Spring Bonnie was pacing back and forth like a caged animal, his hands trembling, his heart hamming in his chest for the umpteenth time tonight.

Is it still even night?

The darkness seemed to have stretched on. Even time itself seemed unreliable and cruel in this place; unwinding and dismantling it's self in some indiscernible maddening way.

He stopped pacing and turned to rest his hands on the desk, though it did nothing to stop the spinning in his head.

"How? How could I…"

Fredbear shuffled beside him, his huge frame struggling to fit in the small security room.

"How could I do…that?" He couldn't bring himself to name the act; he still couldn't believe it.

"You didn't do anything. The old animatronics malfunctioned. Spring Bonnie killed its wearer like Spring Fredbear nearly did."

A cold shiver ran down his spine. In only a brief moment Fredbear had managed to shatter his perfect world and any hopes Bonnie had for a return to happiness. His old friend had indeed told him everything. No detail had been spared, no brutality left unexplained. Bonnie's beautiful world, it turned out, had been anything but.

His stomach heaved and he gagged on another swell of mucus at the back of his throat.

The horrid history was all around him, inside him, inside his mind. That strange night with the sad children and the smiling man replayed itself in his head like a horrible film he couldn't control. This time however the events were no longer abstract. They haunted him with their clarity. He remembered the feeling of organic heat, life and a sensation, like something deep inside his gut churning in on itself. He remembered that horrible gore that leaked from his mouth and joints. His hands began to tremble. He thought of all that dark wet that sprayed across the walls and floors. He shuddered as the sounds of popping and breaking bones pierced his mind. He had killed that night, committed the most profane and evil of acts.

He looked over at Fredbear with a mixture of horror and desperation.

"Is that why I'm here? Is that why the others are here? We are been punished aren't we?"

"The animatronics? Yes, probably, " Fredbear said flatly. "But you know all this already night guard."

Bonnie grimaced. His head was starting to throb again and Fredbear's curt and confusing assertions weren't helping. Not that he blamed Fredbear, he wouldn't want to entertain a killer either. The sticky wetness across his forehead and chest grew as he thought about Tim and his struggle with his old body. There could have been other horrible ends dealt out by his own hands without him realizing it.

"I wish I had never woken up."

He meant it. Even the dark endless sleep was better than this.

"Maybe, maybe I should just go back to sleep."

Freadbear's eyes narrowed as some unreadable expression twitched across his face; the slightest of smiles twisting up the corners of his mouth. Bonnie missed the strange motions. He flopped down into the desk chair as he settled into defeat.

"I wouldn't be able to hurt anyone and I think I would prefer not to be…like this anymore. What do you think?"

The question was met with nothing but the soft buzz of the monitor screens, the empty pause dragging on before a small thought lodged and plucked at his mind like a fly trapped on a web.

"Why are you here Fredbear?"

The big bear machine cocked his head to the side as Bonnie turned to face him.

"If this is a broken place for broken things why are you here? You're not broken are you?"

"I am here to keep everything in its place. I am doing what you should be doing night guard." Freadbear gave a soft mechanical sigh, obviously disturbed by Spring Bonnie's pathetic, broken state.

Bonnie rubbed his hand down his face with a frustrated intensity; sweat dripping from his chin onto his shirt.

"Please. Please! Stop calling me that."

"But that is what you are. I can't stress this enough." A giant paw thumped down on the back of the office chair with a deliberate roughness and swivelled it so that Bonnie was once again facing the static laced screens. "Do try to listen. It's such a strange thing for you to forget who you are. You've always been here, protecting this place." The chair creaked as the big mascot leant down, his toothy muzzle almost resting on Bonnie's shoulder.

"Everything has its place and we keep everything in its place."

The weight of Fredbear pushed Bonnie forward so that screens made Bonnie's skin seem ghostly pale.

"Surely that sounds more reasonable then being a malfunctioning killer animatronic?"

Bonnie couldn't argue with that. He would desperately prefer a reality where he had never hurt anyone, where those horrible images of blood and gore were nothing but unpleasant nightmare.

"Look," the bear's voice barked as his other big paw reached over Bonnie's left shoulder, hemming him in between his muzzle and outstretched arm.

The static on the screens started to spark and crackle into clear images again. This time it wasn't showing the world through Bonnie's old eyes but various rooms, halls and vents of his labyrinthine restaurant. Each screen was labelled in the top corner with a camera number, each camera pointing down at a room where a Freddy Fazbear mascot stood, poised, eyes blank and mouths agape.

"You fixed him!"

Bonnie pointed to one of the screens where Foxy stood on a little stage behind a purple curtain. The monstrous visage of the fox during their little car park encounter was gone and instead a very animatronic Foxy stood, his synthetic fur bristling a neat, bright orange. He looked so new Bonnie could practically smell the acrylic and plastic tang through the screen.

"Yes, but they never stay fixed," Fredbear muttered his always chipper tone failing slightly. "Things don't stay the way they're supposed to, or where they're supposed to and everything falls apart again and again."

Bonnie turned to face the muzzle over his shoulder, slightly startled by how big it looked next to his human face. The teeth that flashed with every word were almost as big as the fingers on his hands.

"I'm afraid you've started to fall apart too night guard and I don't think I can keep putting everything back together on my own."

Fredbear's desperation and confusion was all too familiar to Bonnie by now and it immediately drew a sharp pang of guilt and sympathy from the animatronic turned human.

"I'm sorry." Again, he really meant it.

Fredbear blinked, the actuators behind his eyelids making a very audible click. He watched Bonnie rub his hands together, still studying and scrutinizing his humanness.

"Maybe it was all a dream – my other life." Bonnie conceded with a shuddering sigh, "I know you wouldn't lie to me Fredbear. So if you're not lying, if I have always been here like this," he flexed his fingers, "it has to be true."

The words rung hollow and with little conviction but Bonnie felt they needed to be said. Entertaining the possibility that this world was his reality at least gained him the approval and trust of his old friend and a point of reference to start figuring all this madness out.

"That's the spirit! Turn that frown upside down."

The phrase galvanized Bonnie with its reassuring familiarity. "It may be that this is all happening for a reason," he continued.

"Oh?" Fredbear saw something change in the man's demeanour as he spoke and it made him pause.

Bonnie nodded with a renewed vigour as his synapses started to snap again. "You said yourself Fredbear. I've been here all this time, as have you and this place keeps falling apart again and again. Nothing changes." There was a slight twinkle in his eye as he stared down the monitors. "But something has changed now hasn't it?"

"What's that?" There was a complete sincerity to Fredbear's curiosity.

"I've changed haven't I? So we wait and see what else changes. Yes?"

Freadbear stood up to his full height, finally freeing Bonnie's personal space. Gears turned over in his head as he studied the back of the man sitting before him with a fresh intensity.

"I hadn't thought of that. Fascinating." The bear's voice was distant when he spoke but Bonnie missed that too as he familiarized himself with the tech around the room.

"I suppose we should keep a close eye on things then."

"I suppose we should," Bonnie agreed still not feeling entirely comfortable as he stared at his reflection shimmering across the flickering screens.