Carnage : 1983 | William afton x reader |

Insomnia. - 14

The apartment felt smaller at night, every shadow a question. I'd meant to sleep early — God knew I needed it — but the department's deadline had lodged under my ribs like an ugly, unshifting stone. A month. Thirty days of pressure and paperwork and the sick, patient hum of questions. The finality of Chief Harris's voice kept replaying in my head until the city outside blurred into long, wet streaks of sodium light.

I fell asleep with my notebook on the bedside table, pen still uncapped. The words on the last page — Jay, late shifts, voices, flashlight, maintenance tag — swam into the edges of my dream like props on a stage. Then the stage folded up and the dinner filled the whole world.

At first it was only sound: a child's laugh, thin and brittle, looping like a scratched record. It slid under the floorboards and came back different, stretched and raw, a treble bent into a sob. The animatronics were there, not the stiff, comic faces I'd seen in daylight, but taller, their eyes reflecting a cold, unblinking light. Their mouths opened and closed in slow mechanical chewing, a mimicry of hunger.

I walked without meaning to. My feet found the warped planks of the stage as if someone else was pulling strings at the back of my skull. The room smelled of stale pizza, oil, and that metallic tang I had learned to associate with blood — not in a clean, forensic way, but as a physical sharpness that sat on the tongue.

And then I saw Jay.

He stood half-hidden in shadow behind the yellow bear, silhouette small against the hulking metal. At first something relaxed in me — relief, stupid and useless. But the relief curled as he stepped forward and the smile he wore wasn't the nervous, distracted smile of the man who'd muttered about machines. It was wide, patient, and utterly unreadable.

"Detective," he said — my name in his mouth felt wrong, like a stolen key. The sound of his voice reverberated over the checkerboard floor. It echoed with a thousand other voices I couldn't place: my own, the parents', the children's. The laugh looped again.

I reached for him and my hand passed through his coat like fog. He laughed, the sound curdling into something like metal scraping metal. The animatronics leaned in as if to listen, gears whispering under painted cheeks.

He lifted a hand, and I noticed the maintenance tag on his belt in the reflected light — my notes scrawled across the paper in my own handwriting leapt up to meet me: Jay — unscheduled checks — storage corridor. The tag glinted red at the corner as if stained; I couldn't tell if the stain was rust or something else.

"You shouldn't be here," he said, but his eyes were bright with a satisfaction I couldn't name. The light in them was not human. It was a light that measured guilt and found it delicious.

The corridor behind him sagged like a throat. I heard shuffling — small, hurried steps — and a child's shape blurred past the animatronic's legs, hair a ragged halo. Lily's laugh — there it was again, thin as paper — and then a choking sound cut it off. I lunged. My legs were weightless; the floor gave way and the air thickened, like trying to breathe through a pillow.

I couldn't move. It was that old, awful theater of sleep paralysis — the body refusing the mind's will. My mouth was open and I couldn't call out. A tightness bloomed across my chest like the first ring of ice on a pond.

Jay walked toward the storage door as if escorting the darkness itself. He didn't hurry. He had all the time in the world. The lights above the door flickered, and behind the glass I saw a dozen reflection fractures of his face: tired, apologetic, smiling — a collage of possible lies. One reflection looked straight at me and mouthed, It's not me.

A hand — someone else's, small and cold — brushed my knee. I turned. There was a child standing very close, eyes enormous in the low light, expression blank as a photograph. Her lips parted and she said nothing, but the sound I felt in my gut was a name I couldn't breathe: Jay.