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Mike’s watched enough horror movies to know that usually, if the plot involves the soul of a dead kid (or the souls of multiple dead children), usually the ending would give them some kind of closure as per what would happen in a typical narrative. Because dead kids are just a darn shame to include in your movie, a downright Debbie downer, and audiences don’t want to come out of horror movies remembering how those gosh darn dead kids are still suffering eternally through the curse of “living”. And Mike’s not a devout Christian, but he’s sure it has something to do with how people like to think that the kids are moving on to a better place, like getting reincarnated in a life where they don’t get murdered by some guy in a yellow bunny suit in the back of a pizzeria.
Then again, life doesn’t imitate movies.
After dropping Vanessa off at hospital, Mike’s greeted to a very lovely gift waiting for him and Abby when they come home lying on the living room carpet, unmoving. Abby tells him that Aunt Jane’s just sleeping, at least, that's what Freddy had told her. Mike, the initial shock wearing off, goes ‘Oh, of course,’ before whisking Abby away to her room. As for where Mike hid the body, he’ll never tell.
Why not report it to the police? Ask again when you have to be the one trying to explain how the real killer is an animatronic bear possessed by a kid who died in the 80’s. Yeah, thought so.
He gets called in to the police station later in the week, just as things are beginning to wind down. Mike’s nervous, but he tries his best not to let it show. The detectives apparently have found him linked to a number of disappearances, which makes sense. Max and her brother, Aunt Jane. A witness lawyer who testified that Mike would have a motive to get rid of them, all in order to keep custody of Abby. Mike agrees to a polygraph test.
During it, the polygraph examiner is smart enough to ask the question, “Were you involved in any way concerning the disappearances associated with the cases?” Mike fails.
“Are you aware of the current state of the victims involved in these cases, whether they are alive or deceased?” Another fail.
“Did you kill them?” He passes this one.
They go through the whole song and dance. The police acquire a search warrant for their home, they go and find nothing (let alone any evidence), Abby stays to the side whispering to Mike, “They kinda deserved it, though,” and Mike is looking through the phonebook for affordable child psychologists in the local area only to be disappointed when they have nowhere near the budget to hire one. One of the officers eyes Abby’s drawings of the iconic animatronic quartet but says nothing.
Finally, the police leave him alone because there’s not enough evidence to indict him on anything. Mike still gets occasional death threats from that side of the family, but he usually tells them to go fuck off and blocks their number and throws away any threatening letters that come in the mail.
At that point, Mike sighs in relief because he thinks they can finally put this nightmare behind them. Then, he hears a thump coming from under Abby’s bed one night as she’s in the bathroom brushing her teeth. Perhaps, against his better judgement, he looks.
Bonnie blinks back at him.
Mike breathes in sharply, screaming, ”Abby!”
So, Abby’s been… hiding them. In all sorts of crooks and nannies around the house. Without him knowing. You know, standard kid stuff to be hiding a bunch of killer machines (literally) behind his back because they’re her best friends, and she cries that she knew that Mike wouldn’t be happy about it if she told him from the start. She’s right. What kind of sane, functioning adult would be happy about this situation…
“You said we could visit them,” Abby says petulantly, pointing at Mike accusingly, “But we never did, you liar. You’re a liar, liar, pants on fire.”
“Where did you even learn that from?” Mike asks.
Abby sticks her tongue out. The four animatronics in the room against the wall stand in a line together, remaining still.
“I’m sorry, it’s just—it’s just been busy,” Mike lies. “And I haven’t had time, I’m still looking for a full-time gig and I’m trying my best to scrap money up for this month’s rent. Anyways, it’s fine, they—they came to visit you, so we’re good now, right?”
“Can’t we keep them?”
Before the word 'no' can even come out of Mike's mouth, all four pairs of animatronic eyes turn on him, flashing red. The illusion of choice, as they call it.
Abby sets out plates for six.
“They’re robots, Abby, they don’t eat. At least, they don’t eat like us. They can’t,” Mike tries to explain.
“Don’t be mean to my friends,” Abby complains. “I’ve learned that it’s the thought that counts. In school, they say that you have to treat others how you want to be treated.”
“I’m nice to them,” Mike defensively says. “I just don’t think they care about… plates.”
“You never ask them anything.”
But they wouldn’t respond anyways?
Mysteriously, a dog bowl appears in the corner of the living room one day. They don’t have a dog. Abby says it’s for Cupcake. She leaves some leftover scraps in the dog bowl occasionally. It’s always emptied the next morning.
…Mike doesn’t want to know.
Mike gets hired for a full-time gig. The salary is low, but if he stays on long enough, he’ll get a pay raise. He gets the offer after a botched interview to his surprise, the hiring manager casually mentioning how the other interviewed applicants never called back and Mike was the only one who responded after a certain while.
He tries not to think about how he told Abby how he probably wouldn’t get this job since there were much more qualified people out there that they could hire, and instead, shuts up and accepts his fate as a cleaner despite the mysterious circumstances.
A regular janitor, mind you. Although he does last longer in this job than his last janitorial job, he even becomes quite acquainted with the art of bleach, which may or may not be necessary for the near future.
(Dear god, he hopes not.)
When Garrett got kidnapped, it felt like Mike’s entire world came crashing down on him. The guilt and shame that he’d always have to live with every night when he closed his eyes, watching his entire family fall apart right before his eyes, his entire world shifting from one simple mistake he made, an innocent mistake. There were many times when Mike had thought to himself, what now? What next? How do you move on from something like that?
And while Mike never moved on, life does. Life doesn’t really stop for anyone.
When Mike unwillingly agreed to letting the animatronics stay, he thought to himself in that moment, it’s fine. This will only be temporary. I mean, they’ll lose interest in Abby soon enough and then leave and never come back. Abby will be sad, but she has actual human friends now, so she’ll be fine.
But the thing about life is that it moves forward, just like that. Hopeful days turn into hopeful weeks. Hopeful weeks turn into hopeful months. At some point, Mike just stops expecting anything because clearly, reality doesn’t function the way that he’d expect it to, and one night as he’s sitting on the living room couch squished between Foxy and Chica watching cartoons with Abby, he solemnly realizes, oh my god this is my life now.
The drawing hung by a magnet on the fridge now includes six figures, seven if you count the fucking cupcake.
Trust is a weird thing. At first, he’d been forced to trust the animatronics under the threat of being killed if he didn’t comply with them, but it’s been an entire year now, and they’ve never turned on them. Weirdly, Mike thinks that he's gotten rather comfortable around them, perhaps a little too much.
“My father isn’t here to boss them around anymore,” Vanessa, recently acquitted from the hospital, explains, sitting on the recliner with a mug of hot cocoa in her hand. “They’re harmless, I promise. I’ve known them over the years.”
“One of them ripped off my babysitter’s head from her body.”
“Well, maybe harmless isn’t the right word. More like innocent, in a way.” Vanessa shrugs. “They’re kids. Their perception of right and wrong is different from us.”
“Maybe, but shouldn’t we try to… you know… Help them make peace and all that jazz?”
Vanessa laughs. She actually laughs at him for the suggestion. “Trust me, I’ve tried. I’ve tried everything. If only it were that simple.”
“Have you tried visiting a psychic?”
“Oh my god,” Vanessa says. “You’re unbelievable. You’re actually just being unbelievable right now.”
“The psychic I went to didn’t help. I took the cupcake to go see her,” Mike says, sighing.
“And how’d that go?”
“I was called five different slurs in the span of three seconds, and then she cursed my firstborn to be born with six toes.”
“Six toes isn’t that bad,” Vanessa says.
“That’s what I said! It’s more inconvenient than anything, I’m guessing shoes never fit you when you have an extra toe.” Mike shakes his head. “Regardless, I’ve been trying to get these damn machines out of the house for months now, and they just. Won’t leave. They’ve got dead kids inside of them, can you blame me for wanting them to go away?”
Mike re-emphasizes, “They literally have dead kids inside of them. My sister is hanging around the remains of dead children.”
“They’re nice kids.”
“But—But—They’re dead,” Mike stammers.
“Yeah, I mean, what else would they be?” Vanessa sarcastically asks, flicking a hand out, not understanding Mike’s point. “They’re definitely not alive, so...?”
“You, you have a very, very strange childhood,” Mike sighs.
“I’m living in reality, and you’re not,” Vanessa says. “Dead kids, yeah. Can’t help them move on, yeah. What else are you supposed to do?”
“So you’re saying there’s nothing we can do to, to help these kids move on?”
“Like I already said, if I knew, I would’ve done it a long time ago,” Vanessa says. “Get used to it, Mike Schmidt. You let them in. You can’t just kick them out now, can you?”
“At least take the Cupcake, please. I literally wake up in the middle of the night and he’ll just be sitting there at the foot of the bed, and it scares the shit out of me. He knows what he’s doing.”
“And now you’re giving the cupcake a gender,” Vanessa says, tapping on Mike’s forehead with a sympathetic look. “You’re losing it, Schmidt.”
“Ohh, nice costumes!” A teenage boy wearing a white hockey mask says when he sees the animatronic quartet standing beside Abby and Mike.
Abby smiles pleasantly, now eleven. “Thank you,” she proudly says.
The teenage boy laughs obnoxiously, shouting, “Never knew this town had a bunch of furries! Ooh…!” He turns back to his group of friends, all of them high fiving each other.
Mike shakes his head, flicking his hand profusely side-to-side, trying to give the teenage boy a silent signal to cut it out before the consequences become permanent. Unfortunately, the teenage boy does not listen.
“Take that back!” Abby yells, swinging her pumpkin full of candy around trying to hit the boy. He doesn’t seem bothered at all. “There’s nothing I hate more than bullies!”
“Maybe if you were friends with people other than a bunch of freaks, you wouldn’t be bullied so much,” the boy mocks.
“Hey,” Mike calls, “Knock it off.”
“Now the little girl’s got her daddy to come fight her fights for her,” the teenage boy continues. Mike doesn’t even bother trying to respond, because he already knows that this guy is for sure dead. There’s no saving him. What do you expect Mike to do in this situation? You dug your own grave deeper when Mike tried to give you an out. At that point, Mike just gives up.
He ignores the disappearance posters that pop up around town later (which may or may not contain a familiar face). For the sake of his own sanity. And he’s wiping the dried blood off Chica’s beak because he certainly doesn’t want Abby doing it.
Their father comes over for Thanksgiving because family isn’t always the easiest to get rid of. No, not in that way. For some reason, blood ties are hard to snip off.
Mike thinks the gang shouldn't be allowed to stay in the house while their father is visiting. Abby disagrees. They’re part of the family, too! Yeah, but they’re also… a bunch of murderers…
The worst part is that Mike knows that Abby knows, but she still tries to pretend that she doesn’t know about it because her true feelings about the matter is that she doesn’t really care when they “kill people who deserve it”, and Mike just has to wonder where things went wrong. Like, he knows he isn't the best parent, but...
“Be nice, dad,” Mike warningly says. “I’m serious. Your life might depend on it.”
“What?” his dad asks. Mike can see the closet door opening just slightly ajar, Freddy’s narrowed red eye watching the scene carefully. Mike doesn’t have the energy to laugh or cry anymore.
“I’m serious,” Mike repeats.
“What, is this a hostage situation or something?”
“I’m not the hostage here,” Mike clarifies, using that strange concept known as trust as his leverage. “This is my house, so you have to play by my rules.”
“Yeah, yeah,” his father says dismissively. He sits down at the kitchen table. Mike sneaks over to the closet door where Freddy is spying, closing it with his back as inconspicuously as possible. Abby gives him an enthusiastic thumbs up. Scratch that, Mike would’ve just about cried right now if his father hadn’t been in the room.
The father’s eye wanders to the crayon-scribbled drawing placed on the fridge by a magnet. “What in the hell are those?”
“Language, dad,” Mike says.
“Those are my friends,” Abby says, taking the drawing off excitedly off the fridge and placing it flat on the table in front of their father. She uses a finger to trace over the drawings. “Look, this is Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy. And you can’t forget Cupcake too. They might not be as big as the others, but they’re still important.”
“Abby considers them family,” Mike says.
“We consider them family,” Abby says.
“We consider them family,” Mike says in a flat deadpan tone like he isn’t knowingly talking about dead children who refuse to stop freeloading off him.
Abby pats him on the arm.
“Aren’t you too old for imaginary friends?”
Both Abby and Mike say at the same time, “They’re not imaginary.”
“Do you wanna meet them?” Abby says with an excited sparkle in her eyes. Mike mouths the words, don’t do it, to his father with an expression of, you do not want to know.
Hallelujah for once in Mike’s life, because his father slowly says, with hesitation thick in his voice, “…No, I think I’m… good,” returning Mike’s expression of, You’re right, I do not want to know.
Mike doesn’t bring up Garrett, nor the fact that he found Garrett’s killer, nor what fate had descended upon Garrett’s killer. This is just a perfectly normal Thanksgiving dinner catching up with an estranged father, absolutely no tomfuckery happening here.
(Days after, Mike calls his father just to make sure he’s still alive. His father asks him if he’s involved with the mafia. Mike hangs up without answering. His father doesn’t come over for Thanksgiving anymore.)
“Why, hello Freddy,” Vanessa greets, nodding her head. “Love the hat.”
Freddy adjusts the Santa hat on his head with slow movements of his fingers, expression unchanging. They can only express emotions through their eyes, really, and Mike’s (unfortunately) lived long enough with them to have the ability to be able to tell that Freddy’s in a happy mood, if the ears slightly wriggling aren't already a dead giveaway. There’s no fireplace, but there’s a Christmas tree standing tall in the corner, adorned with ornaments and even a glowing star placed on top.
“You set that up by yourself?” Vanessa asks, slightly impressed.
“I had help,” Mike says. “From a certain pirate."
“He’s got a hook for a hand.”
“He has a perfectly normal hand, too,” Mike snarks back.
“It was a joke,” Vanessa says with a goofy smile, “Sorry if I hurt your feelings, Foxy.”
Foxy raises his hook hand up, Mike knowing that’s his shorthand for the ‘okay’ hand gesture. Abby comes into the living room with a cup of piping hot cocoa just for Vanessa. Vanessa smiles at her, accepting it with grace.
“So, how about a toast to another happy year to the Schmidt family?” Vanessa asks.
“I feel like you’re making fun of me,” Mike says.
“I’m not,” Vanessa says matter-of-factly. “I think what you’re doing is lovely. These guys deserve to be loved, too.”
Vanessa interrupts before Mike can speak after having already opened his mouth, “And yes, I know they’re dead children, Schmidt, we’ve talked about it.”
Mike closes his mouth and stays silent.
Later, when Abby goes to her room to pretend to sleep (while in reality staying up watching the window for any signs of Santa with Chica), Vanessa and Mike are absentmindedly watching late night Christmas Eve television in the living room, Mike's eyes wandering from the screen to Vanessa's hand before quickly snapping back to the romcom television program playing on the screen. Bonnie's head turns to Freddy and they both give each other a look. Foxy promptly leaves the living room, already knowing what's going to happen next.
Freddy stands up from the recliner, blocking the television screen.
Concerned, Vanessa asks, "What's wrong, Freddy?"
Freddy, ears wriggling, starts to play a song...
The low baritone voice of Frank Sinatra begins to fill the room, "Have yourself a merry little Christmas..."
Mike looks at Freddy in disbelief while Vanessa's mouth gapes wide open in delighted surprise. She stands up from her seat on the couch, hand reached out to Mike. "I believe you owe me a dance."
Mike looks up at Vanessa, briefly glancing at Bonnie who winks at him. Understanding that he'll never get used to this life, he takes Vanessa's hand with a wry smile on his face. "I do, don't I?"
On the fridge, there’s actually four new drawings added. Abby wanted to have her new best friends express themselves through their own art since they weren't able to through their words. The crude drawings on there depict the missing children from the 80’s, one of them containing Mike, another containing Abby, and even Vanessa makes a prominent cameo in one of the drawings.
They fit together, like puzzle pieces, into a collage of the Schmidt family.