RUBATOSIS | William Afton x Reader

II. ALARMS

(CONTENT WARNING: trauma, mention of blood, mention of alcohol, anxiety, language, and having the hots for a British person)

You pulled up a seat to the dining table, dropping your breakfast plate down in front of you which caused some of the berries to roll around the dish. You reached a hand out to snatch the bagel you'd fixed and brought it up to your mouth. You weren't feeling too bad today, considering the drama of yesterday's occurrences. After you realized how exhausted you were from it all, sleep came to you pretty easily and you were blessed with the rare gift of a dreamless and nightmare-free rest. The anxiety from the whole event still itched at you, though, begging for you to keep thinking about it. You'd been doing an alright job at ignoring it until you saw yesterday's newspaper, still laying on the other side of the table from when your mother had discarded it the previous day. You couldn't help but wonder if the headline of today's paper would be raving about the small body that you'd witnessed being uncovered yesterday. You never really paid much attention to the news, especially after Cassidy went missing. The last thing you needed in your life at this point was more reasons to feel shitty. An image appeared in your head of Joel's panicked, flushed face screaming at the police officers that held him back and you felt a shiver run down your spine.

You broke away from the thought to examine a piece of notebook paper that sat beside the day-old news. You brought it closer to you as you continued working through your breakfast. The page was splashed with blue ink in your mothers handwriting.

'Y/n, I won't be home until late Sunday night. Don't forget about dinner on Monday. Here's everything we need.'

The note then trailed off in a list of grocery items. She must've left it for you yesterday and you'd been too tired to notice it, because there was no way she came home last night. She never spent Saturday nights at home. You glanced over the list and found that she'd attached three twenty-dollar bills with a paperclip to the back of the note. It wasn't out of the ordinary for you to pick up groceries, since you had a lot more free time than your mom did. Your eyes skimmed over the bit about 'dinner on Monday'. Dinner on monday? Oh... right.

You could briefly remember her bringing up something last week about a get-together with some of her friends. You had no idea that was supposed to be taking place tomorrow, though. It was rare for something like this to take place in your house. Her friends would schedule things like that all the time, gathering their little group together to have dinner, get drunk, gossip, play card games, and whatnot. Your mom, however, hated playing the host and everyone knew it. The few times that these get-togethers took place in your home were disastrous. Your mother would freak out about planning what food and snacks and drinks to prepare for everyone and insisted that the whole house needed to be spotless. By the time that her friends arrived, she was worn so thin that she became nothing but snappy and irritable. She wasn't quite sure what to do with you and your sister, so she made you stick around for dinner until you were dismissed to go to bed. It's not like you had anywhere else you could go. You could remember running away to hide with Cassidy in her room after the tense meal and trying to distract her from the sounds of your mother drunkenly yelling and fighting with her friends.

You felt lightheaded when you realized that this would be the first dinner party you had to go through without your sister. Oh god, you thought, how am I supposed to do this alone? Though you were only expected to greet everyone, eat dinner, and nothing more, you couldn't help but feel anxious. The thought of interacting with your mom's weird friends without the buffer of Cassidy's comforting energy made your stomach flip. You really didn't want to have to make awkward small talk with these people, but you guessed you had no choice. Your mother would surely be pissed if you bailed and you would never hear the end of it.