Rating: T for brief mention of drug use and mild cursing. Trigger warning for unsanitary/gross content.

Setting: Fazbear's Fright

Summary: Mike Schmidt had been pitted against his archenemy for five nights in Fazbear's Fright, and with the help of his ghostly ally Phone Guy, he was determined to send that hotdog on the desk straight to hell. A one-shot based on Scott's comments during Dawko's 3-3-19 livestream.

Author's Note:

Five Nights at Freddy's and all canon characters, settings, etc. are the property of Scott Cawthon.

You are free to use any original concepts, headcanons and characters from this fanfiction in your own work (fanfiction, art, etc.) if you'd like.

Views expressed in this fanfiction do not necessarily match the writer's.

Testimony: "I've never read a fanfic so well designed that was based off of a hecking hot dog." - Ender, FNaF Steam forum user, March 5. You heard him, so if anyone wishes to challenge this with a better fanfic based on a hotdog, may he speak up now. /s

"It's been five days, why aren't you dead?" Mike Schmidt demanded, staring balefully at the moldy green rabbit animatronic slithering its way through the ventilation shaft, en route to his mock-up of a security office.

Stabbing an index finger at the button that would close off the shaft and effectively block his adversary's progress, Schmidt sighed and let the monitor drop to his lap, then returned his gaze to the true object of his scorn, entirely forgetting about the rabbit.

"Stupid hotdog," he grumbled, crossing his withered and discolored arms across his chest. "It's not fair. I got my guts scooped out two days ago and look at the mess I've become, while you've been sitting out on the desk all week and you're not any worse for the wear. We're both made of meat, so what makes you so special that you don't decompose?"

"You didn't hear this from me," said an ethereal, disconnected voice from somewhere behind him, "but Fazburger puts enough preservatives in their dogs and burgers to allow them to withstand anything. Some guy once kept an entire Fazmeal for a year and then shared the photos, just to prove to the world that it didn't decay one bit."

Startled, Schmidt whirled around to find the translucent form of someone he had only seen in photographs before, specifically the photograph attached to the missing-person flier that had been posted at his old office.

"Phone Guy? I can't believe it's you!" sputtered Mike, and the apparition nodded in amusement.

"In the flesh- er, ectoplasm?" Clyde threw up his hands in frustration. "Who cares, I'm a ghost, okay? I came back to check in on you, because I'm sorta worried. Y'know, talking to inanimate objects is the first sign of insanity," he said, pointing at the hotdog.

"But talking to ghosts is perfectly sane?" Mike shot back, and Clyde smirked, knowing the security guard had him on that one. "Between that rabbit out there and this hotdog just sitting there mocking me, I'm about this close to royally losing it and burning the place to the ground." He held a bony thumb and forefinger a hair's breadth apart to emphasize his point. "It's not fair," he repeated in a voice that was perilously close to whining. "I should be dead, but I'm not. This hotdog should be-"

"Y'know, and for the record, I shouldn't be dead, but I am!" Clyde cut in with a roll of his eyes. "Who said life was fair?"

"Not me, that's for sure." Mike leaned across the desk, picking up the hotdog and examining it closely. "My boss - I never did catch his name, so by tradition I just call him 'Phone Dude' - was munching on this with his mouth open when he interviewed me. I'll spare you the details but it was utterly gross. Then, he just sorta wandered away and I never saw him again. If you ask me, he had the munchies but y'know that type, they get easily distracted and forget where they left their Scooby Snacks." Clyde chuckled, causing Schmidt to cringe at the eerie ghostly laughter.

"Anyway, he hired me on the spot, I started right away and then he just up and quit his duties the next night. He's playing your old training tapes instead, for ambience."

Clyde's eyebrows shot upward. "Ugh, typical entitled Millennial, letting some dead guy do the work for him. So he's gonna use my old recordings for this horror house without permission, I'm not sure I like that." He stared at something past Mike. "Yecch, that's downright ghastly. All green and waterlogged and crusty-"

Mike realized all too late that he had forgotten entirely about the animatronic character who was still roaming the mock-up of a Freddy Fazbear's Pizza restaurant that he had been charged with guarding, and slammed the heel of his hand onto the monitor, grunting with satisfaction when he heard the far-off sound down the hallway of another vent slamming shut.

"Wow, he's got a lot of nerve coming back here," Clyde said, shaking his head and watching the frustrated character stalk backwards, crablike, through the ventilation shaft. "But then again, he always does."

"That's what I've been trying to tell you!" Mike replied, holding up the hotdog, still encased in its bun. "That cupcake in our old office, now that guy I actually liked. He just sat there giving me that goofy grin. But this guy..." The guard tightened his grip on the sandwich. "He's pure evil. He needs to die. Again."

"That's exactly how I feel, Mike." Still unaware they were most definitely not talking about the same thing, Clyde pulled both of his hands into fists. His worst enemy, the one who had not only victimized the Lost Children but had set him up for fatal failure on Night Four, was caught in the maze of the horror house, helpless against the default programming of the animatronic suit he had entrapped himself within.

"We don't have much time, though," the ghost added. "This attraction opens tomorrow, at least if your stoner boss remembers what day it is and shows up. He is counting on this, and we can't let him prey on the little kids who are going to be coming through here." Closing his eyes in dread, he could almost imagine the tiny footfalls and excited shrieks that would soon fill the hallways. "That, and this whole thing is in really crappy taste."

"I don't even want to think about taste, but you're right, it's obvious he wants to take down more kiddies." Schmidt's head was swimming and he thought back to the countless times over the past five days when he had been confronted by horrific visions of the faces of the animatronics who had made his life a living hell every time he had been charged with guarding a pizzeria. Yet those hallucinations were nothing compared to the hotdog, which had always been there, scorched like the others, as though he had been dropped into a campfire.

"Schmidt," he had spoken during his first apparition. "You can never get rid of me, and I'll always come back." Cackling with perverse laughter, the vision had faded, only to return nightly, true to his word, while his physical form had never budged from the desk.

"Then it's decided, and I've wanted to do this for a long time!" Mike cried, standing so abruptly he sent his wheeled desk chair rolling across the floor. "Tonight we end this, once and for all."

"We really don't have much time, Schmidt," pleaded Clyde. "Fire. We've got to kill it with fire, that's the only way. We're far back enough in the park that this place would be leveled before the fire department could be let in through the main gates, and they'll know it's an unoccupied structure so nobody'll get hurt trying to fight it from the inside." He smirked again when Mike fixed him with a wide-eyed stare. "All right, so I might've thought about this for a while, okay?"

"I don't suppose you carry a lighter?" Mike asked, kneeling in front of a pile of crumpled paper and foam padding he had torn from the split cushion of his desk chair. Still watching the grotesque rabbit from the monitor he had placed on the floor nearby, he cautiously eyed the four other burn sites he had set up around the office.

"Can't say I have much use for one in the afterlife," sighed Clyde. "Check the desk, though, back in the day when everyone used to smoke we kept a bunch of matches in there."

Sure enough, the wide drawer in the center of the desk yielded a half-dozen matchbooks, printed in monochrome with a grinning caricature of Freddy Fazbear. "Enjoy a LIGHT meal in our smoking section!" proclaimed the text on the cover.

"Wow, these are old," Mike remarked, ripping a match head across the pack. The ancient stick reluctantly sparked, then the flames obediently licked upward once touched to the paper and foam pyramid. The guard rubbed his hands together in glee.

"I've been waiting for this moment..." Seizing the hotdog, Schmidt tossed the evil thing into the center of the hot-burning fire. "Die, you evil fiend!"

"Enough theatrics," Clyde said patiently. "Now move on to the next source of ignition and let's scram before old long-ears in there figures out what we're up to."

The dried-out, crusty bun around the hotdog began to char from the incredible heat, while Mike clapped a withered hand to his forehead, laughing maniacally.

"You've mocked me long enough!" he crowed. "How does it feel to go out in a blaze of infamy?!"

Clyde gulped, realizing he and Mike did not have the same adversary in mind. Just then, the mildewed form he recognized as his restaurant's retired Spring Bonnie character materialized in the doorway, one mechanical hand gripping each side of the frame.

Great. Schmidt's tripping balls, he's let a killer animatronic into the office and everything's on fire, the ghostly guard fretted, watching the flames catch on the corner of a cardboard box that held the face masks of the pizzeria's lineup of characters. This is fine.

"C'mon, Schmidt!" he yelled, making his way toward the exit. Clyde couldn't explain it, but the rapidly-increasing heat was leaving him feeling weaker somehow. He vaguely recalled his old bosses, Henry and William, discussing something called "remnant" that was impervious to anything but heat, but then again they'd come up with some rather crackpot theories back in the day.

As Spring Bonnie lurched into the room, Mike beckoned him closer with both hands.

"C'mon, Bunnyman," he taunted. "you want in on this weenie roast?" Before the animatronic could register what was happening, in rapid sequence Mike thrust the wheeled desk chair forward, catching the rabbit around its midsection, then swung it in a wide arc before shoving it toward the burning desk. Spring Bonnie crumpled backward, and by the time he returned to his feet, flames were crackling over his upper torso. Coughing harshly in the acrid air, Schmidt turned to flee, his last glimpse that of the robot writhing and consumed in the flames.

"Scratch one hotdog," Mike wheezed, seated on the curb across from the burning horror attraction. Clyde stood nearby, nervously eyeing the building to make sure nothing emerged. "Man, what got into me?" He had never felt so disoriented in his life, even after the scooper had done its nasty work.

"If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say it was-"

"My stash!" cried Phone Dude, who burst in on the scene and dragged both hands through his long, tangled hair in consternation. "Y'see, I kept it in the vents, so nobody would find it." He kicked at a piece of gravel in the road. "Aw, just great. My horror attraction's up in smoke, and I guess so is your job." He shook his head sadly at Mike. "But at least you're alive, and that's all that matters." Mike had to bite his tongue to keep from contesting the last part.

"And he took out a certain murderous bunny-rabbit," offered Clyde. Phone Dude scrutinized him with two red-rimmed eyes.

"Hey, Ghost-Guard Guy," he drawled, "anyone ever tell you that you sound just like the guy on my old training tapes?"

"Ugh, my job here is done," Clyde muttered, fading from view after tipping his ball cap to Mike one last time. "Hey, thanks, you did a good thing here, even if you're half nuts."

"Huh. Maybe I should cut back a little, because that guy just disappeared, and you look really far out." Phone Dude rubbed his chin between his fingers, trying to make sense of his surroundings. "Hey, what's this?" His attention diverted, he stooped to pick up something from the asphalt. His face lit up as brightly as the flames behind him.

"Whoa, so that's where I left this!" Recognizing what his boss had found, Mike opened his mouth in an attempt to scream, but Phone Dude was already directing the sandwich toward his open jaws.

"Three second rule!" he said triumphantly, downing the hotdog and its bun in two bites while Mike looked on in abject horror.

"He...survived...you...ate..." The stunned guard's words came in bursts and were interrupted by the piercing howl of a firetruck's siren off in the distance.

"You ate the hotdog!" Mike finally wailed, taking his boss by the shoulders and shaking him. "That thing was evil, man! It survived the fire, and now by consuming it, you've-"

"I've what, Mikey?" Phone Dude narrowed his eyes, which had impossibly blackened, leaving only glowing white pinpricks for pupils. Striding forward swiftly, he - or whatever he had become - seized up the hapless guard by the front of his shirt, nearly lifting him off his feet.

"It's me," he snarled before dropping Schmidt to the ground just as abruptly. Willing the offensive scent of decayed hotdog to leave his nostrils, Mike backpedaled away and turned to run, slamming headlong into something. Scorched and melted acrylic fur was crushed against his face. Staggering back a second time, Mike stood between the two entities, not certain whether he should take his chances with the rabbit who had escaped from the burning horror attraction or his former boss, who was now possessed by an undead hotdog.

Long after Schmidt's panicked screams had faded from his wild rush as far from the park grounds as his legs would carry him, Clyde reappeared, wringing his hands together as he watched the firefighters from a distance. This sure could've gone a lot better, he thought once the evil duo had shuffled away unseen, no doubt in search of more unwitting victims. I hope Schmidt at least does the right thing and hunts those two down, wherever they end up, because this is officially out of my jurisdiction.

Later that week, Phone Dude pulled up to his feet, squinting in the sunlight. He peered down into the sewer grate he was kneeling over and had the vaguest memory of having just vomited into it.

No, that definitely happened, he acknowledged, noticing splashes of his former stomach contents on the metal grid. Grody, but what on Earth happened and how'd I get here? Last thing I remember, I was back at the park, after the fire.

"Must've been something I ate." Feeling uncannily sober for the first time he could remember, the young entrepreneur finally shrugged, gave the sewer one last suspicious glance and set off for the park, new ideas already forming in his head about future attractions he could design to replace the lost horror house.

Meanwhile, swirling in the muck beneath the city streets, a tangled mass of cables, many of them tipped with unblinking eyeballs in a half-dozen hues, rose from the depths.

"It's me," the newly-reunited entity hissed, settling back on its haunches until the time came for its final showdown with Mike.