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William doesn't know why Michael is so useless. The boy is lounged upon William's couch still dressed in his stupid fucking diner uniform. He's watching that show - The soap opera, with the vampire and the blonde - and munching upon his fourth buttered and caramelized monstrosity of a bowl of popcorn of the night. It was six PM. Michael was too old to be behaving like he was still a twelve-year-old boy.
The drone of the soap opera continues in the background as William Afton examines his firstborn son. Michael is lounging sideways, spread out like a starfish. His leg is propped up on the footrest at the end of the sofa while his other foot is propped on the armrest. He looks tired. Too tired for a boy that works 6 hours a day and is still in damned high school. And the girly makeup that rims his eyes certainly does not help it. Michael tended to dress peculiarly, while his father preferred to keep things practical. Eyeliner? Seriously? It did not complement his boy’s eyesore of a diner uniform in the slightest.
He’s wrinkled and dirtied his uniform by keeping it on after work.
William taps his shoe against the floorboards. Arms crossed, a frown pulling at his lips, and a fixed glare. Michael does not seem all too concerned in the slightest, despite his father's clear distaste, and continues watching. Crunching on his popcorn. Stray dust and kernels falling directly from his damned mouth and onto William's freshly waxed leather couch, and William couldn't control his eye's equally annoying and insistant twitch any longer.
Michael does a…thing. Yes, everyone else does this thing, but it’s far deeper a wrong to him when his baby, his little Michael, does it to him. The lounging about upon every individual piece of furniture in the house, the grime, the loud chewing, the brushes against him during breakfast and dinner (It wasn’t that his son disgusted him, he swears, it’s just that it wasn’t anticipated. It needs to be anticipated), the damned moving things, all these little tics that his son knew were wrong and bad that he could not stop despite multiple repeated interventions.
William marches directly to his son and snatches the damned junk food directly from his son’s grip. The popcorn rattles, and some stray kernels come loose and fall onto the floor. His hand flies out to press the off button and snap the telly off as he turns to glower at his boy. The sharp turn, however, proves only to make the boy flinch back into the leather with arms raised above his head. William pauses. He watches, eyes softening, as his son tentatively peeks from between his arms.
There’s a pause. Father processing, son staring.
“Michael.” William begins. He’s lowered his voice far more than he’d rather be at. His son was a coward, clearly, and he hadn’t meant to scare him. He only wants the best for his children after all. Michael lowers his arms finally and grips the blanket in his lap. Like he wanted to hit William. William, his loving father. The man who’d do anything for him, and he looks at him like so. With eyes so angry, so full of disdain-
“Dad. What- What’s up?” His boy’s voice is so small. So quiet. Nothing like it should be. William sighs and reaches out, grabbing hold of his son’s shirt collar. There it is again- the flinch. William casts him a sharp glance and pops the collar, shaking the dust and grime from the day, and adjusting it. He works on fastening the boy’s top button. Seriously, what was it with this kid and his peculiar fashion statements? “Dad.” Michael’s voice takes on that whiney quality it tends to, growing in volume.
William smooths the collar down with a heavy and disappointed sigh. He rests his hands steadily against his son’s shoulders. “It is,” A quick glance at William’s watch. 6:42 PM. “Six forty-two at night. You worked what, six hours? You’ve been home for two. Dinner isn’t done, the dishes from last night are still at the bottom of my sink, and you’re here pigging out on your, what? Fourth? Fifth? Box of popcorn from my damn bank account.”
William’s son shifts uncomfortably. Good, he should be getting under his skin. He needs a little bit of annoyance to get him off his ass. He opens his mouth to speak but opts to stay silent. He gapes like a retarded fish for a second before he stands. Yet the motion of him standing shakes off the dust of the food onto the hardwood and damn it if William doesn’t recoil. Michael pauses and looks apologetically at his father. William can feel his eye twitching incessantly. He has to smooth out and adjust his tie to keep himself from lashing out. “Sorry. Sorry, I’ll vacuum. I’ll broom-” Michael scrambles for the broom closet and abandons his blanket upon the sofa.
Absently, William reaches for it and plucks it up. He folds it neatly and sets it aside on the footrest instead of the filthy sofa that Michael inhabited. God, this boy. Here he was, still doing his work for him despite him repeatedly fucking up just like he was still two. He thought children were supposed to grow, not stay bumbling dumbasses until they wilted and died. He’d hoped his children would grow to be more like him. Not like Henry, God, hopefully never like Henry. Like him, like his Clara, smart. But here he was without Clara, without Lizzy, without Evan, and with dumb, performatively destructive Mikey.
William stands straight and makes his way to the hallway where Michael is still attempting to operate the vacuum. It was an old, out-of-date thing. William could have probably made her better, but Cara had wanted the newest model for their new house.
William wanted to make her happy. And it was worth the struggle to see her perfect orange painted lips spread into the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Her smile makes his heart drop heavy into the pit of his stomach like nothing else could. He turns and stares into the image of her on the wall-mounted cabinet. An urn colored her favorite sea foam green sits beside it. But it’s her beautiful face that William looks at. Her bleached mane of carefully maintained blonde that would glow the subtlest of the gorgeous fiery red it naturally was in the right lighting.
It is then that Michael finally gets the vacuum to run. With a triumphant celebratory cheer, he turns sharply to make his way back to the living room to clean up after himself. Right toward the entryway where William stood. Michael slams directly into him. William flails, caught off guard as Michael, just as surprised, tries to right himself on William’s arm. This sends William and him both flying forwards, directly into the memorial.
The shelf comes loose the second that William’s hand reaches to grab it. He catches himself on the wall in time, but he is not fast enough to catch the platform as everything comes crashing onto the floor. Michael, the little fucking retard, stares with those same blank idiotic blue eyes that William saw in the mirror every morning. He flinches back with a shocked, terrified shout. But not nearly fast enough to evade the collision of William’s fist to his nose.
Michael crumples. William stares. At his crying son, his crying teenage son, his baby. He looks at the spilled urn, the chalky contents of it spilled onto the hall floor and into the foyer of the kitchen. He looks at his hand, at the red knuckles that would likely color purple by tomorrow. Suddenly, he’s thrown someplace else, misplaced in time, staring at his own hands covered in blood as he stares down the- What? The nothing. The nothing, he’s never hurt anything innocent. Michael deserved this. Michael caused this outcome. He did.
William blinks. He blinks again. Michael sobs below him. His shoulders shake as he coughs and sputters on his blood spilling from his nosebleed. William looks at him longer than would be normal. Stares at him. Michael was grown now. Old… Enough. How old was he? How old was Michael? What year was it? How old was William?
Michael runs off with one hand clutching his nose, the other grabbing hold of the walls for support as he flees. There was no need to run. William wouldn’t chase him. He’s never hurt Michael before, he’d never do it again. He just made a grave mistake this time. William did not want to hurt him. William did not want to hurt anything. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
He remembers staring up at the friendly man from the bunker. Listening to him ask, did your father grab you there? Where did you get this bruise, that cut? Why do you flinch from me? Do you know where Mommy went? William couldn’t answer the man. He couldn’t answer a lot of questions, like why his younger sister was pregnant and if it was really his father that he saw going into their room that night.
William blinks back as he dusts the powder into a dustpan. He simply returns it to the bag and returns the bag into the urn. The engraved letters “Clara Afton, loving mother and wife” stare at him. He closes it once again and picks up the fallen board from the floor. He heads into the broom closet and collects his toolbox.
Clara should be home soon. She was a dancer, and William would rather die than hold her back. So he settled to do the cleaning and many an all-nighter watching the children before or after his own workdays. She always performs evenings, always tries to schedule so they can alternate watching their children. She is perfect for him. He may be cold, but she is everything he wasn’t and more than that. She still exists to be his only equal, the only person he can look at and see eye to eye. Like a fairytale. She is his fairytale.
He hammers the slab back into the wall, nail by nail. The house is quiet around him, and Michael’s door remains slightly ajar as William always insisted before…bed. Doors open until 8 PM, eight hours of sleep exactly. No more nor a second less. But doors should be locked at night. Doors need to be locked at night. Doors should always be locked at night. Doors need to be locked, windows need to be barred before nightfall. There should be no way for anybody in. It was unsafe to keep the doors open at night. They have to stay shut and locked or else. They have to be locked. The windows and doors should be shut and locked after eight at night. It is important to keep doors locked at night. At night, it is important to keep doors closed. It's important to keep doors locked at night. Before nightfall, doors and windows must be locked and barred. Before nightfall, it is important to lock the doors and barricade the windows. Doors have to be-
The hammer slams into William’s finger. He curses and shrinks back from his work frantically in order to shake the pain off. He hops from foot to foot and dances into the kitchen, beelining his hopping directly to the sink to run his stinging hand beneath the water. He hangs his head as he does so. The other hand reaches to splash water onto his face to clear his thoughts for a minute. He leans over the sink and stares at the tile as he settles into his thoughts again. He zones in on what he can hear around him, just as Clara had taught. The cars outside. The faint music from Michael’s room. The pitter of the water as it drops from William’s hair into the metal bottom of the sink.
William breathes. He looks at his bruised up right hand, at the winding scarred indents of the springlock scars upon his arm. He rubs at his face and grabs a towel to dry himself. He tosses the thing to the laundry room pantry before he catches himself on the island and heads back the way he came. He steps through the sickeningly silent halls of his family’s home and stops just outside of Michael’s room.
He watches the back of Michael. As his boy’s shoulders quiver and shake while he stifles his sobs. Rock music, his boy’s favorite of which William dreaded, filters through the headphones of his Walkman that he clutches close to his chest. Still in his uniform for work, that was without a doubt bloodied from that nosebleed. Michael really ought to stop staying up so late. Maybe he would not get any nosebleeds anymore if he’d just eat and sleep properly.
Michael always had nosebleeds. Since he was a little five-year-old. His little Michael had always been terrified of blood ever since he was a mere babe. William used to pick him up when his nose would start up, pouring blood at shifts in dry weather. He’d cradle his son in his arms and clean up the blood with baby wipes for him whilst he’d sob over nothing but the simple sight of red. It was endearing how scared Michael was. And eventually, how Evan was. Always jumping at everything, even if William assured them and himself that there’s never going to be a thing to jump about.
Clara had called him overprotective. Clara also called him a psychopath. Clara, William thinks, should make up her damn mind. He looks to the side at Michael’s band posters on the wall. Dreadfully dark and angry to be angry. Clara’s opinions on his mental state do not matter because he loves her nonetheless. And he knew she loved him too. Even if Clara is religious. William knows, and he would always stay back at home on Sundays while she took their kids to church. That was their first big disagreement. The church. William always refused to go, no matter how she would pry. “You’re an atheist, Will. Can’t you at least go once? For the kids? I have recitals some Sundays, and Elizabeth hates to miss them.”
The turning point had been when Clara had made William come along because Elizabeth had taken up with the choir. She had sung that day. William wanted to be there for her, yes. He did want to be there for everything to do with his babies. And he would have attended those shitty services in a heartbeat if he could. For them. It was just when William did end up going and sitting through the service, and the old priest came up to touch a toddler Evan upon the little shoulder, that William sucker punched the poor old man to the floor. He couldn’t control himself from finding that floored old man on said floor and pummeling him into the hospital. But it wasn’t William’s fault.
How could he explain it? The way the cross made him shrivel up. How the lovely choir would make his breathing lock up and his limbs shaky. The verses, drilled into his brain from early in his life, and molded to fit the sickening desires of his decrepit old father to turn him and his sister-aunt into toys. Turned his aunt-mother into a zombie only capable of the passive motions of living. No love, no feeling. William sometimes wonders if it worked on him. If he were just like his mother, unable to remember her name or the fact that she even had children.
It wasn’t William’s fault. No, that was unexplainable. His daughter’s event was unskippable. How could he have explained why to Clara? It was unavoidable. He couldn’t help it. He’d told Clara so as they awaited the police. She wouldn’t look at him. He knew if he ever told her the truth, she wouldn’t look at him the same again. Would she be disgusted by their children for holding generationally inbred blood? William casts one more look at Michael, at his headphone-covered ears and quieting sobs, and he leaves the door clamshelled open. He turns back and makes his way back towards the kitchen again.
He sets the urn back in place exactly where he’d had it on the newly repaired shelf. He assured the engravings faced the wall while the soft green faced him. After, he adjusts his beautiful wife’s picture and gently scrubs the smudges on the glass away. William sighs and adjusts his tie and collar one final time as he enters the kitchen to prepare dinner.
He makes his way around the island to the bowls and ingredients he’d left out before he went to tell Mikey off. He grabs his apron from beside the door as he does and ties it on as he looks at what he’s got. He takes the flour, salt, and other ingredients and whisks the batter together as he looks out of the window towards the setting sun. It was getting dark, and he was late preparing dinner. Michael must be starving.
William sighs and begins to rush himself through the motions of mixing and whisking the batter. After such a sudden nosebleed and all that crying, he knew his son would be hungry. He hopes he salted enough fish. Well, he could simply prepare more chips. Michael loved his chips. William thinks that the boy should eat healthier. God, why did he make fish and chips tonight? He’s the smartest man alive yet even he isn’t immune to mistakes.
William remembers when Michael was born. When he’d first held his firstborn baby in his arms and stared wide-eyed at the pink-faced bundle. Michael didn’t like him then, either. He’d screamed louder than when the doctors pulled him out minutes earlier. But William was enraptured. A life that he made. A person who came from him. He’d made that baby. That child was going to be the rest of his life from then on, he thought.
He hopes that Clara comes home with the other two soon. It was getting late. She’d been gone for too long now. One month… Two years? Two years?
William freezes from where he’d been frying the fish. The oil bubbles and sizzles. The lights illuminate the apples on the yellow and off-white tiles. The house is quiet. The house is quiet. Why is it so quiet? He can’t remember why it was so quiet all of a sudden. Clara must be at a late church event with the kids. Or she took the kids to see Henry and Charlotte for the night.
He finishes what he’s doing before he exits to the halls and peeks into the children’s rooms. Evan is gone, Lizzy is gone, and Michael is home. Why is Michael home? Is he sick? William should make him something light to eat for dinner and prepare him tea.
William sets all of the food out perfectly. He arranges the silverware just as he did every night, and then he sets the kettle out to boil. He sets the box of tea on the counter beside it, and then he begins the clean-up process on his dishes. He calls out to Michael, hoping he did not have his music up loud enough not to hear him or that he’d fallen asleep. He taught him about closing that door.
Sure enough, Michael comes shuffling into the kitchen with his head down. He sits at the table without a single word. Such an odd child. Doesn’t he want to greet his father? The kettle begins to steam. Michael nearly jumps out of his skin. William laughs and shakes his head as he brings the kettle to the table. He carefully navigates to the center and sets it down before glancing at his son. Now that William can see him, he looks at his face and freezes. Michael’s nose is bloodied and bruised!
“Michael!” William gasps and nearly knocks over the piping hot kettle onto the table’s contents. He rushes over and cups Michael’s face. His son flinches back and hiccups a sob, staring at him with wide and fear-filled blue eyes. William stops. He backs away but does not release his son’s face. William tries to wipe the crusted blood and clicks his tongue before moving to retrieve the first aid kit. “You and your scuffles, you rascal. I should have known something was off when I saw you were home this early.”
“Early? It’s 10, Dad.” Michael’s voice is quiet. Too quiet. He should be confident, like William. Like Clara. It wasn’t befitting of him to be so soft sounding. “Don’t back talk, Michael. You need to be careful. Stop picking fights. It’s every other day that I keep finding bruises on you.” William turns around, kit in hand, and kneels before his son. Michael is looking back at William as he meets his eyes. There’s a burning rage there, simmering beneath his eyes. Good, William thinks.
If that’s what it takes for him to get into so many fights at school, then so be it.
William takes cotton ball after cotton ball to Michael’s nose. He cleans and checks it repeatedly as his son absently chews on and picks at the chips William prepared for him. By the time William had patched up and cleaned the teen’s nose, he’d already finished with his meal. He looks just like William in this lighting. Same facial structure and eyes with mirrored looks of absence. He turns to look at William once again. The anger is gone and he looks tired.
“Can I be dismissed?” The plate before the teenager was scrubbed clean of every morsel, just as William had taught him to. Food was a privilege that he was fortunate enough to have been handed to him. William smiles. He rises and ruffles his son’s hair.
“Go on, then. Goodnight, Michael. I love you.”
Michael freezes. His gaze hardens behind his mop of hair. He nods and rises from the table. Still mad, then. He could stay that way. As long as William could continue protecting his son from reality, that was all that he’d need. Michael could stay angry. He could be upset, but William always knew that he’d come around. Michael was just like him, after all. He takes his son’s plate and utensils from where he’d sat as the teen wanders off to bed. William begins to clean the dishes, piling them into the sink.
Ah, he’d forgotten to give Michael his tea. Too bad. He was much too surprised by the bruise. He hopes Michael wasn’t afflicted by a sore throat or a headache. His voice didn’t seem all too hoarse. . .