#anyways. i love you my very specific interpretation of elizabeth afton ♡♡♡

[inhabited-by-something]

(grips your shoulders) tell me about your alive elizabeth afton au

!!! Okay okay so. I have to make clear its not Just her, it's a whole "All the Afton kids live and are left to fend for themselves together with all their combined trauma" au but it's gotten very fleshed out for Liz specifically because my bestie @tibby and I love her ♡♡

But, to give you a very tldr background for this au (which I can/will elaborate more on later) in this version of things, Evan doesn't die from his birthday incident. He doesn't even get hurt aside from the emotional scars. Instead, Michael being the stupid older brother he is puts his arm in Fredbear's mouth after pulling Evan out to go "See, it's not even dangerous, you're crying over nothing" and promptly gets his arm bit, so badly that he ends up Losing the arm entirely. Due to a lot of factors that stem from this incident, William instead of being fueled by grief over his lost son to start killing kids, instead kills Charlie for different reasons, and after witnessing her possession, becomes Obsessed with the ideas of immortality and subsequently making a Perfect Version of his family via his robotics. So a lot of the main facets of canon still happen (Charlie + MCI + DCI murders, Henry leaving the company) but they happen for very different yet related reasons.

So all of that leads up to what happens with dear Elizabeth ~

Because you see, I do love the interpretation of her being a daddy's girl when it's done right (meaning making it as tragic and with lasting trauma as fucking possible.) So she's William's golden child. She's not rebellious like Mike, nor an anxious mess like Evan. No no, she's curious instead. She takes a genuine interest in William's robotics work, and in her he thinks he's actually found the perfect successor among his kids. She gets blatant favoritism from him and she loves it, she is her dad's kid thru and thru.

Unfortunately for her, being loved by William comes with it's drawbacks.

Because see in this version of things, he Was being serious about Circus Baby being built specifically for her. Elizabeth doesn't know that this means CB is meant to be the perfect vessel for her immortality, she's only 12 at the time, but CB is special reguardless.

So of course shes still mad when William doesn't want to let her see CB yet. (It's because she hasn't been perfected for Elizabeth yet, she's incomplete.) Due to other circumstances, one day while William is throwing two simultanious parties at the new pizzeria, he has to bring Elizabeth with him even tho he would prefer not to, and Michael as well. So he leaves Michael with one specific task: keep your sister away from the animatronics. (And of course because of his own accident, he already doesn't trust them, so he would have kept an eye anyways.)

At one point his attention gets diverted by some of the guests asking for help, and because he knows his dad would be pissed at him for refusing, he steps away for what he thinks will only take a moment. Elizabeth, finally free for a moment from supervision, knows she finally has a chance to see CB for herself and takes it. Except things go a little differently this time.

CB does still try to grab Elizabeth with her claws, but luckily for her, Michael arrives back just in time to grab her and pull her back from getting snatched, although not without injury.

CB's claw ends up catching Elizabeth in the face instead, leaving her with a fairly nasty scar that goes all the way from her eyebrown down past her cheek. And as a result, not only does she lose William's favor as his golden child because she's now "imperfect" and marked like her brother, but she's also lost Every bit of trust she ever had in her dad. His beloved machine made Specifically for her just tried to kill her and she can never look at him the same way again.

I'll skip over the finer details for now just to keep focus on Elizabeth, but at some point she, Michael and Evan are left alone together, and so Michael does the only thing he can think of and packs all their shit up to go ask Henry if he can take them in. He Really doesn't want to, not after what William did to Charlie, but he knows if he doesn't then the system is going to split the kids up, and so he does take them in, though hes not really a parent to them. They take care of each other for the most part.

But for Elizabeth, she gets to grow up and go thru highschool trying to reconcile how much of her father is in her, and how much of his kid she Still is even when she hates him, and how even after knowing what kind of monster he is...still missing him. Still wanting to be his favorite kid, the one he was the most proud of.

Elizabeth, as it turns out, is a bit of a robotics genius as she grows older. She outshines both her dad and Henry by miles, she learned a lot from watching her dad work for so many years and from pouring over his old journals she managed to get her hands on. She's utterly amazing, but a part of her hates herself for still following in her dads footsteps, and so she tends to limit herself on purpose in fear of turning out like him and somehow making her creations dangerous without intending to. She's continually haunted by the shadow of her father despite being a much better person than he ever was.

The one creation she does actually make and has a lot of pride in in this timeline is actually Helpy lol. (This started as a little joke but then it became serious.) Helpy isnt super advanced, he doesn't talk, but she makes him as a bit of a jokey gift for Michael (who still gets scooped in this timeline, that's its own thing) because she notices he's lonely between helping to look after her and Evan and because he's had to basically hide away from the world now that he's undead. And she doesn't think he's much at first, but Michael loves him. Helpy is his little bestie and he's the first real proof that Elizabeth is capable of doing good where her father didn't, even if she doubts herself a lot.

Theres so much more I could say but this is already so long so I will cap it off here for now. But rest assured you'll hear more about her later ~ I'm working on some art reference for everyone in this au too so I'll post that whenever it's done :)