Chapter Text
~~~
You took it all, but I'm still breathing.
Alive-Sia
~~~
You were flying like a bullet through the dreary white halls of your workplace, the rubber of your running shoes squeaking their protest against the tile with every swift change in direction, the echoes of several security guards chasing you down and gaining on you, filling the halls. Hastily, you slapped your keycard against the lit up sensor only to see the blue light go red .
You were locked in.
Less than two weeks ago, you had been seated at your bland wooden work desk in the film restoration department of the Welcome Home Restoration Project, better known as the WHRP; a large group of individuals tasked with reclaiming the lost media of the children’s television show ‘Welcome Home.’ You had your overly fancy work issued computer propped up on your table along with the tape you were renewing in your own personal office- working on the main character of the show and being tasked with his recovery surely came with its perks, though you couldn’t care less, this place was terrifyingly boring and lacking of any and all life, its pasty white walls infiltrating your mind and drowning your thoughts in frustration.
You had to head home soon and finish up your work there with your real technology, the issued laptop you had received for this task being practically unusable with how restricting it was; the device would only allow you to access particular apps and tools you had never used before for fixing up tapes. So instead of following the clear cut instructions you had been given on your first day, you had taken to downloading your work onto a USB and setting up your progress on your home computer where you actually understood the formatting.
Hey, just because it was against the rules didn’t mean it wasn’t efficient. You got more work done at home than you did sitting here in this horrifyingly dull prison- No amount of music could lift your spirits in this place and that was saying something because you had gone through the entirety of your college years by sheer music alone.
As always, you made sure no one was out in the hall or peaking through your office windows and when the coast was clear, you plugged in your personal USB to your work laptop, downloading what little progress you had made today, watching the small blue bar signifying the completion status of the file transfer fill up.
The instant the move was finished, you shoved your storage device in your leather travel bag and fled out of the building as though you were afraid the blandness of your workplace would infect you with its dullness. Your coworkers rushed their farewells as you blew past them, giving them curt goodbyes of your own.
Finally! You were home free for the weekend!
Sprinting over to your small silver suv like the devil himself was on your tail, you flung yourself into the driver's seat, setting your bag down on the passenger’s side and veering out of the parking lot of the white, blue and red building that was the source of all the exhaustion in your life besides, of course, your crippling student debt.
The drive to your house from your workplace was under thirty minutes, but to you it felt like forever, your workday making everything that didn’t take place in your home feel drawn out and endless.
When your small grey bungalow with white trimmed windows and a tiny floral garden came into view, you let out a sigh of relief.
Now you could actually get some real work done!
Parking your vehicle in the cobbled driveway, you tapped in the passcode to the lock on your ivory front door, swinging it open the instant the mechanism allowed. The sweet scent of cinnamon flooding your senses, the wax melt you had left running doing god's work and easing your troubled mind.
Entering your home and kicking off your work shoes, you trudged up the winding oak stairs and down the hall to your bedroom, where you slid the USB into your personal laptop, beginning the file transfer.
While your computer was working away, you got changed into some comfier clothes, freeing yourself of your business casual apparel.
And what a relief it was to be dressed in something that didn’t scream ‘Come to me with your problems and I’ll fix them for you!’ Honestly, with how many times your coworkers have approached you with a question regarding their progress or how to use certain programs, you might as well be the manager of the film restoration department and not Thomas Crinsley- that man wasn’t reliable in the slightest and had no clue how to produce anything but a bouncy ball animation, which was the first basic frame creation you’d learned when you started your education. Truly, the man was an embarrassment, a shame he got hired for a position he had no competency in.
The moment the upload was completed, you brought the device down to your kitchen to work on your current project as you made dinner, careful not to drop it as you wove your way down the stairs and to the left through an oak arch.
You may be off the clock, but unlike the majority of your colleagues, you genuinely liked working on the puppet show- you also had to make up for the time you spent at work doing the bare minimum.
At this point you had managed to turn the film reel you had been provided for the main character, Wally Darling, into a digital form through imagery and processing equipment. You had also succeeded in setting up the scene backgrounds for his many appearances in what you assumed to be the first episode as the introduction would imply.
Gently, you set the laptop down next to your stove, on top of your black granite counters.
Your kitchen was rather large, being a more open space connected to your living room, a small dark oak island in the centre with your sink and a small fruit basket full of apples and bananas. Truthfully, it wasn’t much, but it was quaint and that’s all that mattered.
Clicking onto your professional filming application, you began to set up your pasta dinner, grabbing the ingredients and heating up the pots as the program loaded, Wally, a yellow skinned puppet with beady black eyes and a curly blue pompadour, being the only character to show up on the show's title card when it appeared on screen.
Being in film recovery, you were assigned to a specific character and would only be working on clips with your character involved, the other characters removed for others to work on.
The higher ups told you that once you were completed, they would overlap everyone's work and produce the show, which struck you as odd. Typically when finalising a video, you would conjoin all the clips into one to create a single video file, not leave them separate. But who were you to judge what your boss wanted, it’s not like you graduated college with honors or anything…
Resentment of your betters aside, you clicked on the first empty frame of the reel, letting it popup on screen.
Unfortunately, not all of the frames were provided to you, most of which being too dilapidated to make anything from anyway, meaning you had to go through the effort of creating the character using 3D modelling animation and formulate the scenes yourself, using whatever copy of the script the WHRP could scrounge up.
Dumping a healthy portion of your pasta into the boiling water and stirring the homemade sauce, you opened your 3D animation app, which was already prepared with Wally’s model staring straight ahead, dressed in his usual blue sweater, colourful striped pants, red ascot and black and white Oxfords all ready to go for your next scene. You had been anticipating getting next nothing done at work today and had set up your scene creation in advance.
With a few gentle movements of your cursor, you were able to adjust Wally into the position you needed him; sitting atop a wooden stool with a paintbrush and palette in hand, eyes directed at the camera where he always seemed to be facing as though he could actually see you. Though that was to be expected as he spoke directly to the audience in almost every clip you had access to the recording of; which there was very few as audio was incredibly troubling to recover and very little of it could actually be restored, leaving you with fragmented vocals and premature cut offs.
When your pasta had finished cooking, you poured out the water into your sink and added the spaghetti noodles to your sauce, mixing them in before shutting off that burner as well. With everything now finished, you placed the meal into one of the ceramic bowls from your cupboard, setting aside your dirty dishes by the sink, next to your fruit bowl where you noticed something odd.
“Huh,” you muttered, “I thought I bought four apples, not three… Weird .”
You shrugged off the possible loss of a fruit, blaming it on your scattered mind. You must have just forgotten you ate one or perhaps you only grabbed three this time and not four like you had thought.
Flicking back over to your task, you took the computer over to your dinner table, taking a seat with your food and eating as you set up the frame by frame motion of Wally’s introduction scene.
Honestly, you should’ve noticed by now that you never had to move Wally’s eyes, they were always staring at the camera. Even after you had moved them away, they were right back to facing you within a few frames and you never detected this, the change so miniscule it didn’t catch your attention.
In hindsight, you really should have focused more on what the puppet was doing while you were working. Models shouldn’t move on their own, at least not when they’re outside an animation.
Now you really regretted not paying any mind to Wally's movements and simply brushing the odd circumstances aside.
Eyes wide as saucers, you stared in perplexed horror at the figure waving to you on your laptop screen, their movement distorting the dim luminance of your bedroom with their brightly coloured clothing. The request for your 3D modelling app to access your painting one overlaying the model of Wally who was looking to you pleadingly as he motioned towards the allow button, ebony eyes wide and desperate.
Nope .
You slammed shut your laptop, pupils boring holes into the darkened ceiling of your room. The moonlight through your curtain being the only thing to light up the space now that your computer screen was closed.
It was late, like three in the morning late, and you couldn’t be bothered with this tom fuckery- not when there wasn’t an ounce of caffeine in you. This was definitely a delusion of sorts. You knew getting only two hours of sleep every night would come to kick you in the ass, but moving model hallucinations wasn’t on your insomniac bingo card.
Shuffling out from beneath your laptop and leaving it to rest on your tangled mess of sheets you called a bed, you switched on the bedroom light.
If this wasn’t a hallucination, then you were going to want the lights on for the search of your files you were about to conduct; darkness and sketchy haunted film reels don’t go hand in hand, unless this were a horror movie- and if that were the case you were going to take the necessary precautions to ensure you weren’t the first victim, starting with the power of illumination to create a lack of eerie atmosphere.
Taking a seat on your messy bed, wide awake from the fear and adrenaline in your veins, you flung open your laptop as though to catch the character in the act, but found Wally was back in his original 3D model standing position. However… the popup was still there, asking for access to your paint software.
Cautiously, you moved your cursor over to the decline button and clicked.
Your laptop screen flickered, a dark bar cascading down the display and in your shock, you missed how Wally’s eyes were unaffected by the blackness, illuminated despite the glitch removing all other visuals.
Jumping at the unexpected distortion of your device, you scowled, observing it just in case it happened again. Though, after a few moments of silence, just a staring match between you and the inky eyed model of Wally Darling, you shook your head, groaning.
Exhaustion was beginning to play with your mind, you could tell.
Closing your laptop, you plugged it back into its charging cable by your desk on the other side of the room, considering the last few minutes to be little more than a sleep induced delusion; a cry from your restless brain, begging for sleep.
Once your computer was attached to its designated outlet, you sighed warily. It was high time you shut off your mind and gave into your fatigue.
Sleepily, you threw on your favourite pajamas and crawled beneath the covers of your queen sized bed, throwing the pillow over your head to block out any and all sounds as you started the process of counting to five hundred to unwind and bore your racing thoughts to rest.
—
Alone.
He had been alone for ages now, trapped within an empty neighborhood with only Home to keep him company, his friends all swept away with the destruction and dilapidation of the ‘Welcome Home’ tapes. With no whole footage of them interacting with each other, his neighbors had been separated into their own personal versions of Home; segregated.
Years flew by at a sloth-like pace, a never ending event of boredom and loneliness that plagued his mind with a hollow void of apathy.
Until he saw you .
You had digitised his film onto a computer and not just any computer, one without the firewall that kept him locked out.
He could see you as you gazed at him, making touch ups to his appearance within the small frame of premade film. Unfortunately, he couldn’t move here, he did not know how, not within the containment of your personal device.
But then you did something that gave him movement, allowed him to act and smile and crouch and leap. You gave him a physical body outside of Home, where he was free to roam amidst the confined area of your 3D modelling app- whatever that was? Technology had surely advanced since he’d seen it last.
And from there, he was able to reach out farther and grasp at what other accesses the app had. That’s when he discovered more of the film reel you were working on. Though missing the majority of the plot and worst of all, his friends, you were still working on it or more so, him .
Every little tweak you made to his appearance, every bit of attention you gave him had his mind screaming, pleading for any sort of regard from you. However, he refused to move anything besides his eyes in front of you, he didn’t want to scare you, didn’t want to be erased and alone, blocked out by an invisible division such as the firewall that kept him out of your work computer.
But after a month of watching and waiting with no interaction from you in the slightest, Wally began to get restless. He needed you to acknowledge him, to know he was there, to speak with him.
For too long he had been deprived of conversation, locked away in a deserted neighborhood with only Home’s creaks and groans to retain his mental stability.
He needed this from you, though the first time he had asked for audio allowance through the modelling app, you had denied it without thought, not even giving the popup a glance. Wally had felt himself shrivel up internally at your mindless denial, weeping at your disregard as you shut off your laptop for the day.
A week later, today , he had built up the confidence and resolve he needed to reveal himself and get you to accept a different request, this time to your painting app. He had bided patiently, waiting for you to settle down, only moving his eyes to follow you and eat an apple- he was glad you brought your laptop down to the kitchen so he could eat the delicious fruit with a single stare; what little food he could find remaining in Frank and Julie’s gardens wasn’t enough anymore.
When you had carried the device up to your room to work later into the night, adjusting his position and poses with your mouse, he had delayed his disclosure until he was sure your mind was sleep-addled and perhaps more willing to comply.
Hesitantly, he moved without your guidance, waving at you slowly, your face responding with wide eyes, mouth agape at his uninstructed action.
Mentally, he tapped down on the paint app tethered to the modelling program he was on, the popup for access appearing on screen, where he proceeded to silently beg you to press ‘allow’; he had no control of your cursor or anything not attached to your filming and modelling software, so the ball was in your court and your immediate response was to slam closed the laptop.
Oh, dear… he had messed up, hadn’t he?
Maybe he could fix this? Get you to forget or blame it on your own mind?- you were tired after all.
Yes, that might just work!
Wally swiftly posed in his basic model position, standing straight up, his pupils facing forwards and out into the darkness of where your screen was, waiting in anticipation for you to finally start up your device and allow him the privilege of observing you and your world again.
Regrettably, he could not get rid of the popup which could possibly ruin his entire plot of acting like nothing had happened, the permissions outside of his domain of control.
Frightened that you would get rid of him and hopeful that you would accept his access request, he watched with a bated breath as you opened up your laptop, scanning over the screen a few times with your tired eyes before bringing your cursor over and pressing ‘decline.’
Distraught once more at your blatant dismissal, Wally accidently allowed his emotions to get the better of him, corrupting the modelling file with his internal outburst, causing a black bar to flicker down the display.
Quick as a flash, the puppet fixed the incidental glitch he had formed, mentally rearranging the app to its former look.
Your eyes were blown wide in shock before you shook your head and turned back to face him, or rather, your computer screen, your face an exemplar of pure exhaustion and lethargy as you closed your laptop for the night.
You had fallen for his bluff and for some reason that saddened him.