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In some sad way, Elizabeth always knew.
She remembered hating Michael as a little girl. She didn’t remember all of it, obviously, but the most essential parts she did. He was so easy to hate back then — and he never stopped to be, but he turned out to be so easy to love, too. She hated him for being mean and scary and bad and a bully and everything else, and then she grew to love him anew because something changed and something kept on changing, something turned him from her dumb big brother into a total stranger, but a stranger she learned to love nonetheless.
The change was easy to accept. Even if it didn’t make a lot of sense. She never really understood — it felt too complicated to explain with words. It was one of those indescribable, indefinable feelings — that petrifying anxiety walking alone at night, the panic of realizing you’re lost and have no idea how to get back. Something felt wrong, off, even though she couldn’t understand why or explain that feeling within her, the strange guilt coursing through her veins for no reason at all. All she knew was that something went horrendously wrong, and it was Michael’s fault — all she knew was that he changed, irrevocably, in merely a few hours.
Evan couldn’t understand that — not that she could either, but he just wouldn’t be able to get it, ever. Mike’s sudden change of heart was all that mattered to him back then, all he needed to know. Whether he ignored the weird circumstances or truly didn’t feel the same as Elizabeth, she would probably never know. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder what really happened all those years ago to cause him to try and redeem himself so suddenly, so unprompted. She remembered a lot from back then, probably a lot more than she should’ve — not everything, but just enough. She retained the faintest of memories and scraps of feelings from 1983, even though the years that came after all blurred together. She would never forget how Michael went from a bully to a loving brother in the span of one night. Something happened in those eleventh hours to make him that way, because it just didn’t make sense to her otherwise.
She didn’t believe in redemption much, even less in an eleventh-hour one. Not that big, not in such a rotten heart.
She remembered it like it was yesterday, waking up to Mike sitting still in the kitchen. She remembered his eyes, dull and pained, the strained smiles, his promises, and tears. She remembered falling in love with that new version of him, the hurt and hate slowly diluting. It didn’t just disappear — it transformed, slowly, from an ugly thing to something beautiful, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.
That day, she woke up to a Michael she didn’t know. The brother she knew up until then left, and even though she didn’t know that then, she would never see him again.
It was almost as if that Michael didn’t exist anymore — alive but gone at once. Almost as if something buried him deep inside, locked him far away. Somewhere nobody would ever reach him again.
At the time, she dreaded the whole thing to be another one of his jokes or maybe a passing, fleeting change. She thought that maybe as suddenly as it came, as suddenly it would go. Why would he want to fix himself, so out of nowhere, for no reason at all? The Michael she knew never returned, though, and this new version of him remained, so she grew to love him the way she loved the old one. And, which she would one day discover, in a new way that she never got to love that Mike from before.
And it’s not like the old Mike was all bad; he had his moments. She loved him even if she didn’t always like him. At the end of the day, he was still her brother. The guy she used to constantly follow around and imitate; the boy who would hold her when nobody else would. Then, well, the puberty got him, and there was nobody to hold his hand through it, nobody who would tell him that it was okay.
(When Elizabeth’s fifteen, and Mike tells her she’s doing great, she starts wondering who did that for him. Who held him when he had a bad day, or who comforted him — and that’s when she realizes that even though she had him all her life, Michael had no one to take care of him. Deep inside, she starts wishing he had his own Mike, too. Just like her.)
For weeks, it haunted her — all those tiny little weird things that she couldn’t understand: the way he walked, hunched over. The way he looked, so tired and lifeless sometimes. So in pain. She couldn’t tell if his heart hardened or softened. It was just… different. He contradicted all she knew about him. He kept on forgetting things; he forgot that he was the one who brushed her hair every morning, forgot all about his friends. He said he didn’t like ice cream anymore, and her Mike used to love ice cream almost as much as she did.
And Elizabeth missed eating ice cream with him, especially on those hot, sunny days, on which she could swear the heat crawling up and down her skin was scalding.
It was all in the way he looked at them. At her and at Charlie and Evan. Especially at him.
She didn’t or maybe couldn’t understand it at the time, but that haunted look he wore on his face wasn’t just sadness or teenage angst. His eyes carried a lifetime of heartache and regret and so, so much guilt, which couldn’t’ve been born just out of a little bullying. She was a naive little girl back then, and she hadn’t started to think about the meaning of life and death and regret and sorrow yet, and she had no idea why her brother got so gloomy all the time, why he acted more like a ghost than a person. All she knew was that something was wrong with him, something she couldn’t fix. He was like a broken porcelain doll with cracks all over his pale face. A ragdoll full of ripped parts, sewn back together backwards. She saw it in the way his arms were always full of bruises, always marred in some grotesque way. A sign of ownership. Owned by misery, it screamed. The way his cheeks hollowed, property of guilt, it cried. That sadness used to scare her.
That sadness took her brother and never gave him back. It took the pieces of his soul and left him hollowed out. Stole his years of innocence, of childhood. Left him empty.
Back then, she thought that maybe he just felt bad about acting like a jerk. She couldn’t deny him his blame and conscience, not that she knew what any of that was. She just thought he deserved to feel bad a little, maybe not the amount he craved, but just a bit. And maybe that was it — maybe he just felt really bad about how he acted. And child-Elizabeth was more than satisfied with that answer. She didn’t realize that anything else could’ve been going on until she was well into her teen years, and things that seemed to make sense before, just… didn’t anymore. But it was too late by then.
It was July 1994 when she finally accepted something was more than wrong, more than just strange.
But before that, before July and before 1994 and before all the other months and all the other years, it was the dreaded 1983. The date nobody ever wanted to talk about. It was 1983, and Michael had let them both sleep in his room, and as he tucked them into his bed, he started telling them a story.
“A long, long time ago,” he’d start, voice gentle and soft, the way it stopped long ago. “There lived a happy little lion. He was a prince, but he was way overzealous,” he’d say and flash her a smile. “You know, he was desperate to prove himself, to show his dad he was worthy of— of being the future king of all of Savannah, I suppose. But deep down, I think he just wanted to be cared for, I guess. He had a friend, another tiny lion, and an uncle.”
Elizabeth instantly fell in love with the story, as she did with all the other ones that Mike would tell them. Lion King, he’d call this one. Faintly, Elizabeth remembered thinking the big lion reminded her of Uncle Henry or Michael, later on. Not really, but kind of. Just slight of barely. But at one point in her life, it did.
The stories that came after this one were all just as fascinating — Little Mermaid and 101 Dalmatians, and many, many more. Some of them had just two words in the title, Elizabeth remembered thinking. Just two words — so little, and yet so much.
Then there came the time when they, of course, grew out of children’s bedtime stories and getting tucked into bed by their big brother. That was just the natural order of things; the memories started to fade, but love remained. Love always remained. The kind that sews itself into your very core and intertwines with your soul always does. And even though Elizabeth might have eventually forgotten all that Michael used to do for her, she’d never forget how he made her feel. And he made her feel so well loved.
Elizabeth remembered being filled with dread the morning of Evan’s birthday. She felt anxious, her stomach all twisted up in painful knots. Something inside her screamed danger, and all she could think of was that something terrible would happen. She knew something was off, but she had no idea what.
That day, Mike followed Evan like a shadow. She thought it to be a bit odd, so she went right after them like a duckling; the three of them stuck together for the whole day. All Mike did, though, was give Evan a handmade stuffed teddy bear. Helpy, he called it. And Helpy became Evan’s very good friend after that.
Evan asked Mike to get rid of his old Fredbear plushie not long after that. He said it started to scare him, and he was afraid of it biting his head off. And Evan loved that bear.
The party went fine, and the day went even better, but she still couldn’t sleep that night. She could hear a faint crying from a distance, too. But she never got up from her bed.
Lizzie didn’t remember her father much. He was rarely around to begin with, always busy with something: new projects, new robots, being a jerk in general. But she knew Michael did; he was the oldest, and so he remembered their father clearly, and always kept him in the back of his mind. She never asked about their dad because Mike looked so haunted whenever anyone even mentioned William Afton. If she thought about him for more than a few minutes, she’d start feeling feverish herself so she understood that at least.
That itself brought up some suspicions — and as she grew and matured, something new occurred to her. Just because her father wouldn’t bother to spend time with her or Evan didn’t mean he didn’t spend it with Michael. And Mike used to look so… sad back then. She remembered how loving and caring he got, protective even, and she thought, no, there’s no way. William Afton was a jerk, but not that kind of jerk. Neglective, sure, absent, absolutely. But maybe he was the other kind of jerk too; maybe he was cruel in more ways than just one. Maybe he did such horrendous things, the kind of things nobody ever wants to talk about, and she was none the wiser all this time.
Maybe he’s the one that took her brother, turned him inside out and left him aching and reeling.
Did he ever hurt him? He hit her once, she remembered faintly one day. It happened just that one time, but it did. It happened, and there was no changing that. Did he hurt Mike, though? Did he hurt Michael, the wretched mirror of himself, the child that never obeyed, the wayward son? Did he hit him, once or twice? Or until he cried? Did he hurt him so badly, did he scar him so monstrously that Michael hollowed himself out piece by piece? She never dared to ask, afraid of the answer she’d get. Afraid of Michael lying and afraid of him telling the truth. She still loved her dad — the way she loved her mother: distantly. But her mother never got the chance to spend time with her, because she was dead long before Elizabeth could even comprehend what death was. Her father never cared to tell her he loved her in the first place, so would he care enough to hurt Mike when he didn’t bother to stick around? She didn’t know. And until she asked, she’d never know.
And she wasn’t brave enough to ask. Wouldn’t even know how.
Her father went missing somewhere around the time Mike got weird. Before Charlie’s birthday, maybe? Or after? She couldn’t remember; the memories were all fuzzy. Not that she cared much, anyway. But someone must have called the police (that might have been Michael, now that she thought about it, or maybe Uncle Henry) when it became clear he wasn’t gonna show up anytime soon and when the officers came, Mike showed them William’s half-emptied wardrobe, the mess that became of his bedroom and study and the empty driveway, the car nowhere in sight.
Elizabeth never told anyone that she saw Michael planting flowers in their backyard the very same day William must have gone missing. And Michael didn’t even like gardening.
Then Uncle Henry took them in, and they got a bigger house. Learned how to live together. But on their first night at Uncle Henry’s, she sneaked near Mike, just to see if he was asleep yet. He wasn’t; he stared at the wall, quiet, eyes foggy. She didn’t say anything. She left. She never said anything.
She kept quiet, despite all her life wanting to be heard, more than anything.
After that, things quieted down. Life with Uncle Henry was good. Mike still looked sad, sometimes, and on his bad days he couldn’t even get out of bed. Sometimes she’d catch him crying, too.
Charlie gave him a nicely wrapped gift once, on one of his hardest days. Mike called her kindhearted. She said that he looked like he needed just a tiny bit of help, the very same way those few kids she met after getting locked out of the pizzeria did. And Charlie was never locked out of any pizzeria.
Elizabeth asked her when that happened. Uncle Henry said she must’ve dreamt it when Charlie couldn’t answer.
Sometimes, to Evan's amusement, Mike would joke around, pretending to be psychic. He’d pretend to predict the future, the outcomes of voting, or different events. He called it his parlor trick. And he was right most of the time, too, and kept laughing about being a wizard — and Evan would always giggle and stare at him in awe, asking how he did it. And Mike never said (“a magician never reveals his secret, Evan ”), but it creeped Elizabeth out enough that she stayed out of it.
Sometimes, he’d stop. He’d sit still, frozen in time. He’d stare at the wall, eyes numb and cold, so stoic. Completely dead to the world. He’d look like he’d lived a million lives already and died a thousand different deaths; he looked just like their dad.
And Mike was always weird, Elizabeth reasons. And then he just kept on becoming weirder.
But now it was July 1994, and the Lion King had just been released to the theaters. Mike offered to take them to see it. And so they went.
After the movie, something inside her twisted — a lock opened, the key turned, chains shattered; Pandora’s box released for the world to face. And all the disease, all the sickness, all that she had buried away suddenly ate at her, like a horde of starved wasps. The bubble burst.
She was already a teen, and her brother didn’t tell any stories anymore (she was a big girl, after all), and she didn’t remember much from when he did, all those years ago. But after watching the Lion King, the shadow of a memory of the very same tale resurfaced. And, with shivers down her spine, she realized that every little detail Mike always included in his storytelling, she could easily find in the film she had just seen.
Just a coincidence, she told herself. Only it wasn’t.
Because something sinister had already started creeping around her head, all the memories that never were. That never existed because somebody didn’t let them. Because someone had wiped her story clean and rewritten it how they liked it.
The girl she never was. The brother that never died. And a brother that did. The ice cream that never fell, a father that never stayed gone for long.
Her head pounded, and the cold anxiety rolled in her belly. She locked eyes with Evan and wondered if he could feel that too, if he knew, if he remembered the blood that never covered the cold metal. But he said nothing.
She kept staring at Mike the whole way home. And he kept looking at her. And that old, strange feeling made its way back, crawling down her spine. Her heart dropped, and her stomach twisted, nausea making her dizzy.
That wasn’t her brother. Not really. Her real brother was dead — and maybe that’s why this Mike was digging the day William went missing. Maybe that’s what he buried. But she never asked.
He wasn’t her brother, and she wasn’t his sister; they were both gone.
Her brother died a long time ago, even though he was standing alive right in front of her. But the child that he was, the child that he never got to be, that person was gone. He’d never grow up, never get what she got offered on a silver plate. Never feel the love he should’ve felt.
And she knew. She knew he knew she knew something was wrong. It was 1994, and something felt wrong. It was 1994, and it was 1983, and it was all the years between, and it was then, and it was now, and something felt terribly, horribly wrong.
And even though she never asked, and maybe never would, in some sad way, she already knew.
It was 1994, and something shifted.
Something shifted a long time ago.
The memory of her father’s hand caressing her cheek resurfaced, and the memory of Michael gardening — digging, burying — just a day later hit her like a train. She felt dazed as she realized her father had never gone missing. He never even left.
“You,” she swallowed hard, throat dry, feeling suddenly so small, so childlike. It was just the two of them — Elizabeth, Mike. Just two words, so little, and yet so much. “I remember. I forgot, but I— I remember now. You were gardening that day, and you don’t like gardening — you never did, and you still don’t, and you never gardened again. And dad… dad never left the house, did he? You… You don’t like gardening, but you did it when you said he went missing,” she whispered, cautious but firm. “The day before, you were so angry and you— you made sure he’d never hurt anyone again, didn’t you? That he’d never hurt me again. Dad’s still there, isn’t he?”
“Does it matter now?” he asked, shrugging. “We’re all here, and we’re all alive and— and he had it coming, Lizzie, I didn’t do anything he didn’t deserve. You’ll live a safe and happy life, and you won’t die in vain, nobody will.” He looked at her with an exhausted smile. “Isn’t that all that really matters?”
She looked at him for a very long time; this wasn’t Mike, who loved his father despite hating him. This was Mike, who hated him despite loving him, once, upon a time. Because love never just went away — it soured, and it rotted, but it remained. Sometimes it turned into something else, something ugly, but it was always there.
“My Mike is gone, isn’t he?” she asked quietly. A sadness settled in her heart where madness once resided. “You’re not him. Something happened to— to him, to, to you. My Mike never got to grow up and turn into you; you replaced him that night. My Mike got buried with our dad,” she muttered bitterly.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” he admitted reluctantly. “I never thought about it this way. You were— you are all I ever wanted to have back. I didn’t think… you wanted him, too.”
“I wanted him,” she confessed. “I wanted him all my life. Even then, when he was just a big bully. And now,” she sniffles but puts on a brave face. “Now he’ll never know. He’ll never get the chance to choose what he wants to do with that. He won’t get what we all did because of you. He’ll never know… but you do, don’t you?”
“I do. I do, Lizzie,” he assured, smiling at her. She returned it, although it was still coated in sadness.
“It’s still you, though,” she told him, firmly. “You’re not him entirely but— but he would’ve been you one day, anyway. It would take him longer, but he would get there. I know he would. Maybe he was already on his way.”
“I don’t know,” Mike said, and swallowed. He looked at the sky. “I don’t remember what it was like to be him. I was, once. But I don’t remember it now, just like you don’t remember being her. I’m… I’m glad you don’t. That nobody does.”
“It’s still his heart in you,” Elizabeth mumbled, kicking at the dirt. “His love, your love, that’s the same thing, right? I know he loved me, even if he hated it. I felt the same. But you still got his heart inside you. It grew and— and it changed, but it’s, it’s not gone. It’s not dead,” her voice broke, just a little, as she thought about that boy who never got what he deserved. Who died to be able to give it to her. “You’re still here. And you’re him in all the ways that matter.”
Something shifted; something finally slotted into place, after all those years.
“Yes,” he agreed. “In all the ways that matter.”
And that was it; the horror was over. The sadness lingered, but barely.
The stranger and her brother — they were the same thing now. She could say goodbye, and she could say hello, and she could say I miss you, and she could say I love you, and she could ask, and she’d get all the answers.
She didn’t.
Charlie offered to go out for ice cream with Elizabeth later that day. She said she knew vanilla was her favorite.
Elizabeth hated ice cream. She accepted it with a smile.
Vanilla has never tasted more like blood.