The monitors whispered their mechanical lullaby—soft beeps drifting through the dim hospital room like fireflies too tired to glow. Evan lay small beneath the sheets, bandages wrapped around his skull in pale spirals, as though someone had tried to hold his soul in place with gauze. The fluorescent lights hummed above him, casting a sterile halo around a boy who never wanted crowns.

William sat beside him, motionless. His shadow stretched over Evan’s bed like an eclipse—dense, quiet, swallowing the light in slow, hungry breaths. He touched Evan’s cheek with the back of his fingers, a gesture that looked tender if you didn’t know better. His eyes didn’t blink. They shimmered with an awful devotion, too sharp to be love and too calm to be grief.

“You’re so quiet now,” he murmured, voice as soft as a secret threaded under the machines’ quiet warnings.

His hand drifted lower… then slipped beneath the bandage, fingers sinking into warmth no father should ever feel. Evan’s body jerked weakly, a flutter, a feather in the final gust. William’s thumb pressed, slow and deliberate, like he was kneading clay.

“You’re broken,” he whispered, leaning in so his breath brushed Evan’s ear. “But I’ll put you back together.”

The monitor wailed. Then flatlined.

William’s smile twitched. Something like triumph flickered behind his eyes, bright and wrong.

Time washed the world in rot and neon, and the whole Afton family became ghosts with unfinished sentences. But some ghosts wandered closer to home than others.

Michael found Fredbear’s Family Diner on a night so heavy it felt padded, like the world was wrapped in old stage curtains. The abandoned building sagged under moonlight, its yellow sign flaking into dust. Inside, the air tasted like forgotten birthday cake and rust—an aftertaste of childhood gone rancid.

And there, near the ruined stage, stood a figure.

Small. Still. Wrapped in the same hospital bandages from decades ago, as though time had been too afraid to unwrap him.

“Evan?” Michael’s voice cracked around his brother’s name, falling apart at the edges.