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There had been a very conspicuous silence from the studio the past few days. It made Henry nervous.
Now, he didn’t expect to get calls galore while he was away—that would have defeated the purpose of him taking time off—but that he hadn’t heard from Joey to see how he was doing or from anyone else to complain about Joey was… concerning.
There was a feeling of dread sitting heavily in his stomach. And hell, maybe Joey’s shenanigans were finally starting to catch up to Henry’s health because the oddest tightness had formed right beneath his sternum and had yet to ease. His entire being was pointing toward the studio like a compass seeks magnetic north.
But what started as an almost silly worry escalated to something like fear when he called Joey’s home line and got no answer. And he continued to get no answer when he tried the numbers for as many friends as he could remember off the top of his head. It was Saturday, no one would be at the studio, and the odds that everyone he knew was busy elsewhere were slim and none.
He tried the studio anyway, but that was just as useless.
Despite not being due back until Monday, Henry made travel plans late that evening and set out the next morning. Screw his promise to Joey about not cutting his vacation short. Something was wrong, and he could feel it down to his bones.
The tightness in his chest worsened as the hours ticked by—or, not worsened but intensified. It was like something was growing in his ribcage, attached to his heart. One moment, he was overheated, the next, he was shivering. His irritation spiked until every little thing was nearly setting him off. Anxiety pressed on his lungs, inexorable. He spent the whole train ride back to the city with his leg jittering restlessly, absently biting his lip until it bled.
I need to fix it, I need to fix it, I need to fix it ran on loop through his head, an instinct so ingrained it was like breathing. Henry didn’t even know what was broken; all he knew was that he was needed.
Distress choked him, yet he would have sworn it wasn’t truly his own. His skin felt stretched tight. He was afraid and angry and didn’t know why. There was a foreign tinge to the emotions, a newness that was only more confusing.
The tightness became less of a widespread pressure and more of an anchor attached to a single small part of him. He had the strangest notion that if he closed his eyes and followed where it led, he’d end up right where he was needed most.
As soon as he was off the train—finally, Henry had started to feel like he was suffocating—he slid into a cab without pause. The trip couldn’t have been long, but every passing minute made him feel worse.
The studio parking lot was full. It was early afternoon on a Sunday.
Henry fumbled with his keys and shoved through the front door, shaking uncontrollably. In his haste, he nearly tripped over a broken chair inexplicably left in the entryway. Just managing to catch his balance, he became aware of a deep rumbling right as a shadow fell over him.
Looking up, Henry sharply leaned backward a split second before a large, toothy maw could bite down over his head.
“Hey,” he snapped, the storm beating against his insides rising into a hurricane. “Enough.”
He had no idea what possessed him to say that rather than start screaming at the creature looming before him. It didn’t have eyes, just an enormous mouth, yet Henry knew that he was making eye contact with the creature. He clutched at his chest with a bitten-back wheeze. It was like fireworks were going off inside him.
Simultaneously, the creature reared backwards with a pained noise, nearly a growl. It lowered itself to all fours, hunching inward.
Those tangled emotions that somehow didn’t feel like his flared, confusion emerging alongside the rage, overtaking it the longer Henry and the creature stared at each other.
The world beyond the entrance hall of the studio seemed to stutter. Silence stretched through the corridors. Somewhere deep in the building, a Machine stood quiet and cold. It had no love in it yet, no soul.
It had no care for the suffering it had created. And it did not know how that would soon change.
Henry breathed like it was his first breath. “Hello,” he said.
The creature tilted its head, nearly knocking its impressive horns against the wall. It was almost entirely a deep black color. It shone beneath the lightbulbs. Something about its flesh struck Henry as odd, though he couldn’t put a name to it. It almost looked like liquid, yet it was clearly holding its shape.
A sharp tail twitched behind it as it raised its hand and reached out. Henry didn’t move, curious but also completely sure the creature no longer meant him harm. Wicked claws alighted gently on his chest, and the creature let out a rumbling sound not unlike a purr.
Henry lifted his hand, and the maelstrom of anger and fear and confusion and misery faded. The creature nudged at his hand with a knuckle. Familiarity sparked through him at the same time as an easy peace bled through that little anchor in his heart, which stretched no further than a few feet in front of him.
“I feel you,” the creature—the toon, he was made of ink, this was a toon—sounded out, slow and deep, the words clearly unfamiliar in his mouth.
Overcome with equal amounts of joy and horror, Henry stepped closer, past the curled claws, and gently took the toon’s face in his hands. He sagged in place, his whole tense, spike-laden body melting—figuratively—and he turned his head into Henry’s palms with a stuttered sigh.
“Oh, bud,” Henry said, his delight strangled by concern. He didn’t know how it was possible, but he could feel the pain in this toon, could feel that the tempered rage’s source was that of deep agony. “You’re hurting,” he mourned, smoothing his thumb over the ink dripping down his face.
“We are… dying,” he said, hissing out the word with distaste.
Absolute rejection of such a possibility speared through Henry, fierce and burning. He sucked in a sharp breath, and the toon shuddered with a thready whine.
“I’ll fix this,” he swore, leaning his head forward. The toon mirrored him. His ink was cold and stiff, and Henry’s soul cried out that it was wrong. “I’ve got you, bud.”
He hummed. “I feel you,” he repeated, and he sounded so lost. “Why? Who are you?”
“I’m Henry. And I don’t know how or why, but I feel you too.”
“I am the demon.” A pause. “But you do not fear me. Not like the others.”
“I’ll never fear you,” Henry said, and he knew it was true.
“You cannot know that.”
“Mm, but I do. You’re my toon, of course you won’t scare me.” He didn’t know where that certainty came from, but it was there, undeniable. Henry eyed the ragged bowtie stuck to the toon’s chest, the toothy grin stretched into a grimace of pain. “Your base was Bendy,” he realized, and it felt right to say it that way.
The toon shuddered and made as if to pull away. “I am not him,” he nearly snarled, and Henry could feel his defenses building up.
“Well of course not, you’re you,” he agreed, half an instinct away from gently shushing him. He refused to let his toon go. “And I’d like to know what you want to be called.”
Because he wasn’t Bendy, and that was perfectly fine, just like he didn’t need to be Bendy for Henry to care about him. It didn’t make him broken or wrong to be different. It just made him himself and new and someone Henry didn’t know yet.
After a moment of hesitation, he merely repeated, “I am the demon. I am ink and shadow; I am darkness.” Then, quieter, “I am part of you.”
There was something unspoken there, something that Henry felt more than heard. A sense of uncertainty. This toon wasn’t Bendy, and he knew that, and he wasn’t Henry, and he knew that too, for all that he was from or of both of them. And perhaps he wasn’t sure what or who that made him, only days old and so alone and in pain.
“You can choose a name later, bud,” Henry offered. All he wanted was to hug him until his ink wasn’t so cold. “There’s no rush.”
He relaxed. Henry gave in and slipped even closer to hug him, and the toon might as well have been putty in his hands.
“You make it hurt less,” he whispered after a moment.
“Then let’s find a way to make the pain stop entirely.” Henry stepped away and turned toward the studio proper.
There was ink smeared on the walls, broken bits of furniture and floorboards here and there. The hush over the building was eerie, especially after seeing the full parking lot. Where was everyone?
As much as Henry wanted to find his friends and make sure they were all right, his gut said they were running out of time for the toon—toons? Were there more? Obviously, the Ink Machine had been used during Henry’s absence, and something had gone wrong if his toon was in pain merely for existing. Now the question was how to fix it. How to save him.
Henry bit his lip in thought. It wasn’t like anyone had done this before. He was flying blind.
“The Ink Machine,” he said, deciding to start at the beginning. “I need to see it.” He set out, his toon keeping close by. The way he loomed felt protective, and given the level of damage in the rest of the studio, he was glad for it.
They saw only one other person on the trip across the building. A toon whose base had to have been Boris, and Henry sucked in a sharp, upset breath at the sight of the toon’s injuries. He looked to be incomplete, his mouth twisted open and eyes x-ed out. His stomach was a gaping hole, organs spilling out of it. It had to have been agonizing.
His toon, the first one, stepped between them with a growl. The hulking, groaning toon didn’t speak, and after a brief staring contest, his toon nudged him onward. They weren’t followed, and after a moment, shuffling footsteps retreated in the opposite direction.
The all-consuming need to do something about this lengthened Henry’s stride until he burst inside the room with the Ink Machine. His toon joined him, lurking along the wall with a distrustful hiss at the ink-splattered contraption.
Henry eyed the Machine, so innocuous in the middle of the room, resisting the impulse to kick it.
“Some of the others,” his toon abruptly said, “have fallen apart. Crumbled like they dried up.”
There were two possibilities, from what Henry could tell. Either whatever went wrong was entirely internal within the toons, in which case, he had no idea how to fix it, or it was like the toons were fish on dry land. Maybe this was the wrong environment for them, the wrong kind of world.
Maybe a toon needed a toon’s world, one of ink, not something suited for flesh and blood.
He briefly cursed Joey in his head, wishing he’d been here so he could have some idea of how the Ink Machine worked or what they did to create these toons. Henry hadn’t much been involved in its construction. He read storyboards, not blueprints.
All he knew was that, ostensibly, the Ink Machine was supposed to take drawings and bring them to life. Even though its current track record wasn’t so great, he had to hope it could at least do that much.
Snatching up some paper scattered across the floor, Henry pulled an ever-present pencil from his pocket. There on top of the Ink Machine, Henry sketched out a simple floor plan, basing it largely off of the actual studio. He had neither the time nor the creative energy to come up with anything original, except for a big room at the center with a quick little Ink Machine drawn in. A connection between worlds.
“I’m not sure exactly how this works,” Henry mumbled to the Ink Machine. “But I swear I’ll tear you apart with my own two hands if you don’t cooperate.”
The Ink Machine, as expected, did not respond.
Deciding he’d figure out the details later, after he’d gotten his toon to safety, he tucked his pencil away and picked up the drawing, and then he hesitated.
Was it even possible, what he wanted it to do? The Ink Machine was meant to bring drawings to life. Henry wanted it to create a world that existed separately from their own. Even just imagining such a wild impossibility made his head spin.
But he glanced back at his toon and had the thought that he could die at any moment. Just, melt into a puddle or crumble into bits of crusted ink.
Everything in Henry refused to let that happen, not if he could do something about it. Which meant he had to try. No matter what, he had to try.
He put the sketch where he hoped it belonged, and with nothing more than a hope and a prayer, he flipped the biggest, most important looking switch. He pressed the paper into the glass of what looked like a scanner from a copy machine. Light flashed beneath it and—
Something pulled at him. At his insides, at something deeper than his insides.
His toon left the wall with a low growl. The spines along his back were raised as he circled behind Henry, looming and baring his teeth at the Ink Machine.
An impression flashed though his mind, something like lights and color and intangible smiles and a warmth that twined all through him.
“My soul,” Henry said, and he hadn’t even realized he was going to say it until he already had. He felt distant from his own body, aware of the anchor in his chest that led straight back into the toon curling over him but numb everywhere else. “You have my soul.”
He didn’t know how he knew. But he knew it was true.
His toon shuddered, and Henry felt the devastated, fearful apology before it could be voiced.
“It’s all right,” he insisted. It was. It seemed important, though Henry’s mind was all muddled, so he couldn’t parse out why. “I—I’m glad.”
It felt like cracks were running through that deeper-than-deep place inside him, like something was splintering apart. It didn’t hurt.
A hand—the ink was cold and that was wrong—laid over his wrist and tugged lightly. He didn’t lift his hand from the page. “Let go,” his toon begged him. “It wants more of you. It will steal a piece of you like I have.”
“It’s not stealing anything, and you haven’t either. I’m offering,” Henry said. He hadn’t known he’d been offering except for all the ways that he’d been ready to give whatever was needed even before he knew anything would be needed. The Ink Machine rumbled, and the light flashed beneath his sketch again. This time, he felt it in his palm, in his fingertips. Pins and needles prickled through his hand. “It needs it.”
A world. Make a world where his toon could be safe. Where the pain would stop.
The Ink Machine creaked and clicked. Ink rushed through it, growing louder. The lightbulbs overhead flickered.
Henry pressed down harder on his sketch. Take it, he thought, and an echo of his words bounced down through his willing soul. Take what you need. He needs a place to be happy, to live.
There was a piece of him being pulled off. It felt odd, indescribable. Such a nonphysical sensation. If one could reach into a person’s chest and steal the air directly from their lungs and pluck out their very heartbeats, like ribbons and bubbles of life itself—that was perhaps what this felt like.
Your toon, your toon, a world for your toon. They were Henry’s thoughts but not, words in his head that simply sank into him, a promise and offer, a last chance to back out. His heart raced. Part of you for the world for your toon.
“Of course,” Henry said in the way one might say duh to a very silly question with a very obvious answer. There was no choice here.
He sucked in a breath as a sliver of his soul slipped away. His toon grumbled behind him, and his tail wound around Henry’s leg.
Henry exhaled, and the Ink Machine poured a fountain of ink into the large reservoir beneath its nozzle. The ink swirled round and round, and no matter how much flowed forth, the pool never overfilled. At first, Henry thought the ink was reflecting oddly, but when he got closer, his toon right on his heels, he saw there were thin lines of golden light woven throughout the dark ink. The center lowered like a whirlpool, past where the floor surely stood.
And Henry, much like he felt an anchor to his toon, felt a pull, a draw into the spiraling ink.
“I think I just created a world for you,” he said. He stepped up onto the short ledge surrounding the circular reservoir.
His toon spasmed, reaching out to wrap one of his massive hands around Henry’s middle. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
Despite being hyperaware of the spot where part of his soul was missing, Henry grinned, feeling nothing but wonder. “I’m finding out what’s on the other side.” He held out his hand. “We can go together, if you want.”
Even without eyes, his toon blatantly eyed the Ink Machine with severe mistrust. But he joined Henry on the ledge, growling lowly at the whirlpool. “Now what?”
Taking hold of his toon’s wrist, Henry laughed and stepped off the ledge into a new world.