They're Just Children (FNAF: SB X Little Nightmares)

Don't You Cry, Dear Children

'Call me.' 

Those infuriating words blared across his Fazwatch screen again. Just as Gregory was getting used to Freddy's song, the song from the music box he had installed, and right when he was finally starting to feel genuinely happy with something he created other than that incredible jammer, he just had to be broken from his trance. Maybe later he could get Freddy to play it again. 

"H-hello?" Gregory called. 

"Gregory, one of your scrap-heaps could use some maintenance. I don't want it trying to eat me in my sleep." 

Nice to talk to you too, jerk. 

"10 tokens." 

He was fairly sure it wouldn't kill him, but it wasn't exactly his best work. Nothing came close, really, compared to the jammer, that was still the only thing he got praise for. 

"What'll you do with it?" Gregory asked. 

"15 tokens." 

Combined with the 33 in his account already, it could get him a meal a day until the Pizzaplex reopened, around four. Maybe he could get five if he rationed, six if he could bargain. 

"20" He countered. 

"17" 

An even 50, he could work with that, at least until Mono and Six were far away from this slaughterhouse.  

"Deal." 

---

The cracked face turned and panned across the arcade, like the Lady at her post looking over her many lumbering guests. Only there wasn't anyone here, there wasn't anything here, the many Security Bots were nowhere to be seen and Roxanne had vanished like she was never there. Even the tiny red dots of the cameras had started going out. Quickly, one at a time, the dim neon lights and handful of screens that hadn't been turned off started to flicker and die. 

Mono pressed his hand against the back of the game-box they'd been hiding behind. Though the buzz of static wasn't the good kind of familiar, at least he knew it, but even the many vile mazes of signals and frequencies had abandoned him in an emerald fog. Six was already trying to access her Fazwatch. Freddy had to know something about what to do, he lived here. The tiny glass plane was covered in green glitches and the Puppet's shattered mask. Even Mono's eyes hummed like sickly green discs. 

They were alone. 

Distorted green static filled the corners of his vision, though Six remained clear in the center of his sight. She took his hand and dragged him to the rear of their hiding spot, as far away from the last spot they saw the Puppet as she could without running out in the open. For how far their eyes had brought them, they were little help when there was no light at all. They could only see a good few yards ahead, but it would have to do. 

In the shadows of the last pair of glowing green light, the Puppet's long arms extended; not stretching, the white stripes didn't warp and widen, but the black of it's elbows and wrists expanded like they were gaining mass from nothing. The right limb brushed against the far painted wall and it's fingers reached around the many metal boxes, gliding over the buttons and flicking the joysticks as they curled around the wires. 

The left arm started approaching them, the nine white stripes waving through the air and fingers descending on their hiding place. Six pulled Mono to another hiding spot, leaving the row of machines and finding a new haven of screens to take cover behind. In the small green lights they saw the outline of the Puppet's neck. What they first thought was the snapping of wires and bending of metal supports turned into the wet squelches of tearing muscle and breaking of bones.