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The days since being put in this empty cell blurred together. There wasn’t a thing to do to alleviate the mind-numbing boredom. Slumped on the floor with his back to the wall, Henry did nothing but stare blankly wherever his gaze landed first. Sometimes he slept. Sometimes he drifted, awake but lacking awareness.
He knew little of what was going on outside his cell. He sometimes heard the heavy dragging of the creatures that called themselves Keepers, but they didn’t come through the prison hall often. Henry wasn’t the only one to have been locked up for a reason he only barely comprehended. Sammy yelled sometimes, his voice muffled and furious. Similarly, Alice howled her own rage. When they both got going, Norman’s wordless screeches often joined them.
Henry hadn’t made a sound since the door locked behind him. He was stiff and starving for food he’d long suspected he didn’t actually need anymore. He felt hollow down to his soul.
Eventually, the man who did this, Wilson, had the Keepers put thick metal barricades over the windows of the others’ cells. After that, Henry didn’t hear them anymore. They didn’t bother with his; when Wilson appeared at his window, Henry didn’t even look at him.
The man said something, but Henry was too deep in his own head to comprehend it.
The silence afterward was worse than listening to his old friends screaming.
Time passed, though there was no way to tell how much. Wilson and the Keepers only came by occasionally. To gloat, mostly, was Henry’s understanding. His own lack of reaction wasn’t particularly entertaining to the man, so Wilson never lingered at his window long. But he could hear the way he antagonized some of the others.
He hadn’t heard anything about Allison or Tom being caught. Despite the emptiness slowly drowning Henry, he could feel hope for their continued freedom, relief that they hadn’t been separated and locked away.
Eventually, the void inside him had grown to consume everything—almost. One tiny, flickering flame remained, the last bit of life inside the shell who had once been Henry. It guttered weakly, always on the verge of extinguishing.
But despite everything, it didn’t.
It wasn’t anger that continued to live in him; it wasn’t despair. It wasn’t even hope.
It was at the very core of him, an immutable part of Henry Stein that nothing and no one had ever been able to stifle. It waited, for this was the type of flame that just needed a bit of breath to flare into a wildfire.
In this one little spark, a storm was brewing.
Because the only way Henry would lose his determination was if he was dead. And that was the one thing, blessing or curse, he wasn’t ever granted in this world.
• • •
Wilson was a man of many mistakes. A man of many failures. Whatever he thought about his great luck in finding the Ink Machine, this would not be the exception.
Wilson thought he could control the cycle. While he may have succeeded in reshaping the path the loops were originally meant to take, he failed to consider the original intent in their creation. The center of the cycles, the very foundation the studio and its inhabitants were built on—it all rested on Henry.
Joey Drew built this world to make his old friend suffer. That did not change that he built this world for his old friend. And Henry was woven through its every ink drop and floorboard and creature. The world continued on for him.
Henry could not die in this realm. This realm could not be destroyed.
Henry was rotting away in a cell. Beyond the Gent building, the studio began to decay.
Do the math. Because Wilson didn’t. Cyclebreaker? No. Henry was the Catalyst. The Heart. The Creator.
(He was also, though he did not know this, bidding his time.)
• • •
A tsunami can first be noticed by the rapid receding of the tide. A spark only needs the right kind of kindling to become uncontainable.
• • •
In one of Henry’s more aware moments, months, perhaps years after he was locked away, he heard the dragging sound of one of the Keepers passing through the main hallway connected to his little branch-off. It was talking, in that stuttery robotic voice they all had.
Henry didn’t know or care who it was talking to. He very nearly didn’t pay attention, his dead eyes locked on the same crack in a floorboard as they had been for days.
But it must have paused near his corridor because there was no way to ignore it. And the words registered. “…the Ink Demon’s refusal to terminate. Keepers have administered quarter hourly sessions of physical tortures—”
Henry’s eyes snapped up. The kindling caught.
“—and surgical invasions to wear down his powers. All of these efforts have been ultimately unsuccessful.” The Keeper wandered away, leaving the prison in silence again.
Henry took in a long, deep breath. The tide receded.
They… they were torturing Bendy? To try and figure out how to destroy him? And had been for a while, by the sounds of it.
Henry slowly turned his head toward the window; it was the first time he’d moved in months. A fine layer of dust covered him.
Even embers may be reignited.
Physical tortures. Surgical invasions. On Henry’s toon? Ink Demon, Bendy, whatever he went by and whatever form he took—he was Henry’s. Whether or not Bendy was cast as the antagonist, no one deserved to suffer like that.
Henry slowly blew out. Oxygen fed flames.
They—the Keepers, Wilson—would probably keep hurting Bendy until they got what they wanted: termination, or as close as they could get. There was no telling how long Bendy had been trapped at their mercy, their lack of it; there was no telling how much longer he would be there.
Wilson had come into their world, locked up Henry and who-knew-how-many others, and thought that gave him free rein to try and torture Bendy to death?
No. No. Not while Henry still lived and breathed.
Henry seamlessly flowed to his feet, dust billowing off him like smoke. He willed away his creaky joints, the stiffness of his limbs. The emptiness that had consumed him was similarly consumed now by an inferno of rage. It burned in his eyes, a deep golden amber.
Near and far, pipes creaked and groaned. Ink bubbled and flowers bloomed, gold dust drifting from their centers. Long dead lightbulbs and signs flickered back to life. Somewhere, Allison and Tom perked up as the musty air seemed to clear. The floors and walls, entire buildings, trembled.
Tsunamis are often preceded by earthquakes.
Henry didn’t bother with trying to open the door. He was near to bursting with the sum of himself, alive again, and he felt too vast for his own body.
They were torturing his toon. His creation. And that would not stand.
A truth Henry had started entertaining back in the original cycles: whether Joey did something when he trapped him in here or it was just a natural side effect, Henry wasn’t human anymore. What that made him, he didn’t know.
The studio, the city, the realm shivered. The tsunami crested; the blaze roared. And the Creator drove his fist into the thick glass window of his cell, shattering it.
He climbed over the sill and brushed off his jacket. Turning to face the main hallway, Henry nodded to himself. His eyes glowed fiercely. “All right. Hang on, bud. I’m coming.”
• • •
A few minutes later, a Keeper arrived in the prison hall to investigate the disturbance. It found an empty cell, but if it had been paying better attention, it would have noticed something was missing from the contraband board. An axe.
• • •
The Ink Demon didn’t know how long he’d been strapped down to the operating table that was irrevocably stained with his own leaking ink. For all his strength, the Keepers had been prepared. Even if he had the energy, and the willpower necessary to move despite the agony, he wouldn’t have been able to break his bonds.
It was getting harder and harder to remember himself. The more Wilson hissed that the Ink Demon—that Bendy, he was still Bendy even if he didn’t look fresh off of one of Henry’s character model sheets—was a monster and a true demon and nothing but evil incarnate, the more difficult it became for him to deny it.
Weren’t characters what you made of them? Even as Wilson and the Keepers tried to destroy him with increasingly imaginative—and increasingly painful—methods, Wilson was remaking Bendy to fit into the new script. Compared to the villain he was being made into now—the scourge of the studio, the plague upon all lost souls, the monster that needed to be defeated—he’d practically been a saint in the original loop.
He clung to one memory more than any of the others that were slowly being flushed away with every new attempt to kill him. From the old cycle, of Henry, dozens of loops in. As whatever magic that kept resetting all their memories slowly wore off, leaving them all gradually growing aware of the curse placed upon them.
The memory was from the very beginning of a new loop, when Bendy made his first appearance. Instead of running, Henry, Henry who Bendy had been chasing and hunting and hurting for what surely had to be years of accumulated time, had stared at him with deep grief in his eyes.
“I don’t blame you,” he’d whispered, only just audible over the sound of rushing ink. “This is Joey’s fault.”
It’d been an absolving of guilt Bendy hadn’t even realized he’d been carrying. He was created by this man, then created to torment this man.
“I’m sorry,” Henry had continued, eyes shining. “I’m sorry that I don’t know how to save you.”
It was a comforting memory, despite it all. For a monster like him, it seemed nothing less than a miracle that once, there had been someone who wanted to save him.
Wilson had told Bendy about Henry, about so many of the others. They screamed and pounded on their cell doors, swearing to escape and take revenge. But Henry was the one who’d gone lifeless and still, who had surrendered wholly to his imprisonment. He’d given up and had been a model prisoner ever since.
It was a struggle to remember why, but that… it hadn’t seemed right. Henry didn’t… Henry didn’t just surrender. Henry didn’t give up.
The sky is up. The ink is deep. The cycles continue. Henry never quits. Simple facts of life.
The Ink De—Bendy didn’t like the idea of his Creator’s spark finally fizzing out. It was anathema to him.
He ignored the opening of the door on the other side of the torture chamber. He ignored Wilson’s taunts. He couldn't ignore the large syringe the man picked up, and he braced for the pain.
The floor shook, not unlike how the studio walls trembled when the Ink Demon spoke sometimes.
Wilson glared at him.
“Wasn’t me,” the Ink Demon rasped. His voice wasn’t even close to strong enough to do that anymore, and it wasn’t something he could make happen at will.
Whether or not Wilson believed him, he turned his back to continue preparing whatever new procedure he had in mind. Or maybe it was a repeat one, just for the sake of trying to make him scream. He approached the Ink Demon with the needle and jabbed it into his neck with a wicked grin.
The Ink Demon’s body seized as ice flooded his veins. His back arched up as his nerves went wild. His broken spines dangled from his back, leaking ink and sending more sharp waves of pain through him.
His breaths wheezed out of him. He felt paralyzed with the cold but hyperaware of the injuries that were lingering longer and longer as he lost more of his power.
He gritted his teeth, refusing to give Wilson the satisfaction of hearing him scream. His torturer returned to one of the tables and began fiddling with a bone saw.
A pipe hidden in the ceiling juddered as ink suddenly rushed through it. Wilson glanced up at it with a sneer.
There was something in the air, Bendy realized, near delirious. Something electric. Something warm.
An alarm began to blare.
“Someone’s causin’ problems,” the Ink Demon slurred.
“It’s hardly my concern. The Keepers will deal with it.” He sent the Ink Demon a dark look. “Don’t think me so easily distracted, devil.”
The building shook again, accompanied by the distant, grating, electronic screech of a Keeper. It cut off abruptly. Wilson twitched, displeasure making the ink that seeped out of a permanent wound on his head—caused by the Ink Demon himself—run faster. It dripped in thick globs off his cheek, some landing on his shirt, others plopping quietly to the floor.
Just as Wilson turned toward the Ink Demon with the bone saw in hand, the sound of a quickly approaching Keeper interrupted him. The heavy dragging of its cables paused outside the door.
The handle started to turn, and Wilson growled under his breath about being interrupted.
And then the door shuddered violently, splintering inward a little. It took Bendy a moment to realize there was the pointed corner of an axe blade poking through the wood. It dripped ink, and a puddle began to seep in from under the crack.
Wilson didn’t move, and Bendy could only guess it was from shock.
The axe blade disappeared, yanked free. There was a loud thump, audible over the still-blaring alarm.
The handle started to turn again, and this time, the door swung inward to bang against the wall.
Chest heaving, positively burning eyes wide with an unfamiliar wildness, Henry stared Wilson down. Alice’s angry rants were nothing compared to the sheer wrath contained in Henry’s silence.
That electrified feeling got stronger.
“You,” Henry breathed. The walls shook.
Wilson stared back, probably trying to reconcile the lifeless prisoner with the storm standing in front of him.
Henry’s blazing gaze slipped past Wilson to land on Bendy. His fingers visibly tightened on the handle of his axe. The dead body of a Keeper slowly melted away at his feet, its chest split open.
He stepped into the room, facing Wilson again. “You hurt him. You tortured him.” His eyes flared brighter, and lines of light shot down his cheeks and neck, creeping like bolts of lightning painted on his skin to cover his arms and hands.
Oh, Bendy realized, his throat closing up. Turned out, he still had the ability to cry.
It seemed Wilson actually did possess a sliver of common sense and tact. He took a step backward, silent. For how could he have responded? With denial? Justification? An invitation to contribute to the Ink Demon’s suffering?
Even he wasn’t fool enough to do that.
He backed up again when Henry took a step closer, and then he was reaching behind himself for one of the knives laid out on the table.
The way he refused to look away from Henry belied his aloof sneer. “I hardly see how that’s your concern.”
“He’s my toon,” Henry said. “That will always make him my concern.”
He scoffed. “Shouldn’t you be busy, wasting away in your cell? My Keepers—”
“Are dead,” Henry said. He hefted the axe blade. “Don’t worry. You’ll be joining them soon.”
Anger twisted Wilson’s expression. “And who are you to make such threats? I am a god among these wretched—” He had to pause to take in a wheezing breath— “creatures. I have brought order to this realm, I have given it purpose. You, the Cyclebreakers, would have chaos reign!” He coughed, raspy.
Henry eyed him, nearly smug. “Ink’s hell on the lungs, huh, Wilson?”
“You know nothing of which you speak! I am—”
“You’re pathetic,” Henry said plainly. “All talk, backed up by toons who you made to do your dirty work. You’re awful confident when there’s a barrier between you and your opponents. There’s nothing godlike about a man who will only approach someone dangerous when they’re restrained.” He nodded at the excessive amount of restraints holding Bendy against the operating table. “Or maybe you’re just overcompensating for something.”
Wilson seethed. One thing Bendy had learned about Henry back in the original loop was that the man could be mean when he wanted to be. By and large, he wasn’t. His patience and kindness won out more often than not. But as their memories began to stick around despite the resets, Henry’s irritation with Joey grew into something venomous, turning into vicious curses and insults muttered under his breath.
And Wilson, Bendy had discovered, could not stand being belittled.
“I have defeated the Ink Demon,” Wilson snarled, his voice straining to be loud when his lungs wouldn’t give him the breath to shout.
“Beat Bendy in a fair fight a couple hundred times,” Henry retorted. “Then talk to me about defeating him.”
“Then I will be the one to destroy the Ink Demon! For good! I will free the children of the Machine from his cruelty!”
“And I will give you one chance,” Henry whispered harshly. “One chance to walk away and never come back.”
“Or what?” Wilson sneered.
Eyes narrowing the slightest bit, Henry tilted his chin up. “Or I will separate your head from your shoulders.”
“You would fail if you tried.”
“Someone’s not paying attention,” Henry snapped. He lifted his axe, patience run dry. His tone turned condescending, which made Wilson’s lip pull up in a snarl. “Wilson. Do you see a barrier between you and me? And even if there was one… are you truly naive enough to think that would stop me, when your Keepers and little prison cell couldn’t?”
The alarm cut out. The lightbulbs overhead whined and flickered. Henry’s axe gleamed as he raised it.
“Either you run,” Henry declared, his words law. “Or you die.”
“You were weak enough to be trapped in this realm,” Wilson said, and he lunged forward with the knife, swiping down at Henry’s face.
But Henry hadn’t survived hundreds of loops by luck or chance. Long ago, Bendy had watched him learn how to use all manner of objects as weapons. He had years of experience fighting—against Bendy himself, to boot—and a determination that could, had, shaped worlds.
Not even Wilson’s height advantage would help him; Henry was too used to going toe-to-toe with creatures who towered over him.
It was no surprise to Bendy that Henry blocked the swing, the knife’s blade sinking slightly into the axe’s wooden handle. Henry leaned up, steady even as Wilson tried to throw his weight into breaking Henry’s defense.
Face to face, Henry’s firestorm eyes glared into Wilson’s solitary glowing one. “But you were stupid enough to stay,” and Henry’s voice rang with finality that had even Bendy’s heart racing. It was inevitability made audible.
Shoving upward, he twisted his axe free of the knife and swung in an arc, catching Wilson’s wrist in the crook between the blade and the handle. Henry followed through, yanking Wilson off balance as his arm was forced across his body.
Henry kicked out at Wilson’s knees before he could steady himself. Stumbling, Wilson had no hope of dodging the flat of the axe blade that clocked him in the face. He cried out as he fell backwards.
He fumbled the knife, slashing clumsily as Henry followed after him. Henry ignored the cut to his leg the way a mountain ignores a fly. Because while Wilson was busy getting his only weapon caught in the fabric of Henry’s pants, Henry lifted his high above his head.
Golden lines swirled up the handle and covered the blade. The bright lights blurred as Henry swung.
His aim was true. The whole realm gave a great heave, like a pleased sigh, and a madness that had spread like a sickness through the ink ever since Wilson’s arrival shriveled and died with the man who spawned it.
And Henry had kept his promise: technically, Wilson’s head was no longer on his shoulders. It was nowhere, in fact, leaving nothing but a splattered mess of inky gore behind. In Bendy’s opinion, it was nothing less than Wilson deserved.
Delight and hope and relief swelled up in Bendy, and he trembled with it all. His wobbly vision blurred with fresh tears.
Focusing on the ceiling, he heard the thud of Henry dropping his axe as he rushed closer. Something that had been holding his insides in a stranglehold released, and Bendy felt more like himself than he had in a long, long time. He whimpered.
“Hey, hey, I’ve got you, bud, just hold on.” Henry growled at the padlocked manacles—one around each wrist, a second pair at his elbows, a third close to his shoulders. And that was just his arms. Bendy peeked down at him just in time to see him wrap his hands around the shackle, lacking the key.
The pale metal darkened into ink, practically liquifying in Henry’s hold. He was quick to move on to the next. They both remained silent as he slowly worked his way through each restraint.
Eventually, when there were only two left, Bendy chuckled. It quickly tapered off into a groan as his ribs protested the strain. “I knew it,” Bendy croaked, exhausted and shocked and dizzy with both. “I knew it wasn’t true. He said you’d given up, but I knew he was wrong.”
Henry’s shoulders drooped. “He said that, huh? I’m sorry, bud, but Wilson was right. I did give up.” The last bit of metal melted away, and for the first time in agonizing weeks, Bendy was free.
Bendy shook his head in denial, whining from the pain now that he didn’t feel the need to hide it. “Nuh uh, no siree; if you’d given up, you wouldn’t be here.”
When Henry still didn’t look convinced, Bendy forged on despite the dizziness. “You didn’t give up,” he insisted. “Wilson just knocked you down for a bit. And that’s where he went wrong, y’know, because he thought that meant you were out for the count. But that’s not how it works, pal, you hafta to know that.”
Henry opened his mouth to speak, but his eyebrows were still creased with sadness, so Bendy barreled on before he could hear any protests.
“Gettin’ knocked down don’t matter, ’specially not for you, ’cause you always get back up. That’s the important part. No matter how many times you get knocked down, you never stay down, Henry. Take it from someone who’s knocked you down a lot.”
Henry huffed out a laugh, radiating fondness.
Bendy fought past the agony of moving to reach out and wrap his massive hand around Henry’s wrist. He needed Henry to know. “That’s what determination is, pal. Can’t believe I’m the one who’s having to tell ya that. You didn’t quit, not then, not now. And I don’t think ya ever will. That’s just who you are, Henry. You could out-stubborn death itself.”
“Kinda have already, haven’t I?” Henry teased him.
Bendy grinned, his body hurting too much to laugh like he wanted. “Yeah, ya sure have. ’Sides, the way I figure, it’s just part of bein’ alive. A man who never gets knocked down… now that sounds more like a god to me.”
Henry winced, nodding. He would never want that type of comparison being put to him; Henry had never sought power, not in general and certainly not over others. That, Bendy suspected, was what made him such a good Creator.
“You’re hurting,” Henry said, and Bendy allowed the change in subject because he could see some measure of acceptance in the tilt of his head.
“Constantly!” he replied, and it didn’t come out darkly cheerful like he wanted. Choking up, he added, somber, “Since the day they dragged me in here.”
Henry looked down at his hands, at the glowing fractal patterns that decorated his palms and fingers and wrists. Once, he’d sorrowfully told Bendy he didn’t know how to save him. Today, he blew out a quiet breath and said, “Can I try something? To help?”
He managed a weak smile. “Be my guest.”
“Will it hurt if I touch you?”
“Maybe,” Bendy admitted. “But I know you won’t mean it.”
With a bit of a heartbroken smile, Henry boosted himself up onto the table on Bendy’s left. After only a little hesitation, Henry leaned down and carefully hugged him.
Bendy’s brain went a little bit drippy over it—over the first warm, kind touch he’d felt in… since the original loops. The first act of gentleness and care. And most certainly the first hug.
A flood of warmth surged through him, easing his aches and pains, sweeping away the icy chill. He lost the remaining tension that simply existed when you had an expectation of suffering to come. Bendy went boneless with a surprised little huff.
His arms didn’t hurt when he cautiously raised them to encircle Henry in return. He must have made a distressed noise, one he didn’t hear over the frantic pounding of his heart, because his Creator tightened his grip and pushed as close as physically possible.
“I’m right here, bud,” he murmured against Bendy’s shoulder. “I’m not goin’ anywhere.”
Bendy nodded as a truly overwhelming feeling burst in his chest. His throat went tight, his eyes stung, and at long last, Bendy let out every shaking sob and wail that he’d swallowed back for days upon days.
And through it all, Henry held him.