Chapter Text
May, 1982
Everything comes crashing down on Sunday. Not loudly or with an explosive bang, but with absolute silence.
It was an unusual routine that the Aftons had gotten themselves used to. Instead of marching into the kitchen with their teeth brushed and hair combed, each of them walked down with pajamas on backwards and nobody batted an eye. That sense of begrudging anticipation before loading into the car for church wasn’t there anymore, not digging into their stomachs. And nobody sat in the chair at the very end of the table.
Not anymore.
When Michael reached the entrance of the kitchen, Father was already there, a cup of pitch-black coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. Only his nape is visible from where he stands, and once Michael has batted the sleep out of his eyes, he notices the jabbing lack of food on the table. Clearly, breakfast was to their own devices this morning. At some point between a very, very slow blink and opening his eyes, he’s fumbled open the pantry door and now sits at the table with a bowl of crispies and Liz and Evan seated across from him.
And — of course — it’s silent. Sundays always are now. That’s the most striking change, Michael decides: no more is the frantic chatter of his younger siblings as they scramble out the front door, asking if they can skip mass today. No more of Father grumbling as he’s forced to tie Michael’s tie for him. No more of Maman’s scolding. Now, everything is weighted. A thick sort of quiet falls upon them, and it feels wrong to be the first to break it.
Michael’s cereal has gone soggy. He’s not really hungry anymore. From the way Liz’s face has gone a little ashy in the cheeks, she seems to feel the same; so it’s jarring when she opens her mouth and speaks.
“Father?”
The shattering of silence makes Michael feel like flinching, even though her voice is small and webbed with morning tiredness.
There’s a beat before Father’s paper is finally lowered just enough to see the glint of his spectacles.
“Elizabeth?” he acknowledges.
Liz squirms at his gaze. Michael tries to make eye contact with her as if to ask, what are you doing, but her eyes are darting around like little flies and so the task is utterly impossible.
“I was just wondering,” she says, swirling her spoon within her cereal bowl. “Are we going to have to do Lent this year?”
Evan makes a squeak, sitting up straighter in his seat to join his older siblings in looking expectantly at the man at the end of the table. Truthfully, Michael had completely forgotten about Lent, but it was only a few days away, so…
Father was still glued to his newspaper, and they all watched as he flippantly raised his pen — a sleek, red ballpoint he used every time he did the crossword — to scribble across the parchment.
“Hm.” A click. The pen is set down, soon followed by the paper itself. William Afton’s blank expression now faced each of his children. His eyes weren’t so piercing as they usually were, but Michael wasn’t sure the flicker of amusement in them was something he liked, either.
"The word of the day is apostate. Isn’t that peculiar?”
Elizabeth blinked. “What?”
Father sighs, and he’s not smiling, but the edges of his lips are curled ever so slightly. He gingerly grabs his mug of coffee, regarding it before taking a leisurely sip.
Father does this sometimes. Acts like just about everything else in the world is more interesting than answering a simple question. Michael thinks he just enjoys having them all waiting on his next move.
“I don’t know,” he says finally, looking at Elizabeth, then Evan, before his sharp eyes land on Michael. “Why don’t you ask your mother?”
It’s their turn to pause now.
The response churns on Michael’s tongue poorly, turning the remaining taste of milk to ash in his mouth. Ask Maman? They couldn’t — but she was —
“But… she’s sick.”
Evan has shrunk in his seat, like he hadn’t meant to talk. Michael is secretly grateful he did though, because now Father’s looking pointedly at him instead.
“Yes, very astutely put.” Without so much as a last glance to them, Father plucked his newspaper back up and then his face was hidden once more by lines upon lines of typed ink. “Anyway, it’s her decision. You know you can find her upstairs.”
“Like she always is,” Elizabeth snaps, mid-drink of cereal. “I don’t get why she has to be up there—she’s been holed up in her bedroom for forever. When I was gipping everywhere a coupla days ago, I still had to go to school.”
Father sighs through his nose and his stare flits up to the ceiling. “Your mother is an adult. You are ten. And for the love of all that’s well and good, Elizabeth Diane, do not slurp your milk. Go wash that bowl out and get a glass.”
That dampens Elizabeth’s suspicion. She goes as red as her hair and scowls, her chair screeching as she piles out of it so she can drag the barren bowl off to the sink.
“I’m almost eleven!” she hisses over her shoulder, and Michael knows she’s done with the conversation.
But he’s not.
“She’s sick, Father,” Michael says with rapidly narrowing eyes. “We can’t just go up there and ask… can we?”
“I don’t know, Michael. Could you?”
It’s like he can feel the bore of his father’s eyes through his newspaper. Michael wonders for a second if pressing further is a mistake but then he thinks about the silence and the anticipation and his best clothes and the empty chair, and he just feels… angry. It had been four months — four whole months since Maman had last sat at the table with them. Why couldn’t they see her? Did she not want to see them? How sick really was she?
Michael must’ve fallen inordinately quiet, because by the time the questions were formed properly on his tongue, Father was already talking again.
“You could. No, you should.” The newspaper is down once more, folded neatly between Father’s long, crooked fingers. Michael makes a point to not look anywhere above his hands so he won’t have to meet his eyes again. “Go ask her. Tell her I sent you.”
Nobody says a thing. The idea lies in the air like an undetonated bomb. In front of him, his cereal flakes have practically melded themselves into the milk now, floating about in pathetic clumps.
“Um. Okay.” Michael doesn’t even realize he’s stood up until his head goes dizzy from the sudden movement. “Sure. I’ll… go ask her.”
Twinning sets of eyes are staring at him like he’s crazy. Elizabeth shoots him a what are you talking about eyebrow raise — as if it wasn’t her fault Michael got dragged into this — and Evan’s slinks even further beneath the table and out of sight.
Moving feels like a crime, but he does it anyway. Slowly, slowly, slowly, Michael pushes his chair in and takes a few tentative steps away from the table and its inhabitants towards the staircase.
He’s in the archway when Father speaks up a last time.
“Oh, would you look at that? It’s the second Sunday of May,” he says casually. Michael pauses.
“Uhm… what?”
And then Father does this odd thing where he gets up out of his seat. Absolutely thunderstruck, Michael watches as he crosses over past an alarmed Elizabeth to the window. His tall frame looms cramped in the corner of the kitchen as he plucks a flower from the blue vase perched upon the sill.
They all just gape at him.
“The ninth,” Father repeats in a weird sort of mumble. “It’s Mother’s Day.”
Then he’s strolling back over until he’s right in front of his oldest son, a drying rose in hand and a smirk daring to show. The rose is sort of a faded pink color: Michael thinks they received them as a ‘well wishes’ gift from the Emilys’ a month back, and now, Father has it extended out between the two of them as if he’s expecting Michael to take it. Which he does.
“… Thanks,” he mutters. It’s thornless, but he still holds it pinched between trepidatious fingers.
If Michael had found his amusement odd, what happened next could’ve been a spectacle. Father gave him a small pat on his shoulder and winked — as in, closed one of his eyelids fully, playfully — then returned to his seat. Michael’s breath stood frozen within his lungs for what felt like an eternity until reality came smashing back into his head, and everything was as it was once more. Elizabeth and Evan’s eyes drilled holes into his head, and Father’s didn’t. He’s back to the paper, back to things more interesting than them.
Well. Michael guesses that’s his cue. Before he can think again, he’s turning on the heel of his foot and leaving them and his hesitations for the kitchen.
When he’d come down the stairs earlier, the case had been flooded with flowy sunlight. Lazy, pleasantly warm, and almost entirely unnoticeable to him at the time because Michael was still waking up and was preoccupied with more pressing matters like, ‘man, I’m hungry’ or ‘wow, my breath stinks.’
Now, it was dark. From where Michael stood in front of the first step, the window above was blocked, and the darkness that swept the stairwell elongated it cartoonishly. It felt stupid to say something as silly as his staircase was imposing, but Michael was embarrassingly intimidated. In his hand, the rose drags his arm down like an anchor, and in his chest, his heart dances uncertainly. Below, his legs move against his will.
What he concludes is that this is the air’s fault. The further Michael climbs, the staler the taste of it gets, sneaking in through his nostrils with an unwelcome dust, and now it was getting all up in his head and making him scared of stupid stuff, like the stairs, even though he’s almost a full thirteen years old. Or what Maman’s reaction might be when he just barges in on her while she’s sick. Logically, he thinks, she shouldn’t be, because she used to visit him all the time when he got sick, so this shouldn’t be such a big deal.
Besides, Mum never got angry, really. Just stern. Not like how Father could get.
At the curve of the big, flat step — the one right before you could finally see the hallway ahead — he sees it. More like it sees him, catching his attention while hung amongst all the other photos, casually. Innocently. To be entirely honest, Michael didn’t know what it was about this one specifically that bothered him, because it was one of the photos Maman looked the happiest in. Even through the grainy quality and flood of flash, you could see her beaming smile directed up towards the man whose neck she hung off of. Father’s smiling too, grinning at the camera like Michael has never seen him grin. They’re young; young and happy and forever in this wedding picture hung up on the wall with a gold frame that was collecting dust at the top.
That’s what it is. It’s Father — because Michael is so used to him with his wrinkled face and chevron mustache that seeing a version of him where his jaw is smooth and clean shaven and split open into a big smile is just… really jarring. In a couple of years, that could practically be Michael’s own reflection.
Oh, gross. If he grew up and looked just like Father, that’d be super weird. With that, Michael decides this is enough of loitering around to stare at the photo, and he hurriedly scrambles up the rest of the stairs.
There was one, simple path forward in the hallway. Three doors he had to pass until Michael would reach the tall one at the end of the hall; just three doors. That was it.
All of the bones in his feet felt like they were toothpicks made of steel. Every step he took, Michael kept thinking they were going to snap painfully and he was gonna end up spiraled on the ground. He passed his room, the door wide ajar to reveal his soccer ball trailing out aimlessly around his bed, and his feet kept moving. Then Liz’s, whose visible sliver of pink wallpaper within winked at him. And next, Evan’s — who had left a toy duck lonely on the carpet just outside his neatly shut door.
The final door lay before him in its pure, mundane glory. Neither Michael nor his siblings were ever allowed into their parents room. Entering, even with permission, had him expecting Father to emerge from the shadows with a week of grounding ready at his disposal, and when Michael reaches for the doorknob, he can’t tell if that cool sensation his hand is feeling is from the smooth metal or his clammy palms. Logical reasoning shot overtime in his brain, attempting to block out that irrational fear beginning to creep up his neck.
It’s fine. It’s fine! Father said I could go in. It’ll all be fine.
Michael opens the door.
For the record, he’s been in the room before. Just not frequently. So the sight he’s met with is familiar and that calms Michael’s nerves, if not for a moment. It’s dark, but he sees a squashy couch at the edge of the wall that he used to curl up on with Maman when he was way younger, and the closet is open: even from here, Michael can spot Father’s prized suit and tie hung up on a rack. What looks like a couple rolls of scrap paper have been carelessly left a mess on the desk, which is probably the only thing out of place in the room.
Well, the only thing besides the fact Maman wasn’t anywhere in here.
Any previous reservation he had about entering the room is completely abandoned. Michael wrenches open the closet doors, throws back the duvet covers, and searches underneath the bed. There was even a fuzzy robe strewn on the ground that was big enough that Maman could’ve been limp beneath it, but after a few kicks, each increasingly more frustrated, Michael quickly deduced she wasn’t.
Nobody is there.
“Father!” he yells. “Father!”
Nobody answers.
That’s just peachy, Michael thinks as he attempts to put the covers back at least somewhat nicely, seriously, that’s great! Obviously, everybody in his family wanted to play some stupid prank on him or something. Pull his leg and laugh at what a moron he was. Because where else could she be?
Michael tries yelling again.
“Faaaah-ther!” he calls, loud enough his lungs falter a touch. “Mum isn’t—“
What was that?
The rest of his yell hovers stagnant in his throat as a smell whips his senses like a tripwire. Half of the muscles in his nose wrinkle up uncontrollably, repulsed and confused at the same time. Michael can’t even fathom how to describe it properly — metallic, but with a diabolically sour quality to it, like a chemical cleaner or something. It was faint but absolutely terrible, leaving this awful taste in his mouth at just the slightest whiff. Had someone retched in the bathroom or something?
Oh. Michael hadn’t checked the bathroom.
It was hard to tell in the dark, but Father and Mother’s room was actually very large. Not only did their room have its own sitting area, a walk-in closet, and an office for Father, but they also had their own bathroom. The door was closed and the blinds were drawn strictly across the window, so the bathroom door had completely missed him.
Well, more like Michael had missed it. But he was aware of it now. Beneath the door, the lights are on and that smell lingers ominously.
“Maman?” Michael walks to the door and hesitates for a moment before knocking. “Are you in there?”
Standing up close to it, Michael’s nose is bombarded with The Smell, so much stronger here than it was near the bed. He’s pretty sure the hair in his nostrils have been singed off permanently, but he swallows a gag and presses on. Maman could be in here.
“... Is everything okay?” he asks, pressing his ear to the door.
There isn’t a noise that meets his ear… at least, not a loud one. If he strains hard enough, he swears he can hear a shallow breath but that doesn’t really reassure him. Why wouldn’t she respond to him? Michael’s hand upon the doorknob trembles for a beat before he forces himself to grip it harder.
“Okay, Mum, I’m coming in!” he calls, squeezing his eyes shut. Please don’t be naked, please don’t be naked, please don’t be—
As soon as the door is opened, Michael wants to throw up. If the stench before was bad, this was on a whole other level. Repulsive waves of pure acridity slapped him upside the head and made his stomach churn so violently that his head was thrown from the impact. He gasps so harshly he nearly chokes on his own breath and reels back.
“Euuucchh, oh my God,” Michael’s croaking with whatever voice is left in his throat, waving blindly at his surroundings. He’s coughing and stumbling around without conviction because it’s so rank in here, his eyes are watering, and — what the—?!
Something is underneath his foot. It’s hard and not budging under the weight of him but also somehow squishy, because Michael pokes it again and it gives a little. It takes about two seconds to blink the harsh tears out of his vision, and then, it takes two more to realize just what he’s stepped on.
The rose slips out of his hand.
What was beneath his foot was actually Maman — specifically, her limp arm, strewn beside her head in an odd position. All of her limbs were, like she had just suddenly… dropped.
She looks terrible. A bruising black cuts deep underneath her eyes in puffy bags, and her entire face looks more like someone had taken a sallow sheet of wax, stretched it over her skull, and then threaded strands of strangled red hair into her scalp. And she’s thin. So thin, Michael is convinced she’s only bone for a moment. Her whole form is laid out upon the floor, thrown across itself, gaunt, skeletal, and pale; all except for the sickly torrent of blood that runs from her barely fluttering mouth and nose in long, long rivers.
It’s just Michael and the silence. The whole room is collapsing in on him, shoving him into a corner, a squat, into something, and he can’t breathe properly. This time, it isn’t the smell that’s suffocating him — in fact, Michael can’t even feel anything except for the silence, hurtling down upon his senses like an artillery shooting at everything he has. He can’t see, he can’t breathe or taste or even move. Everything closes in the very, very shallow breathing ringing in the back of his ears.
He blinks. Twice. Thrice. Hard, soft, rapidly, then for a long time, but Maman is still on the ground. There’s still blood.
It’s still silent.
The moment his lungs open, Michael is screaming.