Chapter Text
Lunar trotted into the Main Atrium and looked over the balcony, where the late-night patrons were still moving to and fro, and staffbots flittered among the tables to serve them and clean up the mess they left behind. A lot of the humans who passed him didn’t even notice he was an animatronic, and just thought he was a weirdly dressed kid.
“What’s fun tonight?” he asked himself as he looked around at all the flashing signs.
The Pizzaplex was huge! It was fun to run around the big attractions like Roxy Raceway or the Fazcade; the Pizzaplex was like an indoor amusement park that way, so there was a lot stuff to see! Sometimes, Solar would let him off of shifts in the Daycare so he could go off to play around the building. He especially liked the attractions that had glowing things to look at! Glowing things mesmerized him.
“Ooh, Fazer Blast…!” Fazer Blast was always a good choice when he wanted to see the lights! But after a moment to think, tonight he wasn’t feeling it. “…Hmm. Nah.”
He could go to Rockstar Row and see who he ran into; there were all kinds of funny weirdoes living here. Lunar sometimes ran into the Glamrocks or humans or the other random robots from older Freddy places who weren’t supposed to be here but somehow shacked up here, but he didn’t know any of them very well. Solar and him weren’t all that close to anyone else!
Eventually, his bright pink eyes turned to the big Gator Golf sign. “Ooh, that one!” he immediately started making his way over in its direction.
Monty owned the whole Pizzaplex, but the golf course was the attraction his likeness was attached to.
Lunar slipped past the staffbot that guarded the elevator, impatiently swayed to the music for a few seconds, and then ran into the big room when the doors finally opened.
Gator Golf was huge and a ton of fun to explore. Sometimes Lunar would just run in there and pretend to be lost in the jungle! He used to go swimming in the waterways too… until he got stuck in a popup alligator’s mouth and it took Solar three hours to find him and rescue him.
It was crazy Monty never let anyone in there!
Monty treated Gator Golf more like his own personal giant open-concept mansion than a business, with a huge theater-sized television right in the middle of the golf course, in front of a luxury sitting area, where he liked to watch his weird British football. Lunar half-suspected he slept in here too.
Lunar trekked through the big golf course for a while, playing around in the plastic vegetation and the stands you usually weren’t supposed to touch.
Eventually he made his way to Monty’s sitting area, with its huge plush couch, big fancy glass coffee table, and giant TV, currently switched off. Monty had a “butler” staffbot holding a tray with a kettle and tea cups waiting next to the couch. A side table also had a bowl containing a bunch of treats and candy. Monty was always importing weird British snacks. Like toffee. Or these weird big chocolate eggs with toys in them. But they were all the highest class stuff, not anything you’d find in Fazbear’s vending machines. Lunar liked sneaking in here to swipe those goodies!
He glanced around one more time to make sure no one was watching before snagging a big handful of the wrapped candies, and stuffed them in his nightcap. His nightcap was useful as a pocket that way.
He was glad Solar built him with the ability to eat! There was plenty of food to be found around the Pizzaplex… of varying quality, but a lot of it was still pretty good! He drank a lot of fizzyfaz. He was also a big fan of chips. And he didn’t know what he would do if he couldn’t have Nutella.
He was just looking over the bowl and deciding if there were any more pieces he’d like to take when a sound came from the distance and he froze with his hand outstretched. He knew what that was! Monty had come back into Gator Golf! He wasn’t exactly quiet, and he could hear him coming from all the way across the room.
“Those pillocks, making me miss football on the ol’ telly…”
“Oops!” Lunar scurried off to the side and ducked behind some of the fake vegetation, out of sight.
Nothing bad ever happened when Monty caught him in here… it was just… really annoying.
Monty cantered into the room, grumbling in his fake exaggerated accent about having to stay late for a meet and greet with fans after one of the Pizzaplex’s concerts, which he still did with his bandmates, Freddy, Roxanne, and Chica.
The butler staffbot got to work heating the kettle as soon as it saw Monty, and after a minute handed him a cup, which the gator drank daintily.
“Just the one, my good fellow!” he held up a hand to stop the butler from preparing another cup. “I still have business out there with a couple blokes, just popped by for a breather…”
Lunar shuffled along the walkway, from one fake plant to the next, trying to get out of the room before Monty had a chance to catch him.
Lunar’s arm accidentally brushed against some of the fake leaves, and the plastic shuffled loudly.
“What’s all that now!?” Monty was suddenly alerted.
“Uh-oh!” Lunar gasped under his breath, and bolted in the other direction, into a hiding place behind some of the cardboard stands.
The gator tromped closer and looked around at where the sound had come from, and Lunar held still, waiting to see if his stealth would pay off.
After a moment of glancing around, Monty snorted.
“It’s those rats scuttling around again,” the gator scoffed, then shrugged and started to walk away, muttering irately to himself. “Aaach! The Help’s always complaining about that! ‘I heard something scrambling in the basement walls!’ they tell me! I cheer them up by telling them not to worry about the rats, the inspectors don’t care, I pay them handsomely, they won’t bother us a wink! But then they complain ‘I know about THOSE rats, but these sound like some MIGHTY BIG ones, I think it’s something else’… Oooooh there’s scratching and something beating the floor under your feet, how teeeeerrifying…” he said sardonically, waving his clawed fingers like there was a ghost.
Lunar slowly peeked around the corner just in time to see his tail disappearing around the corner into one of the side corridors.
“Huh!” he shrugged as he stepped out and made a break for it.
Sweet, he’d escaped!
He could have just tried to sneak back out of Gator Golf, but Lunar was nothing if not stubborn. He knew where Monty’s hidden route to the catwalks was, so he slipped over to it, and a minute later he had walked out onto the catwalks. Gator Golf spiraled out below him, and the weird Gator coaster thing sat up there, not moving.
Lunar liked being up here too, because he could pretend to be flying.
He walked the catwalks for a little while, and looked at the coaster longingly. He wished it moved! It would be so much fun to ride on that thing! Then he’d really feel like he was flying!
Then he heard Monty’s voice down below and peered over the railing; Monty was down by his big sitting area again, standing in front of the snack bowl with a furrowed brow, peering down into it. He was picking over the bowl and seemed to notice things were missing.
Lunar suppressed a giggle as he watched.
After a little while of observing the confused gator, he just started to pull back from the railing; there was a vent up here that led to Mazercise, which would be his ticket out of here without being seen.
Unfortunately for Lunar, the catwalks could be creaky, being made of metal. And when Lunar stepped on one spot, the metal just so happened to let out a creak.
“’EY!” Monty yelled, whirling around and pointing dramatically at Lunar.
“Uh-oh!” Lunar yelped and sprinted off down the catwalk.
“Ah-HAH! O’ COURSE it’s you! I KNEW I heard something!” Monty ranted indignantly, then puffed up in rage when Lunar made a break for it. “EY!! Where’re you going!? Get back here!”
“Nnn-O!” Lunar called back.
“Quit getting up on my catwalks!”
“Nnn-O!”
He dove into the vent while Monty called after him, and then crawled forward until he reached the turn in the tunnel, and Gator Golf was out of sight.
“Phew,” Lunar sat back, resting against the vent wall, and mimicked wiping his forehead. “That guy’s weird!”
His hat ruffled with the pilfered candy. He retrieved some kind of cherry candy and ate one, before holding onto the wrapper to throw in the trash later. Solar scolded him when he littered.
After a while, Lunar realized he should probably start heading back Daycarewards. That meant he had to keep going and would have to pass through Mazercise.
Then his eyes went wide and let out a huge whine.
“Aww man, I hate Mazercise.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Sometime later, Solar was working at the computer again. He’d already filed Moon’s orders away, allotting time for them; he would start working on them within the next day or two. Even if Moon wanted them to be his priority, this was the best he would get.
He was currently working on a very specific project, one that was a priority over anything else on his list.
“’Ello there, Solar! Are you in? Mind if I come around for a spell?”
When that loud voice reached Solar, he shut his eyes and groaned in annoyance. There was only one person who sounded so ridiculous.
“What do you want, Monty?” he called back impatiently.
Solar quickly hit a button on the computer, one he’d installed when the project began, which instantly closed and hid the documents he was looking at.
Then he stood up to deal with Monty.
The gator swaggered in with that irritating smug expression and that stupid manacle on his face.
“Ah, there you are! Just the man I wanted to see! Put her there, mate!” Monty reached out quickly and snatched Solar’s gloved hand up in his, and shook it vigorously. “Always a pleasure to see you!”
“…Riiight,” Solar slowly retracted his hand when Monty finally released his vicegrip on it. “If you’ve come to ask about the program, it’s not done yet; I’ll have it to you by the end of the week.”
“Mate, that’s fine, wasn’t coming here for that!” Monty waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t need that ‘un just yet anyway, that’s small potatoes!”
“Then, to what do I owe the pleasure?” Solar pressed. Having dealt with Monty for so long, he had a pretty good idea what the gator was gearing up to.
“Ahh don’t sound so grumpy, I’ve come with a fantastic business proposition for you!” the gator winked, going into his salesman voice.
Yep. That’s exactly what Solar was expecting. Monty, shrewd corrupt business tycoon that he was, always had many plans and schemes going at the same time, and this meant he often came to Solar to give him a new project to add to his to-do list before he’d even completed the current one he was working on.
“What is it this time, Monty?” he hoped to just get it over with.
“This is a good, one, you’re gonna love this,” Monty said, holding up a finger. “We got so many children coming to this Pizzaplex, and I was thinkin’, how can we wring some more cash from them, right?”
“…Yeah?” Solar nodded, feeling that creeping nervousness about what Monty had in mind.
“We get them… to make merchandise for US!” he said with a flourish. “We market it as an Arts and Crafts class or some such, and when we get ‘em at their tables, we give ‘em the materials and templates to follow, and we have it in our contract that all the malarkey they make is property of Fazbear Entertainment, so we can keep it! And then we SELL it! We can even motivate them by telling them if they do a good job they’ll be given a special Artistic License, or whatever the hell, the same kind as the greats, Leonardo Da Vinci or Michelangelo! And if they don’t follow the templates exactly, they’ll fail as artists and won’t get the license! They’ll be paying for the lessons AND we’ll be making bank off their labor! It’s a double win for us!”
Solar listened, unimpressed. No, he hated that. Monty always had these horrible, immoral ideas.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking there, mate!” Monty pointed, his claw poking the middle of Solar’s nose. “‘Brilliant’! And yes, I am aware! It’ll make us a real bundle! Millions! Billions!” Then he paused. “But in order to do that, I need some things built for me. I need templates with instructions for the dumb little gremlins to follow, and I need a conveyor belt that will shuffle pieces along like a factory. Can’t be having those kids be TOO disorganized, you know, we’d hardly get anything! It needs to have SOME semblance of coordination! And that, my good man, is where you come in!”
“Mm-hmm, sure,” Solar sighed. “And let me guess, I get a ridiculously low percent of the earnings.”
“On the contrary, I think it’s a very fair amount!” Monty said. “Two percent! With the amount we’re bound to make, that’ll be enough to pay the Daycare’s rent another week or so, don’t you think?”
It wasn’t like Solar had a choice. Each of these “commissions” was one more week the Daycare had to stay afloat; they were barely scraping by, and turning one down might be the one that sank them.
And the worst part was: Monty KNEW he didn’t have a choice. And he took full, shameless advantage of backing Solar into a corner.
He hated dealing with Monty.
“Fine, I’ll do it,” Solar conceded. “Send over the specifications, and I’ll get on it.”
“Fantastic, that’s a good man,” Monty nodded and spoke like he was a good dog. Then he glanced around the Daycare, and then up at the balcony over the ballpit. “Used to do business with Moon. What a shame things turned out this way, don’t you think? Haven’t had much luck with that one in SUCH a long while! He used to be all over my deals, but he hasn’t been ever since, well…” he spun his hand in a circle, pretending to search for ‘gentler’ words. “YOU showed up and Sun went caput, and Moon went sick in the head, you know,” he twirled his clawed finger next to his head in the “coocoo” gesture.
Solar refrained from answering. Everything Monty just said made his distaste for the gator smolder more.
“Oh! And one more thing!” Monty said. “That Lunar of yours! Did you know I caught the little bugger up in my rafters again?”
“Did you?” Solar looked up. “Well, don’t look at me, I don’t encourage him to go to off-limits places.” And that was even usually true.
“I think he stole some of my prime candies, too,” Monty said, harrumphing.
Solar allowed himself to chuckle at that. Frankly… that didn’t surprise him at all.
But then Monty waved his hand. “Ah well, I’ll forgive him this one time! I can’t stay mad at him! He’s good entertainment, this whole Daycare had gotten so unbearably dull in the year before he came along!”
“…Sure.”
“Speaking of which, where is the little devil?” he glanced around.
“Not here,” he shrugged.
“Ahh, probably off getting up into all kinds of shenanigans in my Pizzaplex… But it’s fine! It’s fiiiine. Once you finally put him to work around here, he’ll make up for all the trouble when he starts making me money.”
“I’m not gonna do that,” Solar said flatly.
“Huh?” Monty sounded genuinely confused. “Why aren’t you putting that tyke of yours to work? Isn’t that what you made him for?”
“This might surprise you, Monty,” Solar narrowed his eyes. “But I didn’t make Lunar to be a work drone, or some servant to me.”
Monty stared at him like the concept was utterly incomprehensible.
“Ah well!” he finally said. “Suit yourself! But take it from me, orphans make for a fantastic labor force! Get that kid doing something and it’ll be smooth sailing for you!”
“Mmm-hmm.” Solar ignored the comment, something he was used to doing with this weirdo.
If he just stood there and waited it out, Monty would talk, and talk, and talk, and then he would finally leave.
“With that settled, I must be off! Lots of business partners to parlay with! A pleasure doing business with you, chum!” Monty said with a stiff nod, before finally turning and leaving the area.
“Whatever you say,” Solar said back, but the gator hadn’t given him the time of day as he disappeared.
After he was gone, Solar massaged the bridge of his nose. He always felt like he needed to take a bath after Monty visited him.
“Tricking kids again, using kids again, huh…?” he muttered to himself, just disgusted at the thought of going along with it. If he could make his own choice, he wouldn’t collude with the gator on any of his schemes.
Unfortunately, Monty was one of the few stable sources of money that kept this Daycare going.
While he was standing there, Lunar slowly peeked his head around the corner.
“Is he gone?” he whispered.
“Yeah, he’s gone. Come on in,” Solar nodded.
The smaller bot padded in through the doors. He was carrying a box of nachos with the mazercise logo on it. “Man he’s fast!” Lunar said, popping one of the cheesy chips into his mouth. “He was just in Gator Golf!”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Lunar,” Solar said.
“Sorry!” he said, using his hand to cover his mouth as he spoke.
“But yeah,” Solar shrugged, “he just came here to make me work on one of his projects. It’s just more of his usual crap.”
“He does a lot of bad stuff!” Lunar noted.
“He sure does.”
“I don’t think he’s really British.”
“Y’know, you’re probably right.” But then Solar tilted his head. “You were at Gator Golf, weren’t you?”
Lunar paused with his mouth open, about to eat a chip. “Yeahhh…?”
“Okay, well, look. I know you like going to Gator Golf, but just, be careful. I know Monty seems fun to play with, but he’s… not really someone you want to provoke, okay?”
“You’re worried about me making him mad?” Lunar scraped at some of the cheese with his finger, something Solar would normally tell him not to do, but his attention wasn’t on that. “He seems pretty chill around me!”
“He does,” Solar said. “I don’t think he’ll do anything to hurt you, right now, but… Monty is… complicated.”
It was a good thing that Lunar was on Monty’s good side… but Monty’s opinions and treatments of things could change in an instant if he thought he could get something out of people.
But Lunar didn’t really seem to be listening… It probably didn’t register to him, all that much.
Solar had kept a lot of Monty’s most serious crimes a secret from Lunar, so as not to freak him out… like he did for many serious things.
“He thought I was a rat!” Lunar said out of nowhere.
Solar perked an eyebrow. “Mm-hm?”
“Yeah! He heard me at one point, but I hid and he didn’t catch me, and he started talking about how the workers keep hearing really big rats in the basement!”
“Rats?” Solar repeated.
“Yeah, really big rats!”
Solar paused.
“Well, with you scurrying all over the place…” he snorted after a moment.
“Heeey,” Lunar put one hand on his hip, the nacho box in the other. He reached for the last few crumbs at the bottom, and then it was empty. “Aw, my nighttime snack’s gone. They never give you enough.”
“That’s how they get you to spend money on more of it,” Solar shook his head.
Lunar dumped the box in the trashcan.
“It’s getting pretty late,” Solar said. “You gonna head to bed soon?”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes.”
“Aww. Okay.” Lunar looked like he didn’t want to.
“Where are you gonna sleep tonight?”
“Just the Theater, I guess.”
Lunar could fall asleep almost anywhere. There were a bunch of different places he slept in; it was usually in the Theater, but he could also fall asleep in the miniature house, or up in the play structures or the castle area, or many other places. Solar just slept wherever, sometimes straight up on the floor.
Solar glanced at his own battery. He hadn’t charged in a while and he was getting close to empty; he would need to charge tonight.
Solar often went days without sleep. Sometimes he would only stop working when his battery ran out and charging became an absolute necessity; otherwise, he had to keep busy at all times.
“Alright, head off that way,” Solar nodded. “Goodnight, kid.”
“Goodnight, Brother, I love you!”
“Love you too.”
The smaller bot started to head off.
“Oh and Lunar!” Solar called before he could make it three steps. “Did you take candy from Gator Golf?”
Lunar froze. “…Nnnooooo?”
Solar looked down at him.
“Lunar.”
“Nooooo…?”
“Lunar.”
“…Yes.”
“Nice.”
~~~~~~~~~~
When he was certain Lunar was gone, Solar’s smile faded, and he turned back to the security counter. There was the quick flick of the switches on the wall, and the Daycare’s music stopped and the lights faded back into Night Mode.
He sat at the computer again, but instead of pulling up Moon or Monty’s projects, he delved into a more restricted part of the machine – a part that wasn’t so easy to find.
He re-opened the files he’d hidden at Monty’s arrival.
And then before him, a hidden folder opened, and thousands of files appeared, exactly where Solar had left them off.
It was a mountain of information. Intricate blueprints and complicated technical documents, reports for testing phases for dozens of different mechanisms, documents with millions and millions of mathematical and scientific calculations; there could be entire encyclopedias about quantum physics, space and time, and the fabric of the universe here. It would have pushed this tiny computer to the bursting point if Moon hadn’t upgraded it years ago before Solar manifested, with Solar having added his own modifications to host this and protect this data too.
As Solar looked over it all, his rust-colored eyes narrowed, a shadow of seriousness and determination falling over his face.
This was all the research he had about the Star.
Solar had always known about the Star’s existence; Moon had started working on it when the twins were still in one body; when Sun and Moon separated, he’d continued his research into it alongside all his other flights of fancy, but hadn’t had enough time to finish it before Solar manifested. And then, after the second separation and Sun’s subsequent coma, Moon had abandoned everything else to focus on repairing his brother.
For so long, the half-completed research on the Star had sat dormant in its secured server, and Moon hadn’t touched them since.
But Solar…
As the months had passed and he witnessed Moon try and fail every conventional method of repairing Sun, a thought had occurred to Solar; he remember the Star… and started wondering if it might be the solution to fixing all of his brothers.
So he had cracked his way into Moon’s secured server, and taken all of the information for himself and hidden it in a deep lock on his computer where only he could find it; and for months now, he had been picking through the half-finished details, finding the places where Moon had left off and trying to fill them in himself.
It was the most difficult, complicated, perplexing thing he had ever worked on.
There were so many places where he was stumped, and figuring out how to get over each of these hurdles was a new challenge unto itself. There were places that seemed to work against the conventional laws of science. The entire thing was like a giant 4D jigsaw puzzle, with the confounding madness of a black hole’s singularity mixed with magic.
Solar knew the Star was dangerous. And he knew its chance of succeeding at bringing Sun back was very low.
Even if the Star could repair near-anything that was broken, it could not revive the dead. And the truth was that, even if Moon insisted it was merely a coma that could be fixed, the two of them didn’t know if Sun was actually still alive or if he was actually already dead.
Even if Solar completed the Star, he might just find Sun had been gone from the very beginning.
So maybe Solar WAS just grasping at straws and holding onto false hope that a spark of Sun was still there, deep in his cold unmoving circuits… but this was the single remaining thing he could think of, his last-ditch attempt that might be able to fix everything that was broken here in this place…
To revive Sun from wherever his mind was now… to restore Moon’s sanity and the pieces of himself ripped away from him... And to fix them…
And to also assure all of this, for Lunar’s sake and his safety…
Even though there was a deep, painful part of Solar that knew Sun was probably already gone… He wanted to try. His hope had faded over the year, and he had tried to accept he might never see Sun again, but despite that, he wanted to try.
He wanted to believe there was still a possibility, however remote it was. He didn’t want to give up on Sun, not before he had exhausted the last possible option.
The Star was his Hail Mary.
Solar didn’t even know if he COULD finish the Star; but he was damn sure going to give it everything he had.
He owed it to Sun…
And… he wanted it.
He wanted it so much. So, painfully much…
He thought of them, all of them, every time he looked at the Star’s data.
If Sun could just wake up…
If Moon could just stop being cruel to both of them…
And if he could fix them…
“Maybe then, our family would be whole.”