Finding The Five || FNAF Movie

4 || Residual Energy

"What happened?" I ask, softly.

"I chased him and eventually caught him, but he turned around and cut my arm with a hook he had on his hand..." Michael explains, holding his left arm up as if to show me where it had happened. "When I looked up at him, he screamed at me, and he had like... black... dripping from his eyes."

"Why did you chase him?" I question. "The rabbit chased him."

"I thought he'd give me answers about my brother," Michael admits, confusing me even more.

"You have a brother?" I prompt, not wanting to push too much but not really knowing another way to segway into it.

"I did," Michael replies, looking at me fully after letting his eyes wander like I did. "He uh... he was taken, when we were kids. He was four."

"Oh..." I mumble, "was he..." I look down the hallway past Michael, trying to imply something I'm too scared to say.

"He's not one of the spirits, but the uh... the man in the rabbit suit," Michael pauses and I look at him again, finding his eyes on the ground and his mouth slightly open as if he can't find the right words. "That man killed him." Michael's eyes find their way back up to mine and once they do, I feel his emotions a little more clearly.

Mad, but not vengeful. Sad, but not depressed.

He knew the rabbit man killed his brother, and he knew the rabbit man killed the five kids.

"Was that what your dreams were about?" I try to circle back, avoiding discussing the killer too much.

"Yeah," Michael replies, clearing his throat and looking up at the ceiling. "We were camping in Nebraska. I was supposed to watch him, but I got distracted. I went to call for him, but he was nowhere nearby. A car revved up a little down the dirt road, and I got one last look before he disappeared."

"I'm sorry," I say softly.

"It's alright," he assures me, and for once I actually feel assured by an attempt to do so.

My brain becomes stuck in place for a moment, caught between wanting to comfort him as a normal person would and telling him something scarring about me to make it even. I blame Jonah for my impulsivity on the subject, as well as anything I'm about to say.

"When I was a kid, before I knew I could see ghosts, I would have a lot of residual visions," I explain, catching his attention. "And, like I said, residual energy is a bad memory that basically manifests into a visual or auditory representation of the worst moments of a person's life. So, when I was young, I would see them a lot and not know what they were." I pause, trying to think of the best way to explain myself.

"In um... in my mother's house, there was a bedroom on the ground floor that wasn't used for anything before I was born. It was the only room in the house that didn't have a purpose. My mother wanted to turn it into an office, uh... she did illustrations for children's books for a good span of her life. The problem was she needed it to be painted a certain color. My mom was very specific about colors, she couldn't handle certain ones in certain spaces. So she asked her boyfriend, my father, to paint it a new color for her. He started to, and he spent a lot of time on it, but he always worked with the door closed so paint toxins would stay low in the rest of the house." I take a few seconds, letting my eyes wander down to the ground.

"One day, my mom set up this elaborate little plan to tell him she was pregnant. She bought a little confetti popper, a few cupcakes, even some of my dad's favorite popsicles, which happened to be pink. And when she had gotten all set up, she called him to come see. He didn't come out. She waited, thinking he might be finishing it up, but he never came out. She finally went to check on him and found him um..." I stop, tilting my head a bit and pressing my lips together.