Chapter Text
There are flowers on his doorstep. Mike crouches down, leaning against his door for balance, and hesitantly grabs at the tangled stems. Swaths of uncoordinated, random-coloured petals jut and preen at odd angles because the parchment paper wrapped around the flowers was pressed too tight against them. A shock of twine tied around the thick paper holds everything together. The flowers are squished, nearly molded together, and some seem to be half dead, all dry and flaking. It’s repulsive. It almost looks like some kid’s art project. For a second, Mike thinks about asking Abby if she’s gotten into botany or something, but he decides against it. It was the middle of the day, the middle of the week, the middle of the school year. Abby couldn’t have possibly made this, let alone toss the bouquet onto their doorstep. And she wouldn’t have rang the doorbell that incessantly, and for that long.
Skeptically glancing around at his neighbor’s placid houses, the empty road, the neatly parked cars, and the quiet lull of the midday sun, he shakes his head. Whoever had left this abomination behind was long gone, their point proven. What point was being made with the bouquet was yet to be seen, but, Mike reasons, a point had been made nonetheless. He had just finished repairing his house; he was more than ready to return to the mundanity of normal life. He didn’t need or want someone leaving bizarre gifts at his door. If this was some teenager’s prank, he wanted nothing to do with it.
With a muted rustle, the bunch of flowers are set on his kitchen table. He leans over them, dubiously staring at the twisted, bruised stems. Curiously, Mike gently pulls at a bright orange petal from what he assumes is a lily. The flower, as bent and wrinkled from death as it is, gives easily, and the petal is plucked without effort. Crumpled orange lilies and greying peonies, and some other flowers he couldn’t recognize, didn’t care to recognize. There are two other plants, two that stand out from the other haphazardly added ones. The first one looks delicate; little white caps, miniature blooms like upside-down crowns. The plasticky white flowers are bunched together, sprouting from the same reddish stem, which is peppered with glossy, canoe shaped leaves. With an unnecessary amount of wariness, Mike brings his nose towards the clusters of white flowers. It’s sweet. He’s not sure what he expected.
The second interesting plant that stands out is the freshest of the bunch. The petals look dry, but not nearly as abused as the rest. They’re beautiful; austere purple petals formed into downcast cups. Each flower, each cup, climbs up a single green stem, layered into a sort of cone. The individual blossoms almost look like pansies, with their wisps and flashes of white against the shock of veined, pale violet. Each petal curls in demurely, creating a delicate, regal, miniature alcove for the fuzz of stamens. Mike doesn’t recognize the plant at all, and he feels a bit disappointed for not having seen something like this before. It’s not a violet, not some sort of creeping morning glory, certainly not a rose. The purple flowers smell so faintly, that he’s almost unconvinced that it’s a real plant.
Oranges and purples and greys and whites and greens. All wrapped together in the bruising grip of too-much twine and messy parchment. Mike isn’t sure what to make of it. The bouquet is half repulsive, all gross and crunched and bent to hell, but it’s also just a bunch of flowers scrounged together. He wasn’t going to let his mind run wild with insane possibilities over flowers, he wasn’t going to let himself be intimidated, or whatever, by flowers. Flowers. Flowers? Flowers were completely benign. And, at least the purple ones were kind of pretty. Maybe, he thinks, Abby would appreciate having them.
With a sigh, Mike stretches before sifting through a full rack of drying dishes. When he excavates a particularly tall cup, he closes his eyes and holds his breath, willing the plates to not crash down in a cascade of broken ceramic and plastic. After a healthy pause, after he’s sort of mostly sure that nothing will fall and break, he breathes again, shuffling over to his sink to fill the cup.
“It’s been a month,” Mike mutters to himself, boredly watching the waterlevel climb halfway up his makeshift vase, “Why would anyone send flowers? And why now?” When the amount of water starts making the cup feel heavy, he carefully balances it towards the kitchen table, staring as the water bounces and laps at the rim with each step he takes. It splashes onto the table when he sets it down. Perhaps, he realizes with a taut frown, he had filled it too high.
The twine comes undone with little struggle; the true problem lies with the parchment paper. The stems were smashed beneath it, sandwiched and nearly becoming a sickly green paste from the friction and, probably, the sheer force at which the bouquet had been tied together. The parchment, then, naturally sticks to the flowers, and when Mike tries to gently excise them from their papery confines, he finds that the parchment paper sticks to and tugs at the stems’ skin, threatening to strip the flowers into ribbons. He bites his lip in concentration and gently, ever so gently, peels the paper away with shaking hands, narrowing his eyes at the streaks of stem that gets left behind.
The stems are still bent and even more mangled now, but Mike can’t find it in himself to really care. These were free flowers; a free, pre-arranged, sort of ugly bouquet! And, he figures, it would be a nice surprise for Abby, for her to find the flowers, ugly as they are, all set up in a vase. Well, set up in a cup. Same difference, really. He scoops up the sad congregation of flowers and carefully slides them into his cup. It wasn’t terrible looking. It, of course, didn’t look great, but it wasn’t the worst thing.
It was strange, though, receiving flowers. It had been a month since his house had been destroyed, ripped apart by, what seemed to be, every single animatronic within a fifty-mile radius of his property. It had been an entire month since he had, regretfully, told Vanessa to get lost. An entire month since he had been randomly flash-banged with the information that Vanessa had a brother; a month since he found out that Vanessa had a crazy, murderous, insane brother. For a month, Mike had been repairing his house, filling in gouges, sanding ripped up bumps of drywall; for a whole month, he had been sweating and working and wallowing over his torn up house. He had been saddled with all of the broken, lifeless husks of the animatronics. Mike had, of course, enlisted Jeremiah’s help, through a not-small amount of begging and pleading, with hauling the animatronics to a scrap yard. They had gone at night. Mike had been too embarrassed to be seen moving the hunks of metal around in broad daylight.
So, it was incredibly odd to be receiving flowers right now if they were supposed to be some sort of apology from Vanessa, or some sort of well-wishes gift from Jeremiah. He supposes that they could have come from Vanessa, potentially. Perhaps. It had been a month since they had spoken, maybe she figured that a time frame like that would have been enough for Mike to cool off a bit. He didn’t need a month to cool off, though. Really, he had instantly regretted telling her off like that. He had been stressed, and, really, that’s no excuse, but, the words had tumbled out of his mouth before he could even think about them. And, it felt right at the time; she was the reason he was so intertwined with all of this Fazbear bullshit. But, that wasn’t fair to her. She probably didn’t mean to get him so involved. And she had been trying to get better, she had been trying so hard to escape her past.
If Vanessa had sent him flowers as a sort of olive branch, some sort of peace offering, then he would accept. He would accept that peace offering in a heartbeat. But, he wasn’t entirely sure it was Vanessa who had sent the bouquet. The flowers were terribly dead looking, all wrinkled and crumpled, and the colours were all competing and bizarre. She probably would have left something professional looking, complete with a note, or something like that. She wouldn’t have thrown something so hateful-looking together, wouldn’t have choked the stems together with layers and layers of taut twine, wouldn’t have wrapped the flowers in bent, tattered parchment paper. And, Jeremiah wouldn’t have sent him something like this either. He was too tasteful for that.
There was another possibility. He narrows his eyes, watching his warped reflection in the faceted glass of his makeshift vase. Yeah, there was another possibility. Another terrible possibility.
Things were starting to go missing. It had started innocuously enough, really. So innocuous, so mundane, that he couldn’t exactly pinpoint when it had truly started. So innocuous, even, that he nearly drove himself insane, nearly convinced himself that he was experiencing something like early-onset dementia. Or alzheimer’s, or something. It was small things at first. Small, barely noticeable details and items moved an inch too far to the left, maybe a piece of furniture angled a few degrees too far, farther than normal. His favorite pen, the one that flowed just right, the one that he, embarrassingly, nervously chewed on when he looked through his bills. Missing. He always placed it, cap-side-up, in the same dollar store mug with the rest of his random, hodge-podge collection of pencils and markers. And it was gone. An old bottle opener, gone. The magnet he had bought in high school because he thought it looked stupid, gone.
And, maybe a week after he started noticing the smaller abnormalities, it seemed to increase. As if whatever phantom was sulking through his house, whatever depraved stalker had been combing through his belongings had gotten comfortable, had gotten more confident, bold, even. It was still mundane things, common household objects going missing, but it was beginning to veer off into territory he wasn’t willing to think about. His toothbrush had gone missing. When he woke up in the morning and found that it had vanished, he had stared into his reflection. He had stared and stared, standing stock still, and stared into the mirror. Mike had been in utter disbelief, trying to convince himself he had just thrown away his toothbrush last night, or, maybe, he was still dreaming. He could, if he really deluded himself, be convinced that everything else had been a fluke. Maybe a prank of some kind by Abby. Maybe all that stress was finally getting to him. Maybe, even, he was finally snapping. But, the toothbrush. His toothbrush. There was no reasonable explanation for why his toothbrush would be missing.
His toothbrush, an old chapstick tube, one of his socks, that water bottle he had only drank half of. Gone. Vanished into thin air. When he had asked Abby about it, all frustrated and confused, she had looked at him with such an unnerving amount of concern that he had dropped the subject immediately.
One day when he came home from work, his dishwasher had been emptied. Mike had obsessively opened, closed, and re-opened cupboards and drawers, checked shelves, pried opened and slammed his pantry shut. Everything was put away perfectly normally, all of the dishes in his eclectic collection of different shades and designs, placed in their designated spaces, exactly where he would have put them. It was unnerving. Completely unnerving. He must have looked nearly insane with all of his dread and nervous energy, because Abby didn’t mention anything about how she had caught him staring outside the kitchen window for a collective twenty minutes. He had checked, locked, unlocked and re-locked the locks exactly six times before feeling comfortable enough to go to sleep that night.
Mike could feel the prickly sensation of being watched whenever he was at home. When he ran errands, when he walked to his car, when he went to work, he was fine. The sensation ceased as soon as he slipped out of his front door. It was bizarre, really, feeling so uneasy in his own home, feeling so safe in public. He had written the sensation off at first, believing that he was just overly paranoid from nearly being killed, nearly turned into a bloody pile of bones and organs and flesh, a month ago. But, then he began noticing things that were missing. Chores were being done with a truly unnerving amount of precision, an awfully great amount of accuracy to how they would normally be done.
And, just the other day, Mike noticed his spare key was missing. Stolen away from where it had been laid to rest beneath his welcome mat. Whoever his stalker was had complete access to his house, to his belongings, to, to him, really, until he could scrounge up the money to change his locks. He would need to change all of his locks, too, given that each keyhole used the same key pattern. An unfortunate lack of forethought on his front, certainly. He had been meaning to get around to changing a few of the locks to make it harder for would-be thieves, but he could never be bothered to actually get it done. Plus, it was expensive! Insanely expensive, Mike reasons. He would need to get each lock changed individually, and each one would probably cost at least a hundred dollars. But that wasn’t important right now. Well, it sort of was, but he had more pressing matters. Like the bouquet.
Mike had a stalker. A stalker who was bold, someone who was rapidly raising the stakes, ever-increasing in their confidence to plainly fuck with Mike. A stalker who had left him flowers. Mottled, greying, disgusting flowers, but flowers all the same.
Huffing out a sigh, Mike stands up a bit straighter, pointedly looking away from the flowers. He was exhausted, too-paranoid, and weary, and, maybe he was too tired from being stressed all the time, because he was confronting this information shockingly well. He was so over everything, over Freddy’s, over the whole FazFest bullshit that had happened, over the Aftons and their whole bloodline, over everything. He was so over everything, so done, that he couldn’t be bothered to really care that he was being surveiled, stalked, watched so closely. He didn’t care. Well, he cared a little bit, but he had more important things to worry about. So what if some asshole was watching him? Stalking victims had a terrible habit of winding up dead, sure, but he was already dead on his feet, exhausted, and all that. Maybe that was a terrible way of thinking about things.
His stalker had been so audacious, so terribly bold, coming into his house. Taking shit. Moving things. Though, the flowers were throwing him off; Mike didn’t understand it at all. This was the first time they had left anything behind. That probably represented something, probably indicated something changing. He didn’t care. He would deal with this when it became unbearable.