time, she found herself actually wanting to hold Chica close. After everything, she wanted to remind herself constantly that Chica was still alive and running, and the best way she could do that was by holding her in her arms every chance she could, and their little touches were about the only way they could even communicate any more. Chica could see and hear her still, but she also seemed to enjoy being held, and days passed like that, just reminding themselves that they were both still functional.
Hours turned into days and Chica kept fidgeting in her arms, but had no way to communicate whatever she was thinking. She stayed next to Roxy the whole time, clinging onto her with her one remaining arm except for the few times when they had to recharge, or when Chica got hungry again, using an empty pizza box to signal that she needed a new one; Chica refused to go anywhere near the stockpile of food, and Roxy decided not to push her about that, making her way alone through the Mega Pizzaplex to get down to the kitchens and back.
Eventually, Chica made a garbled electronic sound, pulled Roxy to her feet and took her to the door of Monty’s room. Even without words, the question was obvious.
Roxy shook her head, knowing Chica would see the movement. “Monty? I know where he is, but... I don’t think he’d even recognise us. He’s not like you were, he’s almost feral. I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to make him hear us again.”
Chica squeezed Roxy’s hand tight, then after a moment put their hands onto the door.
“I know where he is,” Roxy said, taking a guess at the question being asked. “I think he was trapped by some rubble, the last time I found him. We could try...” She reached out and felt Chica nod again, so she swallowed her doubt and her reluctance to go and find Monty in that state again, and just started to lead the way to where she had last encountered the alligator. There was still no recognition in him, of course. He tried to attack them on sight, launching himself at the secure grate that separated him from them. Presumably, he was trapped back there; she almost asked Chica about it, before remembering there was no way she could describe what she saw.
After a moment, Chica answered the question anyway, by sitting down in front of the grate, her wrecked endoskeleton creaking dangerously as she moved but barely holding together. Roxy sighed and sat beside her, talking to Monty as much as she could even though he obviously couldn’t understand a single word. Chica hugged her for it at least, which gave Roxy the strength to keep going when all she could hear was the insane growling and metal-on-metal sound of him trying to bite his way through the grate.
Days passed like that, with Roxy and Chica trying to spend time with Monty, as much as they could stand to be around him when he was constantly trying to break out of his impromptu prison and tear them apart, and spending the rest of their time comforting each other in Roxy’s green room. Eventually, they managed to calm Monty enough to safely reach through and run a power cable into him, then retreated quickly before he lost what limited control he had and snapped at them again. It wasn’t much, but it was a tiny bit of real progress – and to Roxy’s surprise, Chica even confirmed with a nod that the power cable was still there the next day, not bitten straight through. It was almost enough to give Roxy cause to hope for any kind of future. Almost.