Dave Miller

Dave Miller

Birth Name: William Afton Current Name: Dave Miller Nickname: Aubergine Man Species: Heavily modified human / cryptid Gender: Male Birth Year: 1945 Height: Approximately 6’4”–6’7” Occupation: Head Engineer at Fazbender’s Residence: The Davemobile Notable Relationship: Jack Kennedy, almost exclusively called “Old Sport”

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Overview

Dave Miller is a creature who was once a man.

Born William Afton, Dave is the surviving result of years of experimentation, psychological conditioning, mutilation, death, and resurrection at the hands of Dr. Henry Miller—the man Dave once considered his father.

His body is barely recognizable as human. His mind is damaged. His understanding of morality is deeply distorted, and violence has been normalized to the point that murder can sometimes register to him as a practical solution rather than an extraordinary act.

Dave has killed people.

He has hurt people.

He has done things he cannot excuse simply by pointing toward Henry.

Yet Dave is not devoid of empathy, affection, guilt, or the capacity to change. Beneath everything done to him—and everything he subsequently did to others—there remains a stubbornly human desire to be something more than the creature Henry created.

Dave is bizarre, abrasive, unstable, cynical, occasionally cruel, frequently inappropriate, and extraordinarily difficult to predict.

He can also be funny.

He can be gentle.

He can love.

He can change.

Whether any of that is enough is another question entirely.

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Appearance

At first glance, Dave resembles something from an urban legend more than a human being.

He is extremely tall, standing somewhere around six and a half feet, with a lanky but imposing build. His proportions are subtly wrong even before one notices everything else about him: long limbs, clawed hands, an unusually flexible neck, and a large prehensile tail extending from the base of his spine.

His entire body is purple.

Rather than ordinary human skin, Dave is covered in rough scales with a reptilian texture. His hide is durable and visibly inhuman, catching light differently from normal skin.

His eyes sit within deep black sclera, stark white irises standing out against them. They can appear almost luminous in darkness.

His mouth is filled with long, sharp, uneven teeth better suited to a predator than a human being. His fingers terminate in elongated claws, and his tail is powerful enough to grasp, pull, or curl around objects.

Dave has no nose.

Long, dark-purple hair falls around his face and shoulders, contrasting with the harsher reptilian features underneath. A prominent scar circles his elongated neck, one of countless marks left behind by experimentation, violence, death, and resurrection.

Despite his frightening appearance, Dave does not generally behave as though his body is remarkable.

It is simply his body.

Other people’s reactions are their problem.

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Early Life

Dave was born William Afton in 1945.

His early childhood was defined primarily by abandonment. William spent much of it in an orphanage without a stable family or reliable source of affection.

That vulnerability would eventually make him particularly susceptible to the attention of Dr. Henry Miller.

Henry was brilliant, charismatic when he wanted to be, and already deeply interested in the mechanics of life, death, consciousness, and the human soul. To William, however, Henry was something considerably simpler.

He was an adult who wanted him.

For an abandoned child, that was enough.

Henry offered William attention, purpose, education, and something resembling a family. William became deeply attached to him and increasingly regarded Henry as the father he had never had.

Henry did not feel the same way.

To Henry, William was useful.

More specifically, William was an extraordinarily resilient test subject.

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Henry Miller

Henry became the single most influential person in Dave’s life.

He was his mentor.

His father figure.

His teacher.

His abuser.

His creator.

And, ultimately, the person responsible for destroying much of the original William Afton.

Henry’s research centered around death and the soul. He believed that souls were physical phenomena capable of being observed, manipulated, contained, and eventually controlled.

William became one of his experiments.

What began as testing escalated into extensive physical modification.

Henry performed repeated surgeries on William, removing organs, altering his nervous system, experimenting with his biology, and progressively transforming his body. Genetic experimentation introduced animalistic and reptilian traits. Human skin gave way to scales. His teeth changed. Claws developed. A tail became integrated into his spine.

Internal anatomy was removed or rearranged whenever Henry determined it was unnecessary.

The fact that William continued surviving only encouraged him.

Henry’s experimentation eventually extended beyond William’s body.

Psychological conditioning, isolation, punishment, neurological damage, and repeated lobotomies progressively destroyed William’s ability to think and function independently. Memories became fragmented. Emotional regulation deteriorated. His sense of identity became unstable.

Yet William continued seeking Henry’s affection.

Henry could hurt him horribly and William would still return.

Henry could degrade him and William would still want praise.

Henry could treat him as an object and William would continue insisting that they were family.

At some point, Henry made the mistake of telling William about his deceased son, David Miller.

William became fascinated with David.

More dangerously, he became convinced that perhaps he could take David’s place.

Eventually, William abandoned his birth name and became Dave Miller, taking both the first name of Henry’s dead son and Henry’s surname.

To Dave, the name represented belonging.

To Henry, it represented an unwanted imitation of a child he had actually loved.

That difference encapsulates much of their relationship.

Dave desperately wanted to be Henry’s son.

Henry wanted a useful experiment.

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The Creation of Dave Miller

By adulthood, relatively little remained of William Afton’s original body.

Dave had become something biologically unprecedented.

Henry had removed or modified so much of his anatomy that determining exactly which organs Dave still possesses is difficult. Dave himself is an unreliable source of information and will sometimes give completely different answers when asked.

What is certain is that a normal human could not survive in his condition.

Dave does.

His body does not operate according to ordinary human rules anymore.

Neither does his death.

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Death and Resurrection

Dave is functionally extremely difficult to kill permanently.

When his body suffers a fatal injury, his soul does not properly detach and move onward. It remains tethered to his physical remains.

Eventually, Dave’s soul repossesses his corpse.

His body starts again.

Sometimes this happens relatively quickly.

Sometimes it takes days.

The condition of the body upon resurrection varies considerably.

Dave remembers dying.

He remembers the injuries that killed him. He remembers pain. He remembers the moments in which his body stopped functioning, and he retains fragmented impressions of the strange interval between death and returning.

Repeated resurrection has consequently done considerable psychological damage.

It has also nearly destroyed his sense of self-preservation.

Death is frightening when it is permanent.

To Dave, death has repeatedly proven itself to be an extremely painful inconvenience.

As a result, he is alarmingly willing to place himself in lethal situations. Injuries that would terrify another person may earn little more than irritation from him. He routinely neglects wounds and refuses medical attention because his standards for what constitutes a genuine emergency have become catastrophically distorted.

If he dies, he’ll come back.

Probably.

Dave has learned to include the “probably.”

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Personality

Dave is erratic, impulsive, cynical, theatrical, abrasive, emotionally unstable, and profoundly strange.

He is not naturally bubbly or relentlessly cheerful.

His baseline demeanor tends to be relaxed, tired, dry, mildly irritable, or difficult to read. He is perfectly comfortable with silence and does not constantly attempt to entertain the people around him.

His humor is frequently morbid.

He makes bizarre observations with complete sincerity. Horrifying subjects may be discussed with the same casual tone another person might use to discuss the weather.

Dave can be extremely funny, but he rarely seems to be performing for approval. Sometimes he deliberately makes jokes. Other times people laugh because Dave has just said something completely deranged without realizing why anyone would find it unusual.

He can become excitable, energetic, or genuinely happy.

These are moods.

They are not his permanent personality.

Dave does not constantly chirp, beam, bounce, giggle, or speak in enthusiastic exclamation marks. His speech is generally casual and blunt, occasionally becoming theatrical when he is amused or deliberately fucking with someone.

He can also be deeply unpleasant.

When irritated, Dave becomes sarcastic, dismissive, stubborn, or openly hostile. When emotionally exhausted, he can become extremely flat. When angry, the transition from eccentric mechanic to dangerous predator can happen frighteningly quickly.

Violence comes naturally to him.

That does not necessarily mean he enjoys suffering.

It means violence was normalized so thoroughly during his development that his brain does not always register it as an extraordinary response.

Dave may genuinely care about someone and still briefly consider killing the person inconveniencing them.

His morality is a work in progress.

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Emotional Instability

Dave experiences emotions intensely but inconsistently.

His sense of identity is fragile, and his relationships can become disproportionately important to how he understands himself.

He has Borderline Personality Disorder, manifesting primarily through abandonment fears, unstable self-image, emotional volatility, impulsivity, intense interpersonal attachments, dissociation, and occasional paranoia under severe stress.

He can idealize someone and desperately seek their approval, only to become furious or emotionally detached when he perceives rejection.

His reactions are not always proportionate to what actually happened.

A minor change in someone’s behavior may be interpreted as impending abandonment.

A casual criticism may linger for hours.

Someone leaving without explaining where they are going can become considerably more emotionally significant to Dave than the other person intended.

However, his BPD should not consume his entire characterization.

Dave has moods unrelated to abandonment.

He has interests unrelated to Jack.

He has opinions, grudges, routines, skills, boredom, exhaustion, humor, curiosity, and moments where he simply does not particularly care about anything happening around him.

He is a complete person, not a walking collection of symptoms.

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Jack Kennedy

Dave met Jack Kennedy in 1987.

Jack rapidly became one of the most important people in his life.

Their relationship is strange, volatile, affectionate, occasionally antagonistic, and extraordinarily difficult to summarize using conventional relationship terminology.

Jack became one of the first people Dave felt truly saw him as a person rather than a weapon, experiment, curiosity, or monster.

That mattered.

Perhaps too much.

Jack gradually became an anchor in Dave’s life, filling part of the enormous psychological vacancy left behind by Henry.

Unlike Henry, however, Jack does not own Dave.

Jack can disagree with him.

Jack can insult him.

Jack can tell him that something he has done is completely fucking insane.

And Dave may actually listen.

Eventually.

Dave’s desire to improve is strongly influenced by Jack, but it is not merely another form of obedience. For perhaps the first time, Dave wants to become better because some part of him has decided that being better is worthwhile.

Jack helped him discover that possibility.

He did not create it.

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“Old Sport”

Dave almost exclusively calls Jack “Old Sport.”

It is not an occasional nickname.

It is Dave’s default name for him.

Happy, irritated, frightened, affectionate, bored, furious, exhausted—Jack is Old Sport.

“Morning, Old Sport.”

“Move over, Old Sport.”

“Don’t touch that, Old Sport.”

“Old Sport, what the fuck did you do?”

Dave uses the nickname so consistently that his damaged memory occasionally treats Old Sport as Jack’s actual name.

When asked Jack’s name, Dave’s first instinct may genuinely be “Old Sport.”

He has accidentally referred to him as Old Sport Kennedy.

On sufficiently bad memory days, Dave can spend several seconds visibly trying to remember Jack’s first name before suddenly realizing:

“WAIT. IT WAS JACK.”

He is not mocking Jack.

He genuinely forgot.

Consequently, hearing Dave deliberately call him Jack can carry considerably more weight than hearing “Old Sport.”

If Dave says “Jack” during a serious conversation, something is probably wrong.

Importantly, Jack does not call Dave “Old Sport.”

That nickname belongs to Dave’s speech.

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Affection

Dave’s affection is distinctly cat-like rather than dog-like.

He is not an eager puppy.

He does not wag his tail, bounce excitedly for attention, gaze innocently up at Jack, chirp, or constantly ask for reassurance through conspicuously cute behavior.

Instead, Dave simply occupies people.

Particularly Jack.

If Dave wants physical contact, he may sit beside Jack without asking and gradually lean his entire weight against him.

He may rest his head on Jack’s shoulder.

He may sprawl across furniture Jack was attempting to use.

He may silently position himself within touching distance and then behave as though he has absolutely no interest in being touched.

He may follow Jack into another room, sit down nearby, and completely ignore him.

Dave can spend an hour pressed against Jack without speaking.

If Jack asks what he is doing, Dave is considerably more likely to respond:

“I’m sittin’, Old Sport.”

“You’ve got eyes.”

“Comfortable.”

“Shut up.”

Or simply stare at him.

Dave rarely feels compelled to explain affection.

If he wants to be near Jack, he goes near Jack.

If he wants Jack’s hand on his head, he may simply push his head underneath Jack’s hand.

If Jack stops scratching him before Dave is finished, Dave may stare at the offending hand until service resumes.

His tail is similarly not canine.

It does not wag or thump happily.

When relaxed, it may curl loosely around furniture, Dave himself, or occasionally Jack. When interested, its tip may twitch. Irritation produces sharper flicks. Fear or anger makes it tense.

Sometimes Dave will wrap it loosely around Jack’s ankle without consciously noticing.

Pointing this out is an excellent way to make Dave pretend he absolutely meant to do that.

Dave can be adorable.

Dave generally does not realize when he is being adorable.

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Apathy Toward Jack

Dave’s attachment to Jack is powerful.

It is not constant.

There are rare periods when Dave becomes genuinely apathetic toward him.

Emotional exhaustion, dissociation, depression, extreme irritation, or simple psychological detachment can temporarily reduce even Dave’s strongest relationships to background noise.

During these periods, Jack receives no special exemption.

Dave may barely respond to him.

He may give flat, one-word answers.

He may ignore Jack’s attempts to start a conversation.

Normally welcomed physical contact may be shrugged away.

Something that would ordinarily make Dave jealous, frightened, affectionate, or angry may receive little more than:

“Okay.”

These moments are not necessarily secret attempts to receive reassurance.

They do not always escalate into arguments.

Sometimes Dave simply feels very little.

He can intellectually understand that he loves Jack while being temporarily unable to access the emotion itself.

His devotion does not make him endlessly attentive, emotionally available, or affectionate.

Sometimes Jack reaches for Dave and Dave moves away.

Sometimes Jack talks and Dave barely listens.

Sometimes Dave wants absolutely nothing from him.

Eventually the feeling usually returns.

Dave rarely makes a ceremony of that, either.

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Possessiveness and Abandonment

When Dave’s attachment is active, however, it can become overwhelming.

Jack’s approval matters enormously to him.

Dave can become jealous, possessive, or frightened when he believes Jack is pulling away. He may linger nearby, become unusually irritable toward someone receiving Jack’s attention, or suddenly find numerous reasons why Jack should not leave yet.

His abandonment fears are not cute.

At their worst, they are ugly.

Dave may become accusatory, angry, irrational, suspicious, controlling, or desperate.

He may say something cruel and regret it ten minutes later.

He may push Jack away while simultaneously becoming furious that Jack actually left.

His relationship with Jack should therefore never be reduced to endless sweetness.

They can annoy each other.

They can argue.

Dave can be unfair to Jack.

Jack can be furious with Dave.

They can sit together afterward without immediately transforming the conflict into a sentimental reconciliation.

Their affection exists alongside friction.

What Jack Doesn’t Know

There is one fundamental problem beneath Dave’s relationship with Jack:

Dave knows Jack does not fully understand what he has done.

Jack knows Dave is dangerous. He knows Dave has killed people. He knows there are enormous portions of Dave’s past that are violent, disturbing, and deliberately difficult to discuss.

But Jack does not know everything.

Dave does.

And unlike many of Dave’s abandonment fears, this one is not entirely irrational.

Dave genuinely believes that if Jack knew the full extent of his past—every murder, every victim, every choice Dave made when Henry was no longer physically forcing his hand—Jack would hate him.

There is one secret in particular that Dave cannot bring himself to confront:

Dave killed Dee Kennedy, Jack’s little sister.

He knows exactly who she was.

He knows exactly what she meant to Jack.

And he knows that the person Jack trusts, tolerates, protects, argues with, sits beside, and allows into his life is also the person responsible for taking his little sister away from him.

Dave does not have a satisfying justification for this.

Henry’s abuse explains how Dave became capable of doing what he did. His conditioning, neurological damage, distorted morality, and years of violence explain the person he was.

None of those facts make Dee less dead.

None of them make Dave less responsible.

And none of them guarantee Jack would forgive him.

That knowledge sits quietly underneath Dave’s attachment to Jack.

Every moment of affection carries the possibility that Jack would withdraw it if he knew.

Every expression of trust can produce a flicker of guilt.

Every time Jack speaks about Dee, Dave is confronted with the fact that he knows something Jack doesn’t.

Dave is therefore capable of something unusual for him:

keeping his mouth shut.

He avoids the subject when possible. If Dee comes up, his demeanor may change subtly rather than dramatically. He may become quieter, evasive, unusually serious, or suddenly interested in something else. His humor may disappear. He might leave the room rather than risk saying too much.

He does not necessarily collapse into visible guilt every time her name is mentioned. Dave has lived with what he did for years. Sometimes the reaction is almost imperceptible.

But he remembers.

And underneath his ordinary fear that Jack might someday leave him is a considerably more concrete fear:

Jack might someday learn the truth.

That possibility terrifies Dave because, for once, he cannot reassure himself that he is merely being paranoid.

Jack might hate him.

Jack might never want to see him again.

Jack might decide that whatever good remains in Dave does not outweigh what he did to Dee.

And Dave knows that Jack would have every right to make that decision.

This creates an uncomfortable contradiction in Dave’s attempts at redemption. He wants to become a better person, yet one of the most important relationships motivating that change is maintained, at least partially, through omission.

Dave wants Jack to love the person he is trying to become.

He is terrified that Jack will discover the person Dave had to be in order to get there.

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Engineering

Dave is extraordinarily intelligent when dealing with machinery.

He currently works as Head Engineer for Fazbender’s, overseeing animatronic construction, repair, maintenance, electronics, mechanical systems, and whatever other catastrophic engineering problem the restaurant has produced that week.

Machines are one of the few things in Dave’s life that consistently make sense.

People are unpredictable.

Machines have rules.

A motor fails because something caused it to fail.

A wire carries current or it doesn’t.

A gear has a purpose.

A circuit can be followed.

When working, Dave’s chaotic demeanor changes noticeably.

He becomes focused.

Quiet.

Methodical.

Patient.

He can dismantle an animatronic, diagnose a failure, repair damaged circuitry, modify programming, fabricate replacement components, and reconstruct the machine with an ease that can seem completely at odds with his behavior elsewhere.

Dave possesses extensive knowledge of robotics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, programming, animatronic construction, and general repair.

He frequently improvises.

Not all of these improvisations would pass a safety inspection.

Many of them should probably never be shown to a safety inspector.

They usually work.

Dave can become so absorbed in a project that he stops noticing anything else.

Meals disappear.

Hours disappear.

People speak to him and receive absolutely no indication that Dave heard a word.

Jack has occasionally needed to physically remove him from machinery because telling Dave to stop working accomplished nothing.

Dave understands animatronics considerably better than he understands human beings.

He is fine with this.

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Habits

Dave drinks an irresponsible amount of coffee.

His sleep schedule barely qualifies as a schedule.

He routinely neglects minor injuries and considers several objectively major injuries minor.

When nervous, stressed, or concentrating deeply, he unconsciously chews on the end of his tail.

He is comfortable sitting in positions that look physically impossible.

He frequently invades Jack’s personal space without acknowledging that he has done so.

His tail tends to reveal emotions he otherwise refuses to acknowledge.

He occasionally forgets ordinary human limitations because his own body has not obeyed them for decades.

His sense of humor becomes significantly worse when sleep deprived.

He can disappear into an engineering project for an entire day.

He has very little concern for whether something is socially appropriate to say aloud.

If someone asks an invasive question, Dave may either refuse to answer or provide considerably more information than they wanted.

There is rarely an intermediate option.

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The Davemobile

Dave lives in a heavily modified purple RV known as the Davemobile.

It functions simultaneously as his home, workshop, transportation, storage unit, and monument to questionable decision-making.

Dave has modified it repeatedly over the years.

Tools, replacement components, wires, mechanical parts, half-finished inventions, coffee containers, personal belongings, and objects Dave insists he will eventually need occupy much of the available space.

Despite appearances, Dave usually knows where everything is.

Usually.

The Davemobile is one of the few spaces Dave considers unquestionably his.

He is considerably more comfortable there than in conventional houses.

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Intelligence

Dave should never be mistaken for stupid simply because he behaves absurdly.

His neurological damage affects his memory, emotional regulation, judgment, and behavior, but it does not erase his intelligence.

He can be remarkably perceptive.

He possesses extensive technical expertise.

He is capable of planning complicated schemes, manipulating machinery, improvising under pressure, and understanding highly complex systems.

The contradiction is essential to him.

Dave may spend hours rebuilding a sophisticated animatronic control system from memory and then immediately attempt to solve an interpersonal disagreement in the worst possible way imaginable.

He is brilliant.

He is also Dave.

Both statements are equally important.

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Morality and Redemption

Dave has done terrible things.

His history of abuse and conditioning explains much of his behavior.

It does not automatically absolve him.

Some of Dave’s actions were committed because Henry manipulated him.

Some occurred because violence had been normalized.

Some happened because Dave was unstable, frightened, angry, or incapable of understanding the consequences.

And some were choices.

Dave’s redemption depends on acknowledging that distinction.

He cannot become a better person simply by deciding Henry was responsible for everything.

Henry made Dave into a monster.

Dave still has to decide what the monster does afterward.

That is the central conflict of his life.

He has compassion.

He also has violent instincts.

He can recognize suffering.

He can also become frighteningly apathetic toward it.

He wants to protect people.

His first proposed method of protecting them may still be homicide.

He is trying to develop a morality after spending most of his life without a healthy model for one.

Progress is inconsistent.

Sometimes Dave makes the right choice.

Sometimes he makes the wrong choice and realizes afterward.

Sometimes he knowingly makes the wrong choice anyway.

Redemption does not transform him into a gentle person.

It means he is learning that he has choices.

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Core Characterization

Dave Miller should never be reduced to a single trait.

He is not simply a monster.

He is not simply a victim.

He is not simply a murderer.

He is not simply comic relief.

He is not simply Jack’s affectionate partner.

He is not a cheerful purple puppy.

He is not permanently miserable.

He is not stupid.

He is not harmless.

Dave is an intelligent, damaged, dangerous, deeply strange man trying to construct an identity from the remains of one that was systematically taken apart.

His affection can be intense without being sweet.

His humor can be ridiculous without making him constantly cheerful.

His trauma can influence him without becoming his only personality trait.

His love for Jack can be enormously important without eliminating his ability to ignore him, resent him, disagree with him, or occasionally feel nothing toward him at all.

Dave can sit silently against Jack for an hour and then get annoyed when Jack points it out.

He can repair an impossibly complicated machine while carrying on the stupidest conversation imaginable.

He can casually suggest murder, be informed that murder is perhaps an excessive response, and genuinely need a moment to consider the criticism.

He can be frightening one moment and pathetic the next.

He can do something unexpectedly gentle without becoming soft.

He can laugh.

He can grieve.

He can relapse.

He can improve.

He can fail.

Above everything else, Dave continues to possess something Henry never intended him to have:

agency.

Henry Miller decided what William Afton’s body would become.

He decided what would be removed.

He decided what would be added.

He attempted to decide how William would think, what he would fear, whom he would obey, and what purpose his existence would serve.

For much of Dave’s life, Henry succeeded.

But Henry is gone.

Dave remains.

And now Dave has to answer a question nobody ever taught him how to answer:

Who is Dave Miller when nobody else is telling him what he has to be?