Chapter 1: You Want Our Help Doing What!?
Chapter Text
“So, let me get this straight,” Mike said, staring at him with wide eyes. The white pinpricks that denoted his pupils blinked back at Evan, narrowed to the point where it was obvious his brother was in some form of utter, complete disbelief.
“You secretly,” Mike repeated slowly, “want William and I to help you build physical animatronic forms for the nightmares. Am I hearing that right?”
“That’s what I said,” Evan answered, raising an eyebrow.
“And you’re saying that you have a way to actually transfer them into the animatronic bodies if we build them?”
“Yeah, I do,” Evan said, a little annoyed now. “What, do I have to repeat myself? Are you finally going deaf?”
The two were in the house’s basement workshop, one of the many rooms in the house that was weirdly tailored for specific purposes. The workshop took up a fair portion of the basement, and the inside looked almost exactly how one would expect a frequently used robotics and mechanical workshop to. There were a multitude of work tables sitting around the area, covered in metallic shavings, work-in-progress machinery, pencils, and tools. Shelves attached to the walls held work books, binders, sketchbooks, and rolls of large, thick paper.
Evan hovered just above the worktable that Mike stood at, kicking his feet and wings absently. His brother looked at him with pinpricks of white for eyes, just staring at him blankly as he processed. He almost looked like a deer in headlights, if Evan was using the expression correctly.
Mike blinked, before sighing and offering a mild roll of his eyes. “No, no, I heard you just fine. I’m just… confused as to how you’d know how to do that. I thought they were projections.”
Discomfort writhed in Evan’s gut as Mike’s questions got close to that thing he wasn’t exactly ready to tell Mike. He’d have to at some point, but for now, he wasn’t going to tell his brother. Especially not his brother, actually.
Sure, he was a little more comfortable with Mike than he had been at the start of all this. Their relationship had improved from barely talking to somewhat friendly conversation, which according to most people, could be considered progress.
Evan sort of just thought of it as ‘figuring out what the hell was going on with his brother’ instead of ‘progress.’ That word felt way too normal for this whole situation.
And in Evan’s defense, whatever the hell was going on with his brother turned out to be a lot. Like, to the point where it was so convoluted that Evan had a hard time keeping track of what had and hadn’t happened to this guy in the past forty years. He’d needed to make a literal checklist on his wall to verify what he actually knew about his brother.
And sure, maybe that sounded very much like a conspiracy theorist thing to do. But at this point, considering everything Fazbear Entertainment-related, you’d need three separate conspiracy theorist closets packed to the brim with every scrap of information you could gather and a therapist on deck. Just so you’d still have somebody to keep you sane while you unpacked all of it.
Then again, none of that was the point right now.
Evan wasn’t about to tell Mike how he could transfer them over into actual animatronic bodies just yet. Nobody needed to know how until maybe after the fact. Maybe.
Mike let out another deep sigh - somehow, considering it was a little hard to breathe if you didn’t have any lungs - and looked at Evan with a tired smile. It was a face that he’d been making a lot since they'd all started living under the same roof again. “Alright. I’ll see what I can do, bud. I can’t guarantee William’s help, but I’ll do my best to drag his crusty ass out of his room.”
Evan’s jaw dropped, but recomposing himself was quick and easy. “And if you can’t?”
Mike’s expression, where it had once been as sincere as you could get for a corpse, turned wicked. “Well, I’ll let you in on a secret.”
His older brother leaned against the table and pulled something out of his pocket, to which Evan’s eyes went wide and stayed that way this time. In his older brother’s hands, a silver lighter shone in the workshop’s orange light, with a faded Foxy sticker slapped onto the side. It had been the one thing Mike had treasured as a kid, and one of the few gifts he’d received from William before everything went wrong. The silver and the sticker were both a bit charred, as thought they’d gone through a fire themselves. Knowing what little he did about Mike, it probably had.
Now, most people with lighters weren’t exactly threatening. Michael Afton wasn’t ‘most people with a lighter.’ Utah’s news outlets had given him the moniker of “The Fazbear Firestarter” for a reason.
Stupid nickname, Evan thought immediately. I could have done way better.
Wait, why do I care about that? That’s not the point!
I still could have done better, though.
Michael, apparently having gotten the reaction he wanted, stuffed it back into the pocket with ease. “There’s a reason I always carry a lighter around, Evan.”
“Why don’t you use it on him more often, then? He’s a prick.”
“If I use it on him too much, he’ll get used to it,” Mike replied. He winked at Evan conspiratorially, and cleared a few tools off the table they were at. “It’s not up to me, but my advice? Maybe surprise them with the physical forms. I think they’d appreciate it.”
Evan blinked, almost ready to bite back and tell Michael that he couldn’t tell him to do anything, but the idea technically made sense. They would probably be way more enthusiastic about the idea if they were surprised by it.
Hopefully. It depended on the animatronic, honestly. Evan would have to just pray that it worked.
“Alright,” Evan said. “So what do you need to make it?”
His older brother winked, before grabbing something off of a shelf nearby.
“Step one,” Michael announced, picking out a weirdly slabbed pencil from one of his tool belt pockets, “Blueprinting. I’ll see if William’s got any ideas, but if you could help me with getting component blueprints made, then I can work with them much easier.”
Evan nodded, taking a second look at Mike, who was pulling down rolls of blueprint paper from a shelf that he usually didn’t touch. He actually seemed kind of excited, which was a little odd. Normally, Mike didn’t get this excited over robotics or mechanical jobs anymore - he only really did it because the only other person in the house who actually had any experience stayed holed up in his room for weeks at a time. And because there were a lot of animatronics in this house that needed repairs, mainly because people kept trying to kill each other.
This seemed… This seemed more like he was genuinely excited to do it than anything else. It was strange to see Mike with a smile that didn’t look chronically exhausted, the way it always looked.
Impossible, Evan thought immediately. Mike was never that excited to do stuff with me.
With a final dismissive snort, Evan teleported out of the workshop. He had other stuff to do.
Chapter 2: Subtlety Isn't A Strong Suit Of The Aftons
Summary:
Michael and Evan go to explain why they need endoskeleton parts to the nightmares. However, Evan chooses to explain this in the worst way possible.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Trying to subtly ask for blueprints from animatronics who hadn’t been developed through blueprints and physical models was… definitely a task that he needed to accomplish. It actually involved much more polite subtlety than most people could manage in one lifetime, let alone three or four.
Michael was very good at being subtle. He’d been excelling at the art of ‘being subtle’ ever since the bite years ago. He’d had to, if he wanted to make it through to graduation alive, and from there, getting through the rest of his life. To put it simply, being subtle was a way of life for Michael.
Evan, his younger brother by six years and a month, used to be fairly subtle. He used to be able to blend into the background easily, to avoid certain situations and keep under the radar. But forty years could change a lot about a person, and to say he wasn’t the most subtle person in the house anymore-
“YOU WANT WHAT!?”
Well. It would certainly be an understatement.
Michael pinched the remaining bridge of his nose as Evan confidently crossed his arms, staring at the nightmare animatronics in the room. Were it possible for him to sigh, he would have done it to a degree that would make even the most disappointed parent step down.
“You heard me!” Evan announced, hands on his hips and wings folding closed, as though he hadn’t just said the most atrocious thing to ever come out of his mouth this week. “Mike needs to steal your skeletons for a little while!”
“I don’t-”
Evan’s head snapped around so fast that Michael would have sworn the boy’s neck snapped with the sheer force of how fast it had turned. His little brother fixed him with a glare that did not match the grin on his face, a very clear indicator of ‘shut the fuck up,’ and Michael did just that. These animatronics weren’t his area of expertise, so his initial thought had been to let Evan handle them. They were, after all, technically his animatronics.
Maybe that wasn’t the most genius idea I’ve ever had, he thought, noting the horrified looks on each of the nightmares faces. Foxy and Nightmare looked particularly horrified by the phrasing, while everyone else was just exchanging worried looks and shooting the occasional ‘can you please tell us that’s not what he means’ expression at Michael.
“Yeah, your bones are really important right now,” Evan added in an unhelpfully conspiratorial whisper. “He says he needs to steal them for like a week or… how long would it be taking?”
His younger brother looked at him, making a little motion with his hand. Almost something like a 'come here' gesture
He wants me to play along, Michael realized. Well, that was a little easier than explaining what actually needed to happen.
“I’d say… I’d need to borrow the endoskeletons for a pretty fair amount of time,” Michael announced, making the most ponderous expression that he could without eyebrows. “Say… three or four months.”
That wasn’t actually true. Michael and William probably only needed a week or two to analyze the endoskeletons and blueprint them so they could start constructing them properly.
That was, if William agreed to help. Michael had yet to actually ask him about helping with this. Two months of living under the same roof again didn’t necessarily mean that he wanted to talk to William. Most of the time, nobody really did talk to him unless it was deemed necessary enough.
And considering the terms people usually parted on if you set them on fire, Michael wasn't exactly high on the list of getting spoken to.
“Why would you need our endoskeletons, of all things!?” Foxy yelped, clearly buying it way more than anyone else in the room. Chica particularly seemed to have noticed the joke, but most of them hadn't yet.
As if to prove this point, the cupcake on her shoulder rolled it's eyes entirely too theatrically for something that didn't do anything besides watching.
“For evil, secret experiments,” Evan answered, and this time Michael let out an annoyed grunt. He wasn’t going to let that one slide.
“Oh, come off it, now. Who do you take me for, William?”
Evan snorted, clearly trying to hold back a laugh this time, and relief washed over Michael. He was admittedly a little worried that Evan was going to be pissed if he interrupted the joke, but it didn’t seem so.
Michael didn’t actually remember the last time Evan had laughed at anything he’d said aloud. Maybe it was that one time when he was starting middle school, after he and Evan had gone back and forth on terrible dad jokes for a couple hours. What was that, 45 years ago?
A faint smile crossed the corpse’s face, before he fixed his face. He’d spent enough time reminiscing these past few months. Right now, he had a job to do.
“Okay, but for real,” Michael said calmly, drawing everyone’s attention to himself. There were so many pairs of eyes looking at him with so many different expressions that Michael had to take a second to reset his remaining brain cells. “We’re trying to blueprint different animatronics and their endoskeletons right now, in case anybody ever needs replacement parts in the future. We’ve got a fair amount of animatronics blueprinted, but we realized that we don’t have any kind of original components for you guys.”
The nightmares all stared at him blankly, before Foxy spoke up. “We’re projections, though - we’re only ever as real as Evan makes us, right?”
His younger brother shifted, wings shuffling in a way that always seemed to indicate he was uncomfortable. He definitely knew something that that none of the others did, but Michael wasn't going to push him. Instead, he looked back at the nightmarish fox, trying to find an explanation that wouldn’t reveal what Evan had actually asked him for help with.
“But if you’re being projected as real, then you’re also going to be taking real potential damages, right?” Michael pointed out, forcing as much fake confidence into the words as possible. “Those damages will eventually start to build up, and if you guys don’t have any components to replace the damages, then it’ll be permanent. I don’t think anybody particularly wants to be permanently stuck with a disabled voice box or broken arms.”
Everyone was looking at Michael like he’d completely lost his mind, which wasn’t exactly the most unusual thing to happen. His family had a tendency to stare at him like this whenever he explained topics that nobody else was interested in, mostly maintenance work or discussing some of his night shifts. People on the streets would even just stare at him oddly on a regular basis, even with an illusion disc active and disguising him.
“Well… alright, that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Bonnie said, one mangled ear tilting to the side. “But if you’re that desperate to dissect someone’s endoskeleton, I think Mangle might be more willing to help with that. It’s already mostly metal and wires, anyway.”
Freddy scoffed. “Good luck with that. You’re going to have to crawl around up in the attic to find Mangle, and I haven’t seen it in a while.”
“Because you don’t leave the room, brainless,” Chica pointed out, poking the ragged brown bear with one talon-like claw. A grating yelp of irritation, and Michael just sighed slightly and turned back to the nightmares who weren’t bickering.
“So, if I want endoskeleton blueprints, I go into the attic and talk to Mangle?” Michael clarified. Bonnie and Nightmare nodded, while Evan rolled his eyes.
“If you can find it, then hats off to you,” Evan said. “That attic is massive.”
“It’s an attic, and Mangle’s a giant animatronic,” Michael said. “How hard could it really be?”
Notes:
WHY DO THEY BE SILLY
Hope you enjoyed this chapter, and have a good day/night!
Wonderbat803c on Chapter 1 Thu 17 Jul 2025 01:01AM UTC
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