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Fritz is not stupid. He knows his mom is lying to him. He doesn't like that.
"Look, there he is!" she says, cheerfully, but even he can tell her smile is forced as she holds him by the squirming hand and drags him toward where the other children are loudly squealing with glee. They're very loud. Fritz hates how loud they're being, but he hates watching them pull apart the impostor Foxy even more, two kids removing its chest plate while it's still moving automatically, swinging its head back and forth like nothing's wrong, like it belongs here. He squeezes his Foxy plush - one of the real Foxy, of the pirate Foxy, not of this fake - to himself and looks at the ground, refusing to look up at his mom's increasingly tired pleading.
He hates this. Hates this dumb new restaurant and these dumb loud, loud kids and this dumb pink fox that is not Foxy, no matter what the announcements and his mom and the commercials say.
His mom tugs his hand again. This time, he digs his heels in and shakes his head. She sighs. He knows that sigh - it's the same sigh she gives whenever Miss Morrison complains about him being 'too loud' and 'not paying attention' in class, it's the same sigh she gives before she usually tells him he's 'rambling' again and that he needs to calm down about Transformers because people around them on the bus don't want to hear it (which is dumb, because they're on a bus, and everything's loud on a bus), it's the same sigh she gives as they share a Look with dad (Look with a capital, not to be confused with the normal look, which usually means they're about to cave in to him). That makes him want to grind his teeth again, because why is she sighing at him like that when she knows what the problem is?
"Sweetheart," she says, very slowly and sing-songy. Fritz hates being talked to like that. It makes him feel dumb and small and angry. "Sweetie," mom repeats, snapping her fingers at him because his eyes have wandered to the ground again, and he looks at her to find her crouching down next to him, looking very tired. Her mouth thins when she sees his face, but she continues: "It's still Foxy, Fritz."
Before she even finishes, he's violently shaking his head in protest. Because it's not. It is not him, it's just copying him, but mom doesn't seem to even try to get it as she just talks on: "The old Foxy was here so long that he got old and too tired to tell stories to kids, so they let him retire, and now they reopened and the new, younger Foxy's here because he still has-"
"No," Fritz half-whines and half-snarls, wriggling out of the way as his mom tries to touch his shoulder. And she still just looks tired, and that makes the hot, pulsing anger in his chest even brighter because she doesn't get it.
"Honey, this is just what happens sometimes," she says, her voice drawn out again like she's getting desperate which he also does not get, because she should be able to see what's the problem, but she doesn't. She just glances at the people walking past them who are giving her long looks (without a capital, because they're not staring yet) and raises her voice up a bit: "It's like- It's like if they gave Starscream a new color scheme. You know? Like, if you repainted your Starscream at home. It's still Starscream! Just-"
"Transformers don't change colors, mom," Fritz bites back, twitching in frustration now.
"God-!" His mom pinches the bridge of her nose. Her eyebrow is jumping a bit. Fritz knows that means she's upset. "Fritz, it's a newer, pull-apart-and-put-back-together Foxy. He's literally just a different color." But that's a lie, because old Foxy told stories, and he was a pirate, and Fritz likes pirates and hates that the new animatronic isn’t one.
And that's when the anger in him boils over, and the kids shriek again and it's too loud and everything's new and shiny and wrong and his mom is still not getting it-
And he bolts.
"Fritz!" he hears his mom shout, and for some reason, she sounds-
It's almost enough to make him stop.
She sounds scared. Really scared. Like, the time he climbed onto the roof scared.
But then, the sound of everyone else in the restaurant drowns her out, and he runs and weaves through the crowd and clutches Foxy tightly to himself, zig-zagging around tables and adults and kids and everything's bright, and as he runs past the stage the band erupts into music and it bites into his brain like teeth and he wants nothing more than to clutch his ears or stop or breathe but then he finally reaches a room that's quieter, even if not quiet, and suddenly, with a flash of both terror and a wish to disappear, he drops to his knees and crawls under one of the abandoned tables he sees in front of him. Only then, he stops, and trembles and gasps and sits down so that his back is against the wall, shaking.
He wants to scream, he's so angry. He just- Mom doesn't get it. No one gets it. He doesn't want a new Foxy, or to play with the new Foxy, he doesn't want to play with other kids, he just wants to-
He does scream, a little. It doesn't help.
He doesn't want to go back yet. He wants to go home, actually.
He buries his head in Foxy’s fur, and gasps and curls into himself and ignores the sounds of footsteps of people rushing past the party room and breathes.
It’s actually really nice, here. The plastic tablecloth smells weird, and the floor is cold, but no one bothers him as he starts to calm down. He wonders why nobody’s sitting at these tables yet - the party rooms in the old place were always booked, he remembers being jealous of the kids at school who’d get to have their birthdays there - and then he decides he doesn’t need to know. He can still hear Freddy and the band, but it’s a lot more muted, and he can hear people, but they’re farther away, and he’s finally a bit calmer now.
It’s okay. Even if Foxy’s not.
Then, from far too close to him, a voice asks: "Hello, little guy!”
Fritz almost jumps into the air as he scrambles to look at where the voice came from. He looks up.
The man in front of him smiles at him, tilting his head to see past the tablecloth that he holds lifted and bunched in his hand in order to see Fritz better, his purple shirt standing out compared to the crowd of mute colors of people outside the room who aren’t wearing what Fritz knows is the Freddy staff uniform. He’s crouching down, and Fritz can see from here that he’s wearing similar sneakers to the ones his dad wears to work sometimes when he tells Fritz he’ll come home later than usual from the restaurant. “Are you lost?” the man asks, a bit too loud for Fritz’s tastes but still better than most of the people outside.
He blinks. The man blinks. They keep staring at each other.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Fritz slowly remembers something his mom had mentioned that morning about talking to strangers in the pizzeria. He wasn’t really listening, but he remembers it now, and holds Foxy tight and stays quiet.
The man’s eyes fall to follow his hands, and suddenly, he smiles wide and asks: “Is Foxy your favorite?”
Fritz raises his eyebrows, but he relaxes a bit against the wall. Okay, the man knows Foxy. The real Foxy. The correct Foxy. He can’t be that bad if he knows the real Foxy.
When he doesn’t respond, the stranger sighs. He shifts his weight on his legs carefully, like he’s trying not to spook Fritz away, which is absurd because Fritz isn’t spooked in the slightest. The man takes hold of something on his shirt, and moves to show it, and even in the bad lighting caused by the plastic tablecloth, he can see a big pin next to the man’s Freddy badge with an emblem of the pizzeria.
“Can you read what this says?” the guard - or, who he assumes is probably a guard - asks.
Fritz shakes his head.
“Okay, uh,” the man’s smile falters a bit, but he continues on, pointing to the text that stretches over it. “Then you’ll have to trust me when I say it says ‘Trusted Adult’, here. I’d prove it to you, but. Well.” He lets go of the pin, and runs his fingers through his hair. “Point is, it’s alright, kid. I just want to take you back to your parents.” He pauses. “You are here with your parents, right?”
Fritz doesn’t respond, because that’s a stupid question. The other also seems to recognize that, because he awkwardly clears his throat then, his eyes flickering back to the entrance to the party room and back. There’s still no one in here, Fritz realizes, which is, again, strange. He doesn’t know what it means, but it’s strange.
“Here to see the new Foxy, then?”
And that’s all it takes for the anger from before to come back, and he vehemently shakes his head, feeling himself tense up in preparation for an argument that Foxy’s still performing, that he’s still there, because he is not.
But then the man suddenly-
Nods?
“Yeah,” he says, agreeably, and then he sits down on the floor to look at Fritz without having to raise up the tablecloth and chuckles. “Not the biggest fan of Foxy 2.0 myself. Understandable. The old one was so much better.”
Fritz feels his eyes widen as he looks down at his plush, then at the staff worker, then back at his plush and back again. The man just shrugs, still wearing an easy, friendly smile. “Doesn’t feel right, does it?” he asks, simply, like he doesn’t need Fritz’s response but would appreciate his opinion on the matter. “For him not to be telling stories anymore?”
“Yes,” Fritz blurts out, loudly, before he can stop himself. The man visibly starts, looking at him with wide eyes that tell him he probably didn’t expect Fritz to speak, but that doesn’t deter him in the slightest.
Because- He was so excited when mom told him they were re-opening the pizzeria. Hurricane was really boring without it, and if he wanted to go to Dave and Busters dad had to take him to the next town over when he went to work, and that place didn't have animatronics. He missed Freddy’s. Or, really, he missed Foxy. The other animatronics on the show were nice and all, but all they did was sing and talk. And that meant Fritz had to stand around with other kids to look at the band perform, and he didn't like that, so he had the option to go to the arcade area, but he didn't like that, either, because older kids were there and they took up space on all of the cooler machines and then he had to stand in line and then they'd always cut in.
But with Foxy, he could just sit down next to the stage, and listen to a story. And everyone else listened to the story. And it was quiet, because everyone was quiet because they were listening, but it was also fun, because Foxy had fun stories to tell.
He doesn’t realize he has been speaking his thoughts out loud for the last minute or so until he stops, breathing heavily and clutching his plush as tightly as he can. He’s shaking a little. He doesn’t like that.
The guard looks at him for a while afterward. He looks like strangers usually do when Fritz starts talking - overwhelmed and confused. The waterfall of words that sometimes pours out of him stops, and they fall into an uneasy silence again until the man says: “Oh, kiddo.” Shaking his head sympathetically, he moves to crouch again, looking for all intents and purposes as distraught as Fritz feels, although something tells him it’s not just Foxy that he’s worried about. He stays quiet for a bit, and lets Fritz stay quiet for a bit, and then, he says: “It’s alright to miss them, you know?”
It’s the first time an adult actually sounded like he meant it as he said it. Fritz doesn’t respond.
“Well, uh, still,” the other continues, “it’s alright to be upset sometimes, but we really need to go back now, kid, so…”
Then, he shuffles something in his vest pocket. Fritz waits, only to be presented with-
He gasps.
“Some of these are leftovers from the old location,” the man says, as he hands over a handful of pins to Fritz. “We didn’t change uniform vests for the reopening, and it turned out I still had a bunch in my pockets, and I just- Felt like carrying these, you know? As a keepsake.” He smiles when he sees Fritz’s face, and then, he picks one of the pins up, only to reveal it’s shaped like the real Foxy’s head, with the eyepatch and everything. “A lot of them still have the old designs, so. It’s not the real deal, but-“
Fritz snatches the pin out of the man’s fingers before he’s even finished speaking. The man looks stunned.
“Well,” he says, sighing again. “Hope you like it.”
Fritz just looks at the badge. His fingers are shaking.
“You ready to go back now?”
He isn’t. But the man’s really nice, and he gave him a badge, so.
He takes the hand that’s offered to him, and the man’s smile is back on his face Fritz almost misses the way it disappeared in between.
They find his mom back in the main area, accompanied by two other people in uniforms who both look mildly sick. The moment she sees him, she rushes forward with a cry and hugs him tightly, and Fritz lets go of the man’s hand in surprise.
“Oh, sweetie,” she gasps, and holds his hair, and Fritz squirms away but not too much because he can tell something is wrong because her heart is beating so fast he can feel it through his shirt. She keeps saying stuff, and he’s pretty sure it’s important, but all he can focus on is the voices of the man with the badges and two other people who now quickly approach him.
“That the kid?” a tall lady with really curly hair asks, looking at Fritz with an indecipherable expression.
“Yeah, uh- yeah,” the man who brought him back says with a nod. He looks a lot more tired under the lights of the main party floor, kind of like mom after a long shift, and his smile is completely gone, now. “Found him under one of the tables in Party Room One.”
The lady furrows her eyebrows. “Didn’t that one have a party scheduled?”
At that, the man pulls a face that looks like he just ate a lemon. “The parents cancelled this morning,” he says, a bit quieter now, his eyes flickering around the main floor. “Said they don’t feel comfortable bringing their kids here anymore, after-“
He stops when the other man standing with them nods meaningfully. They all stay quiet after that.
“Thank you,” his mom says as she stands up, holding his hand just as tight as before. “He just- He just ran-“
“Happens to the best of us,” the man who is not Fritz’s new badge buddy says. His voice is gruff, but friendly, at least he thinks so.
The lady also nods. “Just try to keep him close, ma’am,” she says, looking at Fritz. “We don’t want kids wandering around alone right now-“
“Just in case!” Fritz’s friend adds, almost interrupting her mid-sentence, his voice suddenly weirdly shrill. He wonders what that’s about. It’s odd.
His mom also seems to find it odd, by the way her hand tightens on his hand. “Yeah,” she says, carefully. “Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you, again.”
Fritz waves to the tall man who found him as his mom walks him out. The man waves back. The other two employees don’t seem at all surprised.
He’s not even that upset as his mom lectures him about everything as they walk back to their car. He kind of tunes her out, focusing on running the tips of his fingers over the badge in his pocket. It’s nice and heavy and he’s pretty sure it’s metal, not plastic. He’s glad the man gave it to him. He’s kind of sad he didn’t get to say thank you.
He begs his mom to come back tomorrow. She refuses. He begs his dad. He refuses, too, so after school, Fritz just goes anyway, alone.
He doesn’t find the man again. He does, however, find a golden bunny who promises he can take him to see the real Foxy if he follows him, and Fritz does.