Chapter Text
Gotham City - September 10, 2001 -
The wind howled through the dry trees surrounding the potholed parking lot of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza.
It was a night where the moon seemed swallowed by thick, gray clouds, leaving only the flickering, sickly light of a faulty neon sign to illuminate the facade.
The smiling face of Freddy the bear, painted on a peeling, damp wooden board, seemed to mock anyone who dared cross the threshold of that establishment.
The silence outside was absolute, broken only by the metallic creaking of the restaurant's structure, groaning under the weight of years and partial neglect.
Inside, the air was thick, impregnated with an eternal smell of machine grease, moldy carpet, and the lingering aroma of a pizza that never quite finished rotting.
In the security office, the atmosphere was claustrophobic.
The only access door was buried under a pile of heavy objects.
There were a heap of boxes, chairs, tables and files blocking the doorway; the security guard, had piled everything up in a surge of pure adrenaline.
He was on the floor, kneeling in front of the ventilation duct.
The security guard didn't look like the type of man who would be in a place like that. His hands, though calloused by time, trembled violently as he gripped a worn screwdriver.
His once-pressed and immaculate uniform guard was soaked with sweat and dust.
The nameplate on his chest, which read Alfred Pennyworth, gleamed under the intimidating office light.
He was kneeling before the ventilation grate, blindly unscrewing the bolts.
The screw's sharp metal threads bit at Alfred's fingertips, scoring deeply into the pads.
Blood smeared the screw head and dripped onto the rusty, gray metal vent cover Alfred was laboring to remove from the wall.
Alfred had already freed two of the vent's screws.
He'd tried to bend the cover back away from the wall, but the metal was too strong.
He had to get a third screw out so he could swing the cover out of the way.
The vent was large, big enough, He thought, for him to get through. It had to be.
If it wasn't…. well, he couldn't think about that.
"C'mon, c'mon," he muttered.
The words came out in staccato gasps because Alfred's heart was pounding so violently it felt like it was beating the air out of his lungs.
He needed to get out of there now.
Suddenly, the office phone rang.
The shrill sound cut through the air like a cold blade. Alfred growled, his face contorted into a mask of hatred and dread.
He knew who it was. He answered with a sudden movement.
“Hello, Mr. Pennyworth…” the male voice on the other end was calm, almost melodic, laden with a sadistic satisfaction that revealed no identity, only a profound malice.
“Don’t give me that bullshit!” Alfred yelled, his voice faltering as he resumed spinning the screwdriver with maniacal speed. “Do you have any idea what’s in this place?!”
“I warned you…” the voice on the phone continued, unperturbed. “Here at Freddy’s, imagination… comes to life.”
“You bastard!” Alfred shouted. “You knew this was going to happen?!?”
“I told you the job had…” the voice murmured, “…dangers.”
Suddenly A heavy bang sounded behind Alfred…. A loud bang that vibrated the table Alfred was crouched under.
Involuntarily, Alfred raised his head, whacking it on the table as he turned to look over his shoul- der.
The throbbing that erupted in his skull added syncopation to his rapid-fire breathing.
Alfred stared at the barrier he'd built up in front of the office's metal door.
Was it going to hold?
“You know how it is…” the voice on the phone whispered, the static on the line sounding like a stifled laugh. “Here children can be… wild.”
Alfred then glanced at the monitor wall.
Most showed only gray static from the cameras, but camera 4B, facing the east corridor, showed something terrifying.
There, standing in the dim light, was a boy. His skin was tanned, his hair dark and messy. He wore a green shirt with dark horizontal stripes and brown shorts, completing the look with high white socks.
In his arms, he tightly clutched a golden Freddy plush, whose button eyes seemed to glow in the darkness.
The boy sported a sinister smile, too wide for a child's face, revealing small, white teeth.
He raised his free hand and slowly waved at the camera.
He knew Alfred was watching.
Alfred felt a chill run through his body.
Another bang.
This one reverberated through the office; Alfred felt the vibration course through all the bones of his body.
The vibration turned into a panicked convulsion as one of the filing cabinets he'd piled on top of the desk teetered.
The desk was wedged against the door, but if the cabinets fell, would the desk stay in place?
The wobbling filing cabinet bumped into the desk chair that topped the pile of office furniture Bob had cobbled into a blockade.
The chair toppled over and crashed onto the office's linoleum floor.
The desk twitched, but it stayed in place.
Ignoring the prickles between his shoulder blades as he rotated away from the door, Alfred returned his concentration to the screw.
The blood-slicked screw stubbornly refused to turn for a couple more seconds.
He gritted his teeth and put all his focus on the screw head.
And finally, the screw came loose.
He dropped it as the vent cover swiveled on its remaining screw and swung away from the opening in the wall.
Alfred peered into the black shaft extending in front of him.
Stuffy air wafted from the opening.
Dust billowed upward.
He suppressed a sneeze.
Behind Alfred, a fingernails-on-a-blackboard screech preceded a deafening clang.
Alfred's head swiveled.
The filing cabinet was no longer on top of the desk. It lay on the floor.
And behind it, the desk began to move away from the doorknob.
Alfred sucked in his breath and looked around wildly for his flash- light.
He'd set down the club-style light when he'd begun working on the screws.
Where was it?
Alfred spotted the flashlight a few feet to his right.
He lunged for it as another deafening metallic thud came from the office door.
The overhead speakers hissed, and then they emitted a tinny shriek just as the voice on the phone burst into a chilling, disjointed laugh.
“Time to go” Alfred thought.
Flipping on his flashlight, Alfred crawled into the narrow dark- ness.
More thuds and thumps chased him away from the office.
He scrabbled as fast as he could.
In his seventy, Alfred had come to terms with his old hair looks and receding hairline, but he'd never been thrilled with his slight body.
For once, though, he was grateful for his narrow shoulders.
And even so, he still had to squirm and wriggle his way through the tightened enclosure of the vent shaft.
In spite of the close quarters, he made quick progress.
The continued caterwaul coming from the speakers and the echoing bangs and thumps that sounded like they were pursuing Alfred through the inkiness impelled him through the shaft at lightning speed.
In what felt like both seconds and centuries, Alfred reached the end of the vent shaft that led away from the office.
The passage split.
Alfred aimed his flashlight beam left, then right.
The light revealed the same thing in both directions, darkness and more darkness.
Sweat stung Alfred's eyes and dripped off his nose.
The stench of his perspiration was fetid in the confined space.
Alfred set down his flashlight so he could wipe his face.
Another scourging howl came from the building's speakers. Alfred snatched up his flashlight. Without thinking anymore, he headed down the left passageway.
Losing himself again in frantic crawling that defied his ability to quantify seconds or minutes, Alfred clambered forward until he found himself looking at a vent cover like the one that he'd removed in the office.
Alfred groaned.
Was he trapped? If this vent cover was screwed on as securely as the one in the office...
The cacophony coming from the speakers crescendoed.
The vent shaft shook as the entire building quaked.
Alfred hefted his flashlight and used the end of it to pound on the vent cover.
To his shock... and relief... the vent cover came loose.
It flipped away from the shaft and slapped the wall with a crash that made Alfred cringe.
Even above the din that filled the building, the sound carried, which meant it easily gave away Alfred's location.
He quickly pulled himself out of the vent shaft.
Every nerve ending in his body on alert, Alfred stood and whirled in a circle, shining his light around him.
When the flashlight beam revealed stacks of boxes, restaurant supplies, and a closed, frosted-glass door, Alfred let out a pent-up breath.
He was in one of the pizzeria's storage rooms.
And he was alone.
For the moment.
He took a step toward the door.
Reaching for the knob, he hesitated.
What was on the other side of the door?
Although Alfred could see no looming shadows beyond the murky glass, his heart rate ratcheted up a couple more notches.
His chest felt contracted, like metal bands were constricting around him. Alfred really, really did not want to open the door that stood between his current…. temporary beyond the door. But he couldn't stay here forever. Locking himself safety and what was roaming loose in the office hadn't worked. Hiding in here wouldn't, either.
He had to get out of the building.
Alfred turned the knob and threw open the door. Willing himself not to think, Alfred stepped out of the storage room.
Checking left and right and seeing nothing but the dimly lit hallway, He took off at a sprint.
His rubber-soled athletic shoes slapping at the black-and-white-checked floor, Alfred reached the hallway corner in seconds.
He rounded it, and his gaze locked on the glowing red EXIT sign above
the door just thirty feet away.
Pumped up by hope, Alfred shot toward the door.
He hit the door's metal crash bar at top speed. Fully expecting to catapult through the door into the sweet freedom of the night outside, Alfred was shocked when his body bounced backward off the bar.
He windmilled his arms and kept his balance, barely.
For a few seconds, he hung on to his hope, too.
He threw himself at the door.
Even though Alfred knew he had no bulk, he wasn't a small guy. At five foot eleven, he had a little heft.
Surely, he could bash the door open.
But no. The door remained closed, like it was nailed shut.
Alfred tried again. And again.
Finally, panting heavily, he leaned against the door.
And that's when he heard it.
"Diddly dum dum diddly da..."
The singsong voice echoed through the building as it came toward Alfred.
Its playful tone was like a spider crawling up Alfred's spine.
Goose bumps erupting on his bare arms, Alfred turned and looked down the long hallway behind him.
As soon as he did, the corridor's lights went out.
What little illumination there'd been turned to utter blackness.
"Dum da dum dum..." The mocking tones came closer.
Alfred lost it. Turning, he pounded on the exit door.
"Help! Someone! Help me!" He screamed so loudly that the words abraded his throat like a metal file scouring at his vocal cords.
In spite of his cries, though, Alfred easily heard the pounding footsteps that rushed up behind him.
Going rigid, his whole body immobilized by his brain's inability to accept what was happening, Alfred waited for the inevitable attack that would.
Clinging to a tenuous thread of awareness, Alfred's brain attempted to process all the stimuli that were bombarding his senses.
His eyes registered fluorescent lights, at once scathingly bright and then terrifyingly dark.
His feet relayed burning pressure, vice-like clamping across the arches.
His spine communicated jarring and bumping, cracking into a seemingly endless rock-hard expanse.
His forehead felt warm with thick moisture; it ran into his ears. Alfred blinked as his brain worked to make sense of all these bodily reports.
He attempted to move.
As soon as Alfred tried to get his body to follow his command his brain reached a conclusion about his situation.
He lifted his head and looked down the length of his prone body. He was being dragged down the hallway by his feet.
Looking into the on-and-off shadows, Alfred couldn't see what had hold of him. But he didn't need to see it.
He knew what it was.
Corkscrewing his spine in an attempt to get away, Alfred's head slammed against the floor beneath him.
He felt his hip knock against something sharp and realized he was being dragged around a corner. Stiffening, his stomach flip-flopped with the realization of where he was.
The grayscale of intermittent light was abruptly replaced by a swirling kaleidoscope of color.
Red and yellow and purple and blue floodlights streamed swaths of radiance across Alfred's field of vision.
As his fingers flexed, in his attempt to grab at something, anything to stop his progress toward wherever he was being dragged, Alfred recognized the detritus of long-forgotten fun.
His hand grazed over a party hat.
His thigh rubbed up against a table leg.
Alfred was tugged hard, and his body twisted.
As it did, Alfred's gaze landed on a wall covered with children's drawings.
The yellowed, curling paper covered in crayon-rendered stick figures ruffled in an air current as he was heaved past the wall.
Alfred had looked at that wall long and hard just a few hours earlier, well before he'd realized the danger that he was in.
The wall had given him the creeps, serious creeps.
One drawing in particular, one that was noticeably larger than the others, had captured his attention.
This drawing, hung as if it was the central masterpiece of an exhibit, depicted a large bat standing hand in hand with five happy children.
In spite of the gaiety suggested by the cheerful scene, the image had troubled Alfred.
As he caught a glimpse of the bat drawing now, he felt bile rise in the back of his throat.
Alfred tried to scissor his legs to free himself from his captor.
The motion did nothing but amp up the pressure around his feet.
He was yanked hard.
His head smacked against the wall as he went around yet another corner.
For a few seconds, he thought he heard the undulating, distant sound of laughing children.
Then the hint of cognizance that had surfaced to make him aware of his surroundings once again sank beneath a layer of cobwebbed dullness.
Alfred, coward that he felt he was, welcomed the muffled understanding.
Unwilling to face the truth of what was happening and what was about to happen, he slipped into a dreamlike state that eased the hard edges of his predicament.
He let himself float in and out of reality until, suddenly, his body was whipped from the floor and thrown.
When Alfred's back smacked into cold metal, his mind was jarred into full alertness.
His gaze immediately scanned his surroundings
As he took in the pinching, pressing steel wrapping itself around his back, buttocks, and thighs.
Alfred cried out and attempted to leap from the metal chair he knew he was in.
Before his muscles could lift him upward, a green luminosity shone from a button on the side of the chair, and metal restraints snapped into place around his wrists.
A thick leather strap snugged tightly around his chest.
Alfred writhed, but he knew he was wasting his energy,
“The Parts and Service room,” Alfred thought.
Of all the eerie rooms in the pizzeria that he'd been hired to "guard," this was the room that had freaked him out the most when he'd first seen it.
Its walls were lined with metal shelving that surrounded multiple stainless steel worktables and industrial-looking metal "recliners" that in no way conjured feelings of relaxation.
The Parts and Service room was stuffed full of tools, wires, fasteners, and various disembodied robotic endoskeletons.
Metal feet and arms and hands and legs and elbows and shoulders were tangled on the shelves and strewn across the worktables.
When Alfred had first seen the room, he'd felt like he was standing in a robotic torture chamber.
He had quickly backed out and slammed the door closed.
Once again, Alfred thrashed in the chair.
Using all of the strength he could muster, he tried to free himself.
The chair held on to him, and then it snapped backward, stretching him flat.
As soon as Alfred was supine, a massive, furry brown bear mask loomed over his face.
Alfred screamed.
As Alfred's pointless bawling filled the room, the bear mask opened up.
The two halves of the bear face peeled back like the wings of a beetle, expanding outward.
As the fur parted, spinning robotic mechanisms filled Alfred's vision.
Razorsharp and in constant motion, the inside of the bear
mask was a blur of clicking, clanking knifelike protrusions and pincers.
Every edge of exposed metal was a small lethal weapon that would easily pierce human skin.
From the shadows, the child he had seen on the cameras appeared.
The dark-haired boy walked slowly towards the light. He clutched the golden Freddy plush to his chest as if it were a shield.
“Hey! Kid! Help me, please!” Alfred shouted, his voice echoing off the metal walls. “That thing… the bat… it’s trapped me here. Let me go!”
The boy stopped inches from Alfred. He didn’t look scared; he looked fascinated.
A slow, unsettling smile spread across his face.
“It’ll be a quick process…” the boy whispered, his voice sounding like wind blowing through hollow bones. “I promise.”
“What? What are you talking about?!” Alfred questioned.
Suddenly a sharp beeping sound cut through the air.
The workshop’s red lights flashed rhythmically.
Above him, the machine’s engine roared, and the still blades sprang to life in a lethal blur of silver.
Freddy’s head began its slow descent toward Alfred’s face.
The man began to panic.
Alfred began fighting like an animal caught in a metal-toothed trap.
He whipped his head from side to side.
He bucked his torso.
He kicked his legs.
At first, Alfred felt like his efforts were futile, but then he felt one of the armrests begin to wiggle.
Straining to crane his neck, Alfred looked at his wrist. He couldn't see what was loosening, but something was.
Maybe a bolt was coming free.
“HELP!! SOMEONE!!! HELP ME!!!!” Alfred screamed with all his might, “HELP ME PLEASE!!! SOMEONE GET ME OUT OF HERE!!”
The mask began to approach closer and closer.
The blades began to accelerate, spinning with a sharp, cutting sound.
“I HAVE A FAMILY! FOR GOD’S SAKE!!! HELP ME!!”
Alfred turned to the boy one last time.
“PLEASE!!!! I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!!!”
The despair that had been clutching at Alfred since he'd hit the metal chair relaxed its grip... just a little.
Alfred let himself start to think he might be able to escape.
The lower edge of the helmet touched his chin.
Alfred tried to turn his face away.
But when the mask touched his face, there was no mercy.
With a snap, the internal hooks protruded from the side of the machine, penetrating Alfred’s temples with brutal cracks.
The sound was indescribable, the cracking of human teeth being crushed by gears, the tearing of soft tissue, and the gush of warm blood that instantly blinded Alfred as the mask consumed him. He screamed as the circular blades spun inside his skull, sculpting his face to fit the animatronic mold.
In seconds, Alfred's face became a deformed mass of flesh, his blood oozing from the eyes and mouth of the Freddy costume.
The boy watched everything without blinking, his smile growing with each bone crack and scream the man let out.
The process stopped with a hydraulic sigh.
From the absolute darkness, the bat animatronic emerged.
Its immense wings trailed across the floor, and its purple eyes gleamed with diabolical satisfaction.
The boy walked towards it, his spectral figure vibrating with glee.
“It’s done…” the boy said, looking at Alfred’s mechanized corpse. “Did we do everything right, Daddy?”
The bat tilted its head, a mechanical gesture that concealed the monstrous man inside the springlock suit.
“Yes, Damian,” the distorted, deep voice replied, laden with a sickly tenderness that only served to further bind the child’s soul. “You did an extraordinary job.”
The spirit let out a childish and terrifying laugh, embracing the bat.
The killer inside the machine stroked the boy’s head with its metallic claws, a gesture of affection amidst the abyss.
“It’s alright, my little one,” the bat murmured, extending its immense, gray hand. “Let’s play a little more. Your friends are waiting for us, hold my hand.”
Damian held the monster’s hand.
Together, they walked into the darkness of the corridors.
Leaving behind Alfred's trail of blood and the echo of a childhood lost in the gears of Freddy's.