Woo, I completely lost track of time! I thought it was much, much earlier than it turned out to be. As in, Thursday. And I have five calendars in this house, TWO of them in the room where I do all my writing, so I have no excuse. All I can do is apologize for being so late getting the latest chapter of my Five Nights at Freddy’s fanfiction uploaded, especially as it comes one week after I was traveling and didn’t even post a chapter. Hopefully, the fact that the chapter is super-long will make up for it. And I mean super-duper-long. ‘The bar scene in Heat’ levels of long. Long enough that it qualifies as a full-length book in some circles. Like, five times the length of the average fanfiction on fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org (or at least, the average before I wrote three 200k+ novels, which I’m pretty sure grossly threw off the curve).

So enjoy this extra-crazy-long chapter of Everything Is All Right, Part IV: New Faces, Old Bones and please accept my humble apology for being so late. I promise to buy another calendar. And look at it once in a while (Although, let’s be honest here. The calendars in question are, first, my FNAF calendar and second, Markiplier’s tasteful nudes calendar, so LOOKING at them is not the problem. Noticing there are days scribbled out beneath the pictures and that time as meaning is the problem and another calendar is not going to fix it).

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“Ain’t autonomy great?” Bonnie said aloud and tossed the neck of his guitar into the back corner of the stage.

The camera, unblinking all this time, swiveled to track it, then came back to Bonnie.

“Did you say something?” Chica called.

“No.” Bonnie pushed his ears up against the overwhelming gravity of his mood. “I mean, yeah, I did, but it’s nothing. I don’t think she’s coming, that’s all.”

“Oh.” The happy noise in the kitchen lulled. “Oh gosh, what am I going to do with all this?”

“All what?”

“Um…”

Funny, how Bonnie could listen to Chica putter around in there for a good three hours without the slightest curiosity as to what she was doing, but one ‘Um’ and a lot of quiet could bring it on to an irresistible degree. He got up, slapping his bad leg into working order when it balked on him, and limped over to the kitchen, where his sagging ears snapped upright without any effort at all. “Jumping jackrabbits, Chica!” he blurted, the normally-hated good-ol-bunny expletive popping out of him unnoticed. “What in the living fuck?!”

Cakes. Cakes everywhere. Cakes and cookies and tiny pies and iced scones and muffins, but mostly cakes. The pizza oven occupying the middle of the kitchen floor had become a staging area, loaded with trays covered in frosting roses and cups of sprinkles or colored sugar and other edible decorations; the conveyor belt at either end, a cooling rack for confectionaries still awaiting filling and frosting; while every inch of available space on the prep station was taken up by brightly-colored cakes awaiting the chef’s finishing touch.

“She said I could play with it,” Chica said weakly, closing the open door on Ana’s toy oven.

“Did you use all her little food mixes up?” Bonnie demanded, limping toward the cupboard where Ana kept her food.

Chica quickly closed that too and positioned herself in front of it. “No no no,” she said in her most convincing I-am-not-lying voice. “It looks like more than it is.”

“Well, that’s great, because it looks like all of them!”

Chica squirmed a little, avoiding his eyes and tapping her fingers. “It was getting late. I thought she’d be hungry.”

“So you make her one cake, you don’t make all of them! When have you ever heard Ana say, ‘Gosh, I’m so hungry, I could eat all the food!’”

Chica put her hands over her eyes. “I know, I know. I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

“How do you accidentally make one cake, let alone thirty of them? I have tripped and fallen a thousand times and made exactly zero cakes as a result.” Bonnie picked up a cupcake with white frosting and confetti sprinkles surrounding the words Let’s Eat written in yellow icing, one of Chica’s birthday classics on a miniature scale. “What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know. I made one and it felt so good to just be doing it again and…I don’t know!” Chica watched helplessly as he put that cake down and picked up another. “I thought maybe she didn’t like vanilla, so I made her a chocolate one.”

“She bought it, didn’t she? Why would she buy something she didn’t like?”

“And then I thought maybe she didn’t like cake, so I made some cookies and…you know, other stuff…so she could have a choice.”

“Well, you sure gave her that.”

“I really thought she’d be here before I finished, but she wasn’t, so I thought I’d keep going and…I don’t know.” Chica took the cake out of his hands and put it on the counter, fussing with its precise placement. “As long as I was busy, it didn’t feel like it was taking that long.” Chica backed up, her eyes shifting from one cake to another, and sighed. “It’s really late, isn’t it?”

“She probably had a long day,” said Bonnie and wished it felt even a little like a lie. At least then he’d know he was starting to get over her. But he didn’t. He still thought she was coming back. He may never be her man again, but she’d always be his girl and she was coming back. “I’m sure she’ll be here tomorrow,” he said. Big dumb bunny.

“We should probably put these in the fridge, then.”

“Yeah.”

They each picked up a cake and turned to look at the cooler. Behind the scales of black mold on its inner glass face, the irregular shapes of the food that had stocked it more than a decade ago could still be seen.

“We should probably clean the fridge first,” said Chica.

“Yeah.”