Work Text:
“So how did you two meet?” Gregory asked, looking between his two fathers. They were eating dinner, Jeremy pausing mid bite.
Michael looked a bit confused as well, “You already know how we met, pipsqueak.”
Gregory rolled his eyes, he always hated - yet secretly loved - when his father called him dumb nicknames like that. “But now all of it. What's the entire story like? There had to be something before Freddy’s right?”
The two men shared another look, Jeremy shrugged and Michael simply sighed. “Alright, you want to know the full story kid?” Gregory nodded, “Alright, here you go, but let me warn you - it’s not like the normal love story.”
*****
Michael was seventeen years old and he had just gone through what was probably the worst thing a human could possibly go through. His father had left a year ago after the death of Elizabeth. He truly cared about his children, so much in fact that he left his only son alone in a cold, dark world.
Michael had been staying with his uncle Henry - who had graciously let the boy stay with him - when he had gotten a letter in the mail. Michael never got mail unless it was from school sending in his report card. As soon as he saw the writing on the paper he knew who it was from.
The teen soon traveled below the surface to Circus Baby’s Pizza World - and then got scooped. Like his sister had said, he hadn’t died, but he wished that he had. The pain was unbearable; he had barely made it through.
He had though and now that he knew his father was alive and doing heinous things, he needed to put a stop to it. That’s why he walked into Freddy’s again - picking up the day shift. There weren’t many employees and many of them were teens such as himself in need of a summer job.
That’s where he had met Jeremy Fitzgerald.
Jeremy was the night guard at the location, typically a day shift and night shift employee wouldn’t interact much, but the two teens did. Michael would come in early, wanting to look around the place before the other employees showed up. Jeremy had originally known him as Fritz Smith when they first met, seeing as Michael Afton was dead on all sorts of legal files.
The two talked after Jeremy’s shift ended - he was getting moved to the day shift soon so they would be able to meet up more often.
The first few nights Jeremy hadn’t said anything about the animatronics, but after a close encounter one night he spilled everything to Michael. Jeremy had thought he was going insane - there was no way in hell that the animatronics were actually trying to kill him. It was absurd.
Michael had reassured him that it was alright, despite the fact that it was anything but, and shared his own history with Freddy’s.
After that fateful early morning conversation, the two began meeting up outside of work, going to the mall together, seeing movies, until Jeremy decided to pop the big question. Or at least that had been the plan.
At the end of Jeremy’s time as the night guard, once he was working the day shift again, he had gotten into an accident at work.
The accident being Mangle seeing Jeremy’s skull as a tasty snack.
The reporters had blown the thing way out of proportion to Jeremy’s standards because no, he did not lose his entire frontal lobe. Yes, there was damage too it, but not to the extreme that he couldn’t register fear anymore, though seeing the things he would need to experience later, it probably would have actually come in handy.
But nope, Jeremy Fitzgerald still had a frontal lobe, he was just a bit scatterbrained is all.
After that, the location had shut down. There were a few years of relaxation until another location opened up and Michael - now twenty-three- took on the role of the night guard, finally living up to the Mike Schmidt persona.
There were a couple of burnt buildings - arson seemed to be a Michael specialty at this point - but Jeremy and Michael stayed together through it all, through all the trials and tribulations and despite all the times William Afton came back to try to ruin it all. (Jeremy said that that was pretty homophobic of him, Michael rolled his eyes at that.)
*****
“So what do you think, still curious about how we met?”
Gregory was sitting in shock, dinner all but forgotten on his plate. “You guys are fucking awesome!”
Jeremy gasped, “Gregory!”
“Sorry! But still, you guys are like awesome vigilantes, practically superheroes!”
Michael smiled at that, swirling the coffee he had in his cup, “Huh, you hear that Jere, we’re superheroes.”
Jeremy laughed, moving past Gregory’s swear - who could that have possibly come from anyway - “I guess we are pretty super.”