Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dear Henry,

The studio looked different; instead of the crisp lines and precisely placed boards that he remembered, what little Henry could make out in the sun-lit entrance hall almost looked drawn. Henry pressed his palm against the wall. Despite their sketched appearance, the wood panels still felt like solid wood. Letting his hand fall back to his side, he glanced over his shoulder through the open door. 

There was only one car in the studio’s parking lot—his. When he had seen the state of his old workplace, Henry had doubted Joey would be here at all, yet the door was unlocked. Now, staring into the dark hallway beyond, he almost wished it hadn’t been. 

Taking a deep breath, Henry stepped fully into Joey Drew Studios and let the exit bang shut behind him. As he walked through the silent, dimly lit passage towards where he remembered Joey’s office to be, he completely missed the bright red pentagram that flared to life behind him, sealing the door—and locking him within the studio.

It has been a while, hasn’t it? Almost a decade since we last saw each other. How time flies when one is busy. Despite the nature of our parting, I must ask a favor of you. If our friendship ever meant anything to you, please, come visit the old studio. Whatever day works best for you, my door will be open.

The anger he’d felt towards his friend from so long ago had returned when he’d first read the letter. “‘Despite the nature of our parting,’ he says!” Henry had raged to his kitchen counter. “That son of a—he’s the one who told me not to come back! And now he wants a favor?” His house had neglected to answer him, and in the silence, his irritation had died a quick death. 

With the war behind him, holding onto that old grudge had seemed like such a pointless endeavor. At least Joey had reached out at all, he’d thought. So here he was, traveling through the halls he still knew like the back of his hand. Tempted as he was to find his old workspace before hunting Joey down, Henry resisted. Logically, he knew it’d been a long time since he’d worked here, and that it would only make sense for someone else to take over his desk, but that didn’t mean he wanted to see it for himself. 

Entering a better lit open space, Henry got his first good look at the inside of the studio. Despite only closing a couple years ago, it was neglected in a way he never would have expected. There were hastily patched holes in the walls and ceiling, loose boards littering the floor here and there, and strange pipes curving in and out of the woodwork. The poor lighting and aged posters certainly didn’t help with the abandoned feeling. Stopping beneath one of the black pipes, easily as big around as a basketball, Henry wondered at how new they seemed compared to the rest of the building. He certainly didn’t remember them from when he worked here. 

Standing still as he was, Henry realized the halls weren’t as silent as they first seemed. Music was playing somewhere nearby, a familiar tune that both he and Joey had loved. It was one of those rare things that they easily agreed on. Smiling without realizing it, Henry headed towards the sound, eventually seeing a bright light shining from outside the very door he’d been heading for in the first place. 

For all the mess in here, the plaque reading Joey Drew was still as shiny as ever. The familiarity of it overcame Henry, the sensation powerful enough that he grabbed the door knob and twisted, pushing forward without bothering to knock, just as he always used to. 

There wasn’t anyone in the room. That’s what he noticed first, but then his eyes zeroed in on the old radio playing the music. The smile on his face grew as he recognized it; it was the same one that they’d saved up for together in college. Even in the bizarre sketched style, he’d know that finicky piece of technology anywhere. Henry brushed his fingers across the top, lost in memories. 

“Henry?” 

Henry lifted his head, staring at the wall in front of him. He hadn’t realized, even after the letter, that a part of him hadn’t believed it. Hadn’t believed Joey would really be here.

He turned slowly, hand still resting on the radio. “Joey.” 

His friend stood there, looking perhaps a bit worse for wear, with far more gray in his otherwise black hair than the last time Henry had seen him, seven years ago. There was a dark liquid soaking his pants halfway up to his knees, his tie hung limply around his neck, undone, and his shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. Irreparably stained gloves covered his hands. It was the most unprofessional Henry had seen him since that time Joey had gotten drunk at a highly illegal celebratory party in their senior year. 

Henry could still remember watching his friend climb on top of a table and rip his shirt open to the cheers of their fellow peers. 

“You came.” Joey let out a little disbelieving huff, stepping forward eagerly. “You actually came! Henry!” 

As they approached each other, Henry was treated to a much more familiar sight: smears of ink marring Joey’s face and clothes, even the corners of his glasses. 

“Of course I did,” Henry said as Joey—still significantly taller than him—yanked him into a hug. “Seven years or not, you’re still my friend, Joey.” They pulled away from each other. “And there’s nothing that can change that.” 

A strange expression passed over Joey’s face, there and gone in the blink of an eye. It was one that Henry didn’t recognize, and he once prided himself—still did, if he were being honest—as being fluent in Joey Drew’s complicated emotions. 

Before Henry could ask if he was all right, Joey was back to beaming a mile-wide grin. “You hardly look any different from when I last saw you, my friend.”

Henry laughed; it was true, after all. Good genetics meant he hadn’t quite started to go gray yet, and he was hardly going to get any taller at this point in life. “Trust me, I know. I can’t say the same about this place, though. Joey—” he gestured around the room, “what is all this? The studio looks—well, it looks drawn, to be honest.” 

Joey stepped past Henry and turned the radio off with a click.

In the ensuing silence, an ominous sensation settled heavily in Henry’s chest. There was no real reason to make him feel that way, but something about that unfamiliar look Joey’d gotten combined with the studio’s atmosphere—abandoned, neglected, dead—made goosebumps rise across Henry’s skin. His throat constricted; this was Joey he was thinking about, one of his best friends.

Everything was fine. 

Placing a hand on Henry’s shoulder as he moved back towards the door, Joey said, in the same manner a magician might invite the audience to suspend their disbelief, “Come with me, and I will explain everything.”

There’s something I need to show you. Something amazing. 

Henry followed Joey through the halls, each as recognizable to him as the last. Even after years away, this studio still felt like home.

“Henry,” Joey said, glancing over his shoulder, “what do you know about life?” 

“Life?” Henry scrunched his nose up. He knew a lot about life, but he got the feeling none of those answers would be the one Joey seemed to be looking for. Thanks to the war, he knew a lot about death, too.

“Yes. Creating it, to be exact. Or perhaps,” Joey stopped in front of a door and whirled about to face him, “we might call it the illusion of living.”

Before Henry could even begin to ask what that meant, Joey reached behind himself, turned the knob, and threw the door open, stepping inside and gesturing Henry into the room with a flourish. 

Towards the back of the large, otherwise empty room, standing beneath a spotlight, was a machine. Big and bulky, it struck Henry as being out of place in its sketched surroundings. Peculiar as it sounded, it looked too real. 

Henry heard the click of the door closing before Joey’s gloved hand clamped down on his shoulder again, the man himself coming to stand next to Henry. “Life begets life. It’s the law of the universe: the only way life can be created, is for life to be put into it.” 

There was a large puddle of ink beneath the machine’s large nozzle. Henry glanced down at Joey’s ruined pants. Was that ink too?

“The first attempts,” Joey continued, “were ultimately failures. Blood sacrifices simply weren’t enough. And without a guiding hand—without a concept of what it should become—the ink, well. Those creatures are now a violent, muddled mess.”

Henry blinked, feeling as though he’d missed a crucial part of the conversation. “Wait, what are you—”

“So I moved forward and used full human sacrifices next.”

Twisting away from his friend, Henry stared at him in horror. Joey didn’t notice, his attention consumed by the machine. 

Joey scowled. “More rejects, but I was on the right path. Sentience had been achieved.” He walked away from Henry, right up to the machine. Left alone, Henry’s wide eyes never left his back. “But then I wondered, was I too ambitious? In the spirit of curiosity and progress, I expanded the trial sets. Instead of continuing to pursue my goal of creating life, I tried small, inanimate objects, with varying degrees of success. Even better, a single human sacrifice went a long way when it wasn’t transferring life into a new form.”

“Joey!”

Henry couldn’t take it anymore. The way Joey was talking—about experiments, creating life, sacrifices—he sounded like an entirely different person. Was seven years really enough for someone to change into… this? Or was this nothing new at all, and Henry had somehow never noticed his friend’s true colors? 

Joey turned. Henry could only imagine what he saw in that moment—Henry’s body language and facial expression probably conveyed the overwhelming sense of confusion and hint of fear he felt. Regardless, a small smile crept across Joey’s face, almost gentle.

“You said the studio looked like it was drawn, my friend. Tell me, do you not recognize your own work?” 

His own—what? He’d drawn the studio once, an ongoing project that he used to break up the repetitive work of animation. Of course, he’d eventually run out of existing studio space to commit to paper, so he’d started adding rooms and hallways that only lived within his own mind. By the time he left, his sketched Joey Drew Studios had more than a dozen detailed floors. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it became that his surroundings admittedly matched his style. And yet—

Henry shook his head. “That’s not possible. How could that be possible?”

“With this,” Joey patted the machine. A gleam—a dangerous one, Henry recalled all too well—entered his eyes. “This is the Ink Machine, Henry, and with it… I can bring whatever I desire to life, merely by giving the Machine a picture of what to create. A drawing, anything from a simple sketch to a fully inked work of art.”

He paused there, and when he continued, there was a bitterness in Joey’s words that sounded out of place to Henry—to Henry, who couldn’t remember a time when Joey didn’t get exactly what he wanted, sooner or later. Perhaps not quite the tone of failure; Joey Drew didn’t fail, as he had often said during college, and then after, when the studio had only just started becoming more than a wistful dream. No, not failure; it was something more like inadequacy. 

“All worthwhile pursuits have limitations, though. The fine print, you could say. And this is mine—those drawings I need?—it has to be you who draws them.” 

Your best pal, Joey Drew

Chapter Text

Silence hung between the two men. 

Henry glared across the room. “If this is your idea of a joke, after everything you put me through, everything you said… then Joey, I swear I’ll—”

Joey held up his hands in a placating manner. “It’s not a joke, Henry. Creating life is no laughing matter. If you will just allow me to explain, from the very beginning, then I promise you. This will all make sense.” 

“I don’t want to hear any more of your explanations.” Henry stepped back, shaking his head, slowly at first and then faster the more the words human sacrifice echoed in his mind. With a last disbelieving glance at Joey, he turned and finished closing the distance between himself and the door. Grasping the knob, he tried not think about how he was leaving his friend and this studio—no matter how much it had fallen apart—behind for the third time. 

All the good memories from his time here—would they be tainted by this new one? He’d done so many amazing things in this studio, with so many amazing people. So much of it was still so clear and fresh in his mind: eating lunch every Tuesday and Friday with Norman Polk, up in his projection booth; frequently discussing the ins-and-outs of Alice Angel with Susie Campbell over a cup of coffee; laughing whenever he found Wally Franks’s key ring at the bottom of a trashcan, only to have to hunt the man down to return them; having meetings with his team of animators and getting to show them tricks that he’d learned over the years, and being shown in return some of the newer techniques that were developed after he finished college; and of course, all the good times he spent with Joey in the studio, from discussing story lines to new employees to the entire mess Henry being drafted caused, and then all the way back to the beginning, when they opened the front door together for the first time as partners. 

Heck, even Sammy Lawerence—well, no. Henry had avoided interacting with Sammy as much as possible. Like most of the studio’s employees, Henry had thought the man seemed to have a few screws loose (or just downright missing—it depended on the day). But regardless of his eccentricities, no one could deny that he was the best at what he did.

Henry’s shoulders bunched up. All those sacrifices. How many of them had been his old friends and fellow coworkers? How many became nothing more than the next beating heart for Joey to experiment on? His hand tightened on the knob and he pulled the door open.

“But aren’t you curious?”

Henry froze. 

“Don’t you want to know—did I manage it, in the end? Did I bring your drawings to life? How far did I get—or more importantly, how far could I go?”

He hesitated, his hand slackening a bit. Would it really hurt to stay just to have those questions answered? Henry considered his options: either leave now and try to forget about this whole ordeal, or, hear Joey out and learn exactly what happened here. For his entire life—from the time he was a child, then a teenager, and still persisting into his adult years—Henry’d often had people shake their heads and remind him that curiosity killed the cat. He’d always been too happy to retort that satisfaction brought it back. 

A tug-of-war between staying and leaving erupted within him. Perhaps he could even find out who of his friends had met their end at Joey’s hand, if any at all. Knowing, as heartbreaking as it would be, was preferable to wondering for the rest of his life.

And so, mind made up, he took a deep, bracing breath and stepped away from the door, letting it click shut again. 

“You have five minutes, and then—as Wally always used to say—I’m outta here,” Henry said, crossing his arms. He could give his friend (and his curiosity) that, at least. A chance; nothing more, nothing less.

Joey chuckled. “Ah, Wally. He never did make good on that threat. But we’ll have time to reminisce later. For now…” he turned just so, causing the harsh lighting to cast portions of his face into shadow. Henry suppressed a shiver; his friend looked demonic, with his eye sockets and the far side of his face almost entirely blacked out. “Let me tell you about my Ink Machine.” 

He ran his fingers lovingly over the metal. “It started when I found books, Henry. Books full of secrets and magic—they told me I could create life. That I could shape the world however I wanted. And so I built this Machine.”

Henry squinted. That didn’t make any sense. How did Joey go from magic in a couple pawnshop spell-books to a machine capable of bringing drawings to life? Was he using magic or technology? Or both? Each answer seemed as unlikely and downright impossible as the last. No matter how much he wanted to ask, though—there was that darned curiosity again—he’d promised his friend a chance to explain. 

“But, as I told you, life had to be put into the Machine if I wanted to take life out. The sacrifices. I started small; it was a simple matter of rigging a few accidents to go off around the studio, allowing me the chance to collect blood from a variety of my employees. Grunts, mostly; people that wouldn’t be missed if something went wrong.” 

Mouth dropping open at Joey’s reasoning, Henry pinched the bridge of his nose. This was going to be a long five minutes. 

“I was right to do so, in the end. Their lives were drained out of them into the ink, an utter waste of resources. It took years of work after that, years of trial and error.” Joey’s eye twitched. “So much error. So many failures.”

Henry glanced back at the door, subtly inching closer to it. Joey sounded more like he was talking to himself now, rather than to an audience, much less his supposed best pal. Joey took a deep breath, briefly closing his eyes. When he released it, he finally turned to face Henry fully again, a manic smile stretching his lips. There were shiny dark stains on his shirt—had those been there the whole time?

“I moved on to full human sacrifices, combined with character designs,” Joey said. “And it worked. Almost. There was still something missing, something preventing me from achieving the perfection I desired. Now those monsters haunt the lower levels.”

“The what,” Henry said, not entirely sure if he was referring to the monsters or the mention of lower levels. Beyond the basement, there shouldn’t be—but wait, if Joey used Henry’s entire sketch of the studio, even the imaginary parts—how big was this place?

Joey was still carrying on with his little history lesson, talking about murdering people—fellow workers, at that!—to sacrifice them far too casually for Henry’s taste. Enough was enough. 

“Joey,” he said. The man paused in his ramblings, allowing Henry to continue, “I’m going to leave unless you tell me why you asked me to come here. Exactly why.”

He didn’t answer for a long moment. Finally, beseechingly and with his arms opened welcomingly, Joey said, “Because I need your help, my friend. My Ink Machine only works properly when it’s your drawings put into it. Stay with me, here, and help me create a whole new world, only limited by our own imaginations. Together, we can do anything, create anything—just as long as you can draw it.”

It was insane, it was crazy; it was—far more tempting than it should’ve been. Henry forced himself to remember how convincing his friend’s speeches could be, how easily he’d been able to lure people in to support his cause without quite knowing what they were supporting. He’d seen it happen often enough in college; everyone had hated going against Joey Drew in debates. Try as he might, though, Joey must’ve seen his hesitation, because he was quick to press on.

“Think about it, Henry. Think about what this could mean for the animation industry—real toons, brought to life! The sets we could create—the detail that we’ve never been able to go into before! Anything and everything you could ever draw, popping off the page in a way artists have always only ever dreamed of!”

Henry caught himself staring at the Ink Machine, enraptured by Joey’s words. It was so easy to imagine. Joey was right; every artist—Henry included—wanted nothing more than for the audience to think of their work as being alive. But never before had he ever considered the possibility of such a dream being possible in the most literal sense. It was tempting; so, so tempting. 

And yet…

Joey had said it himself; there was always the fine print.

In this case, the fine print just happened to include human sacrifices. And if taking lives was what it took to make that dream a reality, then it just wasn’t worth it, not to Henry. 

He opened his mouth to say just that, but Joey was on a roll. 

“But it doesn’t end there, my friend, oh, no. If anything is possible, why!—we could cheat death itself. Immortality, Henry, can’t you just picture it? You could draw us young again—”

“Young?” Henry laughed a little, but he couldn’t ignore the new unease building within him. This had just taken an even more uncomfortable turn. “You’re only forty, Joey!”

But his friend didn’t appear to hear him. “And all the while, only we could use the Machine! The possibilities are endless, can’t you see? You might be walking fine now, Henry, but I know there are others not as lucky as you, people who didn’t recover from the war like you did. People would come to us on their knees, begging us to heal them—to make them new!—and it’d be in our power to refuse them if we wanted. No one could truly stand against us!” 

“Now you’re really talking nonsense,” Henry said, frowning. “First of all, even if I agreed—which I’m not—I’m a cartoon animator, Joey. I don’t do realistic. And you’re talking about, what? Becoming a cartoon? You don’t want to just create life, you want to change it. The sacrifices were bad enough, but this?” He shook his head. “You’ve gone mad.”

Joey scoffed and waved his hand dismissively. “I’m inspired, there’s a difference.” 

“Not from where I’m standing.”

Joey, in the midst of turning back to the Ink Machine, stilled. 

“If I had known that this is why you wanted me to come back…” Henry shook his head again, unable to say that he wouldn’t have come at all—at least, not without wondering if it would be a lie. “You have to see how this looks to me, Joey! You’re talking about murdering people, for goodness sake! And for immortality? Y’know, the others used to joke about how I was your impulse control—and, yeah, I deserve a medal for everything I talked you out of, back in the day—but this is ridiculous! You came to work one morning and just up and decided to give ritual sacrifices a try, is that it?” 

“You’d stand in my way?” Joey said, his face deliberately blank. If it didn’t sound crazy, Henry would almost think that the dark stains on Joey’s shirt were slowing growing. “You’d prevent me from achieving the perfection I’ve been reaching for; you’d waste years of my research? All for the sake of believing yourself to be a good person?” He tsked. “You must consider what a few lives are worth in the grand scheme of things, when there is something so much greater to be attained.”

“Are you even listening to yourself?” Henry asked, looking around the room wildly as though he might find a way to make Joey understand hidden within the wood panels. 

Henry watched his friend tuck his hands into his pockets and nod down at the ground. “So that’s the way it’s going to be.”

More wary than he’d be since he’d arrived at the studio, Henry took a step back. “What?”

“Let me make something clear. If you refuse to work with me, Henry, then I will make you work for me.” 

Henry’s sucked in a breath as his entire body tensed at the darkly promised words. He imagined he could almost hear them echoing around in his head in the silence that followed. 

Joey sighed, his face falling. “I don’t want to be the bad guy. I’d prefer us to be partners in this, like the good old days. But mark my words—” He raised his head slowly until his eyes were boring holes into Henry’s own. “I will do whatever it takes to achieve my dreams, no matter what you may think of me.” 

Hands faintly shaking, Henry demanded, “You’d keep me here, against my will? Threaten me to create things for you?”

“If that’s what it takes. Now that I finally have you within my grasp, I have no intention of letting you leave, not when you’re exactly what I need for ultimate success. The exits are blocked off. You have nowhere to go.”

Henry snorted. “You’re bluffing—you had no way of knowing I’d come at all, much less today, until you found me yourself.”

Joey sneered in response and raised his left palm to face Henry. Pulling the glove off, he revealed a pentagram, red and glowing, burned into his flesh. “How easily you scorned the magic I learned when now it’s the very thing trapping you here. You’d need a battering ram to escape now.”

As much as he didn’t want to take Joey’s word for it, Henry couldn’t afford the risk of being cornered. He’d have to get away and figure out a plan once he calmed down. Without taking his eyes off Joey, Henry slowly started backing up towards the door.

Joey watched, a smile meanly curling his lips. “Oh, Henry. What do you think running will accomplish? If you come quietly, I’ll have no reason to hurt you.”

Yeah, Henry thought, like that’s reassuring. He didn’t stop moving.

His friend stepped forward, impatience contorting his face. “Where would you go, hm? You’ve never set foot in this new design, you’d be hopelessly lost by the time you reached the end of the corridor. And not only would I find you eventually, you’d run the risk of stumbling upon one of the rejects. If you stay with me, you won’t ever have to worry about the monsters that roam freely downstairs. In fact, I’m sure with your help, we could destroy them together.”

Henry’s hand found the door knob. 

Joey raised his chin, eyes widening as he finally seemed to realize that Henry was serious. “If you run, Henry… I will make you regret it. I have waited long enough for this day, and I won’t have you ruin it by foolishly trying to escape into an incomprehensible maze!”

Briefly straightening to his full height—unfortunately not as impressive a gesture as he would’ve liked it to be—Henry glared at Joey. “You’re forgetting something; you used my drawing to create this place. I’ll know it better than anyone.”

And with that, he threw the door open and bolted.

He tore past numerous office doorways, listening as Joey’s thundering footsteps followed him into the hall. Henry was taking a gamble here; based on how Joey’d been talking about the lower levels, he was betting that his friend—ex-friend, really—wouldn’t immediately pursue him if he went far enough down. 

But that might be the least of his concerns. Henry could only hope that he wasn’t running out of the frying pan and into the fire. Monsters created from rituals-gone-wrong couldn’t possibly be any worse than Joey Drew. Right?

As he crashed through the door to the stairwell, the enraged shouts of his former best friend chased him into the depths of the studio.

“You are mine, Henry Ross! Do you hear me? Mine!” 

Chapter Text

By the time Henry had the presence of mind to stop and listen to see if his gamble paid off, he was several floors deeper in a studio design that should never have existed. Other than the pounding beat of his heart and the disconcerting sound of dripping ink—presumably, that is; at this point, he wouldn’t have been entirely surprised to find out that Joey had installed a pool or something—there was silence from above. 

Secure in the knowledge that he was safe on that front, Henry took a moment to think about the ramifications of his decision. Sure, he might not have to deal with Joey down here, but what else might be lurking in the shadows of this sketched-out dungeon?

Considering the fact that anything alive in the studio—other than Henry himself and Joey upstairs—would be products of some form of ritual sacrifice, he was suddenly doubting his decision. 

Well, he certainly wasn’t going to give Joey the satisfaction of having Henry run straight back into his arms. And that meant he had only one option: forward. But if he was going to be walking among monsters, he’d need a weapon; something from a mechanic’s toolbox or a discarded pipe—heck, even a splintered board!—would be preferable to being completely empty-handed. 

Henry descended another flight of stairs and turned into the closest hallway. He blinked; it couldn’t possibly be that easy.

There was an axe on the wall, framed and everything. 

Rubbing his eyes, fully expecting the axe to vanish when he looked again, Henry spun in circle when it remained. Nope, he was still alone; and yep, it was still there. 

Ah, well, he thought as he removed his new weapon from its perch, best not look a gift horse in the mouth. Gripping the handle like he’d once gripped a rifle being held across his body, Henry thought of the last time he’d picked up a weapon with the intent to eventually use it. Then he thought about what sort of monsters Joey claimed were down here, and he figured he’d fit right in. 

“Ready or not,” he said into the flickering darkness, “here I come.” 

• • • • • 

Henry had a plan—or at least, he had a goal. Get to the elevator. He’d only drawn the lift in the extended studio sketch, having already finished the existing building by the time the thought had occurred to him. And that meant Joey had no way of getting to it unless he came down here himself; even better though? The elevator secretly went to the roof.

He could still remember adding that feature, laughing to himself about how he’d have an imaginary escape plan for the days Joey worked him too hard. This was taking that hypothetical situation a bit too literally, in his opinion.  

The farther into the studio he ventured, the more he realized just how much Joey’s Machine had affected things. Firstly, there was ink everywhere. It was dripping from the ceiling, splattered over the walls, even flooding some of the corridors—the most concerning, however, were the little puddles on the floor that bubbled like natural springs. 

Henry steered clear of those. 

Secondly, there was evidence that something was definitely living down here. Multiple somethings. Handprints of different designs smeared haphazardly across the walls, footprints of varying sizes emerged from the inky pools, and he didn’t even know what to call the marks that stretched out from the bubbling puddles. 

He stared down at one such mark. It looked like something had dragged itself up and out of the ink. 

“Oh, Joey,” Henry muttered, continuing on. “What have you done?”

Despite his wanderings, he’d yet to actually see any of Joey’s so-called rejected creations.

Rejects. What made them rejected? It sure didn’t sound like they’d died after being created. Were they off-model? Was Joey cruel enough to reject a living being just for that?

If you run, Henry… I will make you regret it.

Yes. This Joey could indeed be cruel enough. Perhaps not the Joey from college, or the Joey from those amazing years working at the studio together, but this Joey?

You are mine, Henry Ross! Do you hear me? Mine!

Henry’s heart clenched, remembering those words and the venom infused in every syllable. 

There was another thing Joey had said that he found particularly worrying. Sentience had been achieved, those were the words he’d used while talking about some of his creations. And that sure sounded like there were two different types of creatures—monsters just seemed too callous a word when Henry hadn’t even seen one for himself—down here; mindless, and, infinitely more dangerous, intelligent. 

If they’re dangerous at all, he thought optimistically. The hope was an empty one, though; if Joey was wary of this place, then he had to have good reason for being so. 

A great crash sounded from overhead, the floorboards of the level above Henry creaking under the strain. The clatter continued, passing over him and cutting off abruptly only a moment later.

Holding his breath in the eerie silence, Henry shifted his stance and tightened his grip on the axe. Would he be forced to kill with it, he wondered. Even worse—would he be forced to kill someone he knew?

From behind him came a quiet groan. He whirled, eyes wide.

One of the bubbling puddles he’d passed seemed to give a little heave before a short geyser of ink exploded into the air above it. Instead of falling back to the floor, however, the thick liquid rapidly clumped together into a form that certainly appeared solid—shoulders and dripping arms, hands with fingers connected to each other by stringy webs of ink, a head—

Henry stumbled back. 

The creature’s head, while certainly humanoid, was almost featureless. A grotesque, gaping maw cut into its cheeks like a proper Joker-grin. The rest of the face was smooth, except for the eyes. Or rather, where the eyes should’ve been; sockets, gouged and empty, somehow managed to stare at him with frightening accuracy. 

And then the creature, groaning all the while, reached out. With a wet splat, it pressed its palm to the ground and began to drag its legless torso towards Henry with startling speed. 

“Can you understand me?” he asked it, lurching away from its reaching arms. “Can you talk?” 

It either ignored him, or had no idea what he was saying.

Henry knew, then, that this was one of the mindless beings. What had Joey said—the ones created from blood sacrifices lacked sentience? That should make it easier, right? It—it wouldn’t be like killing a human.

Wrong.

As soon as both its hands were on the floor again, Henry stepped closer and swung the axe like a baseball bat, aiming for the thinnest part of the neck—hoping for a clean, easy kill. The moment the blade sliced through the ink, the creature seemed to dissolve once more into a puddle, though not before letting out a dying gurgle. 

In the silence that followed, the axe slipped from Henry’s nerveless fingers and he stumbled away until his back hit the wall. He slid down it, until he was bonelessly sprawled like a puppet whose strings had been severed. Henry’s eyes clenched shut and he ducked his head down so his chin pressed against the hollow of his throat.

That gurgle… his hands shook as he pressed his balled up fists to his temples. The metallic tang of blood filled his nose, despite him knowing that he hadn’t been injured. The decrepit ambiance of the studio faded in and out of his awareness, his mind wholly focused on that wet cry. The familiarity of it. It had—it was…

It was the sound of a man choking on his own blood as it burbled up his throat, filling his lungs. It was the sound of a man dying by drowning on the very substance that gave him life. 

A wounded noise escaped him, some contorted amalgamation of a sob and hysterical laughter. He cursed Joey to the high heavens and back; it had been ages since a panic attack had been triggered this way. Most of the recent ones were the result of being grabbed suddenly and unexpectedly from behind, especially by strangers. 

Another of those pained sounds exploded out from Henry as a new thought occurred to him—oh, he had some real fun times ahead if there were more of these particular creatures; that one had popped up from behind him, and if he hadn’t already been listening carefully, it would have gotten the drop on him for sure. 

The distinctive step-drag rhythm of a limp broke through the fog of his mind. Henry raised his head, unshed tears blurring his vision. There was a clacking accompanying it, and whatever it was seemed to be nearby. 

Henry’s limbs felt weighted down as he forced himself to move. His breath dragged in and out of his chest; he wasn’t ready, hadn’t fully come down from the high of a panic attack. Picking up the axe—after what he’d just used it to do—was an ordeal in and of itself. 

After cautiously making his way farther down the hall in the direction of the off-beat footsteps, Henry peeked around a corner. 

The first thing that caught his attention was the room itself. It was huge, even bigger than the one with the Ink Machine. The ceiling was high enough for it to end out of his sight, away from the doorway as he was. In the middle was a massive rectangular pillar that stretched at least half the height of the room, ink spilling down it like a waterfall. There was a banner-style sign on the front, positioned beneath a halo.

Heavenly Toys, it read.

Henry remembered drawing this room. He had been listening to Susie complain about how some of the studio workers weren’t taking Alice seriously, even with her growing popularity. To cheer her up, he’d sketched out something resembling a theme-park or mall attraction, with Alice Angel in mind. She’d gotten a good laugh out of it, but had hugged him tightly while some of the other employees looked it over. 

“Thank you, Henry,” she’d whispered, her chin tucked over his shoulder. “I know I can always count on you.” 

It hadn’t looked like this, though. The ink splattering across the counter and surrounding floor ruined the image for him. All this might’ve been his design, but Joey had still managed to leave his mark no matter where Henry turned.

A series of clacks drew his attention downwards. Not far from the room’s entrance was a creature, this one very different from the one Henry’d just killed. 

First and foremost, it had legs, as well as a much more clearly defined body. Four arms protruded from its sides; the ones on the right ended in typical cartoon gloves. The ones on the left, however, came together before the elbow, connected to an unfamiliar metal contraption. Though it was facing away from him, Henry could see the edges of a mouth poking out from the side of its face. There was something strange on the top of its head—if you asked Henry, he’d say it almost appeared to be a pair of lips—

The strange thing opened, the shape of it resolving into two rows of teeth. Clack clack clack.

Henry felt his stomach churn. He wondered if it hurt, if the little guy was in pain, suffering from a mouth where there shouldn’t be one.

The deformed creature moved a bit, one foot dragging slightly behind the other as it wandered aimlessly. It turned enough to allow Henry to see how its stomach was gaping open, empty, and as its face came into view, Henry finally realized who the living cartoon in front of him was meant to be.

Between the horrified shock at the toon’s physical appearance and the sudden, utterly twisted understanding of what Joey had meant by rejected, Henry couldn’t stop himself from blurting out, “Edgar?”

Edgar—or what was left of him, at any rate—clumsily spun towards the sound of Henry’s voice. 

Henry blinked. Okay, he thought, that’s definitely a human eye. 

The first creature had groaned while it had attacked him; Edgar limped silently closer. A furious little pang echoed through Henry’s chest as he saw the stitches weaving in and out of Edgar’s lips, sealing them shut; he couldn’t talk even if he wanted to. 

“Edgar? I don’t suppose you can understand me, by any chance?” 

Unblinking, Edgar violently jabbed his metal arm at Henry, who barely managed to dodge in time. The way the toon moved, the lack of expression of any sort, the—the total robotic-ness of his actions… Henry realized Edgar was no more sentient than the first creature. 

It didn’t make killing him any easier.

Watching Edgar’s twitching body slowly dissolve before leaking into the creaks between the floorboards, Henry shook his head, anger pulling his brows together.

“When I get my hands on you, Joey…”

• • • • •

It happened while Henry was trudging along one of the many hallways: something dark and shadowy began spreading over the walls around him. He watched as the lines and splotches writhed across the wood.

He reached out and poked one of the curling tendrils. Though it didn’t react or change, his finger came away with a thin layer of ink staining it. 

“Curious,” he muttered, leaning closer. It looked alive, somehow.

Henry spent almost a whole minute watching random patterns and designs form in the ink, if that’s what it really was. He couldn’t help but wonder where it had come from and if it meant something. Perhaps just another product of the Ink Machine? A sign of sickness in the studio itself? It hadn’t spread any further since he noticed it, nor had it retreated.

Turning back to face the way he’d come from in order to see how large of an area the ink covered, Henry froze.

There was a massive figure standing at the junction he’d just passed, not even ten feet away.

It… it looked like Bendy, almost. Though the proportions were all wrong, the head bore the two distinctive, curved horns and the trademark grin of Henry’s little Dancing Demon. Not so little now, Henry amended. This version towered over him, even with the distance separating them. Besides that, his bowtie was crooked, there was ink leaking down his face, completely covering his eyes with more staining his glove—singular, as the one on his right hand was somehow missing—and his left foot seemed to be facing the wrong way. By Henry’s estimation, he was the epicenter of the inky web on the walls.

Bendy’s head was tilted, unerringly facing Henry, exactly like that first, eyeless creature.

After staring at each other—Henry taking in each and every little detail, Bendy utterly motionless in the complete silence between them—for what Henry guessed to be a minute or so, he finally shook his head. “I don’t know what Joey was thinking; you’re even more off-model than poor Edgar back there!” 

Bendy—or ‘Bendy,’ since Henry just couldn’t stand to think of this version as one and the same with his original character design—leaned back a bit, head still cocked. He seemed almost confused, like he didn’t quite know what to do with Henry.

Ah. Sentience. 

Which meant that ‘Bendy’ wasn’t just made from blood; there was a full-scale sacrifice that went into bringing this toon to life.

Henry was suddenly very aware of how incredibly tall ‘Bendy’ was. How small Henry’s axe was. How he wouldn’t stand a chance against him in a fight, not without a hearty dose of luck.

But would ‘Bendy’ attack him at all? 

‘Bendy’ shuffled forward, his head twitching in minuscule increments. Wanting to give the toon a chance and not immediately assume the worst, but cautious enough to understand the potential danger he was, Henry silently stepped back a few times. And it was by doing that, that he realized—‘Bendy’ was blind; his face was still focused in the direction Henry had been standing when he’d spoken. 

Following a gut feeling, Henry remained silent, shifting even more off to the opposite side of the hall. 

His vigilance was rewarded when ‘Bendy’ viciously swiped his hand forward, raking his fingers like claws through where he assumed Henry would be. Finding nothing, the hulking toon ducked forward a bit and twisted his body this way and that, futilely trying to locate Henry. 

Henry’s heart sank. Why were all these creations intent on hurting him? Was it a natural reaction, nothing more than some twisted instinct? Or did Joey give them a reason to react so defensively against humans?

Life begets life? More like violence begets violence.

When he found no indication of where his prey had gone, ‘Bendy’ raised himself out of his slight crouch and began slowly limping down the hallway in the direction Henry had planned on heading. So much for that, then.

The ink on the walls, as Henry had suspected, followed him.

Watching ‘Bendy’ to make sure the demon didn’t hear anything to draw him closer, Henry started backtracking towards the junction. He’d have to take a different path now. With most of his attention still on ‘Bendy,’ a loose board on the floor escaped his notice, right up until his foot collided with it. 

‘Bendy’ whirled around, screeching, and charged.

Self-preservation kicking in, Henry turned and ran. He whipped around corners, jumped overturned chairs, even swiped at one of the eyeless creatures with the axe in his hand when it reared up at him  At times during his flight, the shadowy marks on the wall seemed to get closer and closer, pressing around him like a net. He didn’t dare look behind him to see if ‘Bendy’ was gaining on him; the thundering footsteps and occasional splash of ink was indication enough. 

If he could just find a door, somewhere to hide, anything. 

Wait. There was a—he could—that just might work.

Henry made a turn at the next intersection that took him right back through the entrance of Heavenly Toys. With ‘Bendy’ on his heels, he headed for the stairs—the ones on the left side, he made sure—sprinting up them two at a time. There was a minor delay as he threw the lever at the top, leaving him to lurch forward away from the feel of something grasping at the back of his shirt. His saving grace was a large ink puddle that ‘Bendy’ slipped slightly in—Henry having the necessary eyesight to leap over it—giving him enough time to wrench a larger switch to the side. 

The toy machine rumbled to life. 

‘Bendy’ wrapped his hand around Henry’s upper left arm. He had an extremely narrow window of opportunity for what he had planned; desperate, Henry twisted and struck with the axe still clutched tight in his fist. Where he hit, he had no idea—he only knew that ‘Bendy’ released an enraged shriek, slackening his grip enough for Henry to pull free.

The hanging bookshelves were perfectly aligned for his purposes. The overhead belt jerked a shelf to the side, blocking the door leading out of the room a mere second after Henry dove past it.

As much as he wanted to collapse to the floor and take a breather, Henry knew he couldn’t. Slamming the door shut, he shoved one of the nearby heavy crates in front of it to prevent ‘Bendy’ from continuing to pursue him. Hopefully. 

Not stopping there, he continued at a quick jog—better for his stamina—down the new hallway. Without even trying to get his bearings, Henry took a random turn or two, where he finally reached a dead end with a door. 

It opened easily, and he slipped inside and quietly shut it behind him. Exhaling deeply, he leaned his forehead against the wood, listening for any signs of ‘Bendy.’ There was only silence.

An abruptly loud thunk echoed behind him as the lights in the room went dark. Henry tensed and hefted the axe at his side. He turned slowly; there were a few sepia-colored screens glowing out from the walls, though not enough for him to see who—or what—was occupying the space with him.

“Well, well, well,” a female voice said slowly. For all that there was something wrong, something doubled and distorted about it, Henry could’ve sworn it was familiar. 

“Look who’s here,” she continued. “Mr. Henry Ross, in the flesh.”

It suddenly clicked in Henry’s mind, where he knew the voice—well, one of the voices—from. In fact, he was a little appalled that it’d taken as long as it had for him to remember; to be fair though, it sounded like two separate voices overlapping at times, which made singling one out difficult. But the dominant voice was definitely—

“Alice?” 

Chapter Text

The Creator’s here.

The words traveled, from incomprehensible hisses to garbled syllables to infuriated screeches.

The Liar’s brought the Creator home. 

From the lowest levels of the studio to the most secluded rooms, the truth spread, unstoppable.

Creator. Creator. Help us.

Such knowledge meant little to some of them. It meant perfection to others. Freedom and hope to even more. 

Find the Creator. FIND HIM. 

“Ya think it’s really him?” 

“I don’t know what to think, Bendy. The Searchers are hardly reliable.”

“Have a little faith, Angel. They can tell the difference between the Liar and anyone else.” 

“But they’re still attacking him. We know that much.”

“They’re Searchers, they attack anything that moves! Just ’cause they know he’s the Creator doesn’t mean they’ll spare him.” 

“I just…” Alice sighed. “What if it’s a trap, Bendy? What if this is just Joey trying to lure us out again? Or even worse, what if he’s helping Joey?” 

Bendy clenched his fists. “And what if yer wrong, huh? What if the Creator really is out there, what if he’d be willin’ to help us?” 

Alice shook her head and got up to leave the room. “I don’t want to see you get hurt again, that’s all. Why would he be down here, anyway?”

She made it to the door before Bendy responded, making her freeze mid-step. 

“Same reason as us: runnin’ from Joey Drew.” 

• • • • • 

Above the heads of the creatures that called the studio home, Joey sat in his office. His elbows rested on the desk before him, steepled fingers pressed against the grim set of his lips. 

His eyes were trained on a picture, framed and kept obsessively clean from the mess surrounding it. 

Forever captured in the black-and-white tones, his beaming younger self had Henry pulled up against his side. There was a particular look in his friend’s eyes that Joey could remember seeing often, all the way back to their first meeting; an expression of tolerant fondness. Though the overall feel of the image read as Joey impulsively dragging him into the frame, that wasn’t exactly what had happened.

It had taken some smooth talking, but Joey had convinced Henry to join him for the photograph commemorating the purchase of the studio building. He’d initially thought he’d failed in his endeavor when Henry had disappeared for a short time right before they’d planned on taking it. 

But no, Henry had quietly entered the room at the last minute, bearing a quick but beautifully precise drawing to hold in the picture. Joey had laughed—the one Henry claimed he only heard when he himself surprised Joey or got one over on him—and wrapped his arm around his friend’s shoulder to trap him in place. 

Inked on the pristine piece of paper Henry held in front of him was Bendy, reaching up on either side to hold the hands of the two men bookending him—cartoon versions of Henry and Joey.

It was a perfect photograph. 

And one day, no matter how long it took, he’d make sure he and Henry were that happy again. Immortal and powerful, bringing their dreams to life… just as soon as Henry came to his senses.

This little… rebellion of Henry’s wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, he’d emerge from the dangerous and disordered lower levels, likely injured and traumatized. Having seen the truth of the rejects and failures for himself, he’d be more willing to accept the sacrifices that came with perfection. 

He’d need someone to be there for him, to promise safety and peace. He’d need his best friend.

No matter how long it takes, Joey repeated to himself. He would be waiting to welcome Henry back with open arms. 

Together, they’d be gods.

Chapter Text

A spotlight clicked on across the room, illuminating a figure that was both familiar and not. Unlike the Alice Angel he’d always drawn, the one standing on the other side of a pane of glass was disturbingly distorted. 

Henry approached cautiously, Alice watching him without a word. Half of her face was intact, he realized. The other side, though… her right eye was completely missing, nothing but a black void serving as a socket. Below, the flesh—did toons created from the Ink Machine even have flesh?—of her check was torn, exposing her teeth and gums like Two-Face in the Batman comics. Strange lumps, almost like a ridge, ran from the corner of her mouth to her temple, directly below her horn. Even her halo hadn’t escaped whatever caused this; it was embedded in her head on the corrupted side of her face. 

“Oh, Alice,” Henry said, half reaching out as though he could help her. “What happened?”

Her eyebrows briefly drew together, as she leaned back slightly just as ‘Bendy’ had. Her expression cleared quickly, however. Without warning, she slammed her fists into the glass. 

Henry stiffened. Just because she could talk, didn’t mean she wouldn’t hurt him.

“Joey Drew happened!” she screamed, the two voices blurring together. “Him and that foul ink did this to me! But I am so close to reaching perfection!”

Joey. He should’ve known. 

Alice narrowed her eyes at Henry. “And you can help me,” she continued. “It won’t take long.”

Part of Henry wanted to agree, to say that he would help her. It was the least he could do; he was Alice Angel’s Creator, after all, off-model and corrupted or not. And yet, something about her was ringing all sorts of warning bells in his mind. It was like that gut feeling with ‘Bendy,’ about staying silent. 

It was that gibbering little voice every human has that delights in screaming at you that you’re nothing but prey, that you’re staring down a predator that has set you in their sights. The last time Henry had felt like that, before today, was during the war. 

He wondered what that meant, that standing there with Alice Angel looking at him felt the same as staring down a rifle from the wrong end.

“I wish I could help you, Alice,” Henry said, truly meaning it. “But I don’t know the first thing about how you were made, or what went wrong. I don’t even know what all happened here, and Joey is…” His shoulders drooped. “I think it’d be best for me to leave, while I still have the chance.”

Before he could suggest returning to help her after he’d made his escape and hopefully took care of Joey—much as the thought hurt, the man had apparently murdered numerous people—Alice chuckled lowly. 

“Hmm. I think not. You see, Henry, back here in my little ink-free sanctuary, I have the ability to control the lifts. That is where you were heading, isn’t it? You certainly can’t leave by way of the stairs, now can you?” 

 I hate when I’m right about these sorts of things, Henry thought. Out loud, he asked, “So that’s the deal? I help you with something and you’ll let me leave without trying to stop me?”

Angel-sweet, she nodded.

Unfortunately for her, Henry was the one who’d drawn those little devil-horns in the first place. He wouldn’t trust this Alice as far as he could throw her. That being said—he didn’t really have another choice, did he? 

She’s right about one thing, he thought as he eyed her suspiciously. I definitely can’t go back up the stairs. 

“All right,” he said. “What do I have to do?”

“You can start by bringing me four gears that you’ll find in boxes on the walls.”

Henry closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Of course it wouldn’t be something easy, or maybe something he was good at. If only he could pick up a pen or a brush and smooth out the ridge, fill in her eye, get her halo floating again.

“Before I go back to wandering around out there, do you mind telling me exactly what happened here? What Joey’s done?”

Alice smirked. “I have a better idea; why don’t you earn your answers.” 

Resisting the urge to threaten her with his axe, Henry took a deep, calming breath that smelled predominantly of ink. To be honest, he’d rather missed that smell. 

“Fine. Anything particularly dangerous I should know about? Anyone else besides Edgar and that sludge-monster that I should expect a fight from?”

“If it’s moving, assume it will attack you.” Alice flipped her hair over her shoulder.

Oh, the irony, Henry thought, fighting down a smile.

 “Now, go. The sooner you complete your tasks, the sooner you can leave this place.”

As Henry turned and walked to the door, she added, “And once you have my gears, bring them to the ninth floor. I’ll be waiting.”

Leaving the lighter side of the room for the darker way out, Henry wondered if ‘Bendy’ was still near the toy machine, or if he’d given up and wandered off. Even worse, what if he made it past the bookshelf and blocked door? 

Ah well, he mentally shrugged, guess I’ll find out soon. 

With his hand on the door knob, something suddenly occurred to Henry. He glanced back. “One more thing, before I go: how do you know who I am?”

Alice smiled at him. It was not a nice smile. “Oh, Henry. Just as everyone down here knows to beware the Ink Demon, we all know you.”

She threw her head back and laughed and laughed.

• • • • •

“Gears,” Henry said, standing on a staircase landing, facing a metal box with a broken door. “What does she even need gears for?”

Perhaps luckily for him, no one answered.

The door swung open, despite being half off its hinges, revealing a gear easily the size of his hand when his fingers were splayed. 

Henry leaned his axe against the wall and grabbed the gear with both hands to throw his weight into it; it barely moved.

Be nice to have a wrench right about now, he thought, grunting. With a final, mighty twist, it squeaked and loosened enough for him to rotate it off the peg.

Picking his weapon back up, Henry passed through a hallway to the lift, right where he remembered drawing it. All the buttons, save the secret one for the roof, were lit up and functional. Alice hadn’t been bluffing about having remote access to the controls, that was for sure.

Leaving the gear beneath the floor selection panel, he headed back out, going in the opposite direction as before. If he recalled correctly, of the random odds-and-ends that he’d used to decorate the walls of his extended studio drawing, he only added one item to each floor. Though the exact locations of the gear boxes had been lost to time, he was sure of that much at least. 

Just after Henry had collected the second gear and was making his way to that floor’s elevator access, shadowy tendrils appeared on the walls. 

Exactly what that meant caught up to him right as he stepped around a corner and saw ‘Bendy’s back up ahead. Henry froze; maybe ‘Bendy’ hadn’t heard him. 

To his dismay, the demon’s head slowly turned to face him, that grinning smile bright against the dripping ink surrounding it. 

Henry cursed and took off, a furious screech echoing through the halls. 

If he could just get to the lift in time, he’d probably be able to escape that way. He risked a glance over his shoulder as he passed through the last door leading to his hopeful salvation. 

‘Bendy’ tore around the far corner, taking the turn so fast he slammed into the wall. He scrabbled against it as he got his momentum going again, clawing at the air as though Henry was right in front of him.

Henry smacked the button that read CALL LIFT. The old machinery slowly creaked to life. 

“C’mon, c’mon,” he pleaded. A deep, broken noise came from behind him, something just on the edge of becoming proper words. The hair on Henry’s neck prickled.  

He didn’t dare look back. 

In truth, it was only a few seconds before the lift had risen into place and the gates opened to accept him, but it felt like nothing short of an eternity. All the while, the pounding footsteps of someone much larger than him grew steadily louder. 

Henry practically hurled the gear and axe into the corner so he could grab the cage and slam it closed manually, forgoing the automatic function. 

And not a moment too soon; ‘Bendy’ crashed against the bars, howling his rage. One arm snaked forward, and before Henry could throw himself further into the safety of the elevator, his grasping fingers managed to snag Henry’s shirt.

Without hesitation, ‘Bendy’ yanked, smashing the man’s face against the metal separating them. He grit his teeth, swallowing a cry of pain. ‘Bendy’ snarled at him, his mouth opening for the first time, teeth inexplicably sharper. 

Pushing against the bars proved useless, especially when one of his hands slipped and smushed into ‘Bendy’s body. Horrifyingly, he could feel the ink try to drag him deeper into the demon’s abdomen.

His left hand still free, Henry stretched as far as he could, finally managing to press one of the different floor buttons. The lift began to rise, and despite his attempts to hold on, ‘Bendy’ was forced to release him before he was cut off by the ceiling. 

The sudden lack of tension sent Henry sprawling backwards, gasping. By the time the machinery shuddered to a halt on a new level, he’d mostly regained his breath. 

Letting the silence coax his heartbeat down, Henry stared at the ceiling. 

“Well,” he finally said, “that was exciting.” He sat up and dragged his axe closer. “Let’s never do it again.” 

• • • • •

Retrieving the third gear went off without a hitch, thank goodness. Henry wasn’t sure he’d be able to take another encounter with ‘Bendy’ so soon. There was a large, inky handprint marring the fabric below his throat—he hadn’t realized how close to his face ‘Bendy’ had gotten. Slightly more concerning were the speckles of blood that he’d wiped off his forehead with his shirt sleeve. He’d have to find a mirror somewhere to figure out the full extent of the damage the sharp metal bars had caused. 

Henry would honestly just be happy if he could avoid getting ink in any open cuts; that seemed like a nightmare just waiting to happen.

Naturally, acquiring the fourth and final gear proved to be hell. 

Rounding a corner, Henry immediately spotted the gear box he was looking for at the end of the hallway. He took one step closer, and then it spilled out of a room halfway between the box and himself. 

Henry’s first thought was, appropriately, A tidal wave of ink is about to do me in. Luckily, a moment after the chest-high swell flooded the corridor, it pulled itself back together into something more solid. 

Not taking any chances, Henry ducked back around the corner he’d just come from, peeking out cautiously when there wasn’t any noise indicating he’d been seen. 

His eyes widened. The ink hadn’t been a wave; it was a creature, one he didn’t recognize.

It had a hulking, hunched body with bubbles popping noisily on its back. From what Henry could tell, it had thick, stubby back legs, and slim, wobbly front ones—and that didn’t make any sense at all, not when the creature looked to be having trouble just standing there. It shifted around a bit, a series of spikes across its shoulders digging into the ceiling. 

Even as Henry tried to figure out how he could possibly get past this thing, what with how it actually filled the hallway, it moved enough for him to get a good look at its head.

Or rather, he realized, its heads. Two separate heads of different designs were stuck together at the end of a long neck that sagged in the middle. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. One’s appearance reminded Henry of a background character—an elephant—from a long time ago, only its entire lower jaw was hanging straight down towards the floor, like a broken hinge. The other was tilted at a strange angle, almost so that the bulging eyes could see nothing but the ceiling. Henry was fairly certain it was meant to be a frog head, albeit an utterly massive one—except it was missing the cartoony lips, leaving multiple rows of sharp teeth to visibly overlap each other.

As grotesque as it looked, Henry’s stomach only started to churn when he realized the little white lines around where the heads connected were stitches. The more he stared, the more criss-crossed lines of deliberately sewn together seams he saw; the dripping, writhing ink obscured them at first glance.

The broken-jawed elephant head released a choked bellow, black spurting out of its mouth like congealed vomit. 

Henry ducked back out of sight. How dare Joey? How dare he? This wasn’t a case of a ritual-gone-wrong, or a sacrifice that wasn’t enough. Those stitches meant someone shoved two different toons together and thought let’s see how this works. 

Fists clenched, his entire body trembled with rage. Joey hurt them, hurt innocent toons that didn’t ask for any of this, and then he had the audacity to look Henry in the eyes and say, “In fact, I’m sure with your help, we could destroy them together.”

How dare he. 

Henry leaned heavily against the wall, one hand raising to cover his eyes. He felt sick to his stomach that he’d been tempted by Joey’s gilded words, sick that there was absolutely nothing he could do to help the poor thing right then, sick that the studio had been like this for who-knows-how-long, absolutely sick sick sick. 

“We were their creators, Joey,” Henry whispered. “And creators don’t hurt their creations. Not like that. Never like that.”

There was a quiet little thump from above. Probably some other toon that was suffering pointlessly. 

And the worst part of the whole situation?

He would continue to be helpless to do anything for as long as he was trapped down in this hellhole of pain, courtesy of Joey Drew. And he wouldn’t be able to escape until Alice let him use the elevator to reach the roof. And Alice wouldn’t let him leave until he brought her what she wanted, starting with four gears. And he wouldn’t be able to bring her the four gears because he couldn’t even get to the last one.

Henry released a long breath and let his hand fall limp to his side. Maybe he’d be able to find a different box somewhere else. If only he could remember how many he’d drawn. Resolved to keep searching, he started back towards the lift.

Barely four steps later, a soft rattling sound came from behind him. 

Turning, he watched as a gear—the gear he needed from the box—rolled around the corner and spun to a stop at his feet. 

Henry blinked, carefully watching the intersection where it came from. Nothing. 

Stepping over the mysteriously delivered component, he peeked back down the hallway. The poor creature was right where he’d last seen it, the combined heads now banging themselves against the wall. There was no one else, not a door or ink puddle out of place.

Carefully, in case it was a trap, Henry picked the gear up. He flipped it over, tossed it back and forth between his hands, and held it close to his face. There were a few small smears of ink on it, but considering how most of the studio was saturated in the stuff, that didn’t mean much.

He looked around. Other than the dull thumping from the creature’s self-abuse, he neither heard nor saw anything that wasn’t there before.

Regardless, this gear hadn’t just magicked its way over to him. It would only be polite to…

“Thank you,” Henry said softly. There were a lot of other things he could have added, promises to help, apologies for not knowing, claims that none of this was his fault… 

But he got the feeling, standing alone in that hallway, that he didn’t really need to.

• • • • •

“What did Joey do?” Henry asked, staring up at the giant face of Alice Angel above him. 

Hidden speakers crackled to life. “You’ll have to be more specific,” she said. “He’s done quite a lot, you see.”

“I saw a creature—it was two toons sewn together, like a… like…”

“Like a madman got a hold of a needle and thread and found himself to be bored one day?”

Henry took a moment to close his eyes and compose himself. Without opening them, he asked, “Is that really how it happened? He just asked himself why not?”

When Alice answered, it wasn’t the dominant voice speaking. “Yeah, Henry. From the very start, I think he saw this crazy stuff and decided he oughta do it just because.”

This voice was oddly soft, oddly gentle. It reminded him of happy smiles, the smell of coffee; it reminded him of—

“Susie?”

Silence. And then, “I’m afraid there’s really not much of Miss Campbell left, Henry.” It was Alice’s voice again.

Henry’s axe thudded lifelessly to the ground. “He—Joey, did he…” He couldn’t bring himself to finish the question.

“Yes.” 

He didn’t respond, only moved mechanically to place the four gears in the dropbox she’d pointed out upon his return, before he had started asking questions he almost wished he didn’t have the answers to. Alice said nothing, perhaps possessing enough tact and knowledge of humans (but how much of that knowledge was her own?) to see that Henry was grieving and needed a moment to himself. 

Henry collapsed on the ground with his back to the wall next to the sealed door, facing the rest of the Level Nine chamber. He didn’t have long, he knew that, but for the moment, he allowed himself to remember the good friend Susie had been.

She’d always been so passionate about her work, ready to spend that extra hour or two practicing her lines and songs to get the best possible result. Their discussions over coffee aside, she’d sent him letters during his brief time deployed, with updates on the studio and little details of home that he had so desperately missed. Susie had been there for him upon his return, more than willing to ramble on about the charming young man she’d met while he was away to distract him from the pain and flashbacks. 

Communication between them had abruptly cut off after he left the studio for good, something Henry’d always assumed Joey to be responsible for.

Guess I was right, he thought humorlessly, it just wasn’t the way I was thinking. 

When Henry finally felt ready to continue, the weight of her death—no, her murder—didn’t feel quite so heavy on his heart, having lessened as he remembered her during the good times they’d had.

Henry knew how to deal with grief. You couldn’t survive a war with your mind intact without learning. 

Emotionally and mentally letting Susie go, he pushed himself to his feet, wiping the last few tears from his face. “So. That creature I saw.”

There wasn’t a moment’s pause before Alice said, “We call them Amalgamates. Those disgusting freaks are what happens when two different designs are rearranged into one monster.”

“It looked like it hurt.” Henry retrieved his axe, feeling marginally more comfortable armed. 

Alice snorted. “Who cares? They’re about as mindless as Searchers.”

Frowning, he glanced at the door. “As what?”

“Oh, didn’t I mention? Silly me. I believe you called the one you encountered a sludge-monster.”

“Those are called Searchers?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Henry swallowed. “What are they searching for?”

“Anything they can drag into the ink with them, those filthy slugs!” She followed that with a wordless scream that was full of nothing short of pure loathing.

It took Alice a moment to compose herself, and when she did, it was to give Henry his next task. 

“I need five power cells. You’ll find them in valve panels. To remove them, turn the little wheels.” The speakers clicked off. 

Taking a deep breath, Henry gave himself a little shake. He’d get through this; he just had to play errand boy for a little longer, and then he’d be free.

And he would do something about this mess Joey made, if it was the last thing he ever did.

• • • • • 

Having passed several valve panels while hunting for the gears, Henry was able to find the first three without any problems. At one point, he’d seen ‘Bendy’s wall shadows up ahead, but he managed to backtrack without being spotted. 

The Searchers, however, were being a tad more problematic. It seemed like they sprang up around every corner he turned, in every room he entered. When he first entered a glass-walled chamber that bore a disturbing resemblance to an operating room and wasn’t immediately faced with a groaning torso of ink, it made him wary. He turned the valves with one eye glancing over his shoulder. It wasn’t until he had the power core in hand and he was distracted by a blueprint for the Ink Machine pinned on the wall that he was nearly overpowered. An entire group of Searchers appeared out of nowhere, approaching all at once. 

One after another, he cut them down with his axe. The last one, though, ducked his swing and lunged straight at him. Henry fell backwards under its weight, head cracking painfully on the standalone table. 

“Get off me,” he growled, trying to shove it away. Like when he touched ‘Bendy,’ though, his hand began to sink into the Searcher’s ink. He shoved the axe at it, but without the momentum, the blade didn’t do much more than piss it off. 

With a hiss, the Searcher dove forward and crashed its face against Henry’s. It didn’t hurt, and for a split second, Henry wondered if that was all it could do.

But then the ink began to force its way into his mouth. Choking, he desperately wiggled the axe between them and shoved straight up as hard as he could.

It shrieked and toppled off him. Only managing to surge to his knees, Henry raised his weapon above his head and brought it down with all his might.  The Searcher burst apart on the floor, the blade lodging into the wood beneath it. 

Henry tried to take a deep breath, but the ink in his throat made it impossible. Twisting to the side, he vomited. He kept gagging until his spit came out without any black in it. 

Once he felt like he could breathe cleanly again, Henry reached up and felt the back of his head. There was a small bump from where he’d hit the table, and when he checked his fingers, they were smeared with blood. Fantastic. 

He sprawled on the ground for a moment of rest, the axe still sticking up out of the floorboards. His body shook as he came down from the adrenaline rush. 

Outside the room, ink whispered along the walls. Henry watched it form in dread, too noodle-limbed to do anything about it. His best hope was that ‘Bendy’ hadn’t heard the commotion.

Sure enough, when ‘Bendy’ appeared, he didn’t seem to be in a rush. No, he merely limped along at a sedate pace, not so much as glancing through the window at Henry. A massive ink puddle soaked through the wall he was walking towards, and to Henry’s astonishment, he disappeared straight through it like it was a door. 

It and the shadow marks abruptly vanished. The hallway looked just as it had before.

“You little cheater,” Henry said softly. 

• • • • •

Henry dumped the five power cores into the dropbox.

Alice’s laughter drifted from the speakers. “Had a bit of a close encounter, hmm?” 

He scowled down at the ink soaking through his clothes and staining his hands. Though Henry couldn’t see his face, he’d bet that there were still remnants of black smears around his mouth. His already dirty shirt sleeve could only go so far, after all. Henry just really hoped the cuts were still clean.

“Yeah,” he said over her continued giggles, shifting his grip on his axe. “Hilarious.”

“Oh, come now, Henry. A girl’s gotta find amusement somewhere.”

Henry took a deep breath. “You promised me answers, Alice.” 

She was quiet for a long moment. From somewhere below them came a long, echoing screech. 

“When you first saw me, you asked what happened. Presumably, you meant to me.”

Without interrupting, Henry nodded. 

“Joey Drew will always be to blame, but in my case, he didn’t act alone. The ink. It makes up everything alive down here, and there are so very many of us that become a part of it sooner or later. There are voices—continuous, screaming voices. Once it drags you in, it’s so hard to get out. It shatters you, breaks you into pieces until there are bits of your mind, swimming, like… like fish in a bowl!”

Henry winced as Alice’s voice grew louder and higher-pitched. 

“It’s why I stay in my sanctuary. I refuse to return to the ink, I refuse! Do you hear me, Ink Demon? I will not allow you to touch me again!”

“Can you not?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder. The last thing he needed was to be cornered by ‘Bendy’ here, where the only way back to the lift was a narrow bridge and a single staircase. He’d be a sitting duck. 

“So the ink,” Henry said, trying to find the right words, “it’s… it’s like a hive mind?”

“Yes. And its sole purpose is to absorb more, always more. It won’t matter that you’re human; it will take you just as it would take any of the rest of us.” 

Shaking his head, Henry wet his lips. “I don’t believe that—I can’t believe that. If something’s capable of creating, then its only purpose can’t be to destroy.” He looked down at the axe. “It’s like anything in the world. Nothing is inherently good or bad. It just depends on how it’s used. And by who.”

Alice hmphed, and he easily imagined her physically turning her nose up.

“Right,” Henry said quietly. “I suppose it doesn’t matter to you.”

There was so much potential; everywhere he turned, Henry saw something that should’ve been amazing. Instead, because of the way Joey dealt with all this, everything was wrong. Just the thought of leaving the studio the way it was made Henry feel empty inside. 

Raising his voice, Henry asked, “Look, Alice. I got you your gears and power cores. Can I please leave now?”

“Not quite yet, my little errand boy.” 

It took everything Henry had in him not to say I’m not that short. 

“I have one last task for you, and then you will be free to go.”

You can’t even make that sound convincing, Henry thought. Regardless, he waved his hand to signal her to continue.

“You may have noticed the number of cardboard cutouts littered throughout the studio. For your final task—”

Henry blinked. “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he said, straight-faced. 

Alice didn’t even stumble at his interruption. “—I want you to destroy as many of them as you can possibly find! Your axe will be perfect for the job.”

“Yeah, or. Instead of pissing ‘Bendy’ off, I can use my axe to break in there and—oh, wow, look at all this ink I’m covered in—”

“No!” she cried, voice going high-pitched. “Fine, fine! I’ll allow you to take the lift to the roof.”

He breathed a sigh of relief; he wasn’t sure what he would’ve done if his bluff hadn’t worked. “Thank you. I’ll come back, y’know, to fix all this. As soon as I can.”

Henry started to walk away, pausing when he heard Alice quietly say, with a fair amount of scorn in her voice, “We already have one Liar, Henry. Don’t make yourself out to be another.”

“What?” He was too late; the speakers clicked off as soon as Alice’d finished talking. 

Shaking his head to try to put the strange words out of mind, Henry continued on his way. The button for the roof, as promised, was lit. 

He hesitated, one finger poised over it. A bad feeling churned in his gut. It seemed too easy… and yet, Henry pressed the button, if only because he couldn’t imagine why Alice would lie. At this point, there’d be no reason to stop him; she had to know that he wouldn’t go back to helping her if she betrayed him. And if she didn’t want his help, then the only thing she could gain now by going back on her word would be Henry himself, and that didn’t make sense. 

What would she possibly want Henry for?

The elevator chugged upwards. Henry stood towards the back, axe clutched in both hands. 

There was a speaker above the floor selection panel. He glared at it and whispered, “Don’t you dare.”

Counting off the floors in his head, he was so close—just a few more—when the speaker crackled to life. Alice was in the middle of cackling hysterically when it fully turned on.

“Did you really think I’d just let you go?” she cried. 

“To be honest, not really,” he said, though he doubted she could hear him.

“No, Henry!” she continued, “I know who you are! And I know why you’re here! I need you to make me beautiful again!”

Henry frowned. There it was again, Alice saying that she knew who he was. But, he was just Henry. Why did she make it sound like something that mattered?

The lift ground to a halt between floors, trapping him. Okay, this was fine. He could probably fight his way out when she came to get him—

A click from the ceiling was the only warning Henry had before the floor dropped out from underneath him. He wasn’t able to suppress a shout as he stumbled. The lift free-fell. 

“Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it?” she shouted over the sound of screeching metal. “You’re mine!”

Oh, not that again. “Are you crazy?” Henry yelled, trying to brace himself with something. “I can’t do anything for you if I’m dead!”

He cried out again as the sharp sound of squealing brakes filled his ears. It wasn’t working, though—the lift—

“Alice! It’s still going too fast—”

With a horrifying crash, the world exploded around Henry, and he knew no more. 

• • • • •

Blurry. Distorted. Smoke, heat—was… there a fire? He was surrounded by many sharp things, poking his back and his sides and his arms and his neck—his cheek felt wet, but he didn’t think he was crying. Was he crying?

Henry’s head lolled.

Why couldn’t he move? What… what happened?

He blinked sluggishly. Breathing hurt.

There was something in the darkness. Moving. It was… it was coming towards him. What—who was it?

Everything sounded muffled, like there was cotton or liquid in his ears. But he could still hear the humming. 

It was very pretty humming. Angelic, almost. 

The shape of Alice Angel resolved itself in front of him. Oh. She was the thing—the someone in the darkness. 

A little voice in his head told him to find his axe. That was a good idea, only—he couldn’t remember why. Run, the little voice insisted. I don’t think I can, he told it. 

Alice was talking, but the words didn’t make any sense. “The Creator himself practically falls right into my lap. As if I would ever let you go.” 

Henry’s head lolled some more. It took longer for his eyes to reopen after every blink.

He was so tired. Maybe… maybe he could sleep? Just for a little while. 

Black crept across his remaining vision like ‘Bendy’s wall shadows. Before he succumbed, however, he could’ve sworn he heard Alice screech. In anger? Hatred? Pain? 

Someone’s hand wrapped around Henry’s upper arm, tugging insistently, but the abyss had finally surged up and swallowed what little of his consciousness remained.

Chapter Text

Henry opened his eyes. 

He stood in a void. A spotlight with no source shone down on him, illuminating his lack of surroundings. He blinked and squinted into the darkness; he saw nothing, no walls or ceiling, no beginning or end. Looking down, there was just a shiny black surface— pure ink—beneath his shoes, rippling with each minute movement. 

A familiar screech echoed around him. He whirled, but in the utter blackness, he had no way to tell where ‘Bendy’ was. 

A clank from his right sent him spinning, trying to orient himself. “Who’s there?” he called, his voice stretching into infinity. 

Alice’s corrupted laughter answered him. “As if I’d ever let you go!” she cackled, only to abruptly fall silent a moment later.

Something moaned, sounding far away, and the clack clack clack of Edgar’s teeth burst into existence, his limp growing more discernible as the little toon grew closer. 

Henry stepped in the opposite direction, the spotlight following him. The ink shivered. 

A hand clawed up out of it, wrapping around his ankle. Henry had just enough time to see the Searcher’s gouged eyes before it yanked his foot out from under him, sending him crashing down to the floor. 

The splash he caused escaped gravity, rising up around him like the Amalgamate’s solid wave. Alive, it surged over his body, forcing its way down Henry’s throat and smothering his limbs.

He shouted, lurching up. Panting, his eyes darted around. 

He was in one of the studio’s original hallways. 

“Henry!” 

His neck cracked from how sharply he turned his head. 

“Joey?” Henry stumbled to his feet, backing away from his ex-friend. How had he gotten back up here? That wasn’t, somehow, his greatest concern at the moment.

‘Bendy' loomed over Joey’s shoulder, his grinning smile following Henry’s every move. His gaze drifted a little farther up from the demon’s sharp teeth, and he sucked in a breath. 

‘Bendy’s eyes were visible. But there was something wrong; the ovals, instead of being pie-cut, were made to look deeply set into his face—like eye sockets—with a circle inside, and in each circle was a pinprick dot. 

“I knew you would see reason, my friend,” Joey said, opening his arms. “Welcome home, Henry.” 

Henry just continued to back up, never letting his gaze stray from Joey and ‘Bendy,’ who was curiously tilting his head this way and that. 

Joey frowned when Henry didn’t answer. Ink began to leak from his eyes, dripping slowly down his cheeks. “You still refuse to see reason, then. Very well—” he flicked his fingers at his retreating friend— “get him.” 

A vaguely human-sounding laugh exploded from ‘Bendy’ as he melted around Joey, reforming in front of him. Henry whirled around and ran, listening to Joey’s laugh fade away as ‘Bendy’s pounding footsteps grew closer.

It was just a straight corridor, no doors or objects, no turns or weapons. Henry couldn’t even see an end to it. 

‘Bendy’ screeched from directly behind him, right as Henry’s shirt went tight and he was jerked off the ground. 

“Let go!” he shouted, struggling against the ink as ‘Bendy’s body began to absorb him. “Let go of me, you—”

‘Bendy’s gloved hand engulfed his face.

Henry gasped, flinching as he opened his eyes. He was sitting at his work desk, a little puddle of drool next to some storyboards. 

“Henry? Are you all right?”

His fingers dug into the chair’s armrests as he glanced behind him to see Susie standing there. She wore a kind smile on her face, and held two cups of coffee.

“Susie,” he said. But that wasn’t right; Joey had killed Susie, had done something to her to make her part of that corrupted Alice Angel. 

She carefully set one of the cups down on his side desk, where it wouldn’t damage anything if it spilled— a lesson learned the hard way. 

Susie took a sip of her own. “Have some,” she said. “You look like you need it. Is your leg bothering you again?” 

“My leg? My leg hasn’t bothered me in—” he looked down, right as his mind processed the truth that the studio’s chairs didn’t have armrests.

Feeling like his heart was about to beat out of his chest, Henry stared at the wheelchair he was sat in. The wheelchair that he hadn’t used in years.

“But that’s—this isn’t real. What happened, why is this—” 

Susie placed her hand on his wrist. “You’re really worrying me now, Henry. Of course this is real, why wouldn’t it be?” 

“You’re dead.”

She reeled backwards. “What?” 

Ignoring the way his breathing was growing faster and faster, Henry lurched to his feet. This was just a dream, which meant—

Henry crashed down into the dirt, feeling like his heart had stopped. Pain, there was only pain. The sounds around him were muffled, shouting and machinery and a rapid bang bang bang bang. Everything slowed down as he lifted his head.

One of his army buddies stared at him in shock from not ten feet away. His mouth moved, and though Henry couldn’t hear him with the world so muted, he could tell that the man had shouted his name.

Moving through molasses, Henry peered over his shoulder. 

Three spots of red bloomed through the dull gray-tan of his uniform. His right leg was numb with agony. The blood pooled underneath him, turning to ink as it soaked into the ground. 

Between all three bullets, the doctors would say, you should be dead. 

Hands rolled Henry onto his back. Other hands, gloved hands—massive and white with black ovals on the back—pressed against the wounds. He started screaming, and didn’t stop.

You’ll never walk again, the doctors would tell him as a nurse rolled a wheelchair into his room. 

Watch me, he’d think as the doctors left, as they discharged him—first from the hospital and then from the army—as he returned to the studio, as Joey yelled at him, as everyone told him to give up already. 

Watch me. 

Henry came awake silently. 

The drawn wood of the studio stared back at him from the ceiling. The only sound in the room beyond his own breathing was the gentle tick tick tick of a dancing Bendy clock on the opposite wall.

He was lying on a cot. Other than a trunk in the corner with a hammock hanging over it, the small room was empty of anything else. Without moving, Henry examined everything he could—both for his own peace of mind, and to let his heart calm down. His entire body felt wired with adrenaline, yet still sore and partially numb. His eyes grimaced with the pressure of a headache, his stomach seemed ready to empty itself—was there even anything in it, though? He hadn’t eaten since the morning he went to the studio, and he had no idea how long ago that’d been—and with every breath he drew into his lungs, a sharp pinch rocketed up his sides. 

Something was very wrong. If only he could remember what happened.

Henry closed his eyes and concentrated. He’d met Alice, who sent him to find things; ‘Bendy’ had chased him and had momentarily caught him from the other side of the lift’s bars; seeing the poor Amalgamate and finding out that Susie had died to make Alice—his eyes clenched tighter at the thought—the close encounter with the Searcher…

“Alice dropped the elevator,” he said as his memories flooded back, “with me in it.” 

He dragged his hands down his face with a deep sigh that only made his chest hurt worse. He stared up at the ceiling. No wonder he felt like he’d been run over by a tank.

Going limp on the surprisingly comfortable cot, Henry scolded himself, “That’s what I get for hoping an angel with a dark side would keep her end of a deal. Especially with the way she talked.” 

Oh, well. There was no use moping about it now. Slipping out from under the blanket, Henry planted his bare feet on the floorboards—blissfully ink-free—and took stock of his beaten and bruised body. 

The first thing he noticed were the bandages wrapped messily around his… well, his everything. Shirtless and pant-less, the white strips covered his chest, arms, and legs. Reaching up, Henry felt what he’d missed before—more gauze around his head. Sitting up made him more aware of his ribs—undoubtably bruised at the very least. 

Carefully, he undid the covering on his left arm. All up and down it, from shoulder to elbow, were scratches—the thin ones looked mostly healed; how long had he been unconscious for them to progress so far?—and a few puncture wounds. Several of the larger marks, like a scrape on the inside of his forearm that was still uncomfortably red and shiny and fresh-looking, appeared bad enough to leave scars. 

The only blemish that was old and faded was on his upper arm, going diagonal from the underside to the outside, midway between his elbow and shoulder. A shallow bullet graze. It had been nothing more than a mild abrasion at the time.

But if this was how his arm had fared after the fall, Henry didn’t much want to imagine his back, which had taken the brunt of the impact if he remembered correctly. 

Henry redid the wrapping, tightening it up a bit. He’d explore the rest later, but for now, he wanted to find out how he went from the wreckage at the bottom of the elevator shaft to a bed, all bandaged up.

He desperately hoped it wasn’t Joey or anyone else who might have ulterior motives for saving him. Standing, he knew his body wouldn’t be able to handle a chase or fight. 

The room had a single door. There was nothing Henry could do but hope that there wasn’t an enemy beyond it. 

As soon as Henry stepped out of the room, a song he hadn’t heard in ages filled his ears. A smile crept across his face at the familiar tune of ‘Thinking of You.’ Resisting the urge to hum along, Henry cautiously made his way down the hallway. The first doorway he came to housed a counter with inset sinks and a few toilet stalls.

It was empty, but Henry stepped inside regardless, avoiding some ink trickling from the ceiling on the way. 

The mirror, though cracked around the edges and a bit smudged in places, showed him a reflection that made him seriously question how long he’d been down here. 

Henry looked pale, as though he’d been out of the sun for months, not a day or so, made all the worse by the dark smudges standing out beneath his blue eyes. A combination of blood loss and his injuries—and possibly a lack of food and water, depending on if he’d been unconscious for more than a few hours, which he suspected he had been—would do that, he knew. The bandage around his still-throbbing skull primarily covered his forehead, leaving a number of smaller cuts exposed on his cheeks. 

From his face-plant into the elevator bars, no doubt. They looked a little irritated, but not too bad all things considered. Hopefully they didn’t get any worse. 

He carefully lifted the edge of the gauze to peek underneath. Vaguely remembering something dripping on his cheek after the fall, he wasn’t surprised to find a sizable gash across his forehead, starting at the outside corner of his left eyebrow and cutting up towards the center of his hairline. 

Wonderful. 

Smoothing the bandage back down, Henry leaned closer to the mirror. Faint smears of black covered his face and neck, along with the minimal amount of exposed skin on his shoulders and chest. Someone had tried to wipe the ink off him. 

His gaze drifted up. Whoever had been kind enough to do that had evidently also attempted to do the same to his hair. In a few places, his chestnut brown hair was stained black. Thanks to the ink, it stuck out funnily, almost like Joey’s used to after he’d run his fingers through it in stress or frustration. 

He shuddered, remembering the Joey from his dream, bleeding ink from his eyes and sending ‘Bendy’ after him. Was it accurate, he wondered. Would ‘Bendy’ just sort of… absorb him?

Best not to think about it.

Instead, Henry glanced down at the sinks. Tempting as it was to take a drink, he didn’t know if the water would be safe for a human; plus, his stomach grumbled unhappily at the thought of filling it. With a nod, he left the room—he’d come back once he didn’t think he was in danger of throwing up—to continue down the hall in search of his host. Or hosts. 

Turning a corner, he entered what appeared to be the main room of this living set up. A table with several chairs around it stood opposite from him, playing cards spread out across its surface. Next to it was a stove-oven combination, with a pot and everything. 

To his left was a heavy-looking door, with a place for a lever—which, to Henry’s disconcertion, was missing—on the wall beside it. It was seeing the exit that sparked his memory of drawing this room.

He’d asked Wally if he had any ideas for what Henry could add, and the man had looked him in the eyes and said, “A safehouse. For the apocalypse.” Turned out, Wally’d been watching a horror movie with monsters the night before. Henry had still drawn the reinforced area, perfect for hiding from zombies. 

At least it’s more or less being used for its intended purpose, Henry thought.

Unfortunately, without that lever, Henry was trapped for the foreseeable future. The very thing designed to keep monsters out might just spell his doom by keeping him in. It would all depend on what role his rescuer decided to play: hero, or villain. 

From behind him came a faint gasp. Half-dreading who he’d see, Henry slowly turned on his heel.

He frowned. A sense of déjà vu washed over him.

“Alice?”

This Alice was on-model. Shorter, more cartoony, with pie-cut eyes and a glowing halo that thankfully wasn’t embedded in her skull, this Alice stared at him with her hands over her mouth.

“You’re awake,” she whispered. 

Henry nearly sagged in relief. Her voice was normal; there was no corruption to be found on her.

“You’re actually awake,” she said a little louder. Before he could respond, she turned to call over her shoulder into the part of the safehouse he hadn’t checked out yet, “Bendy! He’s awake!” 

Henry’s heart skipped a beat or two. She couldn’t possibly mean the enormous toon who seemed determined to catch him, right? Footsteps hurried closer. A blur of black rounded the corner and—

He couldn’t quite believe his eyes.

It was Bendy, the way Henry had designed him. Not a drop of ink was out of place on the drastically smaller toon; his eyes were visible and on-model, his bowtie and gloves were pristine, his feet weren’t facing the wrong way, and his horns weren’t elongated or widely set apart. 

They stared at him; he stared back.

Please, Henry thought, don’t make me have to fight them, too. 

Even as he watched, Bendy’s eyes started to go off-model, the ink bubbling oddly at the corners—no. No, he wasn’t going off-model. He was crying. 

Henry didn’t have kids, and he was an only child without any siblings to produce nieces or nephews. But he would never ever deny the fact that, cartoon drawings they might’ve been, these toons were probably the closest thing he’d ever get. Acting on instinct alone and hoping he wasn’t misreading the situation, Henry knelt down on one knee and opened his arms. 

Without a word passing between any of the three of them, both toons made sounds too close to desperate sobs for Henry’s liking and rushed forward, straight into his embrace. 

It was the first time he came into contact with one of the ink-based creatures in a non-life threatening situation. His hands didn’t sink into their bodies, and they didn’t leave black marks wherever they touched. No, they were solid and warm—not quite the same temperature as a human being, but it was unmistakably the warmth of life. 

A little disbelieving laugh escaped Henry; gosh, they were alive, his toons, his creations—they were alive! He clutched them tight, their gloved fingers curled against his skin; he knew that if he had a shirt on, they’d be holding it like they planned on never letting go. 

None of them moved for a long time. It took Henry a moment to understand, but he eventually realized both of them were saying something, muffled against his chest. Every few seconds, Alice said, “You’re okay, you’re really okay,” as though she just couldn’t believe it. He must’ve been in worse shape after the fall than he’d thought. And he still didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious. Heck, he’d probably worried them both out of their minds!

Bendy, like a record stuck skipping on the same words over and over, kept repeating, “You’re here, you’re here, you’re here.”

“Yeah,” Henry said, ducking his head down so his was somewhat nestled between theirs, “yeah, I am.”

It didn’t matter that he didn’t know who he was saying it to. As far as he was concerned, it was an answer meant for both of them. What injuries marked his skin and bruised him to his bones amounted to nothing compared to what he’d gone through before. If he could relearn to walk without so much as needing a cane, then some wonky ribs and a concussion weren’t going to slow him down for long.

And he might not know why something as simple as being there would mean so much to Bendy, but that didn’t change the fact that he was. It was intimidating to hear it said in such a way, like he was an answer to a long-whispered prayer, especially considering some of the things Joey and Alice—or, he amended, ‘Alice’—had said. We all know you, she’d told him.

But why? How? 

Henry shook the thoughts from his head. That whole mess would be dealt with later. Right now, he had two shivering, obviously touch-starved toons in his arms. 

And they, he decided as he scooped them up so he could stand, would always come first.

Dodging the ink dripping from the ceiling, Henry retraced his steps back to the bedroom he’d woken up in. As comfy as the cot had been, he knew how calming rocking in the hammock would be.

It took some determined maneuvering, but Henry managed to climb into the hammock without letting go of either toon. He settled into the soft curve of fabric, each arm cradling one of them half on his chest. Luckily, they were small enough that their weight didn’t aggravate his ribs. 

Back and forth, Henry propelled the extremely makeshift rocking chair with careful twists of his body. He hummed one of the cartoon’s old songs, letting the noise rumble deep in his chest as another way of letting them know that, yeah—he was okay, and he was there. 

In that moment, with two of his greatest, most precious creations tucked up tight against him and 'Thinking of You’ still playing faintly from the main room through the open door, everything that had happened to Henry since he had arrived at the studio was infinitely, amazingly worth it. 

Just to reach this point, this peace. 

And for that moment, as it stretched longer and longer—leaving their sobs and lonely, desperate ramblings behind and replacing those heartbreaking noises with quiet, sighing contentment and soft smiles of happiness—Henry forgot about Joey and his insanity, about the creatures that would have Henry dead at their hands, about ‘Alice’ and her admittedly unsurprising betrayal. 

Worries and pain had no place in that hammock, not right then. 

• • • • •

Henry must’ve dozed off, as he found himself slowly waking up an indeterminable amount of time later. Feeling more rested than he had in ages, he carefully stretched, trying to avoid jostling the toons in case they were still sleeping. 

When he tilted his chin down to look at them, it was obvious that Alice was still safely in dreamland. On his right, though, Bendy stared back at him. Henry could feel how tense he was.

“Did I wake you?” Henry whispered.

Bendy shook his head. His hand had changed positions since Henry had settled into the hammock. Instead of tucked between their bodies, now it pressed flat against the bandages over Henry’s heart. 

Bendy took a deep breath. “I had a dream…” he said quietly. “I had a dream that it wasn’t real. That you hadn’t woken up, or you weren’t here at all.”

“I’m here. I promise, I’m here.”

Sniffling, Bendy nodded. His little shoulders relaxed.

Henry sighed. “I just wish I knew more about why I’m here. And how you guys knew who I was. That other ‘Alice,’ too.”

“I can help you with that second one. How we know you.”

A smile cracked Henry’s face. “Really?” he asked. “I’m all ears.”

Grinning back at him, Bendy wiggled closer to Henry. “It’s easy: ’cause yer our Creator.”

“I know I designed you guys, but that doesn’t explain why—”

“No,” Bendy said, shaking his head again. “You didn’t just design us. You created us.”

That didn’t make any sense. Henry hadn’t even been to the studio in years before now, how could he have created them? Besides— “Bendy… Joey’s the one that made the Ink Machine. And, well, doesn’t that mean he created—”

“No!”

Both Henry and a newly-awakened Alice startled at Bendy’s cry. Tears formed in the corners of his eyes, and he sat up to lean over Henry.

“No!” he cried again. “Joey’s not our Creator, he’s the Liar! You’re our Creator, you gave us life—not him!”

After everything he’d gone through, Henry expected that he would’ve been afraid at the vehemence in Bendy’s voice. Instead, without hesitation, he raised his right arm to pull Bendy down again.

“Hey,” he said softly. “C’mon, it’s okay.” Henry continued to calm Bendy down as Alice watched. 

“Henry,” she said once Bendy had stopped shaking. He looked at her. “What Bendy means is that Joey made us, in that he gave us our physical bodies. But you created us.”

“And he lied about it,” Bendy added, voice muffled against Henry’s shoulder. “Only one of ya gave us life, and it wasn’t the Liar!”

Henry glanced between the two of them. “That’s the second time you’ve called him that. The Liar, like it’s a title.” 

“It sorta is, Henry,” Alice said. “Just like you’re the Creator, Joey’s the Liar.” 

Something cold seeped through Henry’s heart. “What else did he lie about?” he asked.

Bendy snorted and raised his head. “He tried to convince us that you abandoned us. That you left because you didn’t care.”

Henry only managed to avoid lurching upright in indignation at the last second, remembering that he had two toons sprawled over him. His injuries probably wouldn’t much appreciate sudden movement like that either. Henry liked to think he was a fairly level-headed person, but Joey had always been one of the few people who could bring out his more extreme reactions. 

Drawing and animating had always been his entire life, his greatest joy, and his most sincere passion. Even after his and Joey’s last confrontation after his return, he hadn’t simply given up on his dreams—it wasn’t the same, of course, but then, what could possibly compare? And Joey had the audacity to tell Henry’s own creations that Henry left because he just didn’t care anymore? 

“Every time I turn around,” Henry said under his breath, “I find one more reason to give Joey a good ole sucker punch right in the kisser.” 

Alice giggled into her hands and Bendy’s smile stretched wider. 

Addressing them once more, Henry looked back and forth between the two. “You have to believe me, I never woulda left this place on my own. That good-for-nothing piece of—”

“We know, Henry,” Alice said, patting his chest. 

“Yeah! We knew you’d never leave us like he said you did!”

“But… how could you—”

As one, Bendy and Alice answered, “Because we know you.”

Henry stared. That… that really only raised more questions, if he was honest. Before he could voice any of them, though, his stomach made its presence known with a truly terrifying rumble. 

Both toons whipped their heads around to look in the general direction of his bandage-wrapped bellybutton. They slowly turned back to him. Bendy looked like he was about to hurt himself from smiling too hard, and Alice had one hand pressed tightly to her mouth, though the crinkle of her eyes gave away the laughter she was holding in.

Henry cleared his throat. “Uh, I don’t suppose you have anything to eat?”

• • • • •

The bacon soup could’ve been worse. Sitting for close to a decade in the bowels of the studio didn’t do it any favors, but Henry counted himself lucky that it hadn’t been left for any longer, say… thirty years. 

How the cans—and according to Alice, there were a lot of cans—got down there in the first place, Henry didn’t have a clue. He certainly hadn’t drawn them, he knew that much. But then, the room with the toy machine had been filled beyond what he’d done with his sketching pencil. Had Joey actually tried to make use of these lower levels before they were overrun with his rejects?

Henry watched them as he ate the soup Bendy had heated up while Alice had been helping him check his injuries. His back, as he’d suspected, was the worst off. He’d also gotten the surprise of his life when Alice told him that he’d been unconscious for nearly six days, struggling through a fever as—nightmares come true—his body had fought infections within the cuts on his face. 

Part of the reason she’d been so excited to see him moving around was that he’d apparently regained consciousness on a number of occasions for anywhere between a few minutes and an hour over the course of that almost-week, though he hadn’t been coherent. Henry had no memory of any of it. 

“We mostly used those times to get you to eat and drink,” Alice had told him, standing on the cot next to him to re-bandage his head. “We might not know that much about humans, but we knew you’d need that if we wanted you to have any chance of getting better.”

Henry had smiled at her. “You did the right thing. If I’d gotten too dehydrated…”

They’d both shuddered. 

“Y’know,” he said, gaining their attention from across the table. “There’s something I just don’t get. Joey said that the studio down here was full of—well, he called them rejects, but they’re only off-model is all. But you two aren’t. You’re both perfectly on-model. So, why are you down here, too?”

Bendy and Alice looked at each other. She gave him a slight nod, and Bendy sighed. 

“Joey wasn’t so bad in the beginning. Sure, he seemed like he was missin’ a few screws, but… we didn’t think much of it.” The notches in Bendy’s eyes shifted to show that he was looking down at Henry’s bowl of soup. He didn’t continue until Henry resumed eating. 

“The way he talked gave us the jitters sometimes, but it wasn’t till we asked where you were that we started to catch on, I s’pose. He told us that you’d abandoned us. And we didn’t believe him. Maybe things woulda been okay, but then he said that he created us, and we shouldn’t worry about you.” 

Between mouthfuls, Henry asked, “And you just knew he was lying?” 

Reaching across the table to wrap his gloved hand around Henry’s wrist, Bendy pinned the man with a stare. “You gotta understand something, Henry. Every toon—every last one of us capable of thought— knows exactly who gave them life.”

Alice nodded along. “And we knew our Creator sure wasn’t Joey.”

“It sounds crazy, though. I mean—neither of you had even met me before today! How could you just know who I was?”

“We didn’t need to meet you,” Alice said. “It’s like… for years and years, you gave us all this life, from the moment you started drawing us. And once Joey’s Ink Machine made us, we suddenly had it for real. You put a part of yourself in us, and it’s such a great and wonderful part, there’s no way we could ever not know you.” 

Henry let this sink in for a moment. “I… I really did create you then,” he finally said, in awe. 

Bendy and Alice watched with shining eyes as Henry laughed joyously. 

Once he’d calmed down a bit, he asked, “Does that have anything to do with what the other ‘Alice’ wanted me for?”

They nodded. 

“But why did she go wrong, and you guys didn’t?”

“Well,” Alice said, lowering her eyes, “even though you’re our—Alice Angel’s—Creator, Joey didn’t use a sketch of yours for her. All of the toons that Joey says are rejects didn’t have your life.”

Henry fell back in his chair. My Ink Machine only works properly when it’s your drawings put into it, Joey had said. 

But what makes me the Creator? Why would my designs work but not Joey’s? Henry wondered to himself. Could it be as simple as they said? That he naturally poured his heart and soul into his characters, giving them life and thus creating them in a way the Ink Machine couldn’t? It meant Joey had found and used his art, and it made sense. Considering Joey’s speech about Henry being able to create anything so long as he could draw it, combined with the bitterness in his voice when he said the Machine only accepted Henry’s sketches…

It might not be Henry’s fault that Joey brought them to life, but those toons were all hurting because of something as simple as who drew their bodies. But… did that mean— “Can I help them? If my drawings work, can I—I don’t know—heal them?”

He watched them exchange a very serious look.“We’re really hoping you can,” Bendy said, spreading his hands. “Y’see, Henry, we need yer help. Boris—”

“Boris?” Henry jerked up, looking around as though Boris was standing just out of sight. “He’s alive, too?”

“We aren’t sure anymore,” Alice admitted, “because Joey has him. And there’s no telling what he might’ve done to poor Boris, so if he is hurt…”

“I’d be able to help him.” 

“Would you, though?” she asked. “I don’t mean to doubt you, but after ‘Alice,’ we’d understand if you don’t want to trust us so soon.”

Henry stared at her. The difference between the two existing versions—in both Alice and Bendy’s cases—was like that of night and day. Not just in how on- or off-model they were; Henry’s gut had very much known not to trust ‘Alice,’ and ‘Bendy’ definitely had it out for him. But these toons? They’d been excited to see Henry, they had helped him and taken care of him, and were even now saying that if he needed time to think about it, he could. 

A smile twitched the corners of his lips. “I’m not particularly concerned,” Henry assured them. “So long as you don’t go dropping me down any elevator shafts, I think we’ll get along fine.” 

As he watched them giggle, a sudden thought occurred to Henry. He vaguely remembered seeing ‘Alice’ after the lift crashed, but everything else was a blank space in his mind. 

“What happened to her, anyway?” he asked, drawing their attention. “It’s still a bit fuzzy up here,” he waved his hand at his head, “so I’m not sure that what I do know is even right.” 

Bendy grinned and wiggled his fingers. “We chased her off. She doesn’t react too well with ink, so she’ll be hiding away for a while, lickin’ her wounds.”

“You didn’t just take care of me, then; you saved me from her, too.” He tapped the table. “And now it’s our turn to save Boris.”

“Yeah!” Bendy cried, leaping to his feet on his chair. “What are we waiting for?”

“For Henry to get better,” Alice said, tugging him back down. She shook her finger at Henry. “We aren’t going anywhere until you feel first-rate again. You’re only just recovered from that fever, and with the way you’ve been acting, I’d guess that it hurts when you breathe, so I ain’t letting you ruin all our hard work by going back out there before you’re properly healed up.”

Henry gave her a little mock salute. “Yes, ma’am. But—one last question.”

He waited until they’d given him the go-ahead. “You made it sound like Joey lying about being the Creator was—I dunno, the ultimate offense. Like that was the turning point somehow, and things just got worse from there. And—I’m not trying to be insensitive or anything, but, I guess I don’t understand why that meant so much to you.”

The toons were silent for a moment. Bendy finally spoke up, quiet and solemn, “Lyin’ to a toon that you’re their Creator is the worst fib you could ever tell. It’s more than just saying you thought them up, yer spitting at everything their real Creator made them to be. Y’know that other ‘Bendy'?”

“Yeah.”

“Joey used one of your old basic body sketches for him, and just added features over it himself. Since ‘Bendy’ was at least partially created by you, he’s not mindless like the Searchers or Amalgamates. But because of what Joey put in—his greed and desire for power, and just a bunch of overall nasty feelings—well… you know what ‘Bendy’s like. He’s a monster.”

“What you put in,” Henry said slowly, the full realization hitting him, “is what you get out.”

Bendy nodded. “And a fake Creator ain’t gonna get anything successful.”

A question sat on the edge of Henry’s tongue, and though he knew the answer couldn’t be bad, his nerves still thrummed in worry. It took a moment, but he finally asked through a dry throat, “What did—what did I put in?”

The crinkle between his eyebrows must’ve given away his anxious thoughts, as Alice hopped down from her chair to circle around the table, wrapping her arms around him, even as Bendy skipped the floor in favor of crossing over the table itself to join the small group-hug.

“You put a whole lotta love into us, Henry,” Alice said, snuggling into his side. 

“So much that a demon like me don’t know what to do with half of it!” Bendy added, beaming. 

Henry gripped them close. After a moment of silence, he whispered, “I’m going to fix this. None of you deserve any of what Joey’s done.”

Their heads tucked against him, he repeated the promise in his head. For Bendy and Alice, for Boris, for the toons like Edgar and the Amalgamate, for the mindless Searchers, for any others that might be trapped here in pain. For the friends that might’ve lost their lives to Joey’s insanity. For the peace they deserved. 

They stayed like that for a long time.

Chapter Text

By carefully keeping track of the Bendy clock in the bedroom, Henry watched two days slide by. Restlessness ate away at him; he wanted to get out there and do something, anything at all—just, he wanted to help. 

Alice was determined that he wouldn’t leave the safehouse until he could take a deep breath without wincing. Even Bendy, though anxious to go and rescue Boris, had sided with her, everything about his body drooping a bit when he mentioned how Henry really had been in pretty bad shape, and could he please take it easy?

Henry refrained from protesting after that, if only because he hated putting that expression on the little devil’s face. 

But now, he’d finally passed his ‘test,’ and they’d decided they’d leave after one last night of good rest. The toons were waiting for him at that very moment, ready for bed. In the bathroom, Henry gave his healing body a final once-over. Most of the bandages had come off within the past two days, leaving him with the strips covering the gash on his forehead—arguably one of the worst injuries he’d received from his elevator free-fall—and another around his upper left arm.

The toons didn’t know about that one. 

It was one of the wounds that had still looked uncomfortably fresh when he’d first woken up, and while it had improved considerably, that wasn’t why Henry decided to leave it wrapped. 

Just that morning, he’d felt it dripping and, thinking it had reopened somehow and was bleeding again, he’d gone to take care of it himself. Instead, he’d gotten the horrifying shock of his life when he discovered that the substance leaking from the laceration was black. 

Henry didn’t know what it meant, that he was bleeding ink. In fact, he couldn’t even seriously think about it without his breathing growing heavy from an impending panic attack, since all he could see was his nightmare of Joey, ink seeping from his eyes. 

He didn’t want to be like Joey. 

As he poked at the gash, he could feel his heartbeat race at the sight of the mottled edges; instead of the irritated red of infection, they were… well, they were dark gray. Stained. 

Taking a deep breath, Henry held a wad of gauze against the injury as he rewrapped it. He’d deal with it later. None of his other scrapes were like that, so, maybe he’d just gotten some ink in it by accident and now it was coming out. 

After making sure that the bandages couldn’t be seen through his shirt, he headed into the bedroom. Bendy and Alice beamed up at him, both patiently waiting on the cot. Despite the horrors they’d evidently lived through, there were moments when childlike qualities shined past all that—like their insistence on sleeping in the hammock with him. 

Not that Henry minded. Having two small bodies to hug close proved wonderfully effective at chasing away the nightmares. Even his subconscious seemed to be affected by their presence, and by the fact that Henry wasn’t truly alone anymore. 

Once they’d settled in, Henry gently rocking the hammock, he found he couldn’t sleep.

He still had so many questions about this place and the toons that lived here, and while he’d learned a little in the past two days, they’d mostly spent their time getting to know each other over card games.

One particular after-lunch conversation still burned red-hot in Henry’s mind: the revelation of the exact event that prompted the toons to ditch Joey.

“I played a lot of pranks,” Bendy had explained, “for all that there were only a couple’a people to pull pranks on. Just wasn’t much else to do. Joey never liked them, exactly, but… I guess one day enough was enough.”

Dread had weighed Henry’s stomach down. “What’d he do?”

Bendy had shrugged, like it wasn’t a big deal, even as his eyes lowered and his shoulders hunched in. “He hit me.”

The piece of wood Henry’d absently been whittling at the time had snapped clean in half. 

“He what.” 

Speaking quietly, he repeated, “Joey hit me. It was just a little knock upside my head—”

“A little knock, pff,” Alice had shaken her head. “Joey sent him flyin’ clear across the room!”

Henry had buried his face in his hands at that point, willing himself to stay sitting and not go marching upstairs to wring Joey’s neck. 

“It wasn’t that bad—”

“We tried to run away the next day, Bendy!”

“He’d been lying to us for ages, of course we booked it—”

Alice had slammed her hands on the table, silencing Bendy. “The lies made everything worse, yes. We’d been lookin’ for a real excuse to leave since he first tried to convince us he was our Creator, but you know as well as I do that we never woulda actually left without real evidence that he’d hurt us.”

“Wait—” they had both turned to Henry— “you tried to leave?”

“We didn’t know how we’d do it,” Bendy had said, “but we planned on trying to find you. Instead, Joey caught us before we could get too far, and then there was yelling, and we tried to hide, but we got separated and Joey—Joey, he—he—”

Henry had smoothly lifted the hyperventilating toon up and settled him against his chest. “Breathe, bud. You gotta breathe for me, ’kay?” He’d mimicked deep breaths until Bendy’s own had returned to normal. Only then had he looked up at Alice.

Having been waiting patiently, she’d finished the story, “Joey trapped Boris, and by the time we’d realized, it was too late. We haven’t been able to get to the main studio without Joey knowing. That’s why we don’t even know if Boris is still alive.”

“Henry?”

The bubble of Henry’s thoughts broke, and he peered through the darkness. Bendy appeared to be sleeping, but Alice was looking up at him. 

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded. “You’re all tense.”

Henry sighed. “Yeah, just… thinkin’ about things.” His eyes briefly cut to Bendy.

“What we told you about Joey, right?”

“Yeah. If I had only known—”

“You’re not allowed to blame yourself for what happened. It’s all Joey’s fault.” Alice’s hand clenched into a slightly trembling fist. “I wish he wasn’t so big, ’cause I can’t reach his face.”

Suppressing a slight smile, Henry said, “I’ll tell you a secret, if you’d like. A man’s greatest weakness is right within your punching range.” When she didn’t look like she understood, Henry thought for a moment. “Ah, I don’t suppose you remember episode thirty-four?”

Alice blinked a few times, and then her face lit up. “Oh! Really?”

“Yep. Now, I don’t want you to go and put yourself in danger, but if you ever get the chance, you punch that Liar dead in the nuts, all right?”

He smiled as he watched her giggle. “Will do, Henry!”

“Attagirl. Now, we should go to sleep. Big day tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” she said, wiggling a bit. “Do… do you think Boris is okay?”

Henry frowned up at the ceiling, the Bendy clock on the wall counting down the seconds until he reentered the hell beyond the safehouse doors. “I hope so, Alice. I really, really hope so.”

• • • • •

There was no fanfare in the morning. They rose, Henry ate and finished dressing, and the toons brought out the lever for the door. It swung open on creaky hinges.

“Ready?” Henry asked, staring into the dim hallway. 

They each gave him a determined nod, following after him as he strode over the threshold. 

“Keep your eyes peeled for anything we could use to defend ourselves with,” Henry told them. “A pipe, tools, even a piece of wood that’d be easy to hold.” 

“What about a toilet plunger?” Bendy asked.

Henry thought about it. “I suppose that would work. Let’s try to save that option as a last resort though,” he said. 

The three chatted quietly as they walked, backtracking occasionally when they encountered a blocked hallway or large group of Searchers.

“I wonder if there’s a way to save Susie,” Henry absently said as he lifted Alice up over a pile of barrels. When he turned to do the same for Bendy, he found the little toon shaking his head. 

“She was one of the first, Henry,” he said. They watched Henry pull himself up after them. “Joey messed up on her real bad. We’ve tried talking to her, but there just ain’t anything physical of Miss Campbell left.”

“Yeah,” Alice said. “She’s just a drop of water in a bucket of ink. It’s only gotten worse, too. It takes a lot to reach her these days.” 

They turned a corner. 

“If I get the chance, I’ll probably—” Henry looked farther down the hall and gasped. “‘Bendy!’”

He pulled the toons back around the corner with him, heart racing from the sight of the wall portal forming. There’d only just barely been a figure emerging from it, so hopefully they were safe. In their bubble of silence, Henry gestured Bendy and Alice—both wide-eyed and tense—behind him. Cautiously, slowly, he peeked down the corridor. 

Jerking back, he whispered, “He’s coming this way!” 

Together, they hurried in the opposite direction. They took a turn or two, finally forced to a stop after running directly into a dead-end blockage in the right arm of a T-junction. The left side was completely flooded with ink.

Just as they started to go back and find a different route, ink began to creep around the far corner. 

“We’ll have to go left,” Henry whispered. “Should I carry you guys?”

Alice shook her head, clutching the hem of Henry’s shirt. “Our ink’s more stable than most of the other toons. Unless it’s too deep.”

Knowing that he’d drawn some of the sunken corridors anywhere from two to seven steps lower than their surrounding ones, Henry carefully tested it out. He immediately sunk up to his mid-thighs in the stuff. Bendy was slightly shorter than his waist, Alice reaching only a few inches taller.

“Carrying us it is,” Bendy said, holding his arms out. 

Henry swung him up and around, so he was sitting on his shoulders with his legs dangling over Henry’s chest. Alice, he carefully took up in his arms. Moving as quickly but as quietly as possible, Henry sloshed down the hallway, sliding his feet along the obscured floor to avoid tripping over any unseen obstacles.

Bendy’s ankles dug in. “He’s getting closer.”

Grunting as he nearly stumbled over an overturned chair, Henry asked, “What are the chances that he’ll follow us through this?”

“He won’t,” Alice said, her halo flickering as she peered over his shoulder. “Too much trouble. Unless he has a reason to, like if he hears us.”

“Then we better not give him a reason.”

Staying close to the wall, Henry slid around the corner, right as ‘Bendy’s harsh breathing became audible. 

They froze, waiting. There was the slightest sound of splashing ink, and Henry’s heartbeat skyrocketed. 

He closed his eyes, listening. It sounded like a wild animal, a predator who didn’t need to be silent to catch his prey. Surrounded by darkness of his own making, Henry thought he could imagine the noise to be coming from directly over his shoulder. A presence, larger than life, looming right next to his head. His eyes flew open, but they were still alone.

But would that last? If ‘Bendy’ did come this way, would Henry be able to outrun him in such deep ink, with two toons to take care of as well? What would happen to them if he got caught?

And then the breathing began to grow quieter. ‘Bendy’ was walking away. 

Sagging slightly where he stood, Henry sighed in relief. Once he couldn’t hear the demon at all, he continued feeling his way through the ink.

“That was a close one,” Bendy said, laughing a little. Henry could feel him trembling slightly. Alice merely nodded against his shoulder. 

Halfway through the flooded portion of the corridor, some gut feeling prompted Henry to glance behind them.

At the bend, the ink was bubbling slightly. Something purple briefly broke the surface before all went still and calm.

Without changing his pace, Henry said quietly, “There’s something in here with us.” He continued right over their panicked questions. “I need you guys to tell me who it could be.”

“It wouldn’t be one of the Butcher gang,” Alice immediately responded. “They aren’t even stable enough to stand in the ink of ‘Bendy’s aura.” 

“Not a Searcher either. They don’t have the brains to do that.”

Henry’s foot bumped into a fallen barrel. He lost precious time trying to get around it. 

“It’s getting closer,” Bendy whispered, staring back into the ink.

They were almost there. 

Alice gasped, raising her head. “What about Kai?” 

Henry sharply looked down at her. “Joey made Kai? Are you sure?”

On his shoulders, Bendy jerked, nearly falling off. “Henry!”

Henry reflexively twisted his upper body around. Rising up just a yard or two behind him, dripping thick strands of black, was Kai the Sea Siren, a character who’d had a good run in the show. Though she was black-and-white in the cartoon like everyone else, her initial design had been one of the first to incorporate color, bits of purple and green used in her hair and tail to make her easy to distinguish from the dark gray water of the ocean for which she was named. 

Somehow, that color had carried over into her form. Mostly.

The purple in her hair was bleeding out, slowly turning to gray, and if Henry had to guess—despite not being able to see her back fin or tail—he’s say that something similar was probably happening there, too. 

While the animator in him absorbed that information, the rest of him stared in horror at her head. Or rather—her neck, and the stark lack of it. From her rounded, cartoony chin down to her shoulders, the only thing holding her skull in place were the vertebrae of her spine. What might’ve once been ink-based flesh hung in stringy, limp flaps between the bones, caught in the joints. 

She opened her mouth in a wide, soundless, fang-filled snarl, and Henry could see straight through the gaping hole of her missing throat. 

In that moment, the only thing that passed through Henry’s mind was the thought that at least she wouldn’t be able to lure him to his death by her siren-song.

Kai lunged towards him, grotesquely elongated claws flashing out of the ink. Without hesitation, Henry turned away and knew—even as he plowed through the dragging liquid as best he could—that he wasn’t going to make it to dry ground. 

A splash sounded from right behind him, and in a last bid to save his precious cargo, he gently tossed first Alice, then Bendy the last few feet to the room at the end of the flooded corridor.

Razor sharp claws latched onto his left leg—right above his ankle—slicing through his flesh as easily as a bullet. 

Kai pulled, and Henry, try as he might to prevent it, fell. She was on him instantly.

Fully submerged, Henry fought to keep her grasping hands from him, finally getting himself below her in a position where he was able to plant a foot into her stomach and shove. 

He broke the surface of the ink with a deep, gasping breath, to the sounds of Bendy and Alice screaming. It was a combination of telling him to hurry (Bendy, mostly) and a variety of comically censored words aimed at the rapidly re-approaching Kai (Alice, entirely). 

Trying to wipe ink out of his eyes, Henry shoved himself up and stumbled towards safety. 

Just before he could make it though, he registered the toons’ eyes widen and drift upwards. A second later, Kai slammed heavily onto his back, twisting and writhing, claws raking down his shoulder blades. The sudden weight threw Henry’s balance off, right as he slipped on some hidden object.

With a meaty thud, his head smashed into the wall, and Kai dragged him down the rest of the way. He inhaled. 

Stars blooming in his vision, lungs burning from the ink, and his leg and back stinging sharply from the siren’s attacks, Henry sluggishly tried to move, tried to push himself up and out, tried to ward off Kai—but he couldn’t so much as tell which way was which, much less find the strength to fight a creature in her element.

Kai abruptly vanished, wrenched away as though plucked heavenward by an unseen angel. A hand—mercifully lacking claws—wrapped around Henry’s arm and heaved him up.

“C’mon, Henry, just a little farther!” was the first thing he heard as Bendy pulled at him with all his might. He helped as best he could as he coughed violently, almost as disoriented as he’d been after the elevator crash. Everything was a blur of black-and-white, sounds drilling through the pounding in his head. 

Henry was only vaguely aware of his body crashing to the floor, free of the ink at last. Trying to clear his vision, he glanced back at the pool, seeing Alice standing at the edge, black-splattered fists clenched at her sides, shouting something that warranted a fog horn to blare over her words. 

He must’ve blacked out, then, since the next thing he knew, something was thudding against his chest—hands, fists, white-gloved and desperate—and as if that was the signal his battered body had been waiting for, he lurched forward and vomited, sludge spilling up and out of his throat. Henry coughed and coughed and coughed, futilely trying to take in enough oxygen. 

Over and over, he retched; each time forcing more and more ink—thick and gooey—to spill out of his insides. 

His awareness narrowed down to those long minutes, only peripherally taking in the babbled words and trembling hands, the small bodies pressing close for comfort while trying to maintain a courteous distance. Blindly, Henry reached back, relieved beyond measure when Bendy and Alice tucked themselves wherever they could fit without getting in the way. 

Eventually, he realized that, on some level, he was also coming down from a panic attack. He hadn’t even noticed it start.

The three of them sat in silence, Henry occasionally spitting globs of black onto the floor. 

“That was so much worse than the Searcher,” he said beneath his breath. 

Bendy silently gazed up at him. 

“A Searcher tried to force its way down my throat, while I was gathering things for ‘Alice,’” Henry explained. 

Bendy’s frown grew, and—turning his head back into Henry’s side—he burrowed closer, mirrored by Alice.

“Hey,” he said, gently coaxing them out. “I’m okay. See, I’m just fine.” He ignored the slight raspiness in his voice, the ache in his head, the blood seeping from his leg to mix darkly with the puddle of ink he’d purged.

They both gave him deeply skeptical looks.

With a sigh, Henry glanced at the flooded hallway. Kai was nowhere to be seen. “What happened anyway?”

Bendy perked up a bit. “Ya shoulda seen it, Henry. Alice punched her right in the face!”

“Is that so?”

Alice nodded, a small, proud smile breaking through the worry. “I was practicing, for Joey.” 

Henry laughed, loud and long. “In that case,” he finally said, once he’d calmed down, “I have no doubt you’ll make him regret the life choices that brought him here.” 

She beamed back at him.

“Okay,” he took a deep breath, relieved that he could without issue. “Help me up. We’ve gotta keep moving.”

The toons scrambled off him. “Are you sure you’re ready for that?” Alice asked.

“Yeah, maybe you should rest for another minute or two.” 

Henry shook his head. “If I don’t get up now, there’s no tellin’ how long it will be before I feel like I can. Best to just get it over with.”

With the help of the wall, Bendy and Alice managed to get Henry onto his feet. Leaning back against it, he concentrated on keeping his breathing steady through the searing pain of standing on his injured leg. His scratched shoulders protested against the pressure he put on them.

“Gimme a second,” he muttered. He looked around the room, wondering if there might be something he could use as a crutch, but found nothing that would suit his purposes. 

“Take all the time you need,” Bendy said, patting his uninjured leg.

A moan interrupted their moment of peace. From one of the other hallways that led into the room, a Searcher slowly dragged itself towards them, trailing more ink than normal. 

“You’ve gotta be joking,” Henry said to the ceiling. 

Stepping forward, Alice said, “It’s all right. Bendy and I can take care of one Searcher by ourselves.”

“Yeah! Don’t worry, Henry,” Bendy joined her, “we’ve done it before.”

Smiling down at the backs of their heads, standing before him like fierce guards, he nodded. “I’ll wait here as back-up.” 

While they went to kill the slowly approaching creature, Henry attempted to wipe the ink off his face. It was impossible to get it all, considering that his hand hadn’t been clean in the first place, but he felt a little more human and less like one of the studio’s inhabitants once he’d removed as much as possible. 

He heard a cry. When he looked up, Henry’s head was still pounding and his vision admittedly wasn’t at its best, so at first he wasn’t sure that he was truly seeing what he thought he was seeing.

The Searcher had risen up on two legs, holding Alice and Bendy in one hand each by their scruff—which made for a comical image, given that Bendy didn’t even have a neck. The apparently-not-a-Searcher wore a pair of filthy overalls, but other than that, it appeared to be normal; its face still bore the distinctive gaping maw and hollowed out eyes, and the ink of its body still dripped in constant decay. 

It was such a strange picture they made that Henry was convinced he’d either lost it and was hallucinating, or he’d fallen unconscious. 

“Put us down, Sammy!”

Real, then, given that the toons could see it too. Henry squinted at the figure. Sammy… Sammy Lawrence?

“Well, well. A little sheep has wandered into the bowels of hell.”

“Sammy? Is that really you? What—” Henry straightened, preparing to step towards the music director, but Sammy held Bendy and Alice higher.

“Why don’t you just stay right there, hmm? We wouldn’t want anything to… happen to these two, now would we?”

Henry sagged back against the wall. “Oh, Sammy. Not you, too.” He kept his eyes on his toons. “Please, please just let them go.”

“And why would I do that? The Angel would reward me handsomely for them. She’s always eager to receive better ink for transplants, worthy of herself, and she’s always made it known how much she covets the bodies of the perfect creations.” He gave Alice a shake. “Especially the one in her own image.”

Before Henry could even begin to think about everything wrong in those few short sentences, Sammy’s head tilted. Even eyeless, Henry felt the intensity of his gaze.

“Ah. My lord is searching for you.”

“Your what?”

“My lord. My savior. The Ink Demon. Those capable of perceiving his voice have heard him calling for you. It is a high honor to be so desired for a sacrifice.”

A shiver worked its way down Henry’s spine. That didn’t sound like something as simple as a territorial creature angry with a human trespassing in his studio. That sounded… deliberate. 

“To have been chosen for my lord,” Sammy continued, “is a blessing. You will be freed from the limitations of your mortal flesh. There are others of us who are not so lucky. Such as I, trapped in this inky, dark abyss I call a body.”

Henry only half payed attention to Sammy’s rambling. While the man—was he even a man anymore?—was busy expounding upon the glory of ‘Bendy,’ Henry watched his wiggling toons. If he could only get Sammy to set them down, they’d be able to escape, with or without Henry. 

Struck by a flash of inspiration, Henry interrupted Sammy, “I wonder who would be angrier with you.”

Sammy paused and tilted his head again. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.” 

“Here’s the deal, Sammy. Unless you let them go, I’ll run. So, who would be angrier with you: ‘Bendy’ for losing me, or ‘Alice’ for not getting them?” 

“Well…” he hesitated, “It is more important to please my lord.”

Henry spread his hands in a ‘there you go’ gesture. “So let them go,” he said.

To his relief, Sammy began to lower his arms. “And if I do?” he asked, keeping the toons’ feet above the ground.

It took everything in Henry to say, “Then ‘Bendy’ can have me.” 

Bendy and Alice immediately started struggling harder, crying out, “Henry, no!”

Obviously unsure, Sammy looked back and forth between the toons in his hands and Henry still leaning up against the wall across the room.

“I’m not going to wait forever. Choose: me, or them.”

Sammy set them down, though he kept a tight grip as they struggled to twist away. “You won’t resist my lord if I release them?” he asked. 

Before Henry could answer, a wide grin split Sammy’s featureless face, making it seem as though his jaw was missing entirely.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Sammy said, sounding excited. “Our savior has arrived for his offering.”

“Henry!” 

He didn’t have time to wonder what Sammy meant or what Bendy and Alice were calling out to him for, as something black caught his eye in the most peripheral of his vision. Even as his head instinctively turned towards it, a massive hand emerged from the wall directly behind him and clamped down over his face.

Henry’s heartbeat skyrocketed—just like my nightmare, was the last thing he was able to think before the world ceased to exist. 

The nothingness that he was so abruptly thrown into sent him reeling. He couldn’t see or hear or feel—it was as though he was beyond all that. He still had awareness, impressions and sensations registering in his mind as easily as anything, but the foreignness of it made his skin crawl. 

A sound reverberated through his skull, and it took Henry a moment to realize it was laughter, dark and rich. Hypnotizing, almost.

“Henry. So nice to finally meet ya properly. Allow me to welcome you.”

Welcome him? 

“Yes. To your new home.”

Home. Home?

“Yeah, home. You won’t be leaving any time soon, pal.” The voice laughed again, and Henry felt something uncurl in his chest, like roots burrowing themselves into soil. Like something preparing to grow. “Who’d a’thunk. Ya know, I’d hoped someday I’d get you, but with the Liar being the way he is… seemed like a pipe dream.”

But why him? There was nothing special about Henry.

Something warm and powerful wrapped around him. Sounding like it was grinning like a demon—and what a strange comparison, though it felt so familiar—the voice cried, “Nothin’ special, he says! Ha! You’re only the Creator, after all!”

The Creator. Yes, that was… that was Henry, wasn’t it. Someone—he couldn’t quite remember who—had told him that. 

It was so peaceful. Henry’s eyes began to drift shut. There was a heavy weight surrounding him, and it felt so nice to be protected like that. 

A scream pierced the void, briefly stirring him. 

Hm. Someone—no, two someones—were shouting his name. He could practically taste their mingling tears and terror. Henry’s head lolled as he tried to think of who they were.

One of them started with the letter B, he was sure. Bob? Brendan? Ben—Ben! No… Ben-something. 

“Don’t worry ’bout that. Don’t worry ’bout anything. You and me, that’s all you’ll ever have to think about again. Relax, pal.”

Relaxing sounded like a good idea. The screaming slipped from his mind.

“That’s it, Henry. Just let go. You’re mine, now,” the voice said soothingly. 

Mine. 

An electric current surged through Henry, bringing truth on its heels. ‘Bendy’ had him, Sammy had his toons, ‘Alice’ and Joey had—

“What is it with everyone in this studio sayin’ I’m theirs!” Henry growled. He could feel ‘Bendy’s surprise as he pushed back with his entire being—just enough that he could feel the demon’s physical body behind him, the hand on his face, the pain of his injuries; just enough that he could hear Bendy and Alice sobbing for him. 

The connection between them broke, and Henry’s body came alive with renewed struggling. ‘Bendy’ snarled from over his head, pulling him tighter up against his ink. 

From not so far away, an echoing crash shook the floor, followed by an enraged howl. A pause, and then there came thundering footsteps that grew louder and louder.

“An Amalgamate!” Sammy cried, his head snapping in the direction of the sounds. It was enough of a distraction for Bendy and Alice to wrench out of his hands, stumbling away from his immediate reach. “No! Come back here!”

‘Bendy’s grip loosened as well, and Henry managed to dig his heels into both the wall and the floor, using the last of his energy to put some space between their bodies. With a screech that made Henry’s ears ring, ‘Bendy’ let go, a final few words slipping into Henry’s mind:

“You can’t truly escape me. I am inevitable.” 

Henry collapsed forward, only Bendy and Alice’s presences preventing him from crashing all the way to the floor. He looked up blearily; they were alone in the room. 

“We need to go,” Bendy said, glancing over his shoulder at the door in the direction of the approaching creature. “You gotta get up!” 

He tried to stand, but even with one of them on either side, he couldn’t manage more than a few steps before his body gave out. “I’ll never make it,” Henry said, his breathing unnaturally heavy. 

“We’re not leaving you,” Alice cried, tugging on his arm. 

Sounding like it was only a room or two away, the Amalgamate howled again, long and throaty. 

With a last burst of strength, Henry lurched to his feet and stumbled for one of the room’s corners, pulling Bendy and Alice after him. Even then, he only just made it, falling against the wall from a step or two away to slide down it. With his back to the room, he held his toons against his chest, the final line of protection for them. 

The door along one of their walls shattered inward. A quick glance from the corner of his eye showed Henry a beast that might’ve once been a dog—or rather, several dogs. Like Cerberus from Greek mythology, the Amalgamate had three heads sprouting from one base. Unlike Cerberus, not all three heads were equal. 

The two side ones had slit throats, splattering ink everywhere as they looked around blindly, the eyes gouged out on one and stitched shut on the other. The middle’s muzzle was held open by a series of metal pipes that impaled its lower jaw, sticking up against the roof of its mouth.

With broken howls from the side heads, all three swung this way and that, searching.

Henry curled tighter over his toons, eyes squeezed shut, and thought, like a child playing hide ’n seek, We’re not here. You can’t see us. Please don’t see us. 

Growling all the while, the Amalgamate moved on.

In the silence that followed, they slowly uncurled away from the wall. 

“We’re all right,” Alice said, eyes wide, like she couldn’t quite believe it herself. 

Bendy lurched up. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon! Sammy and that stupid demon’ll be back soon!” 

Without the urgency of impending doom, they were able to get Henry on his feet and into a slow shuffle down the hallway that the Amalgamate had come from. They hadn’t gotten far—though Henry was slowly picking up speed—when they heard a screech from farther behind them. The heavy footsteps that began pounding down their corridor didn’t quite cover up the sound of Sammy crying out, “We’ll find them, my lord! They can’t have gotten far!” 

“We have to hide,” Henry whispered. 

They tried every door they came across, but each was either locked or would only open a little from being too badly obstructed from the other side. 

Just as ‘Bendy’ seemed a corner away from them, a door two down from them swung open. Without pause, they hurried inside, silently pressing it shut behind them. 

A moment later, their pursuer charged by, oblivious.

Henry sank to the floor against the wall beside the door. Alice headed deeper into the room, quietly saying she’d see about finding something to wrap Henry’s new injuries. Bendy went about barricading the room better.

“Do Amalgamates usually do that?” Henry asked, still a little breathless.

“No,” Alice said from behind some boxes. “They only rampage like that when provoked.” 

Head thumping back, Henry blankly stared up at the ceiling. Probably not just a coincidence, then. Maybe it was his imagination, maybe it was his tripping heartbeat echoing in his ears, maybe all those hits to the head had finally caught up to him—but he could’ve sworn he heard a little thump from just beyond the ceiling. 

Either way— “Thank you,” he whispered.

It took him a long minute, but Henry realized that Bendy had frozen with his back pressed up against the little barricade he’d built. His small body was shaking. 

“Aw, bud. C’mere.”

Bendy all but threw himself into Henry’s arms. 

“I’m fine, see. I’m here, and I’m fine,” he said, hugging his toon close.

“You’re not,” Bendy hiccuped. “You’re gonna die! Just like that lady!”

“What lady? What are you talking about?”

Alice, armed with strips of fabric she got from who-knew-where, settled down in front of Henry and tugged at his leg until he stuck his injured ankle out for her.

“A homeless woman wandered in here a while back,” she explained over Bendy’s sobs, “and ‘Bendy’ got to her. He wasn’t… invested in her, so she was able to get away. She hid and, well, she died. It wasn’t starvation, or any terrible sickness, but these black veins that ‘Bendy’ left behind when he tried to—y’know, absorb her.” 

Alice tightened the wrap on his leg. “Henry,” she said. “You have those black veins.” 

Going very, very still, Henry asked, “Where?”

“On your face, where ‘Bendy’s hand was.”

“The woman. How long…”

Bendy spoke up quietly, “She didn’t even last a day.”

“Hey,” Henry said, tilting Bendy’s chin up. As soon as he had his attention, he reached out and pulled Alice closer. “I’m not gonna let this kill me, okay?”

Shaking his head, Bendy whispered, “You can’t fight it, Henry.”

Slowly, Henry leaned forward so his face was only an inch or so away from both of theirs. With all the power of someone of who had done the impossible before, who had stood against a storm and demanded it go around him, he gently responded, “Watch me.”

Chapter Text

“Are you kidding me?” Henry cried through gritted teeth. He swung the axe, taking off the Searcher’s head.

Immediately, another two filled in the newly made empty space. 

“I don’t have—” he grunted as he destroyed three in a single stroke— “time for this!”

He twisted to avoid a reaching hand, a spray of ink splattering the wall on his left. Henry bit down on a vicious curse—he didn’t have the breath to spare for all the things he wanted to say about his current situation. 

The ink-bleeding wound on his arm burned, and he wished he had the energy to care, to do something to stop it, but cornered by the largest horde of Searchers yet, combined with his recent adventures in seeing how many different ways ink could find its way into his body, Henry was surviving on sheer adrenaline and spite.

Because there was no way, not in a million years, that he was letting these guys kill him. What a way to go.

Praise be, though, that he had an axe. And while a weapon was certainly coming in handy, Henry didn’t stand a chance to win against so many Searchers, ever-pressing closer with their sludgy moans—at least, not in his current condition. He had to get away from them. 

When he brought the blade down again in a baseball swing, he kept the flat side facing his target, sweeping the Searcher off the ground into the next, like a line of particularly sticky dominoes. 

The result? A gap just big enough for him to do some fancy footwork outta there. Henry reached the closer of the two doors, taking out one last opponent on his way, and made sure to slam it shut behind him. 

No rest for the weary, he thought as he limp-ran down the corridor. 

Henry pressed on at a steady pace until his lungs couldn’t keep up with the rest of him. He ducked into the nearest unlocked room, using his own body as a blockade against the door.

Head tilted back, arms limp, legs aching, lungs—ha, what even were lungs—not lung-ing right—Henry’s vision swam in and out of focus. Great, he really was losing his mind. 

That string of expletives rose up in his throat again, right alongside a gooey glob of ink. He coughed until it came soaring out of his mouth, leaving a delightful aftertaste. 

So maybe there was some truth to the negative affects of ‘Bendy’s attempt to absorb him. Relearning to walk after getting shot in the same leg three times was one thing; there was admittedly very little he could do about internal and mental deterioration. 

He had to get back to Bendy and Alice. Just, maybe after he had a little nap first—

Pain laced up and down his upper left arm. 

Oh, yeah, that. 

Letting his axe flop to the floorboards, Henry unwound the cloth covering the infected gash. The black surrounding the actual wound had spread further out; it was even still oozing a little. 

Whatever plan he’d had to ignore it had been dashed to pieces not long after their escape from ‘Bendy’ and Sammy, courtesy of the not-so-coincidentally rampaging Amalgamate. 

Once she’d finished with the claw marks loving left by Kai, Alice had inspected the rest of his body for additional wounds, and having Bendy curled up against his chest had rendered him immobile against her search. 

He’d been on the verge of drifting off, absently rubbing Bendy’s back, when she’d cried, “Henry! How long has your arm been like this?”

“Oof,” had been his response. “Busted.”

She’d smacked his shoulder.

With a deep sigh that had his lungs protesting, he’d admitted, “I first noticed it was doing that yesterday morning.” 

After discarding the ruined bandage, Alice had wrapped the cloth strips she’d found around the injury. “And what brilliant stroke of genius made you think you shouldn’t tell us?”

“I didn’t want you to worry.” 

“Uh huh. And how’s that working out for you?”

He’d smiled a bit then. “I’m actually surprised you didn’t end that question with young man.”

Looking rather disgruntled about it, Alice hadn’t been able to keep from laughing. 

“I am sorry, though,” Henry had said. “Mom.” 

“Oh, hush,” she’d tutted quite convincingly. With a final tug, she had tied the fabric off before brandishing her fist at him. “I can practice on you, too, y’know.” She’d stood and said, “I’m pretty sure I saw some bacon soup—oh, stop groaning and eat your vegetables—back there. It’ll be better than nothing.” 

Waiting until she’d disappeared behind some boxes, Henry had shook his head, smiling to himself. “She’s got a good sense of humor.”

“You gave it to her,” Bendy had said without moving. “To us both.”

Henry had eyed Bendy, who had, until then, remained silently tucked against Henry’s beating heart since explaining the presence and meaning of the deadly veins marking his face. “I am sorry, bud. I figured it’d do no good to make you both worry when there’s probably nothing to be done.”

Bendy’d given him a half-hearted shrug. “You’re right. If there’s a cure for it, none of us know what it is.”

None of us. Not neither.

“But,” and only then had Bendy looked up at him. At that point, Henry had yet to see such terror on his face as he whispered, “there’s a way to make it worse. Please, don’t be like—just, don’t let your emotions get the best of you. It’ll bleed more and—and the infection will spread.” 

Something in his voice—some haunted, fearful tone—had kept Henry from asking how he knew that. If his suspicions were correct, then he didn’t need to ask anyhow. 

“Which emotions?”

Tucking his head back down to avoid Henry’s gaze, Bendy had answered, “Bad ones.”

“All right, bud. I’ll be careful, I promise. No bad emotions for me.”

Neither of them had acknowledged how impossible that would be in the bowels of the studio, but they’d both been very aware of the futility of such a vow. Knowing that, however, didn’t stop Henry from feeling rotten about breaking it. 

He wiped off as much of the ink—or blood? did it still count as blood?—as he could before he clumsily rewrapped his arm. All right, now he could go and find his toons.

Using the axe as a crutch, Henry pushed himself to his feet. As badly as his ankle stung from Kai’s attack, his real problem was his right leg. The one that’d been shot in the war. 

Stress—of which he seemed to be in no shortage of here—had the tendency to trigger a wonderful combination of a bone-deep ache in his muscles and electric pain in his nerves.

“And of course the stupid thing would act up now. Not like I really need it anyway,” he grumbled to himself. 

Henry popped open the door and came face-to-face with Bendy and Alice. Y’know, figuratively.

“Henry!” they cried, lunging at him. 

By some miracle, Henry shrugged off his surprise fast enough to catch them without falling backwards. When he sank to the floor, it was on his own terms.

Once again serving as the door’s blockade, he held them close, relieved that they were all right. 

“How’d you find me?” he asked. 

“We followed the Searchers’ trails,” Bendy said. Henry had to suppress a giggle at the feel of his face moving against his body so close to his armpit. “And there were only two doors in that room, and since we woulda heard ya come back our way through the first, we figured you went through the other.”

“They took me by surprise and cornered me in there. But hey, at least I got an axe out of it.”

Alice laughed shakily. “I don’t care what you got, you’re not allowed to go to the bathroom alone again, y’hear me?”

Henry buried his face between their heads. “Loud and clear, ma’am,” he whispered.

They stayed like that for a while, simply reaffirming that they were all still alive, until Bendy broke the silence by asking, “Were you using the axe as a crutch?”

Not even giving him a chance to answer, Alice gasped and shot upright. “Is your ankle bothering you? Is it from a Searcher?”

“Or is it from the elevator?” Bendy asked.

“Or is it from ‘Bendy’s attack?”

“Or is it from—”

“None of the above,” Henry interrupted their fretting. “I was shot in the war, and sometimes my leg acts up. Gets stiff, or weak, or some nonsense like that.”

“Oh,” Bendy said. “Wait, you were shot?”

Henry usually had mixed feelings about talking about his short-lived military career. Most people seemed to pity him, and he didn’t need pity. Understanding, sure. Gratitude for his service, perfectly all right. But pity? No. He didn’t go through all that to be looked at like he was broken. 

But he got the feeling he wouldn’t need to worry about that with his toons.

“Yeah, three times in the right leg. Got sent home early with a shiny new wheelchair and some lovely nightmares.” 

He took a deep breath.

“In all seriousness, though—I’m not going to lie,” Henry continued. “Getting shot in real life isn’t like in cartoons. You can’t just shake it off and get back up and keep going. It’s really easy to die in a war. And it’s also really easy to lose yourself after gettin’ injured bad enough to be discharged.” 

Sometimes, in the beginning, it had felt like the world oughta be different because Henry had come back different. But everything had still been just the same, except for the parts of it that had moved on without him.

He tightened his grip across their small bodies. 

“But I survived, see? And that means I’m stronger than everything that got thrown at me. Y’know, they told me after it happened that I’d never walk again. That I’d spend the rest of my life in that wheelchair. That it’d be impossible to regain use of my leg.”

Impossible: you’ll never walk again; you can’t fight it, Henry; I am inevitable.

“But you can walk,” Bendy said, sounding awed. “You can walk.”

“Exactly.” Henry grabbed his axe and stood without letting them go. “I’d like to see what impossible things ‘Bendy’ can do.”

He looked at the door and then at his two passengers. “Uh, a little help, please.”

Alice laughed and reached out, turning the knob for him. He nudged it open the rest of the way and started off down the corridor. 

“Hey, Henry,” Bendy said.

“Yeah?”

“‘Bendy’ can walk through walls.”

“I have an axe, so I could too, if I really wanted. He ain’t special.”

• • • • •

Henry poked his head into the room where he’d first met ‘Alice,’ and quietly called, “‘Alice’… come out, come out, wherever you are…”

“Don’t provoke her!” Bendy hissed.

“I’d rather know exactly where she is than be left guessing. She’s not here, anyway. C’mon.”

They reached the door that Henry had blocked in his escape from ‘Bendy,’ and beyond that the room with the toy machine. With the bookshelf still in the way, Bendy had to squeeze through the small gap to flip the lever until Henry and Alice had a clear path. After a few tries, they were able to join Bendy. 

“Wow,” Henry said with a little whistle. “Looks like someone had a tantrum over not getting what they wanted.”

Ink splattered every available surface on a far larger scale than what it had looked like when he’d first seen it. Toys littered the floor, swept off the shelves, and bits of the machine were sparking.

Further on, they stared out over Heavenly Toys. 

“This is where I first saw Edgar,” Henry said as they started down the stairs. “Or at least, what was left of him. I don’t suppose either of you know why he looked like that?”

Alice glanced at him, her eyes curved in sadness. “What makes you think it wasn’t just the Machine?”

Henry thought about it. It was partly gut instinct, but it was also the simple matter of— “Some of what was wrong with him looked hand-done. After the fact.”

She nodded. “It was ‘Alice’s doing. She experiments on any toon she can get her hands on. That Edgar was just a clone of the real one. Of course, we don’t know if any of the original Butcher gang members that Joey created are even still alive.”

“She experiments on them.”

“Yeah.”

Punctuating each word with the tap of his axe against the railing, he said, “Just like Joey.”

He tilted his head towards Bendy, hopping down each step beside him, and whispered confidentially, “I’m going to strangle him, probably. Just, give him a good shake by his neck and demand to know what he was thinking.” 

Bendy giggled like a child, hands pressed to his mouth. 

They reached the main floor, and now that Henry wasn’t distracted or running for his life, he noticed the absurd number of Bendy cutouts littering the area. They were propped up against the railings, lying on the couches on either side of the room, and there was even one behind the counter. 

“What’s with all of these?” he asked. Henry reached towards the nearest one.

“Don’t!” Alice grabbed his hand and pulled him back. “‘Bendy’ has some sorta connection with them, and he can feel when they’re messed with or destroyed.”

“Yeah,” Bendy added. He shuddered. “And he really hates it when that happens.”

Looking back in the direction of ‘Alice’s room, Henry narrowed his eyes and muttered, “I knew it.”

They’d nearly made it out of the eerily cavernous chamber when Henry stopped short. “Do you hear that?” 

Both toons paused. “I don’t hear anything,” Bendy said. He looked at Alice, but she shook her head. “What does it sound like?” he asked.

“Crying.”

Something deep inside him wanted to find the toon sobbing, and who was he to deny that sort of instinct? He wandered, feet sure of where they were going even if he himself wasn’t. 

“I hear it, too,” Bendy said after a few turns. “Why are we getting closer to it?”

“What if someone needs help? I can’t just—” He cut off suddenly, his lungs seizing in his chest. Henry could practically feel the ink creeping along the walls of his throat, bubbling up from the core of his body. More coughing it was, then.

It wasn’t as easy as hacking it up like a hairball this time—the ink didn’t come out until he full-on vomited. 

Hunched over, breaths rasping in slowly deteriorating lungs, he glanced up through watery eyes at his toons. Bendy looked to be on the verge of breaking down entirely, and Alice had her head bowed, palms pressed against her mouth. 

“The marks are getting darker,” Bendy whispered.

“I’m fine,” Henry told him. He straightened and winced, his body not at all happy with that movement. “C’mon, the crying sounds like it’s right around the corner.” 

“And then we’re resting, because I don’t care how much you say you’re okay,” Alice said, her voice breaking slightly. “You’re not.”

As much as he wanted to press on, Henry couldn’t deny that he felt a bit like death. “Okay. But just a little break.”

They both gave him looks that said they were on to him, but he merely smiled and strode off.

All right, it was more like he stumbled off, keeping one hand on the wall, the other leaning more heavily on the axe as a crutch.

Henry was correct: there was a bathroom around the next corner, and it was easy to tell that the crying was coming from there. He peeked inside.

Sitting on the counter was a misshapen lump, ink dripping off the body worse than the Searchers. It wasn’t terribly large, perhaps basketball-sized, but it was shuddering in time with the heaving, croaking sobs.

Henry cautiously stepped into the bathroom, despite Bendy and Alice tugging at his shirt. “Flip…?”

The creature looked up into the mirror. One of its bulging eyes was drifting uselessly in its socket, but the other locked onto his image.

It really was Flip the Frog, one of the cartoon’s earlier background characters. 

He stared at Henry for a moment before breaking into a loud, wheezy wail. “Noooo,” he cried. “I’m Greg!”

“Greg,” Henry repeated slowly. They hadn’t had a character named Greg, and besides, he knew his own designs, messed up as they were by the Machine. Unless— “Greg… from the music department?”

“Yeeeess,” Greg sobbed, flailing his stubby arms. “And look what Joey did to me!” 

Henry slapped a hand over his gaping mouth. It was—even Susie hadn’t been—he knew who he was, er, used to be—he knew what Joey did.

“Oh my gosh,” Alice whispered behind him, horror dripping from each word. It seemed like they’d caught on, too.

“Greg,” he said gently, stepping closer. “Do you remember me?”

The frog turned around on the counter, wobbly and legs undefined beneath the mess of melting ink. His working eye looked Henry up and down.

“Henry.”

He smiled a bit. “Yeah, that’s—”

“Creator… you. Are. The Creator.” 

Greg’s lazy eye snapped forward, and the working one rolled back until only white was showing. His voice sounded different, raspier, as he said, “I know you. I have felt you.”

“What do you mean, you’ve felt me?”

“In the walls. In the walls!”

“I don’t understand what you mean, Greg—”

The frog screeched at him, grating and low. “I’m not Greg!” He tried to lunge forward, but his ink tried to keep him stuck to the counter, resulting in him merely tumbling over the edge.

Instinctually, Henry caught him.

Flip—if that’s what he meant by not being Greg—responded by biting down on Henry’s wrist.

Bendy and Alice gasped from the doorway, but Henry didn’t react.

“You don’t have teeth, pal,” he said, kneeling down to set Flip on the floor. “Only gums.” 

Flip screamed wordlessly, raking his fingers down Henry’s chest. But they were just that: fingers, no claws to speak of. The worst they did was leave more ink streaked down his ruined shirt.

It was… pathetic, to be honest.

Henry didn’t move as Flip tried to hurt him, again and again. But he was a melting toon with not a sharp edge on him. Tears welled up in Henry’s eyes, watching his former coworker be reduced to pounding his deformed fists on the floor like a child having a tantrum. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. Bendy and Alice moved to either side of him, and he held them close. What about them? Were there human souls resting at their cores, hidden by a perfect body?

Flip went limp, a blob of ink with slightly defined features. His eyes switched back. “Henry,” Greg said, slow and tired, “do something for me.”

“Of course, Greg, any—”

“Kill me.”

All three of them went stiff. 

“What?” Henry asked hoarsely. “You… you want me to kill you?” 

“Yes. I’m tired, everything hurts all the time, and I can’t do it myself.”

“Greg. Look, we’re gonna try and fix all this, maybe we can help you and—”

“I don’t wanna be fixed. Being fixed means livin’ longer.” He closed his eyes, lowered his voice. “He’s always there. Flip, just in the back of my mind. He started screaming one day, and he hasn’t let up since.” He extended his arm—toothpick-skinny and just on the wrong side of too rubberhose to look natural—and rested it on Henry’s knee. “Please. If you have any mercy at all, if you care even a little. Kill me, and let me rest.”

Henry looked down at Bendy, then Alice. The former had his face tucked into Henry’s side, trembling something awful. The latter gave him the tiniest nod, her mouth pinched. 

He faced Greg again and took in his body. Deformed, shapeless, with limbs not enough to hold his body up on their own, eyes that didn’t work properly, and—somewhere deep inside—memories of how he’d ended up this way, right next to the cartoon character screaming bloody murder.

The word caught on the lump in his throat, but Henry forced it out: “Okay.”

Greg went even more limp, grateful, gasping sobs croaking out of him.

Shaking fingers picked up the axe from where he’d let it fall to catch Greg when he’d tumbled over the counter’s edge. “I want you two to wait in the hall,” Henry said.

“We’re not leaving you to do this alone,” Bendy whispered into his shirt.

“I don’t want either of you to see this.”

Dragging their feet behind them, they slowly left the room.

“Greg,” Henry said, gently placing his hand on his… stomach? Back? He couldn’t even tell. “I’m so sorry.”

A single eye opened up at him. “It wasn’t your fault, Henry. Joey went mad all on his own.”

“I. Are you sure?”

Greg nodded and closed his eye. “I’m so tired,” he repeated quietly. “Please, free me.” 

Henry raised his axe—

“Thank you… Creator.”

—and swung. 

Bendy and Alice raised their heads when Henry appeared in the doorway. “It’s done,” he told them. 

For once, they opened their arms, and he collapsed to his knees for them. Henry cried, for the lives that Joey had ruined, for the good men and women, lost to the ink, that he hadn’t even discovered yet, for the pain in his own heart for having to make a mercy killing. 

“Your axe…” Bendy hesitated, obviously having noticed that Henry had emerged empty-handed.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t use it, not after—not after that.”

“That’s okay,” Alice told him, rubbing his back. “We’ll find something else.”

Henry nodded. He took a deep breath and straightened up a bit to offer them a slightly watery smile. “I think—”

He stopped short, tilting his head. His eyes flicked back and forth.

“What?” Bendy asked. “What is it? You—you hear something again, don’t you?”

Alice glanced down either side of the empty hallway. “Henry?”

The noise was faint but almost familiar, like he’d heard it in a dream, or when he was only half awake. It was… pretty.

“Humming,” he finally said. “It’s humming.” 

All three of them snapped their heads to look at each other, panic widening their eyes. “‘Alice.’”

“We have to go.” Bendy clutched Henry’s arm. “Do you think you’re ready?”

“I have to be,” Henry said, rising. “Let’s move.”

Corridor after corridor, no matter which way they went, it sounded to Henry like the humming was always almost right behind them, maybe a corner or two away. It was impossible to tell just which way it was coming from, and right when it seemed like they’d be caught, it would fade away again, like ‘Alice’ was wandering.

They froze at an intersection. Footsteps echoed towards them from all directions.

“Which way?” Alice whispered. 

Henry, planning to point down the path to their right, found himself leading them left. He couldn't have said why, just that this way was right. Another turn, one he hadn’t intended on making, and Henry threw open a door, revealing the stairwell. 

“Go,” he ordered, pushing them towards the steps. “I’ll be right behind you.”

As soon as they took off upwards, Henry shoved a heavy desk against the door. They hopefully wouldn’t need to use it in a rush again.

“Henry…” 

Stilling, he held his breath. She was right there, only a flimsy panel of wood separating them.

“Are you in there?” ‘Alice’ went on. 

Careful not to jostle it, Henry reached out and firmly wrapped his hand around the knob.

Not a moment later, ‘Alice’ tried to turn it. He didn’t let it budge.

“Locked,” she bit out. He heard her start humming again, the sound growing quieter as she moved away. 

Once he couldn’t hear her anymore, he let out the air in his lungs. That was too close for comfort. Henry abandoned the door and hurried up the stairs, gritting his teeth as his legs protested beneath the strain.

A few flights higher, he found Bendy and Alice waiting for him. 

“Henry!”

He got as far as opening his mouth to respond before his lungs gave up. He coughed helplessly, though it wasn’t as bad as the last time. Ink worked its way up his throat, until, hands braced on his knees, he could gather what breath he had and force it out. 

It wasn’t quite like vomiting, but he wasn’t able to spit a single glob out and be done with it. Strands and, ugh, chunky bits bubbled out of his throat, forcing him to continue making the effort to expel it.

“It’s getting worse,” Alice said when it looked like he was done. “The marks aren’t just turning darker now, they’re spreading.” 

“I’ll admit,” Henry choked out, “I don’t feel so good.”

He received twin looks of no, really?

“C’mon,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment before straightening. “We’ve got a straight shot to the top, and we better keep going before I hack up enough for a Searcher.”

They had to take a few breaks on the long trek, Henry’s entire body at that point begging him to just lie down and sleep. He refused—what if he never woke up?

When Bendy and Alice came to a sudden halt in front of him, he nearly bowled them over from being so preoccupied with blocking out the pain.

They’d reached the original part of the studio. Before them, etched deeply into the wood of the door, was a glowing pentagram. 

“That stupid thing is why we can’t go out there without Joey knowing. It tells him whenever the door opens,” Bendy explained. 

“I just had to draw only one stairwell,” Henry said, dragging his hand down his face. “Okay. There has to be some way around this.” He began pacing from one end of the small landing to the other. 

Bendy and Alice stayed at the door, staring at the pentagram as though glaring hard enough would break it. 

“We’ll need to distract Joey too, so we can actually look for Boris,” Alice added.

Henry hmm-ed. “What if I—”

“No,” they both said. 

Nodding to himself, Henry muttered, “I see how it is.” 

He froze as a thought occurred to him. Would that even work? Well, no harm in trying.

“I know you’ve been helping me,” he whispered to the ceiling, “and I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve already done. But now we need to get out there to find Boris, and if there’s anything you can do…”

Silence answer him, though just as he could’ve sworn he heard movement, Bendy said, “I just don’t know. I can’t think of anything.”

Henry turned to face them to find Alice frowning.

“You can’t give up,” she said. “Boris is counting on us! There’s no telling what Joey’s said to him since we got separated. He needs our help, Bendy!”

Bendy threw his hands up in the air. “Gosh dang it, Angel, what do you want from me? I can’t just make the answer to all our problems fall outta the sky!”

A clank from directly above Henry split the air, and Henry had just enough time to register something falling to reach out, allowing one of the smallest toons he’d seen yet to tumble safely into his arms. 

They all blinked. Bendy recovered first and looked upwards.

“I can’t just make a Tommy gun fall outta the sky!” Bendy cried, holding his arms out. 

Alice smacked him on the back of his head. “This ain’t a cartoon. Toon logic doesn’t work in the real world.” 

“Yeah?” Bendy asked, rubbing where she’d hit him. “Well, someone oughta tell him that.” He nodded at the little toon staring up at Henry.

Henry stared back. This toon bore a great resemblance to Bendy, though much smaller and softer looking, all rounded edges where Bendy was sharp. His horns pointed down, and his hairline—truly looking like a hairline, too—dribbled ink haphazardly down his face. 

With a slightly bewildered nod, Henry said, “Uh, hello. I suppose you’re the one who’s been helping us?”

He got a nod in response. Static briefly emitted from the little guy’s mouth.

“Okay, good, sentient.” Henry looked over at the other two. “By any chance, do either of you know who this is?”

Bendy and Alice both shook their heads. 

Henry held the toon up a bit. “I don’t suppose you have some other way to communicate? Maybe tell us who you are and why you’ve been watching out for us?”

The toon blinked and leaned forward a bit, and with a gentle pap, placed his palm against Henry’s cheek. Henry only had time to register the lack of individual fingers on his hand before a voice whispered in his mind, “Creator.”

He startled. It was a lot like how ‘Bendy’ had talked to him, but there was nothing domineering or all-encompassing about this softer, almost hesitant voice.

“Uh—”

“You are Creator. My Creator. I found you.”

It was still such a strange sensation, being called the Creator. Such a title made it sound like he’d done something special, when he hadn’t. The only thing that separated him from Joey was his love for his characters, the passion he’d found in drawing. He didn’t even fully understand why that was so exceptional in and of itself. 

“I’m just Henry,” he said. 

The small toon tilted his head. “My heart,” he whispered, tapping his chest with his free hand. “You gave me my heart.” 

“I don’t understand.”

“Henry?” Alice asked. He looked up to see both of them giving him rather concerned looks. “Are you talking to him?”

And no wonder. Only able to see one side of the conversation, Henry probably seemed nuts to them. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s like when—just, yeah.”

Bendy stepped forward, eyes squinted suspiciously. “You were ’bout to say like ‘Bendy,’ weren’t ya? All right, buddy, enough of that—no gettin’ in Henry’s head!” 

“It’s fine, Bendy,” Henry reassured him with a little laugh. “He doesn’t feel the same, I promise.”

“I like that.”

Henry glanced down. “You like what?”

“What he called me.”

“Buddy?”

A shaky smile spread across the little toon’s face. “Yes, that please.” 

Grinning, Henry said, “Congratulations, Bendy. You just named him.”

Buddy curled up in Henry’s arms and giggled, with only the slightest undertone of static beneath the happy noise. 

“I wanna help,” Buddy told Henry over the sound of Bendy’s protests.

Henry ignored Alice telling Bendy that at least he wasn’t the shortest in the family now—(“Wait, family? Tell me I’m not the dad just ’cause I named the pipsqueak, right?” “Of course not, because obviously, Henry’s the dad.”)—and asked Buddy, “How?”

“I’m fast,” he answered before wiggling out of Henry’s arms. He turned towards the door.

“Wait,” Henry said. He knelt down and engulfed Buddy in a hug. “Thank you, for everything,” he whispered. “We’ll find you as soon as we can, okay?” He felt Buddy nod against his chest. 

It took everything in Henry to let him go, but he understood. This studio belonged to all the toons as much as it was his, and—no matter how small he might be—Buddy had every right to fight for it, too. 

(Almost. If asked, Buddy wouldn’t immediately say that he was fighting for the studio and its better behaved inhabitants. He’d say he was fighting for his Creator.)

Buddy threw the door open and raced out, releasing a staticky screech. With the smallest amount of space possible between the door and the frame, Henry grabbed the handle and held it still, as close to closed as could be. 

Just beyond, they heard another door slam open. Joey, likely hoping it was Henry who’d emerged from the lower levels.

There was the sound of something falling, a crash, and then the pitter-patter of running feet.

After a long moment of quiet cursing, thunderous footfalls headed away from them.

They listened in safety as Joey took off after the little toon, hollering, “Come back here, you miserable reject!” 

Henry carefully peeked through the crack of the door. All clear. He emerged, immediately followed by Bendy and Alice. 

“I’m going to strangle him,” Henry muttered as they rushed down the empty hallway, Joey’s cruel words echoing in his head. “I’m actually going to strangle him, or so help me—” 

Moving as quickly and quietly as possible, each of the three of them tried every door they came across, some knobs opening easily to reveal a dusty office or workroom, others steadfastly locked.

At the end of the hall, Bendy and Alice took off down the next corridor, but Henry stayed in the intersection. 

We don’t have time for this, he thought. The three of them were out in the open, and there was no telling how long Joey would remain distracted. They needed to find Boris now. 

A gut feeling bubbled up within him. Slowly but purposefully, Henry turned and moved in the opposite direction his toons had taken. He came to a T-junction.

Facing the wall, he paused. After a moment, Henry pivoted left. His feet seemed to act on their own accord.

The hallway ended not too far ahead of him, opening into a dimly lit room. There was a table in the center, propped up on display. Someone was strapped down to it.

“No,” Henry whispered. 

Stopping just past the threshold, he stared at Boris—limp, dead, broken, x-eyed Boris—with his chest a gaping hole, chipped ribs pried up, showing off his empty insides. Ink splattered the table—the operating table—and had hardened in cruel lines dripping down his body. 

“No,” he repeated. “No.” 

The wound on his arm burned, and within seconds, Henry could feel ink soaking through the cloth covering it. He tried to calm down, tried to imagine the quietly terrified look Bendy had given him when he’d told him about the emotions bit, tried to breathe deep and even. The ink slowed to a trickle but didn’t stop completely. 

“Henry?”

Some part of him knew that he should keep Bendy and Alice away from here, but he didn’t answer; he just kept staring, lost to the world around him. 

Closer, Alice asked again, “Henry? What’re you lookin’ at?”

Bendy squirmed around Henry’s frozen form, still blocking the doorway. “Didja find some—” He stopped in his tracks. “Boris?”

Alice popped out from Henry’s other side. “Wait, you found—”

Both toons stood there, just in front of Henry, taking in their dead friend’s mutilated body. 

“He… he can’t be…” Alice raised her trembling hands to cover her mouth, shaking her head—slowly at first, but then faster and faster as her denial grew. “He just can’t be—”

“Dead,” Bendy said, sounding distant and detached. “Joey killed him.” As soon as the words left his mouth, the little devil’s legs collapsed out from under him, bringing him to his knees. Bendy stared blankly ahead, mouth hanging open in a frown, inky tears dripping down his face. 

Wordlessly, Alice clenched her eyes shut and screamed into her palms, the sound muffled and broken. She backed into the wall, incomprehensible words spilling out past her lips into her gloves. 

Bendy’s face slowly contorted, going more and more off-model with every passing second. Deep, gasping sobs punched out of his chest, and he hunched over to press his clenched fists against his head. 

Silent, Henry kept staring, the image of a soldier’s whose chest had been blown out superimposed over Boris. “You could’ve saved me,” the soldier said in Boris’s voice. “If you’d just been faster, if you’d just gotten here sooner.” 

The face changed to Greg, human but with a lazy eye. “Maybe it was for the best,” he said. “At least he’s not in pain anymore.”

Ink began to flow steadily down Henry’s left arm. 

Above them, a pipe groaned and dripped. 

Splat. 

Henry snapped out of it. He shook the ink off himself and stepped forward. Planting a foot on the table, he wrapped both hands around the bottom strap and yanked. 

It broke, and he moved on to the middle. 

Bendy looked up, and Alice opened her eyes. 

“What are you doing?” she whispered hoarsely. 

Splitting the second, he grabbed the top. 

“The Ink Machine,” he said. With a grunt, he pulled, just barely managing to catch Boris as he toppled forward. “We can save him with the Ink Machine.”

“But it won’t work!” Bendy cried, nearly hysterical. “It ruins everything it makes, Henry! Joey—”

“Not if I do it! My drawings, remember? My life, my love, my toons—I’m your Creator, and that means something!”

Henry hefted Boris into his arms, even as his entire body protested—his legs ached, the scratches pulled taut beneath their scabs, the ink burned in his lungs and seared his blood, the slow death from ‘Bendy’s poison touch stretched towards his heart—it hurt, but Henry had never let that stop him before. 

“Take me to the Ink Machine,” he ordered them. “And one of you, find me a pen and some paper.”

By some miracle, Joey still wasn’t back yet. Bendy watched, wringing his hands, as Henry set Boris down beneath the Machine’s nozzle, on top of a half-obscured pentagram. Alice slipped inside the room, brandishing drawing supplies. 

Henry got to work, sitting there on the floor. He drew out an intact rib cage, with a pair of lungs and a beating heart tucked safely inside it. It didn’t take him long; perfection meant nothing—his love for his creations, and his desire for Boris to be okay, to be alive—that was what mattered.

Jumping up the moment he was done, Henry took a guess and placed the paper on top of a small, matching pentagram etched into a shelf attached to the Ink Machine. 

“Wait,” Bendy suddenly said. 

With his hand on the switch, Henry turned back to where they both kneeled, just outside the circle’s border.

“What is it?

Bendy gulped, staring at Boris’s body. Sounding like the words were tearing him apart inside, he explained, “This is our chance to escape, with Joey distracted. We might be able to break the pentagram’s power and get outta here. But if we use the Ink Machine, Joey’ll hear it, and he’ll find us. If you save Boris, we’ll have to go back into the lower levels.” 

Henry shook his head. “Why are you telling me this? Why now?”

The toons looked up at him, dark gray streaks from their tears staining their white cheeks. He could almost feel the path of their eyes, tracing over the black veins that marked him. 

“You don’t deserve this,” Alice said quietly. “What Joey’s done to you, what ‘Bendy’s done to you, what all the others have done to you. And it’ll keep happening unless you leave. They won’t stop. You should leave, Henry… while you still can.”

His eyes fell on Boris, stiff and broken, pried-up ribs jutting out. 

Alice was right. They wouldn’t stop, none of them would stop. He was essentially being hunted by his psychotic former best friend, an ink demon who wanted to absorb everything Henry was into himself, a man who’d lost his mind and body to the ink, and an angel that shared a voice with one of his old friends—and that wasn’t even counting all the toons that attacked him simply because they didn’t know anything other than violence and hatred and pain.

If he stayed, chances were he’d die here, one way or another. 

Henry hadn’t asked for this. He hadn’t asked to be the Creator, or for his friend to invite him here with the intention of never letting him leave. He hadn’t asked to face untold dangers, to be dropped in an elevator, to be nearly drowned by a sea siren. He hadn’t asked to be sacrificed, or absorbed, or anything else. 

There were a lot of things in his life that Henry hadn’t asked for.

Alice sniffled, drawing his attention back to them. “We’d understand, if that’s what you wanted. To leave.”

“It’s your choice, Henry,” Bendy whispered. 

Henry stared at them for a long moment. “It’s no choice at all,” he said, throwing the switch. 

And the Ink Machine rumbled to life. 

Chapter Text

Joey slammed the door to the Ink Machine’s room shut, his movements harsh. He glared fiercely at it.

Tricked. He’d been tricked.

The runaway reject had been a mere distraction, and oh, the fury he’d felt when he heard the Machine’s pipes thrum with use. At least that little waste of ink had gotten what he had coming to him. 

What was Henry thinking, teaming up with the toons, and against Joey of all people? Didn’t he understand what they could do together? Didn’t Henry see the futility of resisting?

Joey’s plans were inevitable. The sooner Henry understood that, the better. 

But no, he just had to keep pushing back. Running wasn’t enough of an act of rebellion, he had to emerge from the hell beneath the studio to save Boris before returning. 

And that stung, loathe as he was to admit it. 

Immediately after dealing with the small reject, he’d returned to the corridor with the stairwell door as fast as his aging legs could carry him, just in time to see Henry and the two on-model versions of Bendy and Alice—the weight of Boris split between the three of them—reach said door. 

He couldn’t remember if he’d shouted anything, or if he had simply turned the corner louder than he’d thought, but Henry had unerringly turned to look straight at him. Boris’s body had been facing just the right way for Joey to see that his chest was intact again, and he was sure even now that if he’d been able to get closer, he would’ve seen his ribs moving beneath his inky skin, rising and falling with life. 

But Henry had merely given him a hard, angry look—Henry, whose appearance spoke of what he’d faced down there; the ink covering his clothing, the bandage wrapped around his head and the lump of another beneath his shirt sleeve, the way he was favoring his left leg (but only slightly, so it was likely injured as well), his face curiously marked by strange black veins—and vanished back into the dark depths without a word. 

Infuriating man. But Joey had long ago known that Henry was also the best sort of man to have on your side. Shame that he’d been drawn to the toons. Oh, well, he’d do whatever it took to reach the end of this. If that meant killing more of those monstrous things, then so be it.

• Eighteen Years Earlier • 

“Joey!”

Most people on campus either called his name like they desperately wanted his attention, or like they wanted to punch him in the face. So far, there was only one person somehow capable of meshing the two feelings together into a fitting give me your attention or I’ll punch you in the face, you overdramatic brat. 

“Henry! How have you been?”

He fell into step beside Joey and raised an eyebrow at him. “We just saw each other yesterday.”

“Yes, but there’s no telling what’s changed since then.” 

With a snort, Henry shook his head. There was the tiniest hint of a smile on his face though, and Joey counted it as a win. It was such a nice change from the usual, to have to work for positive reactions from someone. He rather enjoyed it.

“Well, not much has changed, just that I remembered I don’t have your home address. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I have something to send you for Christmas,” Henry said. 

Joey nodded. “A problem easily solved, then. I’ll be staying on campus over break.” 

Henry stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Joey did as well and immediately thought of how strange it was to have someone he’d extend that courtesy to. 

“What?” Joey asked.

Eyes narrowed, like he suspected Joey was merely pulling his leg, Henry said, “But break is more than a month long. And besides, students aren’t allowed to stay.” 

“They make exceptions if you have a good enough reason,” Joey told him with a shrug. “Ain’t got nowhere to go, so they’re willing to put me up.”

“What do you mean, nowhere to go? Don’t you want to spend the holiday with your family?”

Joey imagined flames, licking up the side of his home. “I would, if I had any left.” Unwilling to wait to see the pity cross his friend’s face, Joey turned and continued on at a brisk pace. 

A long moment passed, where he thought he might be able to escape the situation, but then Henry called after him, “Slow down, you stupidly long-legged man!” 

He paused, only to receive a surprise wallop to the arm. “Hey! What was that for?”

Giving him a hard look, Henry started walking at a normal pace, not waiting to see if Joey would follow. He did, of course.

“For assuming the worst of me.”

Joey did a little double-take. 

Henry tilted his head. “Oh, c’mon. You think I didn’t notice how tense you got there? You, what, expected me to pity you?” He shrugged. “Can’t say that I don’t feel bad, but I’d rather skip the touchy-feely bits and get straight to the part where I tell you you’ll be spending Christmas at mine.”

Bewildered, and trying not to show it, Joey asked, “Just like that, huh?”

It was not often that Henry Ross gave Joey Drew a real, true smile. He did now, as he shoved his shoulder against Joey’s and said, “Yep. Just like that.”

• • • • • 

Spending the holidays with the Ross family was—well, Joey wasn’t sure what he’d expected. It wasn’t his first Christmas without his parents or younger brother, nor his second or third. He’d become accustomed to the loneliness, assumed he’d never be capable of caring about someone enough to ever lose that empty feeling. 

And yet. 

Emma Ross had engulfed Henry in a hug that seemed to squeeze the life out of her only son, beaming at him and marveling at how different he looked and how excited she was to have him home for so long. Joey had stood behind his friend on the front stoop, offering his hand to his hostess as soon as her arms were no longer full. Instead, Mrs. Ross had hugged him as well, and said something about finally getting to meet him, and that Henry spoke of him often. 

Without waiting for a response, she had bustled back inside, gesturing them to follow her.

“Often, huh?” he’d asked, grinning mischievously.

“Don’t take it as a compliment,” Henry had told him. “Most of it was complaints.”

“Ah, yes, because a mother will welcome a stranger like me into her home with a hug like that if all her son had done was complain about his so-called ‘friend.’” 

Henry had shoved Joey. “Oh, shut up.” 

Now, on Christmas Eve, Joey sat on a cold bench on their back porch, staring up at the stars. He was happy, something that had surprised him, and the constant, screaming need to be in control and in-the-know and authoritative had dulled to an ignorable little whisper in the back of his head. 

Those thoughts hadn’t been so small and quiet in so long. For years, he’d had them, over a decade back to the very beginning if he was going honest. He couldn’t remember how soon it had been after his father’s funeral that he had decided he needed to know and control everything in order to keep his loved ones safe. Fat lot of good that had done him, in the end, but those voices had never quieted like this before. 

He liked it.

It was snowing lightly, cold enough for Joey to see his breath like cigarette smoke on every exhale, but with his coat wrapped around him in the silence, he felt like he could’ve sat there in the darkness for an eternity and a half. Not just could’ve, he knew. He wanted to. 

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been living in a moment that he never wanted to end. 

Inside, beside the crackling fireplace, he knew there was a messily decorated Christmas tree—it was a Ross family tradition, he’d been told, to do it without rhyme or reason, the only end-goal being to fill up the branches as much as possible—with brightly wrapped presents beneath it, some of which bore his name.

Christmas presents, for him. It’d been years since he could think that. 

On the coffee table, he imagined the plate of cookies slowly growing smaller, Henry sneaking some whenever he thought his parents weren’t looking, Mr. Ross sneaking some whenever he thought his wife wasn’t looking, and Mrs. Ross handing both of them some when she knew they were looking. 

He’d helped Mrs. Ross bake them earlier that afternoon, while Henry and Mr. Ross had seemingly vanished. They’d eventually trooped into the kitchen, soaked with snow and trailing wet footprints behind them, to tug the two bakers into the backyard, where four snowmen waited, dressed with scarves and hats and shirts that recognizably belonged to one of each of them. 

“Pa and I do it every year,” Henry had explained later, while he doodled a Christmas scene with Bendy in a Santa hat. “Make a little snowman family out back.” He’d poked Joey with his cold toes. “First year we’ve made four, though.”

Joey had studiously kept his face down, fearing that his friend might see the slight glistening in his eyes. His efforts had turned out to be pointless, however, for not a moment later a tissue box had smacked him in the shoulder. 

The porch door behind him slid open. He glanced back to watch Mrs. Ross as she approached, carrying a blanket over her arm and two cups of hot chocolate in her hands. Henry gave Joey a little smile as he closed the door behind his mother, before disappearing back to the living room. With its guardian out here, the cookie plate was left vulnerable. 

Mrs. Ross set the mugs down and shook out the blanket, sitting beside Joey so she could tuck it around both their shoulders. Within moments, they were warming their hands against the heated ceramic—Joey couldn’t help but notice that his was decorated with what he was sure was a very young Henry’s doodles.

“I haven’t been able to thank you properly yet,” Mrs. Ross said quietly, hushed out of respect for the night.

Joey frowned. “For what?” 

She smiled. “I know my son, Joey. He has the tendency to be uncomfortably blunt around those he doesn’t know, and I’m not so ignorant as to think it doesn’t put people off. He’s never been afraid to speak his mind, and as his mother, I’m absurdly grateful that I may rest assured that he won’t allow himself to be pushed around. But I worry. He doesn’t make friends easily.”

He couldn’t help the surprised laughter that burst out of him. “Henry?” Joey asked. Henry, while being as his mother described him, had from the very first come across to Joey as one of the best people he’d ever meet in his life—patient and kind and so very in love with what he did. That he was nearly impossible to intimidate or push around—or impress, for that matter—was just the icing on top of the cake. 

“Have you often seen him with others?”

No, Joey realized. He’d never seen Henry interact with another student on a one-on-one basis without the slightest pinch to his eyes. 

“He prefers being alone,” Mrs. Ross continued. “Always has. Drawing is not a new hobby for him, Joey. Ever since he was young, he’s far preferred his comic characters to anyone else.”

That was definitely true. But it made sense to Joey, so he shrugged. “Because he loves them. I think he forgets that they aren’t alive, for how much of himself he gives them.” He’d never get tired of watching the nearly magical way Henry had of imbuing his drawings with life. 

“A good way of putting it,” Mrs. Ross said. “You know, I don’t remember when he created Bendy, that’s how long he’s been drawing him. I’ve seen that little demon go through so many redesigns.” She laughed. “Oh, the character model sheets! We always knew when something was changing, no matter how small, because the house would suddenly be filled with them!”

Joey joined her laughter; he’d seen Henry’s dorm room, so he understood what she meant.

They talked for a while longer, until Mrs. Ross regrettably couldn’t stand the cold. She barely had time to disappear inside before Henry was sliding into her still-warm seat beside Joey.  

“I told her not to tell any stories from when I was—”

“You used to make kids cry on the playground?”

Henry buried his face in his hands. “She didn’t. Please tell me she didn’t tell you about any of that.”

“Henry Ross, teeny tiny troublemaker—”

“No.” 

“—making kids cry on the regular.”

“They were bullies, okay, and they wanted to make me cry first. And I’ll tell you what, if you had interrupted me one more time during our first meeting, I’d have made you cry, too.”

Joey threw his head back and laughed. 

Neither of them spoke as he settled down, just staring at the four snowmen standing proudly in the yard. 

“A family, huh?” Joey finally said.

The skill with which Henry was able to keep up with his non-sequiturs would never cease to amaze him, as he snorted and said, “What, you think I’d bring just any old schmuck home for Christmas?”

“You have to understand where I’m coming from though, since up until last month, you refused to even admit that we were friends.” 

Henry grinned and kicked his legs beneath the bench. “You’re a weird one, and I know that charm of yours is nothin’ but a mask. You borderline—no, you did stalk me—and were utterly creepy for the first month that I knew you. But Heaven help me, because you are my friend. Maybe you’re that cousin that just sort of appears every now and then, and I just can’t decide if you’re cool or not.” 

Joey fiddled with his empty mug. “So I’m a partially estranged cousin now?”

“It was just a metaphor, you dunce. Besides, what else would you be? Uncle just sounds wrong. Maybe a next door neighbor that always ends up at family gatherings even though none of us know why?” 

Quietly, and with a bit of hesitation, Joey asked, “How ’bout a brother?”

“Hm,” Henry hummed in thought, blowing a long breath into the night sky. The white warmth curled up and away to dissipate against the stars, like magic. “I’ve never had a brother before,” he finally said.

“I did. I used to.” 

Henry didn’t look at him, and for that, Joey was grateful. 

Instead, Henry said, “Then I guess you can be an honorary Ross. I mean, we got you a stocking and everything, so it was kinda inevitable when you think about it.”

For long minutes, they sat beneath the blanket, the future stretched out in the stars above them, the past like footprints in the snow.

With a shiver, Henry eventually stood up. “C’mon,” he said. “I wanna give you one of your presents.”

“What, now?” Joey asked, following him into the house.

“Yes, now. You’ve never heard of that, doing one on Christmas Eve?”

“I haven’t heard of a lot of your family’s traditions.”

Henry huffed dramatically. “Joey, we just went over this. It’s our family for the foreseeable future.” 

Joey wasn’t quite able to stop smiling for the short trek up to Henry’s bedroom, where Henry plopped down on the bed and gestured Joey into his desk chair. 

He passed Joey a small stack of papers, which were covered in drawings as far as Joey could tell. On the top was a character model sheet. In the upper right corner, it read Boris the Wolf.  

“What’s this?” Joey asked, glancing up.

“It’s a new character that I’m going to add to my comics. Not just for one or two, but permanently.” 

Henry seemed to be waiting for Joey to notice something, so Joey looked back down at the page. He glanced at the name again, but this time, he saw what was written underneath it. 

Inspired by my best friend, Joey Drew

Something must have changed on his face, because Henry started laughing. Joey cursed quietly. “Henry Ross, you devil,” he said, trying to keep in the strange noise he could feel rising in his throat.

“I hope you know that this means I’m gonna tell you all about the story I’ve figured out for them. It’s just a shame, because it’s so long and extensive that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put it into a comic series.”

A thought clicked into place in the incomprehensible maze of Joey’s mind, an idea bloomed like the sun through a day’s worth of dreary clouds, and for just a moment, the future felt clear to him.

And it looked wonderful. 

• • • • •

Joey smothered his laughter into his palm as Henry paced the length of his office, waving his arms, voice rising and falling in his excitement. It was always such a privilege to watch his friend’s creative mind at work. 

A knock at the door preceded Wally popping his head in. “Mail for ya, Henry,” he said. 

Henry accepted the envelope and continued right on with his thoughts. Joey chuckled and shook his head, getting up to take his own pile from Wally, who saluted him before heading off. 

Shuffling his stack into two different piles—the ones Joey would look at, and the ones Joey and Henry would look at—he waited in silence for Henry to reach the end of his thoughts before pressing the stop button on the recorder sitting at the edge of his desk. They’d learned early on that no one could really keep up with Henry when he was on a roll. 

Joey absently heard Henry tear his mail open, the sudden silence jarring. He paused. Usually Henry would read parts of his letters out loud, either in excitement or to mock them. 

He raised his head. Henry, frozen and looking a bit pale, was merely staring at his letter.

“Bad news?” Joey asked. 

No response. 

“Henry?” 

Slowly, his friend turned to face him. Joey frowned and straightened in his seat. Something was very wrong.

“Joey. I’m gonna need you to stay calm, okay?” 

“C’mon, whatever it is can’t be that—”

“I’ve been drafted.”

Something deep in Joey Drew’s mind—a place that had been shriveling up and dying with every Christmas he spent with Henry and his family, every birthday, every summer, every episode they wrote and animated, every award they won for their hard work—cracked open and splintered apart.

No. No. No. 

“No,” he said. 

“Joey—” 

“No! I—I won’t allow it! You can’t—” 

“There’s nothing we can do—” 

“I refuse to lose you the same way that I lost my father—Henry—!” 

“I know! Joey, I know.” 

“You… you can’t leave,” Joey whispered, the fight seeping out of him as he slumped back into his chair. “The studio, everyone here, your parents… I—we need you.”

Henry’s hands were shaking. “I’ll be back before you know it,” he said softly.

“You can’t promise that. I know—promises mean nothing to death. War is cruel and it takes and takes and takes.” 

Joey realized he was shaking too. 

Nodding silently and staring at his feet, Henry took a step towards the door. “I’m… I’m gonna go tell the others. Um. I’ll be right back, okay?”

Just before he disappeared from Joey’s sight, perhaps in an effort to lighten the mood, Henry halfheartedly joked, “Hey, maybe you’ll find someone who does my job even better than me, huh?” 

“Never,” Joey instantly said. “Your job will be waiting for you, right along with the rest of us.” 

Henry smiled, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes the way Joey was used to by now, “Thanks, Joey.” The door clicked shut behind him.

After a moment of silence in the empty room, Joey muttered, “No one could ever take your place, much less match up to you.”

• • • • •

So Henry left, and Joey wasn’t the same. 

The apartment they’d been sharing since before they’d even started the studio felt dead from its emptiness. Joey avoided going there as much as possible. The couch in his office collected a pillow and blanket, the bottom drawer of his desk several changes of clothes. 

He pushed the studio’s workers harder than ever, himself most of all. The days where he’d join some of the staff for lunch in the lounge ended the day that Henry would have been absent from the seat next to him. Strict rules were enforced: anyone who touched Henry’s desk or other belongings would face serious consequences. 

For the first time, Joey yelled when something went wrong. Episode ideas were carefully scrutinized by him, and they were only approved if he could see something of Henry in them. Nothing less than perfect was allowed out of the studio’s doors. 

It wasn’t an obsession, he’d practically snarl at anyone who dared bring it up.

The next month, Joey spent Christmas alone for the first time in a decade. It would be far from the last. He didn’t even notice, the holiday passing him by like a whisper just out of earshot.  

His impulsiveness grew as the weeks passed, chaos trailing in his wake. Sammy was the first to totally lose patience with him, and his coping methods weren’t much better, as his band could attest to. Norman, fed up with Sammy’s antics, was next. He grumped and skulked more than he’d ever done with Henry around. 

The newer interns—after facing scary Mr. Drew’s wrath—would end up being comforted by those that had worked there longer. It’s not you, they’d whisper after making sure Joey was nowhere in sight. Henry’s gone, and we think some part of Joey went with him. 

It was eventually brought to Joey’s attention that several people within the studio were exchanging letters with Henry. He blew up at anyone who dared speak of them in his presence.

Joey refused to write to his friend himself. The idea that Henry might one day not respond… Joey would drive himself mad over it. 

(He didn’t realize that he already had.) 

Until one day, towards the end of January, as he sorted through his stack of mail—no longer separated into a Joey pile and a Henry-and-Joey pile—a battered letter fell out of the middle.

It was from Henry.

I know why you’re not writing to me, you nincompoop, he read in the first paragraph of the four page long message. So here, the only schedule we’ll have is no schedule. You’ll never even see me coming, just boom, you’ll have a letter one day. Totally unpredictable. 

And when Joey smiled at the messily written words, he didn’t realize that it was the first real one he’d worn since Henry’s departure. 

Things didn’t magically go back to normal, but to say nothing improved would be a lie. Everyone could tell when one of Henry’s letters arrived for Joey. His micromanaging wasn’t as bad, his voice wasn’t as harsh, and the nearly-cracked mask of manipulative charm was left on his desk when he ventured out of his office.

It’s not healthy, most of the studio’s gossip said. He’s dependent on poor Henry. Joey Drew’ll kill him if this war doesn’t.

Only those who knew the two better could shake their heads and say, Henry grounds him. None of this is even a problem when he’s here.

And what happens when one day, Henry’s not here anymore? For good?

Don’t let Joey hear that. Who knows what he’d do if he ever truly realized that Henry could die at any time. 

The gossipers would shake their heads. That’s the unhealthy part. 

Months passed. A year went by. The letters continued, everything was fine. Joey evened out a bit, maintaining some twisted combination of being Okay and Not Okay. 

Until.

Nearly two years after Henry received word that he’d been drafted, mail call went out as normal, during one of the rare times Joey left his office to eat with a small group of close employees. It was no surprise when whichever intern was in charge of mail for the day handed Joey a personal letter, the business ones left in his office. Thinking it to be from Henry, he opened it without breaking from the conversation, only looking down to start reading.

To Mr. Joey Drew,

Our records indicate that you are one of Henry Ross’s contacts in the event of death, MIA status, serious injury, etc. We regret to inform you…

That deep, dark place in Joey Drew’s mind—where the memories of flag-covered coffins and hungry flames resided—shattered irreparably into a million deadly little pieces. Like poison, it spread; like an illness, it infected; like a snowman family melting in spring, everything he was changed into something unrecognizable. 

(If a part of Joey had left with Henry, and Henry was dead, what did that make Joey?)

He dropped the letter—it looked exactly like the one his mother had received when he was nine—only vaguely aware of his companions asking what was wrong. 

Dumbly, he answered, “It’s not from Henry.” 

Susie grabbed it, eyes already brimming with tears. Distant, Joey felt like he had cotton in his ears, like his blood was freezing in his veins. Sounding from far away, someone called his name, over and over. They didn't grab his attention the way Henry always had—the way only Henry ever had.

“Henry’s not dead, Joey!” 

He snapped out of it to hear Susie repeat for the nth time that Henry had just been shot and was being discharged. 

Henry was alive.

(But oh, the damage had been done.)

Two weeks later, Joey waited as Henry’s plane touched down, surrounded by a group of employees. They chattered in excitement, ready to welcome Henry back as though he’d never left. Somehow, none of them had considered exactly the full ramifications of being shot.

Eyes wide, they watched as a stormy-faced Henry was brought over to them in a wheelchair. 

“He’ll never walk again,” was what came out of the nurse’s mouth. 

He’ll never be the same again, was what Joey heard.

• • • • •

The mood around the studio couldn’t decide whether to be tense or not. Henry proved quickly that whatever horrors haunted his nightmares had no bearing on his creativity. Two years worth of episodes and gags and uses of toon logic came pouring out, filling recorders and notebooks by the dozen. 

And yet, the mere sight of the wheelchair could send any employee’s face into sober realization of what had happened.

Henry, being Henry, refused to let it slow him down, much less stop him. 

Their apartment was a mess from Joey’s neglect, though Henry seemed to take it as a challenge. Despite his clumsiness with his wheelchair, Henry didn’t let it get to him as he put things to rights, room by room. Joey couldn’t watch, worry and concern and something very much like empty, useless panic bubbling up his throat. 

There where times, both at home and in the studio, where Henry would lock up, go wide-eyed, and start shaking like a man possessed.

(Don’t let Joey hear that. Who knows what he’d do if he ever truly realized that Henry could die at any time.) 

He realized. And with that realization came the jarring knowledge that he couldn’t protect his friend, he couldn’t truly help him, he couldn’t save him, he couldn’t magically make him—

(There is a time in every man’s life where who they will spend the rest of their days being hits them like a bolt of lightning. They are often unaware of it. This was Joey’s.)

—but what if he could. What if he could magically make Henry better? 

Humans, Joey had known for most of his life, were frighteningly mortal. But toons. Toons could be hurt, they could be put through the wringer, they could be pushed down over and over again, but at the end of the day, they went right back to being—

perfect. 

Maybe… maybe Joey could save Henry if… if Henry wasn’t human. 

• • • • • 

Joey distanced himself from Henry, unable to handle seeing him broken like that. He found books on the dark arts, on forbidden magic, on machines that accomplished the impossible. 

(Henry pushed himself up onto his own two wobbly legs, and Susie and Norman cheered wildly, Wally bounced around hollering, his team of animators were besides themselves with joy. Even Sammy cracked a smile. Joey wasn’t there.)

Joey began building, convinced that if could just do this, then everything would be all right. But Henry couldn’t know. If Henry knew, he might try to stop Joey.

(Henry pulled himself out of a flashback in record time, before he could start babbling and and going into his seizure-like shakes. Two of his animators, having witnessed it, hugged him once he was able to give them a shaky smile. Joey wasn’t there.)

Joey abandoned the prototype and began constructing a revised version. His idea was visionary. The possibilities of what else he could do with this after making Henry perfect again began to fill his fractured mind.

(Henry changed the number on the little chalkboard he had hung on his door. I’ve been panic attack free for: 14 days. Shawn clapped him on the shoulder, and for the first time, Henry didn’t flinch. Joey wasn’t there.)

After weeks of adjustments, Joey stared at his disgustingly useless machine. “You can make it work?”

The demon in the summoning circle behind him said, “I can combine your machine with the magic it’s missing. I’ll give it the potential to work. The rest of it will be up to you to figure out.”

“In exchange for my soul.”

“Yes. Your soul, over and over and over, until death. Do you understand what that means?”

“It means little,” Joey said. “A soul is nothing more or less than a weed in a human’s body, keeping it alive.”

“A crude but relatively accurate description. It will change you, to lose your soul.”

“How?”

“A soul is where the humanity resides. With every time I take it, I will take more of your humanity. You, as a person, will change.”

“You sound like you’re trying to dissuade me.”

The demon stared at the machine. “Not necessarily. But you are meddling with things that even my kind prefer to avoid. Give and take is a difficult balance to maintain, even more so in creating life.” 

Joey thought of the power he could have, the perfection he could achieve. “It will be worth it.”

“Then do we have a deal, Joey Drew?”

He turned back and held out his hand. “Yes.”

(Henry came to work one day and surprised everyone with his lack of a wheelchair, only a cane in hand. Though he leaned heavily on it at times, he never faltered. “Told ya,” he said with a very particular grin—the small but genuinely happy type that he often drew on Bendy—to anyone who gaped at him. 

Joey wasn’t there.)

Beyond Joey’s office doors, Henry improved daily, more himself than ever. And Joey wasn’t there for any of it. Until, of course, he was.

Six months after Henry’s return, Joey became witness to one of his worst and most violent flashbacks yet, ending when Henry lashed out and clocked Norman in the face. 

There’d been several close calls over the past week or two, moments where Joey’s work almost became exposed to Henry—and that was intolerable. Henry couldn’t, under any circumstances, find out about Joey’s plans. 

He knew this with a stark sort of certainty, though he couldn’t quite explain why. 

Since making the deal, Joey’s mood had been steadily worsening, so when Norman fell back and Henry snapped ‘awake,’ Joey took it as the opportunity it was to get Henry to leave. 

The argument, right then and there, was massive and terrible, Joey doing everything in his power to rip his friend to pieces. It’d be all right though; Henry would forgive him after Joey explained everything and made him perfect again. 

In the aftermath, he wouldn’t quite remember what he had said, only that he’d ended with the order for Henry to leave the studio and never come back. 

He saw Henry once more after that, at their apartment that night. Henry stood on the sidewalk, staring up at it while leaning heavily on his cane, a taxi idling behind him. He didn’t look at Joey when he spoke, “I don’t know what happened, Joey. I don’t know why you said all that. And I wish I did, I wish you’d let me in, let me help you the way I’ve always done. But you’re different, my friend.”

Henry finally turned to face him. “You are not the man who became something like a brother to me, that Christmas all those years ago. You are what lurked behind that rotten mask when you first spoke to me in that coffee shop.” 

With one hand on his cane, he opened the back door of the taxi waiting on the road. “You have long known me: I am not easily impressed, I am stubborn when I want to be, I refuse to be pushed around, and I am blunt to those I feel I don’t know. Know this, Joey—you will not see me again by my own choice.”

And with his final words, he tore Joey apart in a way Joey hadn’t been able to do to him, in a way that Henry had always used on playground bullies who stood taller than his shorter frame: “You’ve taken my life and love at the studio from me, my characters, my family of my own making; I’m taking my friendship from you.”

Henry Ross climbed into his cab, and so began the longest seven years of Joey Drew’s life. 

• • • • •

After that, when did things really start to go wrong?

Was it when Joey began making plans to use interns’ blood for practice sacrifices? After all, he refused to do anything to Henry until he knew no mistakes could be made, no design could go awry.

Was it when Joey watched emotionlessly as nameless grunts melted bit by bit, bone by bone, blood to ink, mind to mush? Sacrifices had to be made, and he couldn’t afford a soft, compassionate heart. 

Was it the second, third, fourth time Joey’s soul was stripped from his body, taking more and more of his humanity and leaving a dangerous combination of insanity and determination behind? But how much of himself was even still there? After all, Joey had been lost the moment Henry’s name was drawn for the draft.

Was it when he decided to try a full human sacrifice? Those who wanted things would do anything to get them—he knew this. It was a simple matter of replacing Susie with someone younger, prettier, and arguably more talented than her to manipulate her into asking what she could possibly do to get her job back. “Well, Susie. There is… one thing. I could ensure that you’re the only true Alice Angel forever. Just, stand right there. Yes, that’s… perfect.”

Was it when the studio began to fall to pieces around Joey and he didn’t even notice? Word spread right under his nose that Henry was busy being successful elsewhere, and it wasn’t long before a number of his former team of animators left to join him. They weren’t replaced, and it wasn’t long before the workload—split between fewer and fewer employees—began to overwhelm those who remained. 

Was it when Joey asked Sammy for a favor and then doused him in ink? He was just another failed experiment. Something was missing in his rituals; one tiny aspect, he was sure of it. Each time, it went as it oughta right up until something changed, an obviously critical part—needed to bridge some unseen gap between flesh and ink, human and toon—unaccounted for.

Was it when the Amalgamates were stitched together, in a desperate search for an answer? Was it when the original Butcher gang tumbled out of the Machine into a hell they didn’t ask for? Was it when Kai and Flip and countless others—many of which never reemerged from the ink—were mutilated both physically and mentally? 

Was it when Joey came the closest yet to a nearly properly functioning toon in a small reject, only to lose the skittish creature to the vents, never to be seen—or more importantly, studied—again? Which was even worse, given that he hadn’t used a sacrifice for that one. Now he had no way of finding out why it had worked regardless. 

Was it when Joey bypassed the Machine and tried to combine a picture of Bendy with pure dark magic? Horrified by the partially intangible creature that rose up from the ritual, he was unable to destroy it before it escaped into the studio. He wouldn’t encounter it after that, but he knew it was there, watching like a specter. 

Was it when Norman got too clever, too close? Joey just couldn’t take that risk. He found an old, wonderfully detailed sketch from years ago of Norman sitting behind his projector, concealing his head. And then he watched in angry awe as Norman became the toon in the drawing better than any other attempt before.

(“What was it?” Joey stared down at the picture he’d used. “What made you work? Human life for the sacrifice is necessary for sentience, I know that much—except for that off-model Bendy. But what made that one different?” He paced from one end of his office to the other. “Two experiments that each defied expectations. It wasn’t the Machine, it wasn’t the sacrifice…” He looked back down at the drawing and flipped it over. There in the corner, in familiar letters, was the artist’s signature: Henry Ross. 

Joey scrambled for his desk, throwing open the drawer that held all the drawings he’d used in the past. Just a few down was the one that had resulted in the reject Bendy. 

It was a simple sketch, though as he studied it, he realized something: there were two different styles that made it up, though it was hard to tell. And then it hit him. He knew what this was. Henry had drawn the basic body, likely showing someone how to draw Bendy, and then a different animator had filled in the rest for practice. 

None of the other pictures had any amount of Henry’s influence in them.

That was it; that was what he and the Ink Machine had been missing. Joey smiled.)

Was it when the studio finally closed its doors permanently, despite having been shut down for months? Perhaps the only moderately good thing to come from his entire venture happened at that point, when Joey gave the Ink Machine Henry’s extensive studio sketch. While he’d been busy running around in absolute awe, renewed hope for success flooding his mind, the creatures contained within the Machine’s holding tank escaped into the world, taking on their tainted and corrupted forms, minds lost to the ink.

(They fled from the Liar into the lower levels, working together for the first and last time to make their getaway. It was less a case of common enemy, and more a case of them all briefly—terribly, tragically briefly—remembering who they were, and wanting nothing more than to help each other. But then, it was all lost; what they’d become overtook who they’d once been. Sammy’s insanity, Susie’s obsession, Norman’s righteous anger, Greg’s despair, so on and so forth. And pain. So much pain.)

Was it when Joey used another body sketch of Henry’s and added his own modifications to it? He had to fight off the eight-foot monster that had dragged itself out of the ink, a near-fatal wound forcing his hand. 

Was it when he was no more capable of leaving the studio than any of the malformed creatures that lurked below him?

No. No to all of it.

It was when help Henry became fix Henry. It was when fix Henry became make Henry perfect. It was when make Henry perfect became we could be gods. 

It was when Joey Drew lost sight of his friend in favor of the potential Henry held in the power of his love. It was when Joey Drew wanted that power for himself.

And finally, he knew it was time to put in motion the final stages of his plan. Soon, so wonderfully soon, Henry would be perfect, and Joey would be perfect, and they could destroy all those imperfect rejects and start anew. Not long after losing Bendy and Alice to the lower levels, with Boris locked up and awaiting… dissection… Joey sat down with a pen and some paper, and wrote a letter.

Dear Henry, 

It has been a while, hasn’t it…

He’d come, Joey knew. And then everything would be just as it should—

perfect.

• • • • • 

Bendy startled awake with a cry. The darkness of the room was jarring compared to the bright lights of the upper levels, where they’d been in his dream. 

He looked to his right. Alice and Boris were exactly where they’d been when they’d all collapsed into this room to sleep. But when he turned to his left, the spot that Henry’d occupied was empty. 

Shooting up into a sitting position, he tried not to panic. There was probably a reasonable explanation for Henry’s absence. No need to assume the worst.

Only, the last time he’d headed off on his own, Henry had been cornered by Searchers and was separated from them until Alice and Bendy had been able to track him down.

A muffled cough from just outside the door broke through his racing thoughts. Without waking his friends, Bendy stood and crept across the room to slip out of the smallest crack of space he could fit through.

Sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, Henry rolled his head towards Bendy. He looked terrible: the black marks were thick and dark and almost completely covered his face and neck; there was ink dripping from his nostrils like a nose bleed; even from a few feet away, Bendy could hear the raspy gurgle of Henry’s breathing, and it was scary to imagine how much of the vile stuff was flooding his lungs. 

“You okay?” Henry asked him, voice hoarse from hacking up the disturbingly large puddle of ink next to him. 

Bendy sighed. “Compared to you, I’m right as rain. What are you doin’ out here?” He inched closer to him.

Henry shrugged and opened his arms invitingly, accepting the little demon as he snuggled against Henry’s slightly-feverish body. Bendy nearly purred at the feeling of being surrounded by arms that he knew would protect him, arms that would never let him go.

“But really,” Henry asked, “why are you awake? Did something wake you up? It wasn’t me, was it?” 

“Is that why yer out here?”

Henry’s body sagged a bit. “I’m fightin’ it, Bendy, I really am, and I’ll keep fightin’ it until it finally kills me, but I have to admit—I’m not doing so well.”

“That stupid demon’s trying to poison your heart. He’ll be able to find you, and you won’t be strong enough to fight him.” Bendy sniffled, the idea of losing his Creator so soon after finding him nearly breaking his heart. If they hadn’t been in the real world, if this had been a cartoon, he woulda had the little shattering noise and drippy heart-halves and everything.

But if this was a cartoon, it wouldn’t be a problem; everything could be fixed. Cartoons weren’t made to have sad endings. 

“Hey, c’mon,” Henry whispered, rubbing Bendy’s back. “Don’t give me up for dead yet, bud. I’m still kicking, and no ink demon is going to get his hands on me that easily.” He coughed, and Bendy squeezed his eyes shut so he wouldn’t have to watch Henry struggle to spit out the glob of ink in his throat.

Once his breathing had calmed back down, Henry said, “You didn’t tell me what woke you.” 

“It wasn’t you,” Bendy reassured him. “I had a dream. A nightmare.” 

Henry hugged him tighter. “You wanna talk about it? We don’t have to if you don’t want to.” 

With a deep breath, Bendy rushed out, “We made it back upstairs and we were all fine and you weren’t dying and Boris was awake and we were so close to getting out but then Joey showed up and he fought you and he won and he dragged you away and for some reason me, Alice, ’n Boris didn’t do anythin’ to try to save you, and Joey used the Ink Machine on you, only we thought it didn't work because you didn't look any different but then you started talking like Joey about killing all the rejects and pursuing perfection and then Joey told you to get us and you… you looked at us and said ‘Gladly.’”

When Henry didn’t answer for a long time, Bendy sat back a bit to look up at him. There were tears leaking down his face—some were properly clear, while others ranged from gray to pure black, yet another sign of what ‘Bendy’s touch was doing to his body. 

Offering Bendy a wobbly smile, Henry said, “There’s nothing Joey could ever do to me to make me think any of that. I don’t care if he tries to use his Machine on me, I don’t care if he puts me through a ritual, I don’t care if he yells and throws a fit and threatens me—” Henry leaned down to press his forehead against Bendy’s, eyes dark and serious and glittering wetly— “I will never hurt any of you.” 

Bendy nodded slowly. 

“I’m sorry you had to see that though. Do you want to try to get some more sleep?” 

After some careful consideration, Bendy said, “Only if I can stay out here with you.”

Henry smiled at him. “Of course you can. I’ll try to be quiet when I cough.”

Bendy snuggled down in his Creator’s embrace, already feeling his eyelids grow heavy. He was sure he wouldn’t have to deal with any more nightmares tonight, not when Henry would protect him from those horrible visions. 

A thought occurred to him. Slurring slightly as he slowly drifted off, Bendy said, “Yer not just out here for yer coughing, are ya? Yer bein’ a watchman.” 

Beneath his head, Henry’s chest rumbled in light laughter. “Yeah, I guess I am. I don’t know why, but… I feel like there’s something coming. Something dangerous. And I don’t want to be taken by surprise if tonight is when it finds us.” 

“Yer thinkin’ about the Liar, too, ain’t ya.”

Henry sighed. “I can’t help it. He was my best friend, for years. And now I hardly recognize what he’s become. He was always, y’know, a little out there, but he’s never… even during our last argument, I never looked at him and saw a person who would hurt me. That changed the day I came back.” He took in deep, shuddery breath. “But just now, when I saw him up there… oh, he looked angry, of course he did, but… he looked sad, too. And there’s some part of me that will always want to be by his side, facing anything the world could throw at us. As… as brothers. That’s just how it was, for years—over a decade. I don’t know what happened to him, but I know I can’t help him. Not now. Not after everything he’s done. And especially because he doesn’t want help, he doesn’t—I don’t think he realizes how much he needs it.” 

A gentle snore stopped his rambling train of thought. Henry looked down. 

Curled up against his chest, fingers twisted in the ruined material of his shirt, Bendy’s face was lax in sleep. It was a silly thought, but Henry couldn’t help but wonder if this was how parents felt when they held their children. Gosh, all this crap was worth it just to have met the toons. 

He traced the curve of Bendy’s horns, laughing quietly when the little demon nearly purred in response and pushed up into the soft touch. Henry repeated the action, settling into a rhythm. 

Joey could go screw himself. These were Henry’s toons, and he’d make sure they were safe.

Even if it was the last thing he ever did.

Chapter Text

The tenseness in Henry’s shoulders didn’t leave entirely, but with Bendy curled up against his chest, he didn’t feel quite so wound up. It was a delicate balance, remaining alert and ready for anything without going completely paranoid to the point of losing his ability to function. 

It didn’t help that he could practically sense something looming over them, some great change. A new instinct he was still getting used to, sitting as heavily in his mind as the ink invading his lungs, made him aware down to his bones that they weren’t out of the fire yet. Whether that meant ‘Bendy’ or ‘Alice’s return, another encounter with a cartoon-gone-wrong, or Henry’s own approaching death, he didn’t know. 

Even though he’d already learned his lesson about hiding things from his toons, there was a small detail—a new development, really—that he wasn’t telling them. Though he didn’t have a clue how it was possible, he could somehow feel where ‘Bendy’ was, in terms of proximity, through the poison marks on his face. 

They burned when the ink demon got closer, and while he wasn’t sure if it was actually happening, they sure felt like they were writhing beneath his skin like ‘Bendy’s telltale wall shadows. 

Henry was concerned, to say the least. What was next, him being able to hear ‘Bendy’s voice in his head like he had during the very incident that gave him these rotten marks?

“Knock on wood,” he muttered. Now was no time to jinx himself. 

And as much as he wanted to keep Bendy and Alice—and now Boris, too, once he woke up—in the loop, they were already so convinced that he was gonna drop dead on them at any moment. He didn’t need to add to that fear. He didn’t want to. 

He shifted slightly and winced. Everything hurt; he could admit that. Both his legs were acting up—not made any better from all the stairs they’d climbed in the past few hours—Kai’s claw marks on his back felt itchy and sensitive, though hopefully that was more an indication of healing than anything else; he didn’t even want to imagine what sort of concussion he was nursing, especially given the continuous pounding in his head; and of course, there was the small matter of him having more and more trouble breathing with every passing moment. Combined with his newly aggravated, not-quite-fully healed elevator injuries, and something as simple as standing up was looking more like an impossible task at this point. 

But he had to keep going. He had to, for himself, the toons, and to make good on his promise that he’d make this all right. Death was simply not an option. 

Perhaps the worst part of all this pain was how vividly he remembered the moment ‘Bendy’ had started to absorb him. There had been no suffering in that strange existence. Only peace, and a feeling of warmth and protection. Why—how—did a creature with such deadly intentions turn the losing of one’s self into such a positive experience? 

What hurt Henry most was the fact that there was some deep, exhausted, soul-weary part of him that wanted it. That wanted to just let go, to escape this hell in what might be the easiest way to do so. 

He couldn’t afford to think that way. He refused to surrender any part of himself. 

There was no way to keep track of time passing down here, so Henry had decided when he first took up his post to let his toons sleep for as long as they could. Though he didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there, both before and after Bendy joined him, he never once let his eyes slip shut. 

Despite the uselessness of it, he’d spent most of his time as watchman repeating thoughts of please don’t let anyone find us and we’re safe, we’re not here, no one can find us. 

Several times, the black veins on his face began burning, but ‘Bendy’ never came close enough for the pain to really get bad. 

Eventually, the door beside him opened again. Henry turned his head to watch Alice step out, rubbing her sleepy eyes. 

“What’re you doin’ out here?” she asked. 

Henry smiled. “Just keeping an eye out.” 

“This whole time?” Alice raised an eyebrow. 

Sheepish but not regretting his decision, he nodded. 

Alice sighed and plopped down next to him, scooting beneath his arm when he raised it for her. “You’re not doing yourself any favors.” 

Glancing down at Bendy, still fast asleep, Henry quietly said, “I think some part of me is afraid that if I go to sleep, I’ll never wake up.” 

He felt Alice nod against him. After a moment, she asked, “How do the marks feel?” 

Remembering a line from an episode from a long time ago, Henry chuckled a little and said in a silly voice, “Peachy keen, Miss Angel.”

It seemed to help lift the mood, as Alice started giggling. 

Not breaking from the character’s accent, Henry continued, “In fact, I’ve neva’ felt betta’! Nothin’ like a little tumble ta get yer heart a’pounding.” 

Playing along, Alice said in her own cartoony voice, “But Roger, you’ve lost your body!” 

Shaking with laughter, Henry just barely managed to keep going. “Good golly, yer right! I’m ruined now, Miss Angel, sure as the sun rises. Y’see, what’s a lonely head like me got goin’ for him? Nothin’—that’s what!” 

“How did this even happen? All I saw was that great big boom!” 

“It was the little demon himself! Bendy done gone did this ta me.” 

From the direction of Henry’s chest came, “It wasn’t me, Alice! I swear it.” 

Henry looked down, and Alice leaned forward to see around Henry’s side. Bendy grinned back at them. 

With her halo shining brighter than ever, Alice cried, “But if it wasn’t you, who did it?”

“It was that no-good Parker. He’s tryin’ to make me look bad!” 

“From where I’m standin’, you don’t need any help,” Henry said. 

As one, Bendy and Alice chorused, “You ain’t standing anywhere, Roger!” 

It became too much for Henry, and his wheezy laughter only spurned his toons on. Their merriment finally came to an end when the ink in Henry’s lungs decided to remind him of its presence, and he was forced to cough out more of the vile stuff. 

“Well,” Henry cleared his throat, “I think it’s safe to say we all needed that.” He waited until they hesitantly smiled back at him, slight creases of worry still evident around their eyes, before he continued, “And as much as I wish we could reenact some more episode scenes, we should probably get moving. That we haven’t been found by anyone yet is makin’ me a little nervous.” 

They both nodded and stood up, brushing themselves off as Henry slowly pushed himself to his feet, swallowing every groan that tried to escape him. 

“What’s the plan?” Bendy asked.

Taking a deep breath and somehow managing not to wince at the ache in his ribs, Henry answered, “I was thinking we could head back to the safehouse. I don’t know how much time Boris will need to fully recover, but it won’t do us any good to be constantly on the move.” 

Henry didn’t mention how he wanted to know that they’d be safe in the event that he did end up biting the dust down here. 

Bendy and Alice followed Henry back into the room, where Boris was still unconscious. 

Looking down at him, Alice planted her hands on her hips and asked, “How are we gonna do this? Bendy and I could probably carry him—”

Henry knelt down and hefted Boris into a fireman’s carry, like he learned in the army. Ignoring the way his body—and toons—protested, he rose and headed for the door. 

“I’m fine,” he said over their continued objections. “The faster we get there, the better.” 

Bendy gave him a Look, and Alice wagged a finger at him. “If you get tired,” she said, “say something, and we’ll find a place to take a break.” 

“You’ve got yourself a deal, Miss Angel.” 

• • • • • 

It was pure luck that Henry glanced behind them as they reached the top of the stairs in Heavenly Toys. “We’ve got company,” he called out. 

Steadily gaining on them was a deformed Charley, brandishing a large pipe wrench. At the bottom of the steps, two Searchers dragged themselves after them. 

Ducking into the toy machine room, Henry used his free arm to sweep one of the workbenches clean before gently setting Boris down on it. “I’ll take care of Charley—think you two can stay near here and deal with the Searchers?”

Alice nodded determinedly. Bendy gave Henry a thumbs up and said, “As long as it’s not Sammy again, we should be fine.”

Spotting a rusty tool box near Boris’s feet, Henry pulled it forward. There was only one intact tool—a small mallet—inside it. He took it anyway; in the long run, it wouldn’t serve as a great weapon, but in a pinch, it was better than nothing. 

Henry gave them a last, grim smile. “Let’s try and make this quick.” He passed through the entryway and immediately lurched back along the upper catwalk area, Charley having caught up to them. 

Charley swung his pipe wrench at Henry, and though neither makeshift weapon had much reach, the heavy metal of his would do far more damage if Henry wasn’t careful and got caught off guard. 

As he parried back and forth with Charley, Henry just barely had the extra brain power to notice Bendy and Alice lure the Searchers into the short hall between the toy machine room and the catwalk, forcing the Searchers to filter through one at a time. 

Even though he knew, deep down, that it’d be useless, Henry couldn’t help but try to talk to the toon attacking him. “C’mon, Charley, please. I don’t want to hurt you.” He blocked a blow without returning it.

Charley paused and stared at Henry for a moment. 

The sudden stillness put Henry on high alert, even as he took the chance to really look at what Charley had become. Where Edgar had been about the same size as Bendy, perhaps an inch or two shorter, Charley was disproportionally massive in comparison, just about reaching the middle of Henry’s chest. 

Both his eyes were mutilated, one viciously stitched shut, the other gouged and leaking ink; his jaw hung grotesquely, stuck open like he was screaming; one of his arms was missing the hand; and his right leg was entirely replaced by a plunger of all things. 

Like the Amalgamates, it made a righteous, upset fury burn within him. What had this toon done to deserve this? What had any of them done?

“Nothing,” Henry whispered. “You did nothing to deserve this.” 

The splatter sound of a Searcher being destroyed broke the stillness between them, and as though remembering what he was doing, Charley lunged forward again. 

Having jumped back to avoid being hit, Henry’s spine collided with the wall, surprising him enough to make him gasp. Flecks of ink invaded his throat, and he nearly doubled over as a new coughing attack hit him. 

The spasms sent him jerking, right as Charley’s wrench smashed into the wall beside him, splintering the wood. Unable to defend himself, Henry ducked to the side and stumbled down the stairs to the main floor, trying desperately to breathe. Relentless, Charley followed. 

“Henry!” he heard Bendy cry, right as one of his legs nearly gave out. “He’s right behind you!” 

Bracing his hip on one of the railings in the middle of the room, Henry wrapped both hands around the handle of his mallet, gritted his teeth, and spun, swinging it like a baseball bat as hard as he could. 

He hit Charley square in the head, right as he’d been winding up for a blow that was aimed to do some serious damage to the sides of Henry’s battered ribs. The sheer force of Henry’s strike sent the toon flying to the side, where his body crashed against the wall, shattering a Bendy cutout. 

Dropping the mallet, Henry fell to his knees and vomited, finally clearing his airway. The broken pieces of Bendy’s 2-dimensional likeness, still in his line of sight, seemed to bubble ink for a moment. He looked up towards the catwalk, already knowing what he’d see. 

“Stay where you are!” he cried, spotting Bendy and Alice halfway down the left staircase. 

And at the top of the right stood ‘Bendy,’ staring straight at him. A wall portal dripped closed behind him, and the marks on Henry’s face burned. 

From their positions, neither ‘Bendy’ nor Bendy and Alice could see each other. Henry wanted to keep it that way. With Boris still unconscious in the toy room, and no chance of fighting the ink demon off, there was nothing else for Henry to do but rise to his feet and begin backing up. 

‘Bendy’ started down the stairs. 

“I’ll find you,” Henry said. Getting ready to run, watching as Alice yanked Bendy farther up the steps, he shouted, “I promise, I’ll find you!” 

“Henry!” 

It took all the self-control he had to force himself to turn away from his toons—crying, now, having finally spotted ‘Bendy’—and leave them there as his pursuer screeched at him. 

And he ran, pushing his dying body as fast as it could go, with inevitability snapping at his heels. 

• • • • • 

“Lemme go, Alice!” Bendy thrashed in her arms, inky tears flinging off his face in every which way, struggling against her grip as she pulled him farther and farther away from Henry. “He needs us!”

“He’s trying to protect us! Stop fighting me, Bendy—”

“But who’s gonna protect him? He ain’t got much longer, he can’t—he won’t last—that rotten demon’s gonna get him…” Bendy’s legs gave out beneath him, and Alice let him fall limply. He sat there—body slumped down onto itself, head tilted back—ugly sobbing at the ceiling. 

Behind him, though he didn’t see it, Alice leaned her whole weight on the workbench bearing Boris’s body. One hand pressed against her eyes, the other clutching at the wolf’s limp hand, Alice wept. 

And even though neither of them wanted to admit it, Bendy was right: Henry’s time was well and truly up. His tragically human heart couldn’t take much more of the poison leeching his life away, and if that didn’t do him in, it seemed like the ink in his lungs would. With every coughing attack, both toons had been terrified that each might be the one he couldn’t recover from in time. 

The fear that they’d have to stand by and watch Henry, their wonderful Creator, slowly suffocate to death had increased every time a new attack overcame him. 

Now, with ‘Bendy’ on his tail, they knew. They knew they’d never see him again.

By some miracle, for the long minutes where they knew nothing but blurry eyes and loud, wailing sobs, no Searcher or Butcher gang member or any of the studio’s other numerous threats stumbled upon them. 

They were able to mourn in peace, for all that was worth. 

Boris’s hand twitched, tightening slightly in Alice’s grip. He slowly came awake, eyes blinking open and squinting, like one does after a long nap. Without being noticed, he turned his head towards the sound of crying and silently took in Bendy on the floor and Alice looking like she was one gentle breeze from joining him. 

Bendy and Alice snapped their heads towards him when he hoarsely asked, “Wha’s goin’ on?” 

Alice initially stumbled back, gasping, but then she leapt forward, crying, “You’re okay!”

He just barely managed to sit up in time to catch her as she wound her arms around his neck. “Hey, hey, what’s the rush?” Boris asked, laughing a little. “And what’d ya mean I’m okay? Why wouldn’t I—”

Bendy watched Boris freeze, eyes widening. There was a pit, a growing hole that was desolate and empty inside him, and as much as Bendy wanted to dry his cheeks and celebrate the recovery of his best pal, he just couldn’t. Now when he knew that Henry was out there somewhere, dying or maybe even already dead.

None of them would be here without Henry—Boris most of all—who hadn’t just created them, but had risked his life to protect them, to save Boris, and to get them away from danger. And Henry would die without knowing that Boris was okay. 

“Joey had me,” Boris whispered. “Alice. He cut me open. I died.”

Alice nodded, futility trying to wipe her face clean of tears that just kept coming. 

“Then how…”

“The Creator,” Bendy said, feeling completely and utterly numb. “The Creator—Henry—saved you.” He lowered his eyes, feeling Boris examine him.

There was a thin line of ink seeping through one of the cracks between floorboards. Bendy traced it and watched more leak through. 

Distantly, he heard Alice whisper, “There’s a creature down here, a super off-model version of Bendy—do you remember Joey tellin’ us about the time he added to Henry’s drawing… yeah, that one—and he really really wants to get his filthy hands on Henry.”

“What for?”

“To absorb him. None of us know why, though.”

Bendy watched a drop of ink detach from the growing lines. It drifted upward like a bubble.

He felt something skim along his back, like a phantom sensation, and then he felt what could only be ink clogging his throat—but ink couldn’t do that to him. He could still breathe just fine. Another drop floated into the air.

“How’d you even get me?”

“We snuck upstairs, and Henry gave up his chance to escape to use the Ink Machine to save you. Joey woulda caught us, so we had to come back down.”

Bendy wished he knew how he could miss someone so much, when he had only known Henry for such a short amount of time—although, that wasn’t right, was it? In some way, he’d kinda known Henry since he was just a kid doodlin’ in his bedroom. 

The space around him was full of little ink droplets that shivered with every movement. He nudged one, and stared at it as it collided with another, rippling into a larger sphere. 

A heavy weight pressed down on his heart, but he knew it couldn’t truly be there. His heart wasn’t the one that was dying. 

“Alice… what’s wrong with Bendy?” 

Bendy wanted to scream, wanted to punch something, wanted to not be so small and useless that he couldn’t protect his own Creator. He squeezed his eyes shut, and so didn’t notice the ink on the floor and in the air surge up around him. 

“What do you—Bendy!” 

His eyes shot open right as the ink slammed around him, and he knew just by the feel of it that they were off-model. And he saw. 

Blood seeping down his back from ragged claw marks, Henry turned a corner as fast he dared. His mouth was clamped shut, and he guessed that his face was likely an unnatural shade of red—especially jarring considering how pale he’d been from exhaustion, dehydration, and blood loss. 

He was holding his breath, because the choice was this: stop to vomit in order to breathe, and be caught; or run, and hope he could outsmart the ink demon one last time. 

Time—and oxygen—was running out. Even worse, he recognized his surroundings, and he was on a one way trip to a dead end. 

Out of sheer desperation, Henry grabbed a barrel in passing and hurled it to the ground. It broke his pace, and he nearly sucked in a reflexive breath—the edges of his vision were getting alarmingly spotty—but it was worth the trouble when ‘Bendy’ went sprawling over the obstacle. 

Without a moment to spare, Henry got just far enough ahead to be out of sight and ducked through an unlocked door. As quietly as he was able, he collapsed to his hands and knees and opened his mouth. Ink came pouring out like a vile waterfall, and he was gasping helplessly by the time the flood had ended. 

Beyond his little safe room, he could hear ‘Bendy’ slamming around nearby. He knew then, that Henry was hiding. He could try running, but where would he go? Back to the toons might mean certain death for all of them, and he hadn’t come so far to condemn them now.

Slumped against the flimsy wooden door, the only barrier between him and the ink demon, his back stinging somethin’ awful, Henry deflated. It was just a matter of who or what was fastest at this point. 

Death by suffocation.

Death by his poisoned heart.

Death by absorption. 

He clutched his chest with one hand, his face with the other. The pain was overwhelming, for all that it was just one more to add to the list. Henry wondered if he was imagining it when the beat beneath his palm stuttered. 

A tear slipped down his face to drip off the tip of his nose. It splattered on his chest, as dark as his approaching fate. 

Bendy shrieked for his Creator, too far gone to realize how deep and corrupted the sound had become, too far gone to hear the screams of his friends, too far gone to register anything other than the feel of wood splintering under a fist that was larger than his entire body. 

Oh. 

Oh.

• • • • • 

Feeling more defeated than even when he’d been told he’d never walk again, Henry sighed. Leaving wasn’t an option, not when such an action was guaranteed to result in another chase. His body just didn’t have it in him. 

But staying also meant certain doom, even as some twisted part of his mind craved the peace that he knew would come with being absorbed. 

There was only one other option, and to him, it was perhaps the ugliest of all. While taking his own life might give him some measure of control over the situation, it was the surest form of giving up that he could imagine. Sitting tight and hoping for a way out to present itself was very different from all but admitting that there was no hope whatsoever. 

If it came down to it, Henry wanted to go out fighting. 

He opened his eyes to the dim room and gasped. He lurched up, struggling to overcome his body’s building protests, never taking his eyes off ‘Bendy’s shadow from where it stood on the wall.

But where was ‘Bendy?’ And where was the shadow being cast from, for that matter?

A clatter echoed from far away, closely followed by one of ‘Bendy’s characteristic screeches. Confused, Henry stepped a bit closer to the shadow, trying to figure out what it really was. He sagged in relief. “It’s only a drawing,” he reassured himself. 

What sort of person drew an exact, life-size replica of the studio’s most violent inhabitant? Ah, well, Sammy, perhaps. 

Lacking anything else to do, Henry closed the distance between him and it. The drawing was very well done, other than how a large portion of its chest had been smeared off. With the way the ink had streaked, the drawing was left looking like the result of one of Joey’s cruel experiments. 

Henry looked around. On one of the half-destroyed shelves to his left, a closed bottle of ink sat, next to a brush. 

Mentally shrugging—because he was sure his shoulders and back would protest the real movement—Henry took up the utensils and got to work fixing the drawing. 

“There are a lot of toons in here that could use a bit of help,” he said, “but there’s nothing I can do for any of them. Not right now.” 

Not ever, he tried not to think.

“But I don’t care if you look just like the demon trying to kill me, I will fix up someone in this studio if it’s— well, I suppose this actually will be the last thing I do.” 

He looked up at the head. Using his already heavily stained sleeve, he lightened the ink as best he could to use negative space to create a smile. He repeated the process with the drawing’s bowtie, using the brush to touch up the edges. 

The crashing was growing closer. ‘Bendy’ would find him soon. 

“I’m scared,” he admitted quietly. “I’m scared of just what it will mean to be absorbed by him. Will I die? Or will I still be alive, just trapped in there, losing my mind?” Henry laughed a little, ignoring the way his eyes dripped ink-black tears, and the way his lungs gurgled, and the way his heart stuttered again. “What am I talking about, I’ve clearly already lost it. I’m talking to what’s probably nothing more than a finger painting done by Sammy.” 

He stuck his tongue out to get the last few strokes. “There,” he said, taking a few steps back to better see the full thing. “Good as new.” 

Behind him, the doorknob jiggled. There was an eerie moment of silence before something disturbingly like a dark chuckle sounded from the hallway. 

‘Bendy’ had found him. 

Dropping the inkwell and brush, Henry turned in a slow circle, searching for something to aid him in his last stand. There was nothing, nothing both large enough to even stand a chance at slowing ‘Bendy’ down but small or easily wielded enough for Henry’s weakened state. 

‘Bendy’ slammed against the door, splintering the wood. Another hit or two, and he’d break in. 

Something in the corner of Henry’s eye caught his attention, and he instinctively turned to look at it. 

He frowned. The drawing on the wall was somehow bigger than it’d been a moment ago—

No. It wasn’t bigger. It was closer. 

Henry gasped and stumbled back, right as the not-a-drawing-after-all reached out towards him. A crash from the door had him whirling, and he only had a split second to register that ‘Bendy’ was standing barely two feet away from him when ‘Bendy’ struck. 

Without fanfare, he thrust his hand forward into Henry’s chest—literally, the ink seemed to be absorbed straight through his skin and it was coursing through him, he could feel it, could feel it both cold and hot, like something was consuming-possessing-devouring him—and he was falling-collapsing-tipping straight into ‘Bendy’s waiting arms. 

But there was a screech, not from above and in front of him, but behind, and then hands wrapped around his upper arms and pulled him back and away and Henry didn’t know what was happening. 

His mind tried and failed to jumpstart itself, and there was movement, he was being moved, quickly and painfully. Another screech, and then darkness. It was a very wet darkness, pressing in at him from all sides, writhing, rippling, like whatever the darkness was made from was alive.

With a splash, Henry fell face first into a pool of ink. Before he could even register the danger of, y’know, drowning, those same hands that had pulled him away from ‘Bendy’ yanked him up, but gently, like their owner cared. 

Henry’s head lolled as his limp body was rearranged on something decently comfortable and warm, and it took a little while for his eyes to start working again, but when his vision returned, he found himself staring right up into the face of the shadow drawing. 

Being shot had been a trial in hot, searing pain followed by blessed unconsciousness. By the time he’d woken up later, he’d been on medication and the worst was already behind him. Despite the danger of it all, he’d never had the opportunity to feel like he was well and truly dying.

That was what he felt like now. His strength was gone, his powerful determination only good for stubbornly keeping his eyes open at this point, and his blood felt weighted down by the ink within it. He coughed, barely anything more than a particularly violent exhalation, and a thick combination of blood and ink bubbled up out of his saturated lungs. 

His heart tried to trip to a stop, but Henry resisted. That was all he had left, delaying the inevitable. 

The shadow creature gave him a little shake, and Henry’s head lolled again. He looked up at it blearily, only distantly aware that it was cradling him in its lap like one would a child. There was nothing he could do to stop it as it placed a hand on his chest. 

It was so strange. Bits of the shadow creature were at least partially see-through, giving it a very ghostlike appearance. Henry had never seen another toon like it. The creature didn’t look incomplete, though. Other than the streak in its chest from when Henry had found it—something that Henry now suspected to have been intentional as a method of keeping the creature there— the creature seemed intact and relatively stable. 

It—or was it a he?—leaned down and nuzzled his cheek, a deep, steady rumble vibrating from its chest. Well, at least it wasn’t trying to absorb him.

Spoke too soon. 

It slowly began to increase the pressure in its hand over his ribs, and Henry cried out weakly. Its other arm, the one supporting his head wiggled a bit and somehow grew longer, so that while Henry was still propped up on it, its hand could fold over his face, mimicking the position ‘Bendy’ had been in when he first grabbed Henry after Kai’s attack. 

Henry struggled as best he could—which was nothing more than a feeble wiggle—as the hands on his face and chest gradually pressed harder against him. The steady rumbling purr kept up, and the creature hunched over Henry as much as it was able. 

Feeling like he’d burst into flames from how horribly his body burned at the contact, Henry arched his spine and released one last, long shriek. The pain reached a peak within him, and he thought he might be able to hear static. Vision wavering, Henry braced himself for death.

And then, all at once, it stopped. 

The shadow creature made a high pitched distressed noise as it released its hold on him, instead just gathering him up—seriously, he knew he wasn’t the tallest of guys, but this thing was really making him feel small—and rocking back and forth, crooning. 

Henry took a deep, gasping breath, and immediately froze.

He could breathe. His lungs weren’t rattling and gurgling, and his heart wasn’t stuttering along, and his body didn’t feel weighted down by the all-consuming ink. 

A tear coursed down his cheek. He intercepted it, swiping it up with his fingers, and looked.

Clear. It was properly clear, like tears were meant to be, like water should always be. It wasn’t black anymore. 

Tilting his head back, he gazed up at the creature, who was watching him. “What did you do?” he asked quietly. 

It made a little click-clack noise at him and gave him a gentle head-butt. Reaching for his face—slowly enough that Henry could pull back if he wanted to—the shadow creature lightly traced over where Henry knew the worst of the poison handprint had been. Then it splayed its hand over the portion of its own chest, where it had been smudged. 

And somehow, that made sense to Henry. “I fixed you, so… you fixed me.” 

It trilled and twisted to press its palm to the wall. Little black lines wiggled away from it, like a combination of ‘Bendy’s wall shadows and the marks that had been killing Henry. It didn’t let the lines go far before seemingly sucking them back in. The creature double tapped Henry’s nose.

“You just sort of pulled it out,” he said. “Like. The poison was its own antidote. No wonder no one knew of any cure; you had to fight fire with fire.” 

The shadow creature wiggled and nuzzled him again, cuddling him closer. Henry couldn’t help but laugh. 

“Life begets life,” he whispered, “violence begets violence, so of course kindness and caring beget kindness and caring. Joey’s an idiot for not seeing that.” 

With perhaps the closest thing it could get to a chuckle, the creature gave a firm nod before going back to devoting itself to hugging the life outta Henry—metaphorically, thank goodness—while Henry took the chance to look around. 

Wherever they were—which could be anywhere, since he was fairly certain he’d just gone through his first wall portal—was darker than any other hallway he’d come across so far, absolutely flooded with ink, and the corridor twisted off into various other directions. 

“We’re in the maze,” he said. “Level 14.” 

The creature nodded, purring. 

Henry smiled at it. Curious, he reached up and ran his hand over the side of its head, letting out a rather delighted noise at what he found. Instead of feeling like ink, or anything even remotely similar, the shadow creature was soft and velvety and warm. 

“I have no idea what you are,” he said, petting it as it pushed into his hand. “But you’re going to completely ruin me for the next time I see ‘Bendy.’ You’ll make me forget to be afraid.” 

It snuffled. This was an eight-foot-tall, shadowy creature that shared a likeness with the demon trying to kill him—it was still absolutely adorable. 

Unsurprisingly, Henry began to doze off. Cradled and warm as he was, no longer dying a slow and suffocating death, and still pretty banged up and bloody, exhaustion hit hard. 

“Don’t let me sleep long,” he whispered, eyelids drooping. “I gotta find my toons. I promised I’d find them.” 

Though Henry had no way of knowing, he slept soundly for nearly an hour before being roused by a steady growl coming from his companion. 

He shook himself awake, and before he could ask what was wrong, he heard it: sloshing. There was someone down here, walking through the ink, getting closer and closer. 

Henry twisted in the shadow creature’s hold and turned towards the maze’s hallways, right as a bright, blinding light fell upon them. 

For a moment, there was silence. 

A grating screech, different from ‘Bendy’s, sliced through the air, right as the newcomer rushed at them. Henry found himself being lifted up and set aside, just in time for the shadow creature to lunge forward and slam into their attacker. 

Heart beating wildly, Henry sat in the ink and stared as the two beings, almost of a height, grappled with each other. Blinking spots out of his vision, Henry finally took in the new toon’s form. 

Whoever it was had a body made of ink, though it was more detailed and didn’t constantly drip like Sammy’s had. Wires and tubing jutted out of its shoulders and head, reconnecting farther down the back and legs. A speaker protruded from its chest, and a film reel, much like ‘Alice’s halo stuck out of her skull, was embedded in its left shoulder. But Henry couldn’t take his eyes of the toon’s head, which had been replaced by a projector. 

The two creatures screeched at each other, claws and fists violently swinging between them. But why? Why did they need to fight?

Henry was so tired of all this fighting. He just wanted to help.

Was it reckless, stupid, and possibly a terrible decision? Yes. Did he still lurch to his feet and all but force his way between the battling toons, shoving them apart? Also yes.

“Stop it! That’s enough!” 

His sudden appearance took them both by surprise, stilling and quieting them. The shadow creature loomed over Henry, growling menacingly at the other toon, but it didn’t try to push past the human standing in its way. Letting it stay at his back, Henry fully turned to face the other. 

Though the light blinded him, he didn’t shy away from it. The sound of ink sloshing alerted him to the newcomer’s approach, and he held still despite himself. 

He wasn’t being attacked, which could mean that whoever this was, or had been, still had some degree of sentience. 

It came closer and closer, and perhaps the only reason Henry wasn’t as afraid as he should’ve been was that the shadow creature remained behind him, one of its hands closed around his arm, ready to pull him away if things took a turn for the worse. 

The projector lowered until it was eye-level with Henry. It really was almost as tall as ‘Bendy.’ 

He stared into the light for a long couple of seconds before the speaker implanted in the creature’s chest crackled and cycled through some static.

In a broken and unused voice, the creature slowly sounded out, “Cre-a-tor…” 

One of Henry’s hands slowly reached out and touched the projector, horror building in his throat. No. Please, no, not—not again, not another lost friend. And yet, “Norman? Is… is that you?” 

The creature’s head tilted as it—no, definitely he—reached back and pressed his palm to Henry’s chest.

And Norman said, “My… friend. Hen-ry.”

Chapter Text

Henry stared at Norman, at the creature the man had become—no; the creature Joey had turned him into. Numb, he shook his head in denial. His knees went a little weak, and it was only the shadow creature’s arms wrapping around his chest that kept him from collapsing. 

Not again. Not another. Was this the fate of everyone who had worked here? 

“Why?” he whispered, looking down at Norman’s hand, still pressed to his chest. Ink. It was all ink. 

“Saw… too much,” Norman said, struggling with his words. “Joe-y found out. Thought… I knew.” A loud grating sound echoed out of the speaker, and he shook his head. “Did-n’t.”

Henry breathed out harshly through his teeth, trying not to break down. This studio had been a place full of so many happy memories, so many happy times. Every moment he spent here now pressed down on his shoulders. He’d lose his mind before any of the many dangers here could kill him at this rate. To see the walls he’d drawn, the toons he’d loved, the friends he’d had distorted and destroyed… it was breaking his heart, continuously forming new and deeper cracks. 

Norman pulled away, straightening back up. The projector tilted, staring the shadow creature in the face. “Not… the de-mon.” 

“No,” Henry said, “I don’t know quite what it is.” He tilted his head back, and the creature booped their upside down faces together. “It—or he, I’m not really sure—needs a name though.”

The shadow trilled.

Henry narrowed his eyes. Shadow was boring. Inky… no, there was nothing special about that. It was a reflection, sort of, but that was hardly a name. Mirror?—no. It wasn’t a copy of ‘Bendy,’ but maybe—

“How about Echo? I don’t know if you were created before or after ‘Bendy,’ but he’s solid, and you’re sorta see-through, so you at least look like a variation of each other. Echoes don’t perfectly match the original, anyway, and it can be another name for a shadow or ghost. And it sounds toon-y enough.”

The shadow creature thought about it for a moment before crooning wildly. It picked Henry up and spun around a few times, setting him back down with a little splash. 

Henry laughed, and Norman’s speaker made a sound not unlike an engine sputtering as he shook his head at their antics. “Likes it,” he said. 

“I’d say so, yeah.” Henry’s smile faded suddenly, and he stepped forward out of Echo’s embrace. 

There was something written on the side of Norman’s projector head. The words were badly smudged, and he might have dismissed them as ink splatters or not even noticed them entirely, if Norman hadn’t moved. 

Norman went very still as Henry reached up. He didn’t step away as Henry traced the letters, clearing away some of the grime obscuring them. 

“Hen-ry. Don’t.”

Norman’s Projector! Do NOT touch—that means you, Wally!

His arm dropped limply to his side and he took a shaky step back. “I drew that,” he whispered.

“Hen-ry.”

“I drew a picture of you standing behind a projector, and it—it blocked your head. And I wrote that in the drawing, because, because—”

“Hen-ry.” 

“—because Wally accidentally spilled ink on the paper. I added the speaker and film reel to cover some of the splatter up. I—”

“Hen-ry,” Norman reached out, palms up so as not to spook the trembling animator. Even now, after years of not seeing each other, Henry realized, his old friend still recognized the beginnings of a panic attack. 

“—I did this to you,” Henry whispered. His back hit the wall, and he hunched over, bracing his hands on his knees. “I did this to you!” 

Blood rushed in his ears, and his vision wavered. Henry’s breathing became faster and faster, and some part of him knew he had to calm down. His mind slowed, and logical thoughts lost their importance as his heartbeat quickened. 

He did this. It was his fault. All of it was his fault— 

Foreign hands, large hands, hands he didn’t immediately recognize touched his shoulders and sides. With a strangled sound, he twisted away, nearly collapsing into the ink. Adrenaline poured through his veins, and his body shook violently. 

There was—‘Bendy’ was in front of him. 

Henry stumbled back with a yelp. Pain shot up his right leg—he’d been shot—no, that was years ago. 

Someone—was someone saying his name? A bright light blinded him, and he cried out, twisting-turning-no-no-no, trying to escape, get away from the guns—no, from ‘Bendy’— 

What had—he didn’t understand—why was he—oh, he remembered: something was his fault. He hurt somebody, he needed to—a promise, he’d promised—lost, though, where was— 

A touch to his shoulder sent him tripping away, nearly headfirst into a wall. He braced himself, trying to find the part of his mind that wasn’t so jumbled up, but—that was a corpse. 

There was a corpse just down the hall. Limp, broken, dead dead dead—had he done that? He hurt people, he hurt everyone—it was all his fault! 

Was this—he was having a panic attack. Everything went blurry, and he slid down towards the floor, only to be caught up by gentle hands. He tried to writhe away, but for as careful as it was, his captor’s—captor?—grip remained solid. 

The world spun as he was lifted—up? No, maybe down, because he was suddenly sitting, or sprawling, or dying—he didn’t know. 

A steady rumble caught his attention. He could feel it, and hear it, and there was just black, everything was black, where had the light gone, what happened—

“Hen-ry. Breathe.” 

He wanted to tell the voice that he was trying, he really was, but his lungs felt too big and too small and too far—

Very slowly, a palm that didn’t belong to him—at least, he didn’t think it did—pressed against his face, covering his mouth. 

For a moment, he felt suspended in time, like he didn’t exist. 

But then his body caught up, and he started breathing through his nose, which didn’t make him quite as lightheaded as when he was panting short and sharp. 

Between the rumble and the hand preventing him from hyperventilating again, Henry gradually came back to himself. His heart slowed, the rushing blur of noise faded, and his bleary vision cleared. 

Norman crouched in front of him, the light of his projector greatly dimmed, with his hand being the one covering sealing his breath within him. The shadow creature—no, Echo—had evidently been the one to catch him, and now they were back to sitting on the floor, Henry carefully trapped in its arms as it purred against him. 

He blinked at Norman, who cautiously pulled his hand back. Henry was still trembling all over, and his face felt wet from tears he hadn’t known he’d been shedding, but his lungs seemed to have gotten back with the program. 

“Thanks,” he said, and his voice was rough and his throat hurt, and he wondered if he’d been screaming. 

“Pan-ic?” Norman asked, “Or flash-back?” 

“Little bit of both, I think. Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Not your fault.”

Henry’s eyes strayed to the side of Norman’s projector head. He’d beg to differ.

“No. Joe-y picked… ran-dom draw-ing. Not your fault.” 

Trying to believe it for himself, Henry nodded silently. 

After a moment, Echo trilled, ending on a higher note, like a question. It nudged the side of Henry’s head with its own. 

“Yeah, I’m fine, bud,” Henry told it, reaching up to pet the side of its horn. “Promise.” He blinked. “Promise… promise! I gotta get back to my toons!”

Henry tried to lurch up, startling Norman into standing, but his legs were still just jelly enough that he pitched forwards. With a grating screech of surprise from his old friend, Norman barely managed to catch him. 

“Hen-ry!” 

Blinking dizziness out of his eyes, Henry shook his head. “Okay, how ’bout take two?” 

Echo hovered behind him, Norman in front, each ready and waiting to steady him as he straightened up. This time, though he wouldn’t put any confidence in a pace faster than walking, he didn’t immediately fall over. His legs still hurt somethin’ awful, but there really wasn’t much to do about that. 

“I’m good,” he said. “Now how do we get out of here?” 

“The lift?” Norman asked, gesturing in what Henry guessed to be the general direction of the elevator. 

“Not after ‘Alice’ dropped me in it.” 

Norman reared backwards, his speaker briefly shorting out, and Echo growled. 

“That’s not important right now—Bendy, Alice, and Boris are up there somewhere, and they probably think I’m dead. We have to get to them.” 

Echo click-clacked and waved towards the nearest wall. A portal bubbled into existence. 

“Excellent,” Henry said, smiling. He glanced at Norman. “Will it be safe for you?” 

Rather than answer, Norman stuck his hand through the ink. When he pulled it out, there didn’t appear to be any damage. 

“Where?” Norman asked as Henry stepped up to it, sandwiched between him and Echo. 

Henry squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated. Where would the toons go? Would they wait in the toy machine room, find the nearest safe area, or continue on to their original destination? 

Shoulders relaxing, Henry opened his eyes and stared into the depths of the ever-shifting portal. 

• • • • • 

A distorted roar shook the room as Bendy smashed his fist into the floor, splintering the boards like toothpicks. Alice pressed back against the table, staring up at him. This had never happened before, Bendy had never become—that. 

Bendy’s horns, instead of curving towards each other, were elongated and stretching more upwards than inwards. It looked like an asymmetrical crescent moon had been cut out of his head, leaving one side longer than the other. 

His mouth, she might’ve thought was missing entirely, if it weren’t for his initial scream-turned-roar, and now a continuous string of growls that had to be coming from somewhere. The smile he’d been created with was gone, replaced with a simple jagged line that reminded Alice of the way the Searchers’ faces simply split open when they moaned. 

And his eyes. Pie-cut by slivers on both the left and right side, they were also bisected up and down the center each way, leaving the black separated into four sections that still functioned as one. 

He looked like a puppet with buttons sewn into his face, or a child’s demonic depiction of him, or—something about it made him look dead. 

But his off-model-ness didn’t stop there—his body was huge, large enough to be hunched over against the ceiling, with spikes arching off his back in a line, similar to a dragon character in their show had, like a deadly fin that stretched from the neck down. His gloveless hands looked as though they could squeeze the life out of Alice without pause, and his fingers ended with slightly curved claws. In place of legs, Bendy’s body split in two close to the ground, and each side connected to a puddle of bubbling ink. 

Alice had never been scared of Bendy before.

But as his claws curled into the floorboards, slicing through them like butter, she couldn’t quite contain a whimper. 

“Alice,” Boris whispered, clutching her hand. “Has this ever…”

“No,” she said. “I’ve never seen any toon do this.” 

“What do we do?” 

Alice watched with more dread than she’d ever felt before as Bendy slowly turned towards them. “I don’t know, Boris. I don’t know.” 

• • • • • 

Henry coughed slightly as he emerged from the wall portal, though it wasn’t the lung-ripping, life-draining, ink-filled hacking it used to be. Norman gripped his right hand, Echo his left, and he let them guide him forward onto solid ground. 

“I don’t like that,” he said, knowing full well how petulant he sounded. “I don’t like that at all.” 

“O-kay?” Norman asked, watching as Henry gave himself a full-body shake to get rid of the creepy-crawly feeling he got from that impenetrable, consuming darkness. 

Henry offered his friend an enthusiastic thumbs up. “They’re near here,” he told his companions. They were on Level P—honestly, what had he been thinking when he named these floors—near where Henry got all up close and personal with a Searcher. 

Norman made a curious noise. “How can—”

“Well, well. The Creator lives.” 

The three of them whirled around. Standing at the nearest intersection down one of the hallways, ‘Alice’ stared at them with a decidedly malicious smirk, an axe held in front of her. 

Henry shivered as her eyes trailed up and down his body. “Someone’s seen better days,” she said lowly. “What sort of hell have you been through, my little errand boy?”

“Not that again,” Henry muttered under his breath. “Look, ‘Alice,’ we just—”

“I wonder,” she spoke right over him, “if you have any idea of the chaos roaming through the studio at this very moment. Hm. Perhaps not. You don’t look nearly scared enough.”

Lifting his chin, Henry glared. “I’ve dealt with ‘Bendy.’ He doesn’t scare me.”

‘Alice’ laughed and stepped closer. “Oh, Creator, I didn’t mean the ink demon. There’s something far worse tearing this place apart.” 

Henry frowned and narrowed his eyes. What did she mean? Surely he would’ve already encountered someone like that.

“And what’s this… a Liar’s reject, and the Projectionist. What peculiar choices of company.”

Echo growled, and Norman’s speaker crackled. “I’m… Nor-man,” he ground out. 

With a delighted noise, ‘Alice’ appraised him. “He speaks! Last I knew, Projectionist, you were skulking around the maze, counting the corpses. Are those hearts still down there? Before the Creator, I had planned on using those. But why waste time on that when I have him?” 

“You can’t have me, ‘Alice.’ That’s not how things work.”

She sneered and took another step towards them. “Only one of us is armed, Creator, and as you know, blade beats ink. Your little pets can’t touch me.” 

Norman crouched down a bit, clearly ready to try to prove her wrong, but Echo shoved him back. Thrown off balance, Norman stumbled away, as Echo gave Henry a quick little nuzzle before squaring off directly in front of ‘Alice.’ 

“No,” Henry said, grabbing its arm. “No, I won’t let you!” 

Echo growled and jerked his head towards Norman, who looked back and forth between Echo and Henry. 

Henry understood a split second before Norman reached for him. “Norman, don’t you dare! Let me go—no! No!” Though he was careful not to hurt Henry, Norman didn’t allow him any leverage as he dragged Henry away from Echo. 

‘Alice’ cackled, and brandished her axe, desperation and anger burning in her single eye. “Trying to protect the Creator? Ha! You’ll be nothing more than a smear on the wall by the time I’m through with you!” 

“Norman, please! Echo! Echo, don’t! I can’t lose you, too!” 

Echo crouched and snarled at ‘Alice’ before lunging at her, right as Norman pulled Henry out of sight. 

A shriek echoed down the hallway, and Henry nearly went limp in Norman’s hold, not even trying to fight the tears spilling down his face. 

“Toons, Hen-ry. Your toons. Ech-o… wants you to find them.” 

Henry remained silent for a moment before nodding. He straightened and took a deep breath, scrubbing his face with his palms. “We need to reach the stairwell,” he whispered, voice cracking.

Norman gently pulled him in the right direction, guiding Henry as he tried to calm down. 

“Sor-ry.” 

With a sad sort of smile, Henry shook his head. “Not your fault. Besides,” he swallowed heavily, “maybe Echo’ll be fine.”

“May-be.” 

But no matter how much he tried, his hope just couldn’t overcome ‘Alice’s words: blade beats ink.

• • • • • 

Alice huddled against Boris’s side. The crashing and snarls of their best friend had long since faded away, but she’d probably never be able to forget the sight or sound of Bendy attacking them. 

She looked up at Boris. He was still staring at the door, barricaded with every piece of movable furniture in the office they’d taken refuge in. Though neither of them had been hurt—Bendy had been considerably slowed by his size in the too-small hallways—they were both shaken immeasurably. 

For a while, she’d told him about everything they’d gone through with Henry, from the moment they realized their Creator was in the studio to him running away from ‘Bendy’ to save them. But now that she’d finished their story—and how painful it was, to say that the last time she’d seen him was practically guaranteed to be the last time she saw him ever—they’d fallen into silence. 

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. “I don’t know how to help Bendy.” 

Boris held her tighter. “You said it’s probably from losing Henry. I think he might be the only one who can help Bendy now.” 

“But he’s gone, Boris. He’s dead.”

“Hey,” he shifted around to face her better. With his thumb, he wiped away her fresh tears. “You don’t know that for sure.”

Alice hiccuped. “But even if he somehow did escape, he won’t be able to find us! I don’t even know where we are anymore.” 

Boris thought for a moment. “Well, I can’t say I know Henry personally, but from what you’ve said, he’s not the kind to give up when the goin’ gets tough. If he really promised to find you, then it sounds to me like he will, one way or another, no matter where we are.” 

She opened her mouth, ready to argue his point, but stopped. “Do you hear that?” she asked after listening for a few seconds. She sat up.

Boris turned towards the door. “It sounds like… someone’s callin’ yer name.”

Alice leapt up and frantically began pulling chairs down from the veritable mountain they had made. “It’s Henry! C’mon, help me, Boris, Henry’s out there!” 

“Are you sure?” 

“It’s gotta be!”

“What if it’s Sammy, or that other ‘Alice Angel’ you mentioned? This could be a trap!” 

“No, no, I know it’s not!”

They finally pushed away the last desk, and Alice threw the door open and jumped into the corridor. “Henry!” she cried, whirling in a circle. 

“Alice!” 

Boris stepped out of the room behind her, but she barely noticed over the sight of her Creator down the hall. There was another toon with him, poor Norman Polk who became the Projectionist, but Alice didn’t care or stop to wonder why. 

Instead, she ran as fast as she could, nearly tripping over her own feet, but within moments, she was able to throw herself into Henry’s outstretched arms. 

Laughing, he smoothly stood with her momentum and spun her around. Once he came to a stop, he tucked her against his hip, supporting her with one arm. 

“You’re alive,” she sobbed into his shoulder. “You’re actually truly alive!” 

“You bet I am, kiddo. And I’m feeling better than ever—er, not counting all the normal, non ink-specific injuries.” 

She pulled back and gasped. The black marks that had covered his face were gone, as though they’d never been there at all. “What happened?” she asked, lightly touching his unmarred cheek.

He gave her a sad smile. “I’ll tell you later, I promise, all right?” His eyes shifted to look past her, and his smile transformed into something far happier. “Boris!” 

Without giving Boris a moment to even consider protesting, he wrapped his free arm around the wolf—nearly as tall as Henry himself, she realized—and tugged him into a hug.

“How are you feeling? No side effects, right?” 

“I’m right as rain, Creator. Yer certainly better off than I was expecting, what with Alice’s story.” 

Henry beamed at them, and Alice felt like everything might be okay. “Trust me, I’m better off than what I was expecting, too.” He turned a little, putting them more in the direct line of sight of the Projectionist. “Guys, this is Norman. He’s been a huge help.” 

“Hell-o.” 

Alice gasped. “You can talk!” 

“Can now,” Norman told her. “Could-n’t be-fore.” 

“Where’s Bendy?” Henry suddenly asked.

Alice looked back at him as he stared down the hall in the direction she and Boris had come from. “Henry,” she said, “somethin’s real wrong with him. He’s… he’s not himself.” 

“He tried to attack us,” Boris said quietly. 

She wasn’t quite sure how she expected Henry to react, but she knew deep in her ink that no other reaction would’ve reassured her as much as his did. 

He took a deep breath and set Alice down. “Tell me,” he demanded, eyes kind and determined. 

Their Creator would make everything okay.

• • • • • 

There was only pain. 

Bendy screeched and slammed his fist into a wall. Oh, it didn’t hurt him; none of his destruction hurt him.

The pain was in his chest, where he was sure his heart had been wrenched out of his ribcage, like Boris’s, or had become all shriveled up like a pitiful dead thing. 

He screamed, a sharp and broken sound. Something—someone—precious had been taken from him.

Their name escaped him, but he still knew it to be true. 

Perhaps physical devastation wasn’t the answer to his internal devastation, and certainly not at the level of chaos he was creating, but he couldn’t much bring himself to care. Whoever might have told him such things was… somewhere. Bendy wasn’t sure. 

There was a lot he wasn’t sure about, but he didn’t care about that either. He couldn’t.

The room he was delivering a beating to was large, even to him, with a high up balcony that wrapped around it—not unlike the smaller-scale catwalk in Heavenly Toys, though he tried not to think of the comparison, since thoughts of that place only increased his anger. Bendy didn’t know the purpose of this room, only that it happened to be on the receiving end of his heartbroken fury. 

Small creatures came in through the door near the ink that served as his feet. They cried out to him, but the words didn’t make sense. He snarled at them because noises like that couldn’t be misinterpreted. 

As expected, they scattered, making high-pitched sounds of panic. He could nearly taste their fear, though it made him feel queasy for some reason. 

One of the small creatures, the one that looked different from the others, stared up at him, seemingly unafraid. Well, that wouldn’t do; if Bendy had to feel terrible, then so did everyone else. Terror was the closest thing he could get to the churning-burning-chilling emotions roiling inside him, so he roared down at the small, pale creature. 

This one started running like the others, though he got the impression it still wasn’t very afraid of him. 

Maybe if Bendy took away some of the pale creature’s friends, the pale creature would fear him. 

He looked around, trying to find one to ground into the flimsy floorboards. Just as he zeroed in on one, a bright light flickered irritatingly in his peripheral vision. Growling, he turned towards the tallest of the small creatures. 

Bendy tried to mash it beneath his fist, but it moved out of the way just in time. He tried again, the shaking of the floor knocking the creature down. Perfect.

Just as he was about to kill it, a cry that was more distressed than the others he’d heard so far interrupted him, and he swiveled to face it. Despite how fear-filled the noise was, the smallest of the small creatures wasn’t looking at Bendy. 

He dragged himself around to follow its line of sight. 

Across the room, the pale creature had climbed all the way up to the balcony. It took Bendy a moment to realize, but it was standing on the wrong side of the railing. 

Bendy snorted to himself. What a stupid small creature. 

But something deep in him screamed for him to save it. He inched closer, unsure. 

Meeting his eyes, the pale creature stepped out into the air and began to fall. 

Sheer, blinding panic erupted in the empty hole where his heart oughta have been, and with desperation he’d never felt before, Bendy dove forward, reaching to catch the small—no.

To catch Henry, his Creator.

Bendy nearly smashed into the wall, so great was the power he’d put into his lunge, but he had just enough control to stop himself, Henry resting safely in his cupped hands. He whined loudly, and curled around his Creator. 

“C’mon, bud,” Henry said, reaching to pat anywhere he could reach. “Come back to me.” 

The hurting, aching hole began to fill up again, and it seemed to Bendy as though between one blink and the next, he returned to his normal size, and Henry was the one holding him.

“Henry,” he whispered, his voice still bearing notes of off-model distortion. “Henry.”

“I’m here, bud. I’m here, I’m okay.” 

There was more talking happening over his head, voices that he only just barely began to recognize, but he didn’t pay them any attention. All he focused on was the feel of being as pressed as close as physically possible to Henry. 

The heartbroken rage seeped away like loose ink, encouraged by Henry rhythmically stroking Bendy’s head and the gentle rocking motion of him leaning back and forth. Peace settled over him, and some chipped and stretched-thin part of his mind settled, leaving him whole. 

It felt nice to be whole again.

• • • • • 

“Is he gonna be okay?” Alice asked.

Henry glanced back down at the little toon tucked up against him. Though Bendy wasn’t sleeping, unless he could do so with his eyes open, he was limp and relaxed and breathing deep and slow. He hummed softly, almost like a purr, and Henry smiled a bit.

“I think he’s gonna be just fine,” he said. He scooted backwards and a little to the side until he could lean against the nearest wall, below where he’d climbed over the railing. His toons and Norman settled on the floor around him.

“How’d you know that would work?” Boris asked, head tilted back to gaze up at the balcony.

Henry thought about it. He didn’t really have any concrete proof or past experience that would show the others that he knew what he’d been doing. It had been little more than a gut feeling, but recently, Henry had gotten very good at listening to those. 

“I can’t much explain it,” he finally said. “I know you don’t want to hear that I didn’t know if it would work, and that’s not entirely true. I knew it would, I just don’t know how I knew it would.”

“Well,” Alice said, smoothing out her dress with shaking hands, “I’d prefer if you didn’t do it again any time soon.”

“I won’t, kiddo. Gravity’s not the type of thing I’d like to mess with, desperate times not included.” 

She gave him a single solid nod. “Good.” 

They all sat in silence for a few minutes, calming down after that brief adventure—Bendy’s off-model form really had a set of pipes to him; those roars had actually shaken the studio’s walls—until Norman’s speaker crackled.

“Now… what?”

All eyes, and a projector lens, locked on Henry. 

He sighed. “I don’t know, to be honest. We could try to keep going to the safehouse, but I’m not sure what the point would be now, what with Boris awake and doing fine. I certainly don’t need rest—hey, you know what I mean, Alice; besides we could all use a day-long nap at this point—so even if we made it there, we’d still be left with the question of ‘what now.’” 

“We could just live there,” Alice suggested. 

Shaking his head, Henry said, “I wouldn’t last long, kiddo. Bacon soup has been keeping me alive so far, but that’s not the sort of diet I could spend a lifetime on.” He took a deep breath. “We need to get out of here. Leave the studio, stop Joey, try and help anyone who needs it.” 

“Can we?” Norman asked, gesturing at the four of them. “Not… much.” 

“Norman’s right,” Boris said. “I saw some of what Joey was doin’ before he killed me. He’s gotten better with those darn pentagrams of his.”

“If he catches us…” Alice trailed off, shivering. 

“He won’t,” Henry promised her. “I won’t let him.” He held their individual gazes until each gave him a little nod. 

Before they could say anything else, whether it was to make plans or offer suggestions, Bendy finally stirred in Henry’s arms. 

“Hey,” Henry said softly, ducking his head down to meet his toon’s eyes. “There you are.” 

Bendy blinked blearily at him, his visible hand clenched in Henry’s shirt. “I was a monster,” he whispered back.

“Nah. Y’see, monsters poison my blood, or drop me in elevators. Monsters don’t catch me when I’m falling.”

“But I was huge, and scary, and I think I had claws.” 

“Well, yes, that’s true. But here’s the secret, bud. Bein’ a monster has nothing to do with how you look. I can promise that having claws, or fangs, or being made of a whole lot’a ink has nothing to do with being a monster. Y’know how I know that?” 

Bendy shook his head.

“Because the worst monster in the studio right now is little human Joey Drew.” 

Realization seemed to dawn on Bendy then, and he nodded. Shuffling around without breaking contact from Henry, he turned to face the others. 

“Sorry, guys. I didn’t mean to attack you.” 

Alice laughed and dove forward, wrapping him up in a tight hug. “It’s all right. You weren’t yourself, and you didn’t actually manage to hurt us.” 

“Yeah,” Boris said, leaning forward to engulf them both in his arms. “We were just worried about you, pal.” 

Bendy smiled and pretended like he wasn’t tearing up a bit. “I’m so glad you’re both okay. If I had…”

“Don’t think like that,” Alice told him. “You’re fine now, and we’ve just gotta believe that it won’t happen again.”

“Sounds good to me.” Bendy finally noticed Norman. “Uh. Is that…?” 

“I wasn’t sure if you’d met Norman yet, bud.”

“He’s—he’s Norman? Not the Projectionist?”

Norman raised a hand. “I’m… me. A-ware.” 

Bendy grinned. “That’s great! How’d you and Henry find each other?” 

Henry nudged the three toons up, and then rose to stand behind them. He stretched as Norman climbed to his feet. “I’ll tell you later, bud. It’s a bit of a long story, and I think we’ve already lingered too long in here. Let’s find somewhere safe to rest a bit, and then we can figure out what we’re gonna do about Joey.” 

Norman and his toons turned to walk back to the entrance, and for a moment, Henry stood watching them. He took a deep breath, still marveling over his ink-free lungs. They might just be able to do this. 

He’d barely taken a single step when a horrible tingly feeling erupted in his chest, and before he could so much as even consider what it meant, ‘Bendy’s large hands clamped down on each of his upper arms. 

Henry froze as the ink demon leaned down, his head brushing against Henry’s cheek. Dark warmth spread through him, and this time, he was aware enough to feel something foreign latch onto his mind, bringing with it ‘Bendy’s deep mental chuckle. 

The others began to turn around, likely having noticed Henry’s absence. 

“Ya didn’t think you could get rid of me that easily, did ya?” 

He couldn’t let ‘Bendy’ start to absorb him this time, or his fear of not having the strength to pull himself free—his fear of not wanting to be free—might come true. 

“You think you can take me?”

“You think you can resist? Beat me at my own game?”

Henry narrowed his eyes. “Watch me.” 

‘Bendy’ pulled him closer as Henry unexpectedly pushed back, knocking the ink demon just off balance enough to shove both of them through the wall portal.

Inky blackness swallowed them up, and the portal snapped closed, cutting off his toons’ cries of despair.

The last thing the toons saw of their Creator was the grim determination burning like living fire in his eyes.

Chapter Text

Henry stood still, slowly turning his head this way and that, listening. 

It was all he could do here: listen. 

Surrounded by all-consuming darkness that seemed to physically press in on every side, like he was submerged without drowning, he waited. 

Pushing himself and ‘Bendy’ back through the portal had surprised the ink demon just enough for Henry to wiggle free. And now here they were, in the not-space between one portal and another, a void of everything and nothing all at once. 

He couldn’t see anything; there was nothing to see. But that meant ‘Bendy’ was as blind as he was here.

Closing his eyes, if only to focus on his other senses without his instinctual human mind worrying about being blind, he slowed his breathing. 

There. Just ahead of him, he was sure there was movement. The world rippled gently with it. 

Without making a sound, Henry crouched. The substance-that-perhaps-didn’t-actually-exist allowed him to move through it without disturbing the stillness. 

Henry felt something brush through the air above his head. A hand, large and deadly and searching. He held his breath. 

There was no telling when or how ‘Bendy’ moved away, just that he was suddenly gone. Henry stayed crouched, waiting for the slightest indication that he wasn’t alone anymore.

“How long do you think you can keep this up?”

‘Bendy’s voice echoed through the infinite void, impossible to pinpoint. 

Without opening his mouth, Henry replied, As long as I need to.

Laughter, low and dark and close and far and terrifying and welcoming. “Clever.”

Henry smirked to himself, and began inching along to his left. I’m not helping you find me, he not-said.

“Why fight, though? What I want, it’s more inevitable now than ever. You can’t leave this place, Creator. Not without me.” 

Yeah, like Henry would just accept that. He pressed his palms to the surface beneath him, smooth and rough and not-all-there. His fingers pushed through it like water, like jelly, like sand.

How did the wall portals work? It wasn’t just ink, no matter what it looked like. Ink on its own didn’t behave like that, same as drawn characters didn’t simply come to life by themselves. Something more was needed. In the toons’ case, it was Joey’s Machine. 

With pentagrams and magic in mind, Henry reached with his mind into the world around him, imagining it in all ways. He imagined it to be a part of himself, and as simple as puzzle pieces clicking into place, it was.

Magic was just imagination brought to life. 

‘Bendy’ stood not far in front of him, facing the opposite direction. Henry couldn’t see him, but he knew it to be true.

You seem very sure of yourself.

“Got good reason to be, don’t I?” His voice darkened, “I know you want it, Henry. I know the peace appealed to you.” 

No. You’re wrong. Henry carefully stood, keeping a mental eye on ‘Bendy’ as he started backing up. 

“It wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Tell me—why do you resist, when it doesn’t even hurt? Why have you decided I’m the bad guy?”

I don’t know where you got the impression otherwise, but humans don’t like being absorbed by ink creatures. 

“Lie. You did.” 

Henry clenched his fists. Don’t listen. Don’t listen. 

“I’m waiting, Creator.” 

Because it’s giving up, he fairly blurted out. If I gave in, I’d be leaving my toons to Joey’s mercy—of which I’ve recently learned he has none. And I can’t do that to them, no matter what. 

Chuckling, ‘Bendy’ asked, “What makes you responsible for them? Because you’re the Creator? You’re mine as much as you’re theirs.”

Stop it. I know what you’re doing—you’re trying to get in my head.

“I’ve already been there, remember. You felt so protected when I—” 

Henry stomped the ground, and even as ‘Bendy’ whirled in his direction, the world shuddered around them, knocking the demon back. 

‘Bendy’ snarled as he tried to regain his bearings. 

Pulling shadows around him like shrouds, Henry willed himself to melt into the darkness, invisible and hidden. He had to find a way out of here, before ‘Bendy’ really did get into his head. 

Imagination. Could he just imagine a door out of here? No, he got the sense it was a bit more complicated than that, otherwise Joey would doubtlessly have made use of this method of travel.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he heard. ‘Bendy’ sounded closer, underneath the eerie echo. 

Henry reached for the demon’s location in his mind and nearly gasped. ‘Bendy,’ though he appeared to be wandering aimlessly through the void, was so close, either of them could reach out and touch the other. The hair on the back of his neck prickled as ‘Bendy’ stopped.

He didn’t dare move, even as ‘Bendy’s head turned the slightest bit to face him. 

“Give yourself to me,” he whispered, “and I’ll destroy Drew. Your toons will be safe.”

Before Henry could answer with an emphatic I don’t believe you, a wave of that terrifyingly familiar peace swept over him. The tenseness in his shoulders that hadn’t seemed to fully go away for days now bled out of him, and his arms went limp at his sides. But how?—‘Bendy’ wasn’t touching him.

“A taste,” ‘Bendy’ said, an answer to Henry’s unspoken question. “A mere fraction of what you could have.” 

Stop it, Henry not-whispered. He hated how weak his protest came out, how much he didn’t actually sound like he wanted it to end. 

He felt ‘Bendy’ reach for him, slowly, like he was giving Henry a chance to move. The final nail in the coffin—if Henry stood still and let it happen, then he truly must want to surrender. It’d been a long time since he felt nearly paralyzed in place like this. 

At the last possible second, barely a moment before ‘Bendy’ would’ve had him, Henry dropped to one knee, ignoring how it took all his willpower to do so. In one swift movement, he dug his hands into the malleable ground, squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, and reached and pushed and imagined. 

The world compressed and popped, and ‘Bendy’ screeched as the weight of an animator’s mind froze him where he stood. 

“I created you,” Henry said out loud, his chest heaving with the exertion needed to bend this dark and unknowable world to his will, “I don’t know how much of Joey you got, and I don’t know about out there—but in here, we’re on even footing.”

‘Bendy’ strained in his imagined bonds, but Henry allowed him no wiggle room. The manufactured sense of peace by absorption pressed upon his heart, and some corner of his mind begged for him to give in and let go and just stop fighting for once, but he focused on the thought of his toons—of Bendy and Alice and Boris and Norman, who were waiting for him; of Buddy and Echo, who had given themselves up for him; of Kai and Gary and the Amalgamates and any others, who were suffering, who he might be able to help.

He had a reason to accept ‘Bendy’s offer to end his suffering, but he had every reason to refuse it. And he didn’t allow himself to forget that. 

Crying out at the pain of it, Henry started pulling the life from ‘Bendy.’ It wouldn’t last, not in the real world, maybe not even for long in here, but he had to get ‘Bendy’ to stop manipulating him.

‘Bendy’ howled, their in-between, not-world resounding with his fury. 

Henry yanked himself back, his hands—having sunk in up to his wrists—making a squelchy noise as though he was escaping quicksand in a cartoon. Stumbling to his feet, he spared a moment to take in his mental impression of ‘Bendy.’

He looked a bit meltier than normal, but the important part was that he was wholly distracted by trying to break loose. 

Spinning on his heel, Henry reached out in front of him and forcibly imagined a wall. Just that. A wall. Not corners, not a floor or ceiling, not a room.

Please, he thought to himself, nothing complicated. Just a wall.

Henry took a single step forward, and his fingers brushed against raggedy wood like that of the studio. 

Don’t imagine a door. That was too easy, too simple. Instead, he remembered the feeling of passing through the wall portals before—how alive the darkness had felt, the way it had rippled and twisted, not menacingly though, just ever-present and inescapable. 

Something bubbled up beneath his palms, and he leaned his weight against the changing surface, imagining himself stepping through with ease. Behind him, he felt it as ‘Bendy’ freed his upper body. 

“Runnin’ outta time, Henry!” 

He didn’t allow himself to be distracted. He focused on the image in his head, picking out the details and enhancing each, letting the phantom sensations wash over him. It hadn’t hurt to pass through the portal, not exactly, but it’d been uncomfortable. He’d had an impression of stretching, as though his body had warped when going from the real world into the void and back. 

‘Bendy’ shattered the bond on his right leg. He laughed, high-pitched and distorted and hysterical. 

The moment the portal fully formed happened a mere second after ‘Bendy’ pulled his left leg free and lunged at Henry. 

Henry spun partway through, allowing himself to fall backwards as the demon reached for him, using his hands, one foot, and the very last bit of influence he had in the void world to carry ‘Bendy’s momentum up and over him as they spilled out into the studio.

• • • • •

In the deafening silence that followed Henry’s disappearance into the portal, Alice felt her halo droop and dim. Again. They’d lost their Creator to that demon again. 

A dull thud broke through the cloud of painfully familiar despair. She turned and gasped. 

Just behind her, Bendy had fallen to his knees, his entire posture similar to after Henry had led ‘Bendy’ off back in Heavenly Toys. There were even little drops of ink beginning to rise into the air around him. 

Boris seemed to catch on right as she jumped at Bendy, crying, “Not again! You can’t lose yourself again, not without Henry here! You’ve got to hold on.” 

“Alice,” Bendy whispered tearfully. “I don’t think I can.”

“Well, I know you can, pal,” Boris said, kneeling behind Bendy to hug him while Alice attached herself to his front. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”

Trembling, Bendy absently shook his head as his eyes started to go off-model. “No, it—he’s gone. He’s gone.” 

“Not gone,” Norman said as forcibly as his crackling speaker allowed him to. They all looked up at him. “It’s Hen-ry. Be back… soon.”

A smile that only felt the tiniest bit fake spread across Alice’s face. “Norman’s right. It’s Henry! He came back to us before, he’ll come back to us again. If you can’t trust me on that, trust that he’d never give up on us.”

“You don’t understand,” Bendy told her, his voice briefly going corrupted. “I can’t feel him.” 

Alice leaned back a bit. What? She glanced at Norman and Boris, but the former shrugged and the latter seemed just as confused as she was. 

“Bendy… what do you mean by feel him?” she asked. 

He opened and closed his fists a few times, silent as he thought. “It—I think it started just after we got Boris back,” he explained. “I had a nightmare while we were sleepin’ and Henry was up watchin’ over us, so we talked. I dunno, I just remembering falling asleep and havin’ a good dream, and then when we went off once you woke up, I thought… I didn’t know at first.” 

Bendy paused to take a few deep, shaky breaths. No one interrupted him. 

“I felt it more after he ran. He got hurt, and I could feel it. Yeah,” he said when Alice raised an eyebrow at him, “he got scratched on his back, and he was chokin’ and stuff, and then—” Bendy squeezed his eyes shut— “his heart was hurtin’ him real bad. I think it was gonna kill him.”

“And that’s why you… lost it? ’Cause you knew he was dying?” 

He nodded. “Once I was that thing, I couldn’t feel him at all. There was only pain and anger. I… I wanted to make you guys feel as horrible as I did.”

Boris looked around at the destroyed room. “That’s why you attacked us.” 

“Yeah. But now—he wasn’t gone like this before.” 

“The por-tal,” Norman suddenly said. “Feels wrong.” 

There was a moment of silence between the four of them as the three toons let that sink in.

“You mean,” Alice glanced over her shoulder at the wall where their Creator had disappeared, “he could still be in there?”

Norman nodded. 

“Should we wait here then?” Bendy asked, looking more like himself. The idea that Henry might not be so surely dead seemed to have done him good. “In case he comes back out?”

Boris immediately shook his head. “No. Henry was right that we’ve been here too long. I know I’m pretty new at this compared to the rest of you, but even I know it’s too open in here.” 

“Where… to?” Norman asked as the three of them stood.

Alice considered their options. “Do you think we should go and wait where he’d think to find us?”

“No,” Bendy said, “he’d rather us stay safe than go somewhere obvious. I say we head towards the upper levels, and try to find an office near the stairwell that we can hide in.”

Boris and Norman gave their agreement. Alice smiled and said, “Sounds like we have a plan, then.” 

• • • • • 

They left, totally unaware of the pair of eyes watching them from just out of sight. 

• • • • • 

They made good progress, coming across only the occasional Searcher on their journey. None of them mentioned it, but the same fear ran through all of their heads: seeing ‘Bendy.’ Because if that demon was wandering around again, it most likely meant that whatever happened between him and Henry was over, and there were so very few ways that sort of encounter could end. 

Boris and Bendy were lagging behind a bit, though Alice didn’t mind. She could use the peaceful silence to just sort of process everything that was happening, since it all went by so quickly. 

As they walked down a long hallway, a loud crash from the upcoming intersection had the group freezing where they stood. A horribly distorted scream shook the walls.

“Amalgamate,” Alice whispered.

Clopping, like that of horses’ hooves—though with the accompanying skittering noise, it sounded like there were one or two legs too many—rapidly got louder and closer.

Without shouting in panic like she wanted to, Alice dove for the nearest door, relieved when the knob twisted beneath her palm. She only just noticed Norman duck into a room on his own, while Bendy tugged a slightly confused Boris into another. 

She closed the door as quickly and quietly as she could, slumping back against it in the dark. The Amalgamate’s ragged breathing filled the hallway she’d just left. 

Scratch. Scratch. 

Alice opened her eyes, though she couldn’t see anything. Her body trembled. Was there something in here with her? 

Scraaatch. 

Oh gosh. Oh gosh. No, please no. 

The Amalgamate was still outside her door, trapping her. 

A long, drawn out sniff came from deeper in the pitch black room. Alice silently stretched her arm out to the side, searching for a light switch. 

Footsteps, dragging and slow, but growing closer and closer. Some strange fluttery sound. Wings, perhaps? 

Her fingers found the switch and she flooded the room with light. She only had time to gasp, eyes wide, before the other toon leapt at her.

• • • • • 

Bendy peeked out into the hallway once it sounded like the Amalgamate was gone. Behind him, Boris waited a bit shakily, stunned and horrified by the description of what the Amalgamates were. He’d admitted to Bendy that he was kinda glad Joey had only killed him, since it seemed there were far worse fates he could’ve been subjected to. 

“I think the coast is clear,” Bendy said. He leaned further out as a door on the opposite side clicked open, revealing Norman.

“Safe?” he asked.

They all listened carefully, but the horrible breathing and wonky footsteps were gone. 

“Either of you see where Alice went?” Bendy asked when she didn’t immediately join them. 

Boris pointed at a door a few down from theirs. 

Walking towards it, Bendy called out, “Alice, c’mon. It’s safe.” 

Nothing. 

“What are ya waitin’ for, Angel? We got places to go and people to see.” 

Nothing.

Bendy looked back at the others. Boris frowned and stepped past Bendy, calling, “Alice?” 

Nothing. 

“Open it,” Norman said.

“Alice, if this is a joke, it ain’t funny, ’kay?” Bendy took a deep breath and shoved the door ajar with a bang. 

The three of them froze at the threshold.

Just in front of them was a toon from the special Halloween series, Vladimir Vampire, a cheesy Dracula sort of character. Only now, with the Ink Machine’s defects inflicted upon him, did he look far scarier than he’d ever been in the cartoon. 

His face was gaunt, the sickly gray-white ink-skin stretched over his skull in a way that turned Bendy’s stomach. His fangs, only little triangular points in the show, were massive and curved, gleaming perfection against the rest of him. 

Part of his gags had included the ability to transform into an adorable bat, the cuteness of which had always been the bane of the character’s existence. Now it looked like that form had been forcibly mashed into his more human-esque one, reminiscent of the Amalgamates. Vladimir completely lacked arms, horrid wings with patches ripped out of them stitched onto his body in their place. 

Claws adorned his feet, one of which was pinning Alice to the ground—not that she was trying to get up, Bendy realized with dread.

There was no telling how long the three of them would’ve stood there, rather dumbly, as Vladimir hissed at them, ink dripping down his face, if Alice’s halo hadn’t suddenly clattered flat to the floor instead of remaining in its on-model position. 

The noise shocked them into movement, and Norman pushed between Bendy and Boris with a grating cry, startling Vladimir off Alice’s prone form. While Norman forced him back, flaring his projector light and swiping madly at him, Bendy and Boris raced to get Alice outta there. She didn’t move as they carried her into the hallway.

“Norman!” Boris cried. “We can lock him in!” 

Bendy didn’t pay attention to how they did it, too focused on the damage done to Alice. Every part of her body made of black ink was faded, drained away, stolen. Various shades of gray now made up her dress and hair and all the other little accents. Any white ink had become translucent, and her halo remained unlit in his hand, looking like nothing more than a ring of pale metal. 

After a moment, Boris joined him kneeling over her body. “I take it you’ve never come across him before.”

Bendy shook his head. “Is she gonna be okay?” 

Boris didn’t answer right away. “She’s alive,” he finally said, and they watched the shallow rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. “I guess we just gotta hope she doesn’t get worse.”

When neither of them moved after that, staring numbly at what could’ve been Alice’s corpse if they had been just a minute later, Norman knelt down and scooped her up. “Need to find… Hen-ry,” he said, his tone allowing for no argument. 

They slowly stood up after him. “Where do we even…” Boris trailed off.

“For-ward,” Norman told them, starting down the hall. “Press on. Don’t… stop.” 

After a few seconds, Bendy quietly said, “It’s good advice. Y’know. In general.”

Glancing back at them, Norman nodded. “Hen-ry’s,” he said, with something almost like happiness coloring his robotic tone. “Used to say… just keep draw-ing. Upset or… frust-rated. Just keep draw-ing. Press on.”

“Were,” Bendy hesitated slightly, “were you very good friends with him?”

Norman’s projector head dipped. “Yes,” he said. “He didn’t… mind… me lurk-ing. Sat with me. Lunch. Missed him, af-ter.” 

“We’ll find him.”

Crackling clunking emitted from Norman’s speaker. It took Bendy a moment, but he realized Norman was laughing.

“No,” Norman told him, “he’ll find us.” 

• • • • • 

They emerged from one of the studio’s numerous staircases into a large area with a lift access point. The bars that blocked it off from the rest of the room were warped and damaged, bent away from their intended beginnings and ends. 

Norman stared at it for a long moment. “Hen-ry said…”

“That the other ‘Alice’ dropped the elevator, with him in it?” Bendy asked. Next to him, Boris gasped. “Yeah, she did. Put the brakes on too late, and he nearly—” Bendy cut himself off. He didn’t want to think about the utter mess Henry’d been when they rescued him from the wreckage. “He’s fine now.”

Growling, Norman turned away from the empty and ruined corner. 

Their ears popped—for all that two of them didn’t even have ears—and ‘Bendy’ suddenly came flying out of a wall portal. Those with jaws dropped them, and they watched as Henry stumbled out after the demon, grinning triumphantly. 

• • • • • 

Did Henry expect to emerge from the void world right in front of Norman and his toons? No, no he did not. And if it weren’t for the fact that ‘Bendy’ was still being bothersome, he’d have been glad for the surprise. 

As it was, he barely got himself upright before passing fully through the portal, popping out to see the unfiltered surprise on his friends’ faces. If that wasn’t enough of a shock, he quickly became aware of a strange tingling in his hands, and when he looked down, the only reason he didn’t gasp was that he was still trying to catch his breath in the first place. 

His hands, from his fingertips to the joint of his wrist, were ink-black. Not inky, just colored. He wasn’t dripping like Sammy or solid ink like Norman. Instead of ending in a solid block, the black faded back into his skin tone in jagged, messy lines—not unlike, ‘Bendy’s wall shadows, actually.

“Henry!” 

Bendy and Boris’s combined shout had him raising his head, just in time to see ‘Bendy’ heading straight for him. Instinct had him adjust his stance and meet the demon head on. His own hands intercepted ‘Bendy’s reaching ones, and though the size difference was like that between a child and adult, Henry gripped tight and dug his feet in and refused to be moved.

Locked together, opposing forces each giving their all, they entered a stalemate. 

“I can’t absorb you,” ‘Bendy’ said, his voice strained. “What—”

They both watched as the black on Henry’s arm snaked closer to his elbow a little. 

Henry gritted his teeth as ‘Bendy’ laughed, the real world’s sound grating harsh and horrible, while the one projected directly into his mind rolled low and almost delighted. The overlap was almost disorienting, and for a split second, ‘Bendy’ gained a little ground before Henry forced him back. 

He ignored how utterly impossible this should be, him holding back an ink demon more than two feet taller than himself. Then again, the entire studio was a practice in impossibilities, and there was no reason for him to start seriously questioning it now, when it was working in his favor.

“You’re just full of surprises, ain’t ya, Creator? Absorbing you is lookin’ better and better for me.” 

“Good luck with that,” Henry said through his clenched teeth.

“Don’t ya know, Henry? Your little stunt may be preventing me from gettin’ ya through your hands, but really—” he leaned forward a bit, and his next words sent a chill down Henry’s spine— “any skin contact will do.” 

‘Bendy’ surged upwards, looming more over Henry than at him. 

The change in angle forced Henry to take a step back to avoid being shoved downwards. Another step, and another, and then his back hit the wall. 

‘Bendy’s grin widened.

On some level, he registered the panic happening between his toons on the other side of the room, but really—what could they do? ‘Bendy’ was just as big a threat to them as he was to Henry, even if it was in a different way. If anything, Henry just wished they would book it, find somewhere safe if possible, because it sure looked like he’d reached the end of the line.

He was out of tricks, and there was nothing he could do while pinned against the wall as ‘Bendy’ pressed closer. 

An unholy screech filled the air, and it took Henry a moment too long to realize it wasn’t from ‘Bendy.’

Norman practically jumped on ‘Bendy’s back, wrestling the demon away from Henry. Being nearly the same height, Norman throwing his weight around proved to be somewhat more effective than when Henry tried. 

‘Bendy’ was forced away from him, and belated pain slammed into Henry, sending him sliding down the wall, disoriented. 

All his aches and injuries, he realized, hadn’t affected him in the void world. Now, without ‘Bendy’ to focus on, his suffering filtered back through his senses, overwhelming his mind. A deep, hated part of himself regretted not surrendering to ‘Bendy,’ and he shoved those thoughts as far away as possible. 

Crying from across the room caught his attention, and hidden behind some overturned desks, he could just barely see Bendy and Boris alternating between watching ‘Bendy’ and Norman exchange vicious, violent blows, and giving him concerned glances. 

Tucked further back in their little corner, he saw the edge of Alice, lying on the floor—only something seemed wrong. 

Before he could put much thought into it, ‘Bendy’s terrible real-world laughter distracted him. He’d gotten Norman backed up against the lip of the exposed elevator shaft, the fingers of one hand curled around his throat, while the others dug into the side of his chest. 

Panic bloomed sluggishly in Henry’s chest, and he tried to stand. Both legs immediately gave out from the sharp pain radiating through each. 

No. No, not Norman too.

Henry watched Norman’s projector twitch slightly, and he knew, he just knew, that his old friend was looking straight at him. 

He shook his head, knowing in the most painful way possible, exactly what Norman was thinking. 

But Norman returned his focus to ‘Bendy,’ raised his hands to grab the demon in turn, and threw his weight backwards.

Together, he and ‘Bendy’ disappeared into the gaping void, falling, falling, falling. 

Until they’d eventually hit the ground, landing in the sharp and dangerous wreckage, so many floors below them. Where, presumably, they would die, or rejoin the ink, or however that worked. 

Henry’s mind didn’t quite comprehend it at first. He just kept staring at the empty space where they’d stood. 

The world was shaking, everything—no, it was. It was Henry. His whole body trembled, and his vision faded in and out and he tried to understand how Norman could just be gone. 

“Henry. Henry.” 

He blinked, long and slow, finally finding it within himself to focus on Bendy in front of him. 

“I’m sorry, Henry, I’m sorry,” Bendy said, clutching the front of his shirt, nearly collapsed on him. “But we have to keep going. We can’t stop.” 

“Alice isn’t doin’ so well,” Boris added from beside him. 

Henry’s mouth opened and closed a few times, no sound coming out of him. After a few more tries, he managed to ask, “What happened?” 

The two toons exchanged a glance. 

“A vampire,” Boris finally said. 

“I’m fine,” a faint, shaky voice protested. Henry hadn’t even noticed Alice get up. 

“You’re really not,” Boris told her. 

“What about—what about the rest of you?”

“We’re fine,” Bendy said, pressing his face into Henry’s chest. 

He smiled a little, sad and shocked and numb. “I get the feeling you’re really not.” 

Henry looked up at Boris, knowing that he’d perhaps give him a better hint at what was going through Bendy’s head. Boris nodded down at Bendy and over at Alice. “Just felt a bit useless is all,” he said.

Understanding his meaning, Henry wrapped an arm around Bendy and held his hand out to pull Alice closer. Her ink was all off, gray and translucent where it should be black and white, but in the context of Boris’s answer of vampire, he decided to hold off more questions until later. He waited until they both raised their heads to look at him before asking, “Is that true, guys?”

There truly was no rest for a fath—Creator. For a Creator.

“We couldn’t do anything!” Bendy burst out, going right back to burrowing into Henry’s chest. “We just stood there, every time!” 

“I’m glad you didn’t do anything,” Henry said, earnest as he could. “I ran the first time to protect you, and I pushed him and me through the portal because there wasn’t much else I could do. And Norman… Guys, there was nothing either of you could have done, and I don’t want you to feel like any of it was your fault.”

Neither of them looked too reassured. 

Henry thought for a moment, finally smiling as something occurred to him. “How ’bout this. Who saved me from the other ‘Alice?’ Kept me alive after the elevator crashed? Who got me away from Kai? Who’s taken care of me from the moment we met? Who was willing to give up the chance to save one of their best friends for my safety?” 

“Us,” Bendy whispered. 

Alice nodded. “We did,” she quietly added. 

“Yeah, exactly. Now,” he took a deep breath and forced himself to his feet, a toon cradled against him in each arm, “we’re going to keep going. We’re going to find somewhere to rest, and then we’re going to confront Joey, and then we’re going to look for Buddy and Echo, and anyone else that needs help.” 

“Who’s Echo?” Boris asked, following Henry as he started off. 

“A friend,” Henry said, after a moment of thought. “I’ll tell you guys about Echo once this is all over, okay? On the off chance that you might get to meet it—him? They? I still don’t know, and Echo never showed any particular preference.” 

The rest of their trip was spent in relative silence, Alice falling asleep against Henry’s shoulder within minutes. Bendy was as good as asleep, for how closely he kept himself tucked against Henry. Boris seemed content to let the silence drag. 

Henry couldn’t stop replaying the image of Norman pulling ‘Bendy’ down into the elevator shaft. 

When they finally reached one of the topmost lower levels, Henry chose a relatively intact room, where he settled Alice and Bendy down on a couch pushed against the wall. Bendy stared blearily up at him, and Henry gently smoothed his thumb across his cheek, a physical reassurance to himself that his little toon was still here. He did the same to Alice before stepping away from the sofa. 

“I’ll be right back,” Henry said quietly to Boris, briefly griping his shoulder. “I just… I need a minute.” 

Boris nodded and sat down on the couch between the other two. 

Henry left and gently closed the door behind him. He didn’t go far, just around the nearest corner, where he leaned a shoulder against the wall and covered his eyes with one hand while hugging himself with the other. 

How many more? How many more friends would he lose before this was all over? How many would die because of Joey’s actions? 

In the midst of his mourning and grief, a tingle of warning shot up his spine. 

• • • • • 

Alice, Boris had quickly discovered, wasn’t so much asleep as she was drifting in and out of consciousness. 

Bendy was just existing, not really reacting to the world around him. Boris wondered if it had anything to do with how his friend could apparently feel Henry to some degree.

He’d only barely started to drop off himself when Bendy shot up with a yelp, clutching the back of his head. 

“What is it, what’s wrong?” Boris asked, startled fully awake and ready to run and get Henry. 

“Feels like somethin’ just cracked my head open!” 

Confused, Boris frowned. “But there’s nothing—”

Eyes wide, they turned to each other at the same time. “Henry!”

• • • • •

“My lord will be most pleased. It’s time for you to be sacrificed, Creator, once and for all.” 

Chapter Text

Long before Henry opened his eyes, before he even fully returned to consciousness, he felt pain. It was there, in the ache of his legs; the sting of his back and shoulders and ankle; the nearly forgotten gash on his arm—in all the chaos, he hadn’t checked to see how the infection was doing in ages now—tight and sore and heavy; the thick feeling in his head, behind his eyes and around his temples from too many bashes and crashes and falls; a full body exhaustion that, despite the relief from his drowning lungs, had only gotten progressively worse. 

Pain. What he wouldn’t do to alleviate it.

You could’ve, a traitorous part of his drifting, concussed mind whispered. Here, now, hurting, it sounded so much more reasonable than when he’d… done whatever he’d been doing. 

Everything felt far away. His toons, the studio, Norman and Echo and Buddy’s sacrifices. ‘Alice’s betrayal. Joey’s madness. The letter that started it all. 

So far away. 

There were noises around him, a voice he mostly recognized. It wasn’t trying to reach him though, not screaming for his attention, so he didn’t try to respond. 

Why did everything have to hurt so much? 

If you’d just let ‘Bendy’ save you… the voice reminded him. 

Save him? Since when was being absorbed into an ink demon the same as being saved? 

Well. Maybe—in a certain way, in a certain outlook, from a certain point of view—‘Bendy’ actually wasn’t all that bad. What was it he’d said, back in the void world? Why have you decided I’m the bad guy? 

Why had Henry decided that? Really, was it just because ‘Bendy’ had chased him? So had others, but he hadn’t thought of them as being strictly bad. He’d even tried to talk to them. But with ‘Bendy,’ Henry always ran, always fought. Oh well, it didn’t matter now, did it? 

Something—he couldn’t quite remember what—made him believe that it was finally time to stop running. He could rest now.

Right?

He started to slip deeper into unconsciousness. 

But then a tremble, a shake, a sensation larger than himself nudged against him. No, it seemed to protest. Don’t go, it seemed to beg. Feel, it seemed to say.

Feeling hurt, though. Henry didn’t want to feel. 

Deeper, the sensation pushed. 

And then it was like a light turning on, allowing him to see what he’d been missing. There was a web, a confusing tangle of threads all connected in ways he didn’t understand. 

Some were stronger than others. Many trembled in fear and pain. Others were snapped in the middle and waved emptily in a breeze that didn’t exist.

What was this?

Who cares? the traitorous voice asked him. Henry was wrenched away, forced to face the yawning chasm of complete unconsciousness. Remember? It doesn’t matter any more, you’re giving up. You’ve been knocked down one time too many, and it’s pointless to even try to escape again. 

Almost. He almost listened.

But no. No. He couldn’t think that way. He—he had to get up. Wake up, move, stop just lying there, stop waiting for the inevitable. 

Don’t just accept defeat because it’s easier!

You’ve made it this far. Are you really going to just give up now, after everything? Or haven’t you been paying attention? Yes, it hurts. Yes, it’s difficult. Yes, you’ve had to fight for every forward inch you’ve made and you’ve been forced to deal with the setbacks. But you’re winning. 

Now get up, and finish this. 

Henry struggled to open his eyes. His head hung down, and he sat slumped against a support column. There was blood dripping from his hair, soaking into his pants. 

That’s right. He’d been hit on the head. No wonder he felt like his skull had been stuffed with cotton. With great effort, he managed to look up. 

He was alone in a room he didn’t recognize, lit by a concerning amount of candles. Pentagrams and smeared words covered the walls. Ink trickled from the ceiling, forming puddles on the floor. When he tried to shift positions—his back hurt quite a bit from being slumped over like a rag doll and his shoulders protested the way they were pulled together behind him—rope burned around his wrists. 

Great. 

What had even happened—

The image of Norman yanking ‘Bendy’ into open air flashed through his mind, and he squeezed his eyes shut as if that would help.

Another friend, gone. That’s right. Was it better, Henry wondered, to know that Norman was dead and no longer trapped in the body Joey’d forced him into, or to know that Sammy and Susie and who knew who else still lived, but in madness. Or were the good men and women he once knew them to be truly dead as well, replaced by some corrupted insanity given life?

A door to his left creaked open, and he turned his head in time to see Sammy emerge. Henry nearly startled at the sight of the stained and broken Bendy mask covering Sammy’s face. 

“You’re awake!” Sammy said gleefully, clapping his hands together. “It won’t be long now, and then we can get started.” 

With the headache pounding against his skull, it took Henry a moment to really comprehend what Sammy was saying. Was he expecting ‘Bendy’ to show up? The ink demon was at the bottom of the elevator shaft right about now.

With Sammy as devoted as Henry suspected, how would he react to that knowledge? If he got angry, Henry would be left at his mercy. Best save that tidbit for if things really became desperate.

Instead, hoping to stall for time as he started trying to pick apart his bonds, Henry asked, “Why are you doing this, Sammy?” 

His old friend—were he and Sammy actually friends back then? Acquaintances, surely, but friends?—didn’t pause as he fiddled with some candles resting on a barrel across the room, even as he answered, “Because my lord demands it. You caught his attention, Creator, and then you rudely tried to escape from him.” He tutted.

Before all this, Sammy used to do that mockingly. Now, he sounded like he genuinely intended to scold Henry. 

“But all will be made well! The time of sacrifice is nearly at hand, and soon, my lord will be quite pleased with me.”

Henry shook his head, both to deny Sammy’s words and to try and clear away the lingering sluggishness. “But why? What is it about ‘Bendy’ that makes you want to do this? What could be worth hurting people?”  

The mask turned towards him a bit, and Sammy seemed to consider him. “You wish to know what makes me a loyal and devoted believer?” 

If it would delay whatever was coming, then, “Sure, y’know, why not.”

Sammy slowly approached him. “Do you know what it’s like, to be liquified from the inside out?” he asked in a low voice.

Goosebumps raised along Henry’s arms. “He didn’t,” he whispered. “Sammy, tell me he didn’t.” 

Crouching in front of Henry, Sammy reached out and touched his cheek. The ink of his fingers was cold, unlike his toons. “You are still flesh,” he continued as he dragged the mask up and off his head, revealing his gouged eyes and distorted, gaping mouth. “You haven’t felt loss and despair like no other. You are still yourself.” 

A little cloud of black smoke puffed out of his mouth, and Henry couldn’t help but be reminded of the good old days, when Sammy was always blowing cigarette smoke into people’s faces. At least one thing hasn’t changed, he thought as he choked on the fumes. 

Sammy stood and moved away, leaving three spots of ink dripping down Henry’s face. “Who would you turn to, Creator, when you are lost even in your own mind? When there is a Liar above you, and monsters below you. The Angel describes the ink as a screaming well of voices. She’s not wrong. I know you doubt my lord. I know you have escaped him at every turn. He’s offered you salvation and you have rejected him, despite your true desires.”

“Stop it,” Henry said. “Don’t pretend like you can guess my thoughts.” 

“I don’t need to guess. I saw you myself, before we were interrupted by the Amalgamate. How hard you struggled to force yourself to leave his promise of peace behind. You gave in delightfully quickly, before those toons distracted you. Without them here this time, there will be no one to get between you and my lord. He’ll be your lord too, soon.”

“No. You’re wrong. The only thing ‘Bendy’s going to be for the foreseeable future is a puddle of ink at the bottom of the elevator shaft.” Henry ignored the fact that Norman was down there too, right where Henry himself had nearly died.

Sammy froze and stared at Henry, perhaps trying to discern whether he was telling the truth. Whatever he saw made him turn to face the room to Henry’s right, where he could just barely make out one of those rotten cutouts half-hidden from his view. 

“My lord?” 

One of the knots holding his restraints together came loose. There were still more, though—seriously, how many knots had Sammy tied?

When Sammy didn’t get the response he was clearly hoping for, he sighed and tugged his mask back on. 

“Whatever hinders him will not stop him forever. It’s a shame he can’t be here for what’s next. My lord would’ve enjoyed it, I think, to watch you go from defiant to compliant. Do you want to know what I’m going to do to you?”

“Not particularly, but I get the feeling you’re gonna tell me anyway.” Henry was running out of time, and options. 

Circling Henry, Sammy told him, “I fell into the ink one day, and I thought I’d never escape. My lord saved me, he set me free. I lost everything I was, Creator, and through him, I found myself anew. He showed me truth, when before there had only been lies. It’s your turn now, to drown and be set adrift. And my lord will save you as he saved me, and when he pulls you away from madness—oh, Creator.”

Sammy paused at the wall behind Henry, and Henry was just able to twist enough to see him grab a lever. “You will beg him to finish what he started,” Sammy told him reverently. “You will beg him to free you in all ways, and then he will absorb you fully. You will sacrifice your weak flesh to receive his blessings.”

“Do you even hear yourself?” Henry cried, painfully aware that he’d asked Joey a similar question right before Joey basically threatened to enslave him. 

“It’s time to begin, Creator. Are you ready? Can I get an amen?”

“Sammy, don’t—”

But Sammy pulled the lever down, and immediately, the pipes hidden within the walls clanked and groaned.

“It isn’t quite the Ink Machine,” Sammy admitted, coming to stand before Henry. “But for our purposes, any ink will do.” 

Henry looked up at a sound above him, ducking back down with a cry just in time to avoid getting a face full of ink as it cascaded directly onto him. He was drenched in seconds, the thundering spray crashing against his head and neck. 

It didn’t drain away, he realized in horror. Instead of seeping through the studio’s floorboards, the ink swirled to fill a pentagram around him that Henry hadn’t noticed earlier. It contained the sloshing liquid, and Henry watched it slowly but steadily begin to fill up. 

Sammy was serious; he was going to drown Henry. 

He pulled wildly at the rope holding him in place, no longer caring about his efforts going unnoticed. Time was ticking, because even Henry could only hold his breath so long. Never thought he’d see the day where escaping from a void world inhabited only by himself and an ink demon dead set on absorbing him would turn out to be easier than simply not drowning in ink. 

Hunched over as much as he could be with his wrists bound behind the support column, Henry looked up at Sammy through the inky waterfall. “This isn’t going to do you any good!” he cried. “You’re only going to end up killing me!” 

“That’s the thing about the ink, though. In it, there is no such thing as mercy in death.” Sammy sounded very much like he was smiling widely. “No matter how long it takes my lord to return to free you, you’ll be in there, waiting. It might benefit you, even! The more time you spend in madness, aching for a way out, the more willing you’ll be to accept my lord as your savior when he comes for you.”

Gritting his teeth, Henry strained at the ropes. His shoulders screamed, and he wasn’t able to hold out long before falling limp against the column. This was bad. This was very bad. He was completely sitting in a pool of ink now, and it was rising fast. 

Maybe if he could stand? He tried to push back for leverage, but the ink made it difficult, the immense pain he was in even more so. What good would it do anyway? With his luck, he’d barely manage to get to his feet before the rush to his head would make him slide right back down.

The rope, submerged, slipped too much between his fingers. He couldn’t pick at the knots right anymore. 

“Sammy, please! Don’t do this!” 

After a long moment where Sammy merely stared at him, up to his chest in the stuff, he said quietly, just loud enough for Henry to hear, “I’m sorry, Creator. But sacrifices must be made.” And with that, whatever remained of Sammy Lawrence turned and walked away, leaving Henry to his fate, and shut the door to his little side room behind him on his way out.

The ink rose, to his neck, and then to his chin, and he never stopped fighting against it. Even as he strained to keep his mouth above the liquid, he struggled against his bonds. And when the moment came when there was simply nothing else he could do, when he could push his head no higher, Henry took a deep breath and clenched his eyes shut as he was fully immersed. 

But Henry Ross was human, and humans couldn’t hold their breath forever. 

So, after some time, bubbles popped to the still rising surface, and his legs—comically sticking out of the confining forces of the pentagram—stopped moving. 

The ink took him. 

One moment, he was consciously aware of losing his battle, the next he was somewhere not too different from the void world, at least in how it felt.

Darkness, pressing in and around him, liquid at the touch yet not hindering him. Henry was allowed barely a moment to register this before the screams started. 

Some were wordless, drawn out wails and howls full of pain and anger, and Henry felt that pain and anger as if it was his own. Others cried out against the Liar with garbled, distorted voices full of hatred, and Henry felt that hatred as if it was his own. Many shrieked in confusion, gasping for breath as they begged to know where they were, what had happened to them, someone please, where am I?—and Henry felt that disorientation as if it was his own. 

But they all whispered nothingness into the space between them, the space that no longer existed. They were one, and they all felt everything and their madness was contagious and untamable. Such things as memories and names—save for those of pain and death and the Liar—weren’t allowed here. 

And Henry felt that nothingness as if it was his own, and—wait. Who was he?

Who was he? 

Who was he? 

He was stripped away and everything that had made him him was lost and stolen and consumed, and in the real world, his lungs filled with ink and his heart slowly stuttered to a stop. 

Naturally, this was right as the door burst open, allowing Bendy, Alice, and Boris to spill into the room. 

• • • • •

“We have to go find him, Boris, there’s no tellin’ what happened to him!” Bendy cried, trying to wiggle free of Boris’s hold on him.

“That’s just it! We don’t know, and look at us—you’re barely holdin’ onto sanity, Alice is having trouble so much as staying awake, and this is all still new to me! We don’t even know who has him.”

“It was Sammy,” Bendy nearly snarled at the thought of the crazy former music director hurting Bendy’s own Creator. “It had to have been him.” 

“But what if it wasn’t?” 

“Lemme go, Boris!” 

“Just listen to me for a second! What if it was Joey?”

Bendy froze. From the couch, Alice managed to sit up a bit. “Joey doesn’t come down here, Boris,” she said. 

“First time for everything, right? Look, all I’m sayin’ is that we can’t rush into this. We don’t know who’s got Henry. We need to figure this out, because if we get caught too, then we’re all sunk.” 

Taking a deep breath, Bendy nodded. As much as he wanted to race out there, possibly in his monst—no, Henry said he wasn’t a monster even when he looked like that—in his other form, Boris was right. They didn’t know who had taken their Creator, nor where he was now. And they didn’t have time to make guesses, not when everyone who could possibly want to capture Henry would do so for all the worst reasons. 

“What do you suggest?” he asked, forcing himself to calm down, as difficult as it was. 

Boris settled back down on the couch, pulling Alice up against him for support. “You said you can feel Henry, right?” 

Bendy nodded. Even now, there was something inside him, like a thread, reaching across and bridging the distance between him and his Creator. 

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you can use that to find him? Track him somehow?” Boris asked. 

Could he? There’d been a moment, right before he’d lost control of himself after Henry ran, where he’d almost been able to be Henry, where he was almost in Henry’s shoes. Bendy had felt what he’d felt, seen what he’d seen, thought what he’d thought. 

“Maybe,” he said. “I might be able to see where he is.” 

Boris nodded. “Anything would help.” 

Turning away from his friends for the closest thing to privacy as he could get, Bendy closed his eyes and poked at the thread connecting him and Henry. There was only darkness on the other side, but based on the pounding ache Bendy thought he could feel, the man was well and truly unconscious from that hit to the head. Pulling back a bit, he tried for something less specific.

A direction. Even just knowing whether they should search this floor, the ones below them, or the last few above would help. 

Nothing. He frowned. Was he even doing it right? Was there a right way at all?

What would Henry do? 

He’d start by imagining it. Bendy pictured the thread as being connected to his heart and did the same with Henry’s end. Two anchor points—all it had to do was stretch between them. 

Without opening his eyes, he imagined looking down at himself, and there: he saw the thread, vanishing out of the room at an upwards angle. It wasn’t steep enough, probably, to go to the upper levels. And right above them was—

“The music department,” Bendy said, spinning around. “He’s gotta be somewhere in the music department.” 

“Sammy, then,” Boris said with a nod. “At least we’re not goin’ into this totally blind.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Alice asked. 

Bendy eyed her slumped over position. “No offense, but can you even stand?” 

Glaring, Alice slid off the couch. To her credit, she managed to maintain an upright position for several seconds before she started to slump to the side. Boris caught her. 

“There’s nothin’ for it,” she said. “We can’t wait for me to feel better, and Henry’s the only one who might be able to help anyway.” 

Bendy watched her stumble forward, as behind her, Boris rolled his eyes. When they left the room a minute later, Alice was firmly settled on Boris’s back, pouting but not tripping every other step, so Bendy counted it as a win. 

They made it up the stairs without any close encounters, and while they went, Bendy tried poking at his and Henry’s thread. 

He went stiff as a board for a split second as he registered what he was finally seeing, and then he leapt forward with a yelp, “Hurry!”

“What is it?” Boris asked, taking two steps at a time to keep up with Bendy. 

“Henry’s drowning!”

“What do you mean, he’s drowning?” Alice cried. 

“I mean Sammy’s tryin’ to send him into the ink!” 

Boris and Alice gasped as Bendy shoved open the stairwell door. “C’mon! I saw the room he’s in!” He led them down a hallway, around a corner, and there it was—the last barrier between them and their Creator. 

They burst into the room, no Sammy in sight, and stared in horror at the column of ink near the wall opposite them. They raced to it, horror briefly choking Bendy at the sight of Henry’s legs sticking out. They weren’t moving.

“Henry!” Bendy collapsed to his knees beside the edge of the pentagram. “What do we do?” 

Boris set Alice next to him before rushing to a lever in the wall. It stopped the flood of ink, but that didn’t matter much when Henry was already submerged. 

Bendy groped blindly through the liquid, but he could only just barely reach Henry at all. “He must be tied down somewhere!”

“The pentagram!” Alice said. “Break the pentagram!”

“How? It’s burned into the floor, not drawn!”

Boris knelt down on Bendy’s other side. “The boards, we can pry one up and break the circle.” 

The thread in Bendy’s mind trembled and began to fray in the middle.

“Hurry!”

It took jumping and screaming and wiggling and precious seconds that Henry didn’t have, but their desperation was great enough that the board they’d chosen surrendered its place in the floor relatively easily. 

The ink nearly swept Bendy and Alice away as the boundaries keeping it contained vanished, revealing Henry at the center, slumped over and frightfully still. 

He wasn’t breathing. Seeing his Creator like that made him dart forward and all but ram himself into Henry’s chest, hard enough that the hopefully only-slightly-dead man’s body jerked and a flood of ink came pouring out of his mouth. 

Boris used his teeth to rip away the rope around Henry’s wrists, and together, the three of them managed to get him flat on the floor. Bendy pushed on his chest again, and more ink bubbled up and out. 

Again. Again. Again.

“Bendy.” 

He ignored them, ignored his tears, ignored the way his hands were shaking somethin’ awful. 

“Bendy, he’s gone.”

“No! He’s—he’s not, okay? I can still feel him, he’s there, he just—he needs help!” 

“Bendy, his heart stopped. There’s… there’s nothing we can—he’s dead.”

What would Henry do?

He’d look the impossibility in the face and say Watch me. And then he’d do it. 

This time, when Bendy slammed his hands into Henry’s chest, he reached for the thread, barely hanging on but still there, and he tugged at it and begged, Henry, please! Come back! Don’t leave us alone!

This time, when Bendy slammed his hands into Henry’s chest, Henry gasped. 

And then there was coughing, and vomiting, and ink everywhere, but the toons were too busy crying to care. 

“He’s alive,” Bendy whispered, “he’s alive.” 

Though he didn’t regain consciousness, Henry was breathing—wheezily, yes, but it was better than the alternative. 

“He’s really alive!” he said, beaming through his tears at Alice and Boris. 

“So he is,” someone said off to the side. 

They twisted with wide eyes to look at Sammy, framed by the door off to the side that none of them had payed any attention to. He skirted the edge of the room, not getting too close to the toons. 

“But it matters not. My lord will still eagerly take him. It’s only a matter of time now, until he and the Creator are one.” 

“That stupid demon can’t have him, y’hear? Besides, didn’t Henry tell you what happened?”

Sammy tilted his head at them. “A mere fall like that won’t slow my lord for long. He will come, and what will you do? Run? You wouldn’t be able to take the Creator with you. Fight? Even the three of you together, if you were all well enough, would be nothing more than bothersome flies to my lord. He would crush you, given the chance.” 

Alice snorted, but Bendy wasn’t paying attention. His gaze was focused past Sammy and through the still open door they’d come through, where the hallway sure looked a lot darker than it had a second ago.

No. 

No. 

Not now, not when Alice was still weak from her encounter with Vladimir, and Henry was unconscious. Not after almost losing him to the ink.

A massive white gloved hand slapped against the doorframe, drawing the others’ attention to it as well. Alice clasped her palms over her mouth and Boris’s shoulders slumped. Sammy straightened and slinked off to the side, allowing them the full, unhindered view of ‘Bendy’ stepping over the threshold. 

He was limping worse than before, and there was a spot in his side where his ink wasn’t refilling properly. But as he took in the sight before him—the three toons, defenseless and terrified, and Henry, unconscious and unable to properly resist—the furious grimace his mouth had been set in slowly turned up into a wicked grin.

Chapter Text

For a long moment, everyone was frozen, the toons staring at ‘Bendy,’ and ‘Bendy’ staring back. And then a low groan escaped Henry, breaking the spell. The ink demon stepped towards them, his grating laughter making them wince. They were thoroughly trapped, and he knew it as well as they did.

Alice nearly whimpered. After everything, this was how it was going to end? When they were so close and had survived so much? 

Beside her, Bendy abruptly said, “Keep trying to wake him up.” 

“What?” She turned to him as he stood, his fists clenched at his sides. “Bendy, what are you—”

“I’m not letting them take Henry.” 

Ink began to bubble up from the floor, lifting into the air around him. She’d never seen him so angry before, and some part of her wanted to shy away from him, and it took all her self-control not to.

Instead, she gaped at Bendy. “What if you lose control?” They’d be doomed twice over if that happened.

“I won’t,” he said, moving away from her. His eyes went off-model, and she shivered. “I won’t. I won’t.” 

Trembling, Alice watched Bendy change like he had before, only the end product was a little different this time. He wasn’t quite as large, and his emotions didn’t drain out of his face. He was somehow keeping himself from crossing that final line, she realized. For them, for Henry. 

With a furious roar, Bendy charged at the ink demon, who just barely managed to lunge out of the way. Injured as he was, ‘Bendy’ slammed gracelessly into the wall, where he leaned heavily against it. Alice watched him wince, clutching at the wound. Hope bloomed in her heart. Maybe he was already bad enough off that this would work. 

But then, when Bendy swiped at him again, the demon pressed back into a hastily formed portal, only to pop out next to Sammy. He grabbed Sammy and, as the man laughed delightedly, collapsed over him. To the trio’s horror, the excess ink from Henry’s near-drowning seeped across the room to converge on the two, turning them into a monster to rival Bendy. 

“No,” Alice breathed. “Oh, no, please.” 

Sammy’s voice, garbled and darker than normal, screeched, “If this is how you want to play the game, then fine! We’ll play it your way, you false lord!” 

Henry shifted beneath Alice’s motionless hands, so she turned her back to the massive creatures as they began battling behind her. His face was pinched and he’d begun shivering. 

“Henry,” she whispered. “Henry, you gotta wake up.” 

His head lolled a bit, but he otherwise didn’t react. Her shoulders slumped, but she refused to give up. If she kept talking to him, maybe he’d be able to use her voice to find his way back to them. The only problem was how difficult it was to keep her head on straight with terrifying sounds coming from the opposite side of the room. 

A great crash, accompanied by the sound of splintering wood, made Alice duck her head. She didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see what was happening. Let her hold onto her hope for survival a little longer. 

Over her hunched form, Boris called out, “Why does the ink demon even need Henry, if you work just fine for him?” 

The ‘Bendy’-Sammy amalgamation cackled. “The prophet’s corrupted body is a poor substitute. Not enough flesh left on him.” 

Alice briefly exchanged a wide-eyed glance with Boris. That hadn’t been Sammy answering, that was ‘Bendy’ himself. They’d never heard him speak before. Against her will, she twisted to look over her shoulder.

Perhaps expecting their reaction, ‘Bendy’ continued, “But I won’t have to worry about that ever again, not once I take the Creator.” 

Bendy howled and managed to sucker punch him. Reeling, ‘Bendy’ rubbed his misshapen jaw. “I offered him a deal, y’know. A good one.” He skirted around the edge of the ruined room, eyeing Bendy, who never moved from his defensive position between the ink demon and Henry. “Let me have him, and I’ll tear the Liar apart for you. Absorbing him wouldn’t even hurt, I promise. In fact, Henry craves the peace I offered him, away from all this.” He held his hands out placatingly. His wicked teeth curved in a smile, and his eyes—unbeknownst to the toons—looked exactly as they had in Henry’s nightmare from the day he woke up in the safehouse after his elevator fall. 

“He’s suffering,” ‘Bendy’ told them. “And I could so easily end it for him.” 

Alice held her breath. She ached at the thought that ‘Bendy’ could help Henry better than they could, and on some level, it was a tempting offer. But if Henry had already refused, then it wasn’t their place to change his mind for him. 

Luckily, Bendy seemed to be in agreement with her. “No,” he growled. “You can’t have him—not now, not ever!” 

Snarling, the ink demon briefly dropped into a crouch before lunging straight at Bendy. They met in the middle, and Alice physically startled at their collision. Mirroring the way Henry and ‘Bendy’ had been pushing against each other earlier, now the two of them locked hands and poured all their strength into trying to force the other to yield. 

There seemed to be no give or take on either side, but something nudged her knee. 

She looked back at Boris, who was equally transfixed as she’d been. But then, what had brushed against her—

“Henry!” she gasped, once more leaning over him. He had that certain expression on his face that she recognized from after she and Bendy had rescued him from the other ‘Alice.’ He’d woken up mere hours after she’d seen his brow crinkle and his eyes flicker rapidly beneath his lids. 

Maybe all he needed now was a little help. 

“Henry,” she repeated a bit softer. “We need you, please. Bendy’s gonna get himself killed unless you wake up soon, but even if he doesn’t, we’re all gonna die anyway. I—I know it hurts, and I know being asleep probably feels really good right now, but, please, come back. We can’t do this without you.” Alice periodically gripped his hand, and when he weakly tightened his in return, she nearly shouted with joy. 

As the floor shook beneath them, Henry’s eyes slowly opened. He blinked up at her as she got as close as she comfortably could. Even with her incredibly limited experience with actual humans, Alice could tell he was disoriented and groggy. So, probably not in any position to help them, as much as the thought scared her.

“Am I alive?” he croaked. 

She laughed, desperate and broken. “Yeah, yeah you are. Only barely, really, just hangin’ in there.” 

More awareness began to return to his eyes, and he gave his head a careful little shake. “I don’t think this is what people mean when they say they woke up to see an angel over them,” he said weakly. 

“Coulda been worse,” she told him, swiping at her tears—not inky black as they should’ve been, thanks to Vladimir and his fangs. “Coulda woken up to Mr. Tall-and-Drippy over you.”

With a twitch of his lips that seemed to want to be a smile, Henry nodded. “That would be bad.” 

“Very bad.” 

“The worst.”

“Duck,” Boris interrupted them, yanking Alice down even closer to the floor. A barrel sailed over them, right where their heads had been. 

Henry stared up at them in confusion. “What’s going on? I’m not still dreaming, am I? You guys saw that flying barrel, too, right?”

Alice hugged him as gently as she could. “We saw it, all right. And that’s what I meant when I said Bendy’s gonna get himself killed. He’s going head-to-head with the monster ‘Bendy.’”

Looking distinctly alarmed and even more awake, Henry tried to sit up. Each keeping one eye on him, Alice and Boris helped him, propping him between them. His face screwed up in pain before he leaned over and coughed glob after glob of ink out. 

“I’m fine,” he told them once he caught his breath. 

Before Alice could say that she thought otherwise, an ear-splitting roar distracted them. ‘Bendy’-Sammy was trying to force Bendy out of his way to get closer to Henry, Alice, and Boris. Of course, Bendy wasn’t having any of that, and if you asked Alice, she’d say that her friend looked about ready to bite the demon’s head off if he could. 

For a moment, she could almost swear that ‘Bendy’ was staring straight at them. 

• • • • •

When Henry had to quietly fight for his every breath, he didn’t much appreciate his body locking up when ‘Bendy’ made very deliberate eye contact with him. His eyes—they were just like from his nightmare. 

He knew, somehow, exactly what the persistent demon was about to do. 

Mimicking the maneuver Henry had used on ‘Bendy’ when they were leaving the void world, ‘Bendy’ let himself fall back with one foot raising to vault Henry’s Bendy up and over him, sending him crashing headfirst into the wall. 

A new, dull pain spread out through Henry’s skull, and his vision wavered. 

Bendy didn’t get up as the excess ink melted off him, leaving him in his on-model form. 

Henry slumped to the side as ‘Bendy’ laughed. “You’re all out of tricks. It’s time to finish this, once and for all.” He turned around and reached for Bendy’s defenseless body.

Despite how awful he felt, despite how he could barely breathe, despite how he couldn’t even stay up on his own, Henry threw out his hand and cried, “Don’t touch him!” and as he did, he felt a world explode in his chest. 

Something burned him up from the inside out, and his mind expanded and twisted and grew, and those strange, elusive threads he’d seen before waking up at Sammy’s mercy flared and thrashed and went taut all through him and out of him into the far corners of the studio. That deep sensation that had begged him to stay, that had pushed him into first discovering the threads—it was back, and it roared its way into his heart and soul, just as he’d poured his heart and soul into creating it without even knowing. 

You are mine, it said, and before he could protest as he had with everyone else who had said those same words to him, it continued gently and happily and lovingly, and I am yours. 

And the walls of the studio beat in time to his heart, just as Gary had said in his madness. 

Before ‘Bendy’ could take another step, the studio gave a great heave around him, and the floor split beneath his feet, and with a great cry of rage and fear, he fell. Not into the void world, but into infinite, unending darkness. 

Henry’s hand trembled, and the floor closed back up. 

Silence. Just like that, it was over. 

Pressed against Henry’s side, Alice trembled. “What was that?” she whispered.

Henry sagged again, and then Boris was there, pulling Henry’s arm over his shoulders for extra support. “Alice, have you—”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It was me,” Henry said. He forced himself to stand despite their protests. “I did that.” 

Somehow, he found the strength to stagger across the room, collapsing in front of Bendy. He was alive, thank goodness, just unconscious. The other two toons joined him as he carefully lifted him off the floor. 

And just like that, knowing Bendy was safe, that they were all as safe as they could be in this moment, his adrenaline fizzled out like a doused fire, and Henry had all of a second to realize that he was about to crash hard before the shaking started.

He nearly fell over as his muscles tensed and relaxed in unpredictable spasms, locking him up in a hunched over position, with Bendy clutched tight to his chest. White overtook the edges of his vision, and everything swam so much, he squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to stop the dizziness. 

Devastatingly, his breathing began to speed up. With the weight of ink in his lungs, his throat clogged within a few sharp pants, and the panic that caused sent his adrenaline skyrocketing again, only this time, with no outlet to speak of. 

These kinds were worse than those like the one he’d had on Level 14. Having a panic attack while fully aware that he was having a panic attack made him feel so helpless, especially since he could pinpoint the individual moments where he became worse and worse.

Like now, Henry knew he had to calm down or he really would suffocate himself on the ink, but his thoughts were so far away, so slow, so useless. 

On both sides of him, he was half aware that Alice and Boris were begging him to tell them what to do, how to help—but he couldn’t answer. Henry tried, he really did, but these types of attacks left his body as little more than a shell, disconnected from his miraculously still functioning mind. Something that might have been an attempt at words stuttered out of his mouth, but he couldn’t be sure they actually formed a coherent thought.

Past experience told him that no, whatever noises he just made held no true meaning. 

Some distant, fractured part of Henry wondered if this was how it would feel to be fully absorbed by ‘Bendy.’ Like he was just a passenger in a body that belonged to someone else, a memory with his own thoughts but no way to share them. 

He had lost full control of himself, in all ways—he was hyperventilating, his chest hurt from the burning in his lungs thanks to the ink saturating them, his muscles were wound up so tight that he felt like he was about to snap like an overstretched rubber-band. He tried and failed to tell the toons to slow his breathing.

Bendy shifted in his arms, but there was no way to determine if he was awake or not. A rushing sound filled his ears, drowning out everything else. You might be squeezing him too hard, Henry told himself, desperate to gain even the slightest bit of influence over his body back. Loosen up!

Alice and Boris abruptly stood up and moved away, and he croaked a plea not to leave him, though nothing more than a hoarse noise slipped out amongst his too-fast breaths. 

And then, infinitely gentle, a hand pressed against his mouth, forcing his panting to stop. His body adjusted accordingly, and it wasn’t long before bit by bit, Henry began to come back to himself. 

It was still a long time before he could unwind and straighten up, and even longer after that to open his eyes and loosen his hold on Bendy. Through it all, the hand stayed in place, grounding him and serving as a physical reminder to work on his breathing. A cough began to build in his throat, but he stifled it. He couldn’t afford to break his pattern until the shaking started to slow down. 

Henry wondered how Boris or Alice had figured out to cover his mouth.

The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was that the hand cautiously pulling away from his face wasn’t covered in a white glove. But—that wasn’t possible.

He looked up right into the cracked lense of Norman’s projector head. 

“I’m dreaming,” he whispered. “This can’t be real.” 

“It’s real,” Alice told him, inching closer again. Pale tears dripped from her eyes as she clutched his arm. “He came in while you were,” she made a vague gesture that still somehow perfectly got her point across, “and he went right to you.”

“But how?” Henry asked, leaning up on his knees and gripping Norman’s shoulder with one hand, the other still cradling Bendy. “How did you survive?”

Boris quietly said, “I don’t think—Henry, I don’t think he can talk.” 

Immediately, Henry’s gaze dropped to his friend’s chest, where the speaker was completely missing. Damaged and broken wires stuck out of a deep gouge in his inky body where it should’ve been, and the more Henry looked, the more injuries he saw. Besides the nearly shattered lens, the projector itself had deep claw marks slashed across it, and most of the tubes and wires sticking out of Norman’s back were snapped or appeared to have been pulled out entirely. The rest of him was battered and smeared, the closest thing to legitimate cuts and bruises he could probably have. 

“You were in a fight,” he realized.

Norman nodded, and hesitantly pointed at Alice.

Henry’s heart skipped a beat. If Norman had fought the other ‘Alice,’ then that meant she had survived Echo’s attack. And if she’d survived, then that meant Echo probably hadn’t. 

“Oh,” he said, shoulders drooping. But just to make sure, “I don’t suppose you saw Echo?” 

If Norman had a way to look sad, Henry was sure he’d be seeing that sort of expression as he slowly shook his head. 

“Oh,” he repeated. He took a deep breath, and this time couldn’t stop the violent coughing. Gosh dang it, he’d only gotten his clear lungs back a few hours ago, and then this had to happen. 

While he worked on getting himself under control, Boris asked Norman, “So, uh, what happened to the other ‘Alice?’”

Norman didn’t hesitate to draw a finger across his neck. 

Dead. 

“Good,” Alice said, her voice thick as more tears built in the corners of her eyes. “One less problem to worry about.” She sniffled. 

“Aww, kiddo.” Of course. Just because Alice hadn’t ever met Susie, the woman had still been her voice actor. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Not your fault, and not yours either, Norman.” She stepped forward to give Norman a hug. “I’m glad you made it, really. It’s probably for the best, too. At least now, whatever was left of her doesn’t have to suffer anymore.” 

While they had their moment, Henry turned his attention to Bendy, who was still unconscious. He barely had time to realize that when something else caught his eye.

“It’s gone,” Henry whispered, turning his free hand over. The black that had covered them after his escape from the void world was nearly completely faded away, just a little lingering on his palms, as far as he could tell.

“What’s gone?” Boris asked, crouching down beside him.

“My hands were covered in ink or something. It happened while ‘Bendy’ and I were in between portals.”

Boris thought for a moment. “When you popped out, yeah, I remember that, but I guess I didn’t really think about it. What caused it?”

“I don’t know. But if it’s going away on its own, then that’s fine by me.” He looked around at their little group, at Bendy’s limp body, at Alice’s ink-loss, at Norman’s extensive injuries. He wasn’t doing so well himself, but since that literally only left Boris, he’d have to just power through it. “We need to go. Now, and finish this. We’ll find somewhere safe to leave Bendy and Alice.” 

“What?” she cried. “Why do we have to stay behind?” 

“Because Bendy still hasn’t woken up, and he can’t be left alone.”

“But why me?” 

Henry sighed. “Kiddo, I’m sorry, but you don’t have the ink to spare if we get in trouble. If you lose much more, I’m not sure there’ll be enough left to keep you together.”

She planted her hands on her hips and pouted. “But Norman’s hurt too, and you didn’t say he had to stay behind!” 

Glancing up over her head at his friend, Henry said, “Norman’s also a lot bigger than I am, and I don’t think I could lock him in a room if he was really that determined to get out.”

Alice opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. With a sigh, she nodded. “Fair point.” 

“You’re forgetting about yourself,” Boris said. “Shouldn’t we wait until you’ve had time to recover a bit?” He eyed Henry’s ink-stained clothes and pale, gray-tinted skin. “You were dead, Henry. You drowned.” 

“I’m fine,” he forced his hands to stop trembling, “really, I am. I need to finish this,” Henry said, and didn’t add the part he was privately thinking about: while I still have the chance. 

Because that was it, wasn’t it? With ‘Bendy’ and Sammy out of the way, the last obstacle standing between his fist and Joey Drew’s face was time itself. And he was running out. Again. He could feel it. 

• • • • •

They got Alice and Bendy set up in a secure room that was a safe distance from the stairwell leading to the upper levels. Boris briefly debated whether or not he should stay with them, but Alice insisted that he go with Henry and Norman, if only because Henry seemed to need all the protection he could get. 

Before they left, they helped move a bunch of the available furniture in the room closer to the door so Alice could easily barricade the two of them in. 

As the trio trekked up the stairs, Henry thought about the experiences he’d had so far. There were certain things starting to click into place regarding his sudden ability to open bottomless pits in the studio’s floor, when realistically, there were over a dozen levels below them. Or, maybe not so sudden an ability as he had first thought.

It linked back to several things, the first and most important of which was the fact that Joey had used Henry’s sketch of the studio to create it. Add that to the apparent bond he and Bendy had—though he didn’t know why he didn’t have an identical one with Alice, since he’d known them the longest—and it wasn’t so crazy to think that maybe there was a legitimate connection between himself and the studio. 

The event that stood out to him was back during their first encounter with ‘Bendy’ and Sammy, after Kai’s attack. The raging Amalgamate that Buddy had sent their way to allow them the chance to escape had somehow completely missed them, despite Henry’s back being in plain sight. 

But had it been? We’re not here. You can’t see us. Please don’t see us. That’s what he’d thought at the time, he remembered even now. What if his thoughts had influenced their surroundings to the degree that the Amalgamate had literally not been able to see them? 

And later, after saving Boris—Henry had spent the whole night out in the corridor, repeating thoughts along the lines of please don’t let anyone find us and we’re safe, we’re not here. And despite feeling ‘Bendy’ approach several times during his time guarding the door to his toons, the demon had always turned back before he could get too close. Henry’d been so surprised that no one had stumbled across them.

There might’ve been other instances, but Henry didn’t strain himself with trying to remember them. He had better things to do, like wholeheartedly think to himself that the pentagram at the top of the stairwell—their final, physical obstacle preventing their safe escape—would be gone by the time they got up there. 

No pentagram, he thought, believing it with all that he was, there won’t be a pentagram. Please. Just give me this. 

Norman, leading their little group, stopped at the top of the stairwell, blocking Henry’s view. He almost didn’t want to look, because if didn’t work, then they were really out of options. Boris stepped around Henry, joining Norman in staring at the door.

“The pentagram’s gone,” Boris said. 

Even as his lungs twinged in his chest, a smile crept across Henry’s face. He did it. It actually worked. He carefully nudged his way between them to press his palm against the wood where the symbol should’ve been. The studio seemed to hum warmly beneath his hand. 

“Do you think Joey got rid of it for some reason?” Boris asked him. 

Knowing deep down that what he’d thought was true, that Henry was connected to the studio somehow, he shook his head. “No, Boris,” he said, “it was me.” 

He turned to look back at his companions without dropping his hand. 

Boris straightened. “Like you did with the floor.”

Henry nodded slowly. “This is my design. It’s—quite literally—a part of me.” He laughed suddenly. 

Norman and Boris simultaneously tilted their heads in confusion. “What’s so funny?” Boris asked. 

“It’s just—when I first ran from Joey. I told him I’d know this version of the studio better than anyone, since I drew it. I guess I was more right than I thought.” He had to wonder, though, if he still would’ve run the way he did if he’d known what fate awaited him in the lower levels. 

Yes, he decided as he considered all the good and bad things he’d gone through. He would’ve.

Henry shook himself free of his mind to focus back on the here and now. “Here’s the plan,” he said. “We stick together, okay? We’re looking for a way out that’s not the main exit. Oh, and keep an eye out for a small toon that looks a bit like Bendy.” Nodding at Boris, he told them, “I don’t think we would’ve been able to rescue you without him, and if he’s up here somewhere and needs help, I want to make sure he’s not left alone.” 

After receiving nods from both his companions, Henry carefully eased the door open. The hallway beyond was empty.

“Stay quiet,” he reminded them. “If Joey hears us talking, it’ll all be over.” 

Boris stepped through the doorway, and just as Norman was about to follow him, a particularly rough attack seized Henry’s lungs. Using the crook of his elbow to muffle the sounds, Henry turned away from him until it was over.

When he lowered his arm, his eyes widened. His shirt sleeve was covered in fresh ink, but worse than that, mixed in with the black was red. To top it off, he was sure it was becoming increasingly harder to breathe. 

Stay calm. He had to stay calm. 

Henry turned back around. Norman was watching him, and he knew by the tilt of his friend’s head that he was worried.

“I’m fine,” Henry said. I don’t have time to be anything else, he didn’t say. 

Norman slowly nodded, clearly doubtful. He ducked out after Boris, and after taking a careful breath so as to not aggravate his lungs even more, Henry followed. 

• • • • •

It was sheer luck that Joey glanced at the “alarm” connected to the pentagram he’d placed on the door leading into the lower levels. It was deactivated—not as though someone had tripped it, but as though it’d been completely removed. 

Peculiar. And rather suspicious, all things considered. 

He stood from his desk. 

• • • • • 

Bendy had finally started to come around some time after Henry and the others had left.

“Welcome back,” Alice said, smiling as he finally woke up all the way. 

He blinked up at her. “What happened?”

“You’ve missed a lot. ‘Bendy’-Sammy knocked you out—if it makes you feel any better, Henry got him with that move first, remember?—Henry’s okay, Norman’s alive, and now the two of them plus Boris are somewhere in the original studio trying to figure out if there’s a way they can get us out safely, without confronting Joey. I think Henry just doesn’t want us to see it happen, or accidentally get caught in the crossfire.”

Bendy pushed himself into a sitting position. “Wait, wait, wait! Norman’s alive?” 

“Yep. We don’t know how yet, though, because he can’t talk. Got into a fight with the other ‘Alice’ and lost his speaker. Oh, and she’s dead, too, now. And you won’t even believe what Henry did to save you from ‘Bendy.’” 

Burying his face in his hands, Bendy said, voice muffled and despairing, “You’re killin’ me here, Angel. How long was I even out?” 

“I’d say less than an hour.” 

He looked up at her, eyes wide. “And I still managed to miss all that?” 

She nodded solemnly. “It’s been a very eventful hour.”

Before she could continue, a very faint rattling noise interrupted her. Bendy frowned, and she returned the look. That, well, it almost sounded like—

“The doorknob,” she breathed.

Frozen in fear—because if it was Henry or Boris or Norman, they would’ve used the special knock they’d come up with—they both winced when something rammed against the door, pushing it open barely an inch. 

And in the crack of space, a very human eye peered through at them. 

There was nothing quite as horrifying to Alice as hearing Joey Drew say, in a very pleased tone of voice, “There you are.” 

Chapter Text

The silence was unnerving. In the lower levels, there’d always been something making noise, pipes or machinery or sloshing ink. The eerie sounds had once disturbed Henry, but now, he missed having that ambiance surrounding him. 

It didn’t help them with being stealthy, either. With nothing to provide cover, the three of them stepped carefully and slowly, wincing at every drawn out creak of the floor. If only they knew exactly where Joey was. 

That was something that had been bothering Henry, actually. He didn’t even know how long he’d been here, and yet all the signs pointed to Joey never leaving. With the way Bendy and Alice had talked, it sure sounded like Joey was always right beyond that last stairwell door, waiting. 

But that didn’t make any sense. Why would Joey stay here like that? For all that Henry understood that he wanted to succeed, why spend so much time on a project that he had to have figured out was ultimately going nowhere? Why send a letter and hope that Henry would show up, rather than Joey going out to find him? 

Henry shook his head. Now probably wasn’t the time to be thinking about that. Although, what other time was there for him?

A tap on his shoulder mercifully brought his thought process to a halt. Boris’s eyes were scrunched up in worry as he leaned closer to Henry and whispered, “I don’t suppose you can tell where Joey is with your connection to the studio?” 

“I’ll try,” he whispered back. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and concentrated. He’d done this a couple times already, he realized. Leaving Level 14 with Echo and Norman, and then again after Echo stayed behind to slow ‘Alice’ down— he’d just sort of known where his toons were. The same thing happened when he forced his way out of the void world. He’d popped out right by the group. 

But could he do the same thing with Joey, or was it only because he was their Creator that he could find them like that?

Only one way to find out. 

He grasped the web of threads that lingered in the back of his mind. Though there wasn’t one specifically for Joey, he poked at the line that seemed to be connected to the studio. It unfolded in his mind like a living thing, filling him up with warmth and life. 

It’d be so easy to get lost in this sensation, to just let go of the world around him in favor of this shining, impossible version. Forcing himself to stay on the surface to avoid doing just that, he poked around, trying to figure out how this worked. 

“He’s not nearby,” he heard himself whisper, as though from far away.

“That’s good,” Boris said. There was a pause. “Henry? You can stop now.” 

But he didn’t want to stop. He traced along the path before them, feeling it branch out and twist in new directions. So much potential, all left to rot by Joey.

“Henry?”

He could feel the Ink Machine. It positively glowed with the possibility of life. 

“Henry.” 

There was an exit— it had a pentagram on it, but what did that matter now? 

“Henry!” 

So much. There was so much. He was everywhere, in the walls, in the ink, in the electricity coursing through the building. He was the void world and the screaming well, he was— he was the Creator. Distantly, Henry felt himself shaking violently, like he was having a seizure. 

“Henry!” Someone grabbed his shoulders and gave him a hard jerk around. 

His eyes shot open, and he stared in shock at Boris, who had his hands raised like he wanted to help but didn’t know how, and Norman, who was still gripping him tightly. Poor Bois looked absolutely terrified, and Norman was all tense. 

Something wet trickled down his cheek. Unable to stop himself from trembling, Henry reached up and swiped his fingers across his face. Blood, leaking from his eyes and nose. 

“I’m fine,” he whispered.

“You really aren’t,” Boris said quietly. “Don’t do that again, please.” 

Henry nodded and winced as a single cough burst out of him, ink and more blood speckling his lips.  

“You really aren’t,” Boris repeated, and this time, it sounded more like a realization than a reprimand. 

“Hey,” he smiled weakly, “don’t worry about me, okay?”

Looking like he was about to cry, Boris shrugged. “Someone has to. What can we do?”

Gently extricating himself from Norman’s steadying hold, he sat down and leaned back against the corridor wall. “Just give me a minute, and I’ll be ready to keep going.” 

Boris and Norman exchanged a glance that Henry knew meant he’s not only lying to himself, he’s lying to us, because there’s no way a single minute of rest is going to be enough for this man. However, before Boris could voice their thoughts, a bang from a hallway or two over shook the studio. 

“Do you think that was Joey?” Boris asked, glancing fearfully over his shoulder. 

Norman shrugged before turning towards the hall leading in the direction of the noise. 

“What are you doing?” Henry asked, straightening up a bit. “You can’t possibly be thinking of going to check it out!” 

His old friend looked back at him, and for a moment, the overhead lights caught on the scribbled words on the side of his head. 

Norman’s Projector! Do NOT touch— that means you, Wally!

Norman didn’t blame him. Norman blamed Joey, and for the first time in years, he stood even the slightest chance of confronting the man. 

“Don’t,” Henry whispered. 

Even though Norman couldn’t speak, Henry heard him as clearly as if he could. Someone has to, and I don’t want it to be you. 

And so, despite Henry’s protests, Norman left, his heavy footfalls fading away around the corner.  He was only just barely out of sight when Boris took a step after him. Before Henry could even think to protest, he said, “He killed me, Henry. I remember how it felt.”

“Boris, please.” 

“You’re in no condition to face him.” 

Henry tried to push himself up, but his right leg gave a vicious twinge that sent him sliding back down, hunching over into himself. By the time he was able to unclench his fingers from his pant leg, Boris had already vanished. 

“No. No, no, no.” What were they thinking? Although, in all honesty, it sounded like they were thinking like him. 

He listened, desperately waiting to hear something, anything— but there was nothing. No yelling, no screaming, no crashes, bangs, or booms. 

With all that he had, Henry forced himself to his feet. He’d barely made it up before he started coughing again, and it was worse than before. When he’d been basically poisoned by ‘Bendy’s touch, he’d been able to purge the ink as it welled up, clearing his throat for short periods of time. Now, it refused to come out, and he hated to think about what that might mean. 

Step by step, he made his way through the halls, doubling over far too often as his breathing became worse and worse. 

Ahead of him, finally, was an open door. Though there was no noise coming from within, Henry knew— in that way he now understood was coming from the studio— that this was his destination. Perhaps, even, what with the rate his body was failing, his final destination. 

Henry stepped over the threshold.

Across the room from him, Joey grinned. “So nice of you to join us, my friend. Won’t you take a seat? You look like you could use a nice, long break.”

In one hand, he held Alice by her neck, the other only inches above her head with an open bottle of acetone ready to eat through her at a moment’s notice. Faded as she already was, it wouldn’t take much. 

Pinned beneath one of Joey’s feet was Bendy, the man’s boot firmly pressed against his chest. His eyes were mismatched, the pie-cuts different sizes— perhaps mimicking the way a human’s pupils could go wonky with a concussion. 

On either side of the room to Henry, Boris and Norman stood silently, held in place only by the promise of harm hovering over Bendy and Alice. 

In the center of the room— and more importantly, in the center of a pentagram— an empty chair waited. 

Eyeing the bloody circle and complicated markings, Henry said, “I think I’ll stand.”

Joey inclined his head in silent acceptance. 

Henry took a step forward and spread his hands. “Let them go, Joey,” he begged. “Please, just leave them out of this.” 

“I can’t do that. You got them involved, so they’re fair game.” 

Shoulders slumping, Henry sighed. 

“However… I could be persuaded to allow them to live.”

Of course. That was what this was all about, wasn’t it? “Joey…”

“It’s as simple as that, my friend. Agree to work with me, agree to do as I say—”

“I won’t be your slave!”

Joey smiled. “I’m sure, in time, we’ll be partners as we once were. Everything will be as it was. The only difference will be our power. But make your decision quickly. My patience won’t last forever.”

Henry didn’t answer, his thoughts racing at a million miles a minute. 

“Don’t you dare!” Alice cried, at the same time as Boris said, “You can’t, please, you can’t.”

Bendy tilted his head to look at Henry. “Please,” he whispered, crying. A little voice continued on in Henry’s mind, I don’t want to see what he’ll do to you. I don’t want to see my nightmare brought to life. 

You won’t, bud. I promise.

“In exchange for me, you’ll let them go?”

“Yes. But only after you sit down and allow me to, well, work my magic.”

Henry walked closer to the chair, his gaze holding Joey’s, only to stop at the very outside edge of the pentagram. “What will it do to me?”

“You’ll have to wait and find out for yourself. I would, however, recommend you say your goodbyes while you still have the chance.” 

The toons’ pleas for Henry not to do this were silenced when he nodded. Taking a shaky breath, Henry glanced first at Boris, then Norman, before focusing on Alice. She shook her head at him, silently begging him not to.

“Alice,” Henry said, his stare boring into her, “episode thirty-four.” 

Before the others had the chance to react with anything other than plain old bewilderment, her eyes went very wide, and he proudly watched her rear back and drive her fist as hard as she could directly into Joey’s groin. 

Dead in the nuts, just as they’d talked about that night, so long ago.

With a wheezy cry of pain, Joey immediately stumbled back, dropping the bottle of acetone— and more importantly, dropping Alice. Without hesitating, she dragged Bendy up off the floor and away from Joey Drew. 

They rushed to the door with Boris and Norman on their heels, but Bendy skidded to a halt before he could cross the threshold. 

“Henry?” he asked, and for good reason. Henry hadn’t moved. 

Glancing over his shoulder, Henry saw that the four of them were crowded around the doorway, partially in the room, partially out. He gave them a weak smile.

He turned back as Joey managed to straighten up, glowering. Throwing his arms wide, he said, “Here we are, Joey. You and me. Just like how this all started.” 

“This all started when you ran from me.”

A fury Henry seldom felt bubbled up in him, and he didn’t think twice about shoving the chair aside to storm right up to a surprised Joey and sucker punch him. 

Behind him, the toons gasped as Joey smacked backwards into the wall, clutching his bleeding nose. Henry shook his hand out and said lowly, “Don’t you dare say that. Don’t you dare. I didn’t run from you in that cafe, and I’ve spent years wondering if I should have.”

Careful to back up out of Joey’s reach, Henry continued, “You were my best friend! You and me, Joey— it was us against the world, for years! When we first met, you freaked me out, you really did— and I don’t know what changed, what you managed to do— but then suddenly you were coming home for Christmas and birthdays and my parents asked about you all the time and we made four snowmen, Joey! Four! You became part of my family, my parents loved you!”

Joey stared at him, something like shock slackening his features. 

Henry barreled on, days and days worth of words having built up in his mind since arriving at the studio, which were now all coming pouring out in a rare display of total loss of control. 

“And then I came back from war, and you changed! You changed, and I never knew why. You stopped talking to me, it was like you couldn’t even look at me, you— I thought you hated me. You made me think that the man I would’ve been so proud to call my brother hated me. And you said all those things— I’ve had nightmares, reliving that argument with you— and then you sent me away. You sent me away from my characters, my friends, my home— and the next time I see you, you’re telling me that you’ve been killing people. What happened to you? What made you become this?” When Joey didn’t make any move to respond, Henry shouted, “Answer me!” 

Far below them, the studio heaved and roiled, mirroring Henry’s fury. And someone that should’ve been long gone slipped just the slightest bit out of death. 

Pushing himself off the wall, Joey stepped forward. “It was you. You happened to me. I lost my family, Henry, you know that. And then that war almost took you from me. Don’t you see? I had to save you, when you were broken. I had to make sure you could never leave me, too.” 

“You’re telling me that sounds okay to you, right now, saying that out loud?” 

“I understand, I understand that it’s scary. But it’s okay, Henry, it’s okay because the Ink Machine will make you perfect again. You don’t need to fear it. Together, you and me, we could do anything with it.”

“I don’t need to be perfect. I don’t want to be! I’m me, I’m Henry, and I don’t want to be turned into something else! Don’t you get that I would rather die than become whatever it is you want me to be?”

Joey scoffed and shook his head. “You’re just saying that.”

Wishing he had something to throw at the man, Henry deflated. “Is this it, then? You won’t accept that I don’t want that? Because, Joey— the way I see it, if we can’t come to some sort of agreement right here, right now— then there’s really only one way this can end.” 

“Is there even a way we could come to some sort of compromise?” 

“Maybe,” Henry said, shrugging. “But if we did, I’d have at least one non-negotiable condition.” Eyes hard, he carefully watched his friend. “You could never, ever touch any of the toons again, without their permission. No tests, no experiments, nothing.”

There was the slightest change in Joey’s otherwise gentle, almost remorseful expression, and Henry knew. There’d be no redeeming Joey Drew. 

Henry looked down and swallowed his disappointment. He hadn’t had much hope that Joey would come around, but it still hurt. “I didn’t think so.” 

Joey nodded. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.” 

“I know. You just aren’t sorry for the right things.” 

Clenching his fists, Joey examined Henry. “So this is the way it’s gonna be, huh?” He took a deep breath, and became unrecognizable to Henry’s eyes. This wasn’t his friend. It was entirely possible that the man he’d once cared about so much, the man who’d been like his own family, was well and truly dead— or maybe not dead so much as destroyed. “Y’know, if you’d just given me a chance to explain when you arrived, you would’ve known that when I use your drawings, I don’t need sacrifices. But instead, we had to go through all this nonsense, and you’re still going to end up doing what I want.”

“Whether or not you found a way to create toons without killing people doesn’t change the fact that you murdered innocents— our friends, no less!— to begin with.”

“Then if there’s no changing your mind this way, you realize I’m going to do it for you. If you refuse to join me freely, then I’ll just have to take what I want. Tell me, Henry— have you wondered why I don’t leave the studio?” 

Henry searched Joey’s eyes, and seeing the bitterness in the pinched corners, took a guess at the suspicion that had started creeping up on him earlier. “Because you can’t.”

“Because I can’t,” Joey repeated. “When I created the monster that rules over the lower levels, the massive off-model Bendy, he got too close. I should’ve died from the wounds he inflicted on me.” One by one, he undid the top few buttons of his shirt. Pulling it down, he revealed a pentagram, scarred over but nevertheless carved into his flesh. “This is all that’s holding me together. My Machine saved me, but only just. I can’t leave now, or the effects will cease to work.”

Shaking his head, Henry said, “I’m sorry that happened to you, Joey, I am. But you’re not going to change my mind with a bit of a sob story.” 

“You don’t understand. I am forever changed because of this, and despite the limitations my… condition has put on me, there’s one perk.” And just like in Henry’s nightmare, Joey’s eyes began to bleed black.

Different from his dream, however, was the ink rising up through the floor, trickling over Joey’s body as more bled straight from the pentagram, soaking his shirt. In some strange, grotesque combination of melting and buildup, it began to fuse to him, distorting him completely.

Where’s my fighting form, huh? Henry jokingly thought to himself, though his levity was interrupted by the ink in his lungs choking him. Yeah, no more ink for him please. 

“So,” Joey said, his voice slightly garbled, “how do you intend to get out of this one? Will you fight me? I told you, you are mine. You wouldn’t win.” His eyes slid past Henry to the four toons that had so far remained silent throughout their entire exchange. “Or would you make them do it for you?” 

It was at that moment that Henry truly realized what he was going to do. Exhaling shakily, he backed up a bit and hoarsely called over his shoulder, “Go.” 

“We’re not leaving—”

“Get out of here!” he ordered them, his voice breaking as tears welled up in his eyes. 

The door clicked shut, and Henry shook his head in useless denial. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to do this. 

Joey began to advance, slow and steady— victorious. “Even now you won’t just give up. A last stand, is that what this is? If that’s what you want, fine. You against me, one on one.”

Crying now, not great, gasping sobs, but quiet, mournful tears, Henry told him, “I can’t do that, Joey. I can’t let you have the chance to win. I can’t give you a fair chance, in any way, not after everything you’ve done. I can’t risk you surviving. I won’t risk my toons like that. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You were my best friend, and I’m so sorry.”

Sneering, Joey laughed. “Confident words for a man who’s about to lose his freedom. Look around! You’re a human in a toon’s world, Henry. There’s no place for you here, not as you are.”

Taking his last look of his friend— even though it wasn’t even really him anymore, was it?— Henry smiled sadly. “You’re wrong,” he said, “I have more right to this than you ever could. This studio might not have needed a living sacrifice to work, but it still has life in it. My life, Joey. You might’ve built the Ink Machine, but this is my world.”

It was easy, in a softly horrifying way, to do what he needed to. It was easy, the way pulling a trigger takes no effort at all. It was easy, and that was perhaps the worst part, because never in his many years of being friends with Joey had he ever thought the man would die easily. Loudly, grandly, fantastically— with all the life Henry remembered him having— but never without a word, helpless to prevent his own death. 

At his command, the studio warped and twisted around its Creator, and just like that, before Joey could even try to make his own last stand, the ceiling and floor snapped together with a concussive boom. In an instant— a terrible, wonderful instant— the monster that Joey Drew had become was no more. 

And Henry collapsed to his knees. 

It was easy, and it was over.

• • • • • 

The studio shook, and they all winced at the crash that rattled the walls. 

In the silence that followed, Bendy inched closer to the door, wanting nothing more than to throw it open and rush inside. What if Henry was hurt?

Ominously, the moment he thought that, the thread between them flickered and began to fray in the middle, like it had when Henry had nearly drowned. 

“No!” he cried, lunging forward, startling the others.

Alice tried to grab him.“Wait, Henry told us to stay out—”

But then he shoved the door open, revealing Henry, alone in the room, curled up on his side with a small— but slowly growing— puddle of ink and blood dripping out of his mouth. 

His eyes, Bendy discovered as he rushed to kneel in front of him, were half-open and glistening with tears. 

“No,” Bendy whispered. 

Henry moved the slightest bit to look up at him. “Hey,” he said. 

“What happened, where’s Joey?”

A tiny droplet of water slipped from Henry’s eyelashes. “He’s gone,” he whispered. “He can’t ever hurt any of you again.”

“But what did he do to you?” Boris asked, gently placing his hand on Henry’s back.

“Nothing. Joey didn’t touch me.”

“Then what—”

“Drowning,” Henry said quietly, “like I did, without medical attention… my lungs are full of ink, guys. Echo might’ve been able to get rid of ‘Bendy’s poison, but this is a bit different. I can barely breathe, and it’s not ’cause it’s choking me this time.”

“But you were almost okay!” Bendy cried, slamming his fist against the floor. “Before, you weren’t like this!” 

Henry shrugged with the shoulder not pressed against the floor. “I’m so tired. I don’t want to give up, I don’t, but…” A pained little sob escaped him. “I just killed someone in cold blood. I killed a man who was my best friend for years. I feel— I don’t know what I feel, but I’d really like to stop feeling it.” 

“That doesn’t mean you have to die,” Alice said. “Henry, please, don’t leave us now.”

A thought— not a new one, not by any means— filled Bendy’s mind. He hadn’t brought it up before, hadn’t seemed like the time to get into something like this, but now? There would never be a better moment than this.

“Draw yourself,” he said, “draw yourself and be okay. Become a toon.” 

Henry closed his eyes and slowly shook his head, to the immediate and vocal distress of everyone. 

“Why not?” Bendy asked over the noise of bike horns coming from Alice’s mouth. 

“What if it doesn’t work?” Henry reached out and Bendy latched onto his hand with more desperation than he’d ever felt before. “What if I become a monster, what if I try and hurt you guys? What if I become like Joey?”

“You won’t,” they all said, leaving no room for doubt or hesitation. Norman nodded firmly. 

“And if you can’t believe that for yourself, then trust that we believe in you,” Alice added. 

“Yeah,” Boris said. “I barely know you, and I’ve already caught on to the fact that there ain’t nothing that can stand in your way, not really.” 

Bendy held his breath as Henry considered it. Please, he thought, please please please. Don’t let this be the thing that wins against you.

Finally, Henry gave a tiny nod. “Okay,” he said.

“Really?” Alice asked, bouncing in place. “You really will?”

With as deep a breath as he could manage, Henry struggled to sit up. Luckily, he had four pairs of hands ready and willing to help him. Smiling a little, he wiped the ink from around his mouth.

“You’re right,” he told Bendy. Looking from each of his toons to Norman, Henry continued. “I’ve survived Searchers and Amalgamates and an elevator falling and the ink that wants to absorb me. I’ve survived ‘Alice’ and Kai and the Butcher gang, I’ve survived Sammy trying to sacrifice me, I’ve survived ‘Bendy’ trying to absorb me, poison me, trap me, and smash me. I’ve survived Joey freaking Drew and his insanity, so there ain’t no way, no how, that I’m letting this kill me. Get me paper and pencils— and for goodness sake, make sure there’s color. If I’m going to spend the rest of my life as a toon, I won’t be doing it in black-and-white.”

With three identical cries of joy, the toons threw themselves upon their Creator.

“Trust me, guys,” he said from beneath them, “I’m desperately in need of hugs right now, but we should probably hurry. I don’t think I have long.” 

Henry, it turned out, was right. He didn’t have long at all.

It only took a few minutes for them to find the drawing supplies he needed, but even that short amount of time left him looking so much worse. 

“You’re really actually dying,” Bendy said, watching Henry hunch over a desk. He was pale, paler than he’d been yet, and he seemed out of it. Every shallow breath he took sounded wet now. 

“I’ve lost count of how many times I should’ve probably died by now.” Henry briefly lifted his sketch to the light before nodding in apparent satisfaction. “It’s still scary, though.” 

“But you’re not gonna.” 

Henry spared Bendy a glance. “I hope not, Bendy. But, if this is the one I don’t make it out of, it won’t be for lack of trying. That’s all I can promise, bud, that I’ll try.”

A noise at the door of the office they were borrowing drew Bendy’s attention away from his Creator. Alice beckoned him into the corridor. She looked crushed, so Bendy was quick to leave Henry’s earshot and follow her down the hall.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. 

She took a deep breath. “We found Buddy.” 

Bendy perked up, but then he registered that she wasn’t happy about it. His stomach dropped. 

Alice nodded at whatever she saw in his face. “Joey got ’im. But we’re leaving him where he is, with the hope that Henry will be able to, um. Put him back together.” 

They both winced. 

“So, yeah,” she said. “We figured telling Henry right now wasn’t a good idea.”

“I think you’re right. We’ll bring it up once he’s feeling better.”

They lapsed into silence, though Alice broke it after only a few moments. “Are you excited?” 

Bendy smiled softly. “How could I not be? Joey went about it in all the wrong ways, but I get it, I guess. I wouldn’t want to lose Henry either.”

The thread quivered suddenly, and another strand or two of the greater material that made it up snapped. Bendy made his excuses to Alice and hurried to rejoin his fading Creator. 

“What do you think so far?” Henry asked, offering him the paper. He seemed okay on the outside, but that didn’t mean much when his lungs were the ones about to give up on him. 

He took the page and carefully examined the design on it. The character sure looked like Henry, in all the best, most important ways, too. He was mostly colored as well, just needing a few last touch-ups. 

“It’s practically perfect,” Bendy said, passing it back. “You’ll look great.” 

Henry smoothed the paper down on the desk but didn’t move to continue working on it. He stared into his cartoon likeness’s eyes, and Bendy felt himself grow more and more concerned. 

“What’s wrong?” he finally asked.

“Do you think it’ll be me? Or will it only be some foreign creature that’s wearing my face? You guys can believe in me all you want, but that won’t mean much if it’s not actually me that comes out of the Machine.”

Bendy pressed up against Henry’s side. “It’ll be you,” he said. “I just know it.” He stayed where he was as Henry gave him a grateful smile before continuing to work. 

After a few minutes, something occurred to him. “Henry?” 

“Yeah?”

“You— you want this, right? I mean, other than being afraid of it not working, you’re okay with becoming a toon?”

Setting his tools aside, Henry pulled Bendy up into his lap and hugged him close. “I’m definitely nervous,” he said. “The track record for humans to toons so far doesn’t work in my favor, after all. And the thought of using the Ink Machine on myself is kinda scary.” 

Bendy nodded, making sure he could hear Henry’s heartbeat when he settled back down. He understood that. It’d been scary for him when he came out of it. 

Henry continued, “But becoming a toon? I think I’ll get used to that just fine.” 

“Good. I’m glad.” 

They lapsed into silence again as Henry kept making adjustments and Bendy managed to doze a bit. Everything had been so hectic, so crazy, that the relief of being completely safe from everyone who wanted to hurt him made him go limp from the release of that constant fear. 

Wait. That— that was true, wasn’t it. Norman had said he’d killed ‘Alice,’ who would’ve taken any chance to drain him and their Alice of their ink. According to the others, Sammy and ‘Bendy’ had been one big monster when Henry opened the floor beneath them, presumably killing them both. And now, the biggest threat that had always loomed over their heads— both literally and figuratively— was dead. 

They were truly safe, for the first time ever. 

It felt incredible, being secure in the knowledge that there was no longer a horror or two potentially waiting around every corner for them.

Just as he was about to mention it to Henry, something cold washed through him. It took him a moment to catch up with what his body had already recognized— Henry’s heart. 

It nearly wasn’t beating. 

Bendy shot up. His Creator only looked like he was asleep, but that made it so much scarier. “Norman!” he screamed. “Alice, Boris!” He tried to shake Henry awake, but there was only the slightest response. 

“What’s wrong?” Alice cried, bursting into the room. She gasped when she saw how limp Henry was. 

“Time’s up,” Bendy breathed. He snatched Henry’s drawing— he sure hoped it was as completed as it looked— while Norman scooped Henry up from the chair. 

Boris appeared in the doorway of the room with the Ink Machine as they approached. “It’s ready,” he called to them. 

Norman and Alice got Henry settled on the pentagram directly beneath the nozzle. “He’s not breathing!” Alice cried. 

Placing the drawing on the matching symbol, Bendy grabbed the switch to activate the Machine. With one great yank, he pulled. 

The Machine began to whir, and for a bright, shining moment, it was all gonna be okay. 

And then the inky wall shadows appeared across the floorboards. 

“That’s not possible!” Boris said, backing away from them as they spiraled out from the middle of the room. “He’s dead!” 

“It’s not the ink demon,” Alice pointed at Henry. “They’re coming from him.” 

They were. The shadows stretched out from his body, covering the floor, walls, and within seconds, the ceiling as well.

“It’s not just Henry,” Bendy whispered as the thread in his mind snapped and fell away. “It’s the studio, too. They’re dying, both of them, together.”

In the wake of the shadows, the wood itself seemed to almost rot right before their eyes. The decay spread rapidly, the studio darkening in the wake of Henry’s death. 

“No…” Bendy whimpered. “No, he— he can’t be—”

A slow trickle of ink leaked out of the Machine, nothing like the rush of ink it should’ve been— it was like comparing a garden hose to a waterfall. It splattered over Henry but didn’t engulf him. 

“We were too late,” Alice said brokenly, her legs giving out. Boris kneeled next to her and wrapped himself around her shaking body. 

Bendy just stood there, even as Norman joined the two on the ground. He felt numb in a way he hadn’t been before, when Henry was lost to them but still alive. But now, with the thread split apart, it was like he was completely empty inside. They’d been so close, and they’d still failed in the end. 

His tears slipped unchecked down his face, plopping weakly to the ruined floor. Alice shook as she sobbed, and Boris let out a high-pitched whine. Norman’s damaged light flickered before fading out completely. 

The lower levels darkened floor by floor, and the studio gave a shudder. It wasn’t alive, not in the way the toons were, but it also wasn’t dead. Not really. 

And it felt, as much as it could, the pain and loss in that little room up on the first floor. There were worlds within its walls, in the void spaces between, magic infused into every inch of every board and within every drop of ink that dripped and flowed through its entirety. 

Its Creator was dead, and soon, it would be as well. So, with its last little spark, its last bit of heart and soul given to it by Henry himself, it stretched out in the infinite nothingness and pulled the two bits of Henry’s broken thread back together. 

The ink pouring out of the Machine around his body seeped through that nothingness and fused them back into one, as it should be.

Above, the pentagram began to glow, and the ink began to become him, and the furthest reaches of decay began to recede. 

And— most importantly— Henry opened his eyes, alive.

Chapter Text

To die in the ink meant you found no peace in death. Buddy pressed his hands against the sides of his head, for all that he didn’t truly have either in the hivemind, in a useless attempt to block out the screaming. Tendrils of other consciousnesses pulled at him, trying to take him, break him, steal him away.

He wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer. Why bother, even? 

The voices surged up, threatening to engulf him. One, they shrieked, one, one, oneoneoneoneone! Buddy tried to ignore them, tried to think of something, anything, else. 

In his mind’s eye, he watched the Liar corner him, reaching out to tear him apart with a horrible, victorious sneer on his face. No, no, please, he didn’t want to feel it again. Dying once was enough. 

Buddy began to unravel, losing himself to the ink despite his weakening struggles. The voices got louder and louder and louder until he couldn’t even tell where the divide between them and his own thoughts was.

And then, one stood out from the rest, quiet but alive in a way the hivemind could never achieve. From very far away, he imagined he could almost hear someone say, “Oh, Buddy. Hang in there, kiddo. I’ve got you.” 

Distantly, he listened as the voice spoke and responded to words he wasn’t able to hear. 

How many pieces are there? Okay, try and get the splatter off the wall. Careful, his head isn’t secure. A laugh, bright and broken. I really have no idea what I’m doing. 

Something started to gather up his fractured, shattering soul. For a moment, he wondered if he should try to resist, but then he realized it wasn’t trying to pry him apart even more like the voices wanted. Instead, it was nudging the bits of himself back into all their proper places. 

“C’mon, Buddy, you can do it. You’re so close.” 

His heart stumbled into beating again, and he opened his eyes to his Creator leaning over him. 

With a beaming smile, Henry said, “There you are.”

• • • • • 

It was a feeling like no other, to watch Henry come back to life for the last impossible time. The studio healed in rhythm with his strengthening heartbeat, and the toons watched the decay recede until all signs of his death were gone. 

They jumped around, screaming their joy in celebration as Henry got his breath back— finally free from the ink that had tried so very hard to take him time and again. 

First Bendy, and then Alice and Boris as well, leapt at Henry once he was able to push himself upright, all on his own. He laughed with them as they mercilessly dog-piled him back to the ground.

That one had been far too close for comfort. But never again. 

Never again. 

• • • • • 

“Ready?” Henry asked Norman. He had one hand on the Ink Machine’s lever, a new and improved drawing of his friend waiting on the miniature pentagram. 

Sitting on the floor beneath the nozzle, Norman nodded. 

Off to the side, the four toons watched as Henry activated the Machine. Buddy was nearly vibrating from where he sat between Bendy and Alice, who was still mostly faded. After getting his feet back under him, Henry had taken a closer look at the damage Vladimir had done. 

“See this?” he’d asked, tracing over what at first glance was only a darker smudge on her dress. “Your ink’s coming back all on its own. Makes sense, really. Humans can replenish their lost blood, and since you guys are alive, it stands to reason that you can do the same with your ink.” Henry had smiled up at her, crouched as he was. “You’re healing, Alice.” 

“I don’t feel as bad as I did after it first happened,” she’d told him. 

Nodding, Henry had stood and said, “I suggest we let your body finish fixing you up itself. If there’s no significant improvement in a few days, we’ll see about using the Machine, all right?”

Even now, only an hour or two later, the dark smudge had spread and solidified even more. 

Ink poured out over Norman, covering the projector like paint. When the flow stopped, the toons initially frowned, since he didn’t look any different. But then Henry stepped forward and picked at the seam of the machine covering Norman’s head until it split in two, revealing skin and hair proper facial features— one of which was a mouth that quickly stretched into a smile. 

The toons cheered wildly as Norman cried, “Henry!” and jumped up to throw his arms around their Creator. 

“We made it,” Norman said, clutching Henry’s shoulders. “We actually made it! We shouldn’t have, but we did!”

Laughing, eyes filled with happy tears, Henry could only nod vigorously. 

“Why did you even come back?” Norman asked. “After what happened— why now?” 

“Joey sent me a letter. I couldn’t just ignore it.” 

Norman snorted. “Bet you regretted that pretty quickly.” 

“I did,” Henry said, smiling. “But not for long.”

With the toons’ help, they made quick work of removing the tapes and wires hanging from Norman’s shoulders and back. The more ink they wiped off, the more ordinary clothing was revealed in his restored form. As they went, Norman told them how he’d survived his own fall down the elevator shaft.

“Our monstrous friend somehow managed to open one of his wall portals on the floor at the bottom. I’m sure he didn’t intend for me to fall through with him, but I did. We fought a little, inside there. He tried to escape, but whatever he did, something must have gone wrong, because two separate portals opened and all but sucked us out.” He shook his head. “Sheer luck that it spit me out right on top of ‘Alice’— literally, as a matter of fact. Caught her off guard enough that I managed to knock her axe away, and she didn’t stand much of a chance after that.”

Stepping back to admire their job well done, Henry said, “Speaking of the other ‘Alice,’ what do you say we go on a hunt for Echo?”

• • • • • 

Henry gently shushed the toons’ frantic babbling. Like when he’d first met Bendy and Alice after waking up from his crash, he repeated words of comfort over and over. 

“I’m fine, I’m alive, I’m here.” 

It took some time for them to calm down, and even then, calm wasn’t quite the right word for it. Boris continued to whimper and whine softly, Alice was giggling in the way people who were emotionally wrung out did, and Bendy’s body quivered with the force of his continued sobs.

“I’m fine, I’m alive, I’m here.” 

Norman knelt beside Henry’s toon-covered body. After looming briefly to look into his eyes, Norman sat back and settled down with the fabric of Henry’s shirt twisted in his fist. 

“I’m fine, I’m alive, I’m here.”

Henry could feel them. The web buried in his soul, connecting him to all he’d created— it was so much brighter now. Their joy drowned out their lingering fear and heartbreak, their relief blissfully overwhelming. Deeper still, the studio’s thread trembled faintly, and it took him a moment to realize it pulsed in time to his heart.

“I’m fine, I’m alive, I’m here— and I’m not going anywhere.” 

• • • • • 

Hurt. Hurting hurting hurting. Smeared, axe blade, wicked sharp— a chunk was gone gone gone. 

Alone. Always alone, had been, was, and would be. Creator was gone. Creator, stay safe. Creator, stop the Liar. Creator, find your toons. 

Remember me, please? 

Immortalized, a painted mural on a corridor wall, a shadow with no way to move. 

It hurt. 

Tickle touch. A voice, kind and familiar. Creator? Laughter, joy, happy happy happy.

Creator! 

The wound— pain pain hurting pain— began to shrink, and new life surged through the new ink that filled the hole ‘Alice’s weapon had left. Healing, repaired, fixed up, saved. 

As soon as the wound was gone, Echo stepped off the wall, solid and whole and no longer smeared. Just a few feet away, holding an ink-covered brush in one hand, Creator beamed, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes.

“Echo! You’re all right! Does anything hurt, did I miss somewhere?”

Instead of answering, Echo swept Creator up and spun him around and around, delighting in his shining laughter. 

Creator-Creator-Creator! Creator had come back, Creator had remembered, Creator cared! 

A tentative poke tickled Echo’s soul. A line, a thread, a tell-tale sign of life connected Echo to Creator, and the line-thread-sign-of-life trembled with happiness. 

If only Echo could make noises beyond purrs and chirps, then Creator could know that his happiness was returned tenfold. No one had ever helped Echo before, much less done so twice. Echo tried to poke back, tried to share the well of delight-thank-you-good-things-love. 

Creator laughed again, and Echo trilled triumphantly. Something inside Creator was lighter— and it wasn’t just the absence of ink. 

Echo rumbled, curling around Creator. What had happened to change him? 

“Joey’s dead,” Creator whispered, scratching the side of Echo’s head. “I killed him.”

Purring contentedly, Echo tried to remember who Joey was. Joey, Joey— Joey who? Joey Drew, the lying Liar who lied. Dead? Dead-dead, gone for good, never coming back? 

Sounded like cause for celebration. But before they could get around to that, there was still something about Creator that made Echo confused. He felt different, and not just because he could reach into Echo and do soul tickles. 

It took some contorting, especially since Echo refused to release Creator, but finally their faces were right across from the other’s, Echo hanging upside down. 

And then, well, it would've been hard to miss from there. 

• • • • • 

Eventually, Bendy sat up. Having been behind him when they cuddle-attacked Henry, Alice and Boris were positioned more on his sides, unlike Bendy— who was currently sitting on Henry’s torso.

He looked down and finally took in his toonified Creator.

Ultimately, Henry didn’t look that different. His proportions were just the slightest bit not-human now, though Bendy doubted someone who wasn’t actually trying to spot the signs would notice. Parts of Henry that had previously been naturally detailed were simplified, like his clothes and hair. The colors definitely helped, though. Henry was still Henry.

The biggest difference was his eyes. They were a combination of human and toon, the design of them simpler and larger than they used to be, with his pupil and iris each replaced with a more stylized pie-cut shape resting in his sclera. 

It was funny, Bendy thought. A human would probably look at him and see a fellow human, whereas any toon would look at him and be able to tell he was a toon. Like camouflage, almost.

“You’re like us,” Bendy whispered. “You’re actually like us now.” 

“Yeah,” Henry said, a smile splitting his face. “I am.” 

• • • • • 

Without having to be worried about being caught by Joey, Sammy, or ‘Bendy,’ it was easy to move around the first few floors until they found where the original members of the Butcher gang were being held. One by one, Edgar, Charley, and Barley were restored to their on-model forms.

Henry laughed as they bounced around him. Edgar’s arms and legs were firmly wrapped around Henry’s left leg while Charley and Barley danced arm-in-arm, periodically kicking out their legs to a mystery tune in their heads. Sitting on Norman’s shoulders, Buddy clapped along.

“Now what?” Alice asked. “Do we just keep looking for more toons to help?” 

Henry considered for a moment. “Yeah, I think so. At the very least, we know Kai and Vladimir are out there somewhere. While we go, though, we should try and do something about all the ink. That way, not only will we hopefully give everyone trapped in it peace, but we won’t have to worry about being ambushed by Searchers.”

“That’s all well and good,” Bendy said, “but how?”

Sparing a minute to pry Edgar off his leg and transfer him to his shoulders like Buddy on Norman, Henry grinned. “You tell me.” 

Boris frowned. “We could use buckets and sponges.” 

“Think bigger. More creative, more impossible.” 

“Uh, a vacuum?” Alice suggested. “Y’know, one with a hose attachment?”

“Better, but keep going.”

“A vacuum with a hose that never fills up,” Bendy said. 

Henry snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “Bingo.” He took off out of the room with the others on his tail, Edgar hanging on for dear life. 

An hour later, they were all armed with vacuums that would essentially send the ink back to the Machine where the souls trapped within it could be freed for good. When they found Kai, Henry and Norman managed to wrestle her out of the ink and take her through one of Echo’s portals to the Ink Machine, where she was put to rights. 

It was nice to be hugged instead of clawed up, Henry couldn’t help but think. The wonders of an intact throat and having full color returned to you, he supposed. 

Boris and Bendy were the ones to come across Vladimir as they went around sucking up the ink. Stronger than he was earlier, having fed on Alice’s ink, he chased after them. Shouting for Henry, they led Vladimir up to the first floor, where they managed to trap him until Henry had a new drawing ready. 

It was unbelievable, really, how in a matter of hours the studio could go from a place of sheer horror to one of second chances— or however many chances some people had had. 

By the time night rolled around, it was looking like the studio Henry remembered, just a bit run down. And now, he stood at the exit, surrounded by his original three toons and Norman. 

“Ready?” he asked them. He held Bendy and Alice’s hand on either side. They each squeezed, and Boris and Norman nodded. 

In silence, they pushed the door open and stepped outside— Henry for the first time in who-knew-how-long, Norman for the first time in years, and the first time at all for the toons. 

The night was warm and cloudless, and far above their heads, thousands of stars shone down upon them. Henry smiled softly at the familiar sight. How good it felt, to breathe fresh air, to not be surrounded by the same wooden walls, to smell something other than ink. He tilted his head back until he couldn’t see the ground, giving him the illusion that he was surrounded by space.

“It’s so big,” Bendy whispered. “There’s so much.” 

Alice shifted next to Henry, though she didn’t let go of him. “It’s beautiful.”

They stood in silence for a few minutes until Henry said, “C’mon,” while tugging them in the direction of the grassy lot beside the studio. “We’ll get cricks in our necks if we keep standing like that.”

Together, they settled down, the toons sprawling contentedly over Henry and Norman. 

And for a while, they simply allowed themselves to exist beneath the stars.

• • • • • 

Everything changed after that. The studio was put to rights, and other toons that were lost within its winding halls were found and restored. Arrangements were made for renovations, and as long as he was careful, Henry was able to fool those he had to meet in person. No one suspected anything as damaged structures were repaired, better ventilation added, and spaces converted into proper bedrooms and other such household necessities. 

Amalgamates were carefully cornered and separated, stitch by stitch. Henry never complained about the long hours he spent sorting out which body parts belonged to who, though on days where he came face-to-face with the more grotesque bits, he’d have an entire army of toons piling into his bed before he could even fall asleep. Their collective presence was more than enough to head off most nightmares before they could even start.

Even as they got good at reading the little habits that indicated his mood or mindset, they got equally good at poking across their individual bonds with him to best understand what he was feeling. 

The threads grew stronger by the day, and eventually, Henry no longer bled— ink instead of blood, but still— when he delved deeper into the bond he had with the studio. 

Together, the toons that had suffered for so long under Joey’s reign of terror explored what it meant to be free and alive and whole in ways they’d never been able to be before. 

(And somewhere deep in the parts of the studio that perhaps didn’t truly exist, in the nowhere and the void and the space beneath floors, someone clawed the rest of the way out of death, though he was not entirely alive. Not yet. But he would be soon enough. And then, well… he had his Creator to find.) 

• • • • • 

Henry turned a corner, following the thread connecting him and Bendy, which was trembling with a painful, clearly negative emotion. There on the ground with his back to the wall was the little toon, holding something in his hands.

Sliding down next to him, Henry silently examined the object Bendy had. It was a book with a plain black cover, stick-straight capital letters spelling out the title: The Illusion of Living. 

“That’s what we are, aren’t we,” Bendy said quietly. “Just an illusion of life.”

Henry blinked a few times in surprise. That was a heavy topic to be thinking about. “Joey said something like that to me when I got here, y’know.” He gently pulled the book away from Bendy, tossing it carelessly down the corridor, where a little void hole swallowed it up at his request. In a single, smooth motion, he swept Bendy up into his lap, where he shamelessly cuddled the little demon. 

“He was wrong,” Henry continued. “It’s not an illusion, it’s… an art. The art of being alive. And you have it, and I have it, and Alice and Boris and Norman and Buddy and Echo and all the others have it. See?” He took Bendy’s hand in his own and pressed it first to his chest, and then to Bendy’s, letting him feel their individual heartbeats. “We’re alive, Bendy. Joey was wrong.”

With a little sniffle and shudder, Bendy curled in closer to his Creator’s chest, listening to the sound of life thumping away inside him. “We’re gonna be okay, right? Now that it’s all over, and everyone’s safe and happy?”

“Aww, bud. We’re gonna be absolutely fantastic.”

They sat for a long time in the quiet, Henry rocking back and forth a bit as Bendy relaxed in his arms. He could feel the studio around them, the toons littered throughout its halls, the life in every nook and cranny. The threads that connected him as the Creator to it all pulsed and thrummed within him, bright and shining and strong. 

They had mourned those they’d lost, like Susie and Gary and those who had been too far gone by the time Henry had been able to start helping them— even Sammy was grieved over, because no matter how he’d been before everything went to hell in a handbasket, no one deserved to lose their mind and body, much less die the way he did— and they would likely continue.

Joey was a different story. The toons had borderline celebrated his death, and while he was infinitely relieved for everything to be done with, it had been bittersweet to Henry. He mourned Joey twice over, in a way, once for the man he remembered him to be, his best friend and brother, and a second time for the horrendous way Henry had killed him. If nothing else, he was glad Joey’s reign of terror had ended, and he could only hope that wherever he was now, he could be happy again. 

Everything— all the pain and suffering, all the running and fighting and surviving, all the times he shoulda-coulda-woulda died— was worth it to have reached this moment. The end of it all, and the start of something new and beautiful. 

Somewhere else in the studio, Norman paused in what he was doing and looked around in sudden realization. His stillness having caught the attention of the other toons in the room, he asked, “Hey, does anyone know what happened to Wally?”