It's about the 4th time around that Henry feels real sympathy for his nemesis.

Maybe he would have – should have felt it sooner, but the man has been a little preoccupied the first time with the fact that a furious amalgamation of his beloved creation is actively trying to kill him. And then the next few times he's too busy trying not to freak out about being stuck on a loop in this nightmare of a studio.

A never-ending, never-changing studio.

So Henry doesn't pay much attention to his largest foe, beyond the usual run-like-hell-and-hope-you-don't-get-caught kind of attention, until maybe the fourth or fifth go. Because that's when he notices the chains.

They're broken near their base at Bendy's throne; large rusted loops that hang grievously like a twisted rendition of plastic children's toys. Henry dares to look closer at them, sees the dried ink coating their ends, and feels sick. It's the kind of sick he first felt upon seeing Sammy in the music department, or stumbling across that entire room full of silent, haunted ink people.

Was Bendy wearing cuffs? He wonders. Did I see them and not care enough? But no matter how much the man wracks his brain, he can't remember gleaming metal or jingling iron.

The answer comes soon enough. The glove and mismatched hands hid the evidence a little too well, but when the ink demon stands over him and transforms once again, those mangled holes in his palms aren't spaced out like character design.

Henry stops feeling sick when Bendy kills him seven times in the next room.

It's about the 12th time around that Henry makes a tangible mistake.

He's barely survived Sammy's second, crazed attack, and the onslaught of distorted inky lives who may have wanted help, once upon a time, but who now can only reach out with the intent to harm.

Tom and Alice are at his side, despite the rocky start to their repeated first meeting. They never remember anything, as far as Henry's aware, but Alice is always willing to trust his judgement fairly quickly and Tom never objects much at all.

Until the unexpected happens.

Alice asks Henry to go first along the broken floorboards. Henry doesn't want to for good reason – he's sick of falling down entire flights. Usually it doesn't matter what the man doesn't want, because he'll do it anyway, repeat the sequence and loop again. Nothing changes.

But this time, Henry is tired enough to put his foot down.

"I'd rather one of you go first," he mumbles, still sore from a Searcher's heavy blow to his back. Alice has the decency to look surprised.

"Why do you want to do that?" she asks while sheathing her sword. Tom watches without comment. His axe is gripped tightly in hand.

"I'm not as young as I used to be." It's meant as a joke, but something a little too genuine leaks through because the toons look at each other in hesitance. Henry can't help but straighten; this is something new.

"I don't know…" Alice looks between Henry, Tom, and the poorly-lit hallway. "This is uncharted territory for us. We can't risk getting caught by the ink, or its monsters. You're a lot more resilient than us, Henry."

"I'm well aware," he almost snaps. Almost. "But you do have a sword, and an axe. And you've obviously been fine for a while."

Henry doesn't know why he's arguing. He's tried it before, briefly, to no avail. But this time he's absolutely floored as Alice seems to reach a decision that's not 'don't be silly, Henry'.

"Alright," she says, flicking hair out of her face. "I'll go first then. You guys can stay behind me."

Tom looks vaguely alarmed by this change of script. He reaches out as if to put a hand on Alice's shoulder, but stops short of touching her. She doesn't notice, already plowing ahead into the hallway.

There's a bit of hope flickering in the back of Henry's mind as he follows the toon. Maybe Alice won't break the board, because she's less heavy. Maybe she can reach the end of the hall and throw him a rope, and then he won't have to fall again, won't have to repeat everything again, he'll finally be –

A board snaps. Alice falls.

"Henry!" She screams up at him, in the exact tone as when their roles were switched. There's a distant splash and an echoing thunk of something solid far below.

Tom is already pushing Henry aside to stare into the empty abyss, unable to call down for his partner. Henry opens his mouth, to reassure him or maybe say what the toon cannot, but then a horrible thought comes up.

I fell into a pool of ink.

It's enough to send the man scrambling. He clamps one hand onto Tom's arm and turns him around; the wolf is so startled by the movement that he almost lashes out on reflex. Then he scowls and points accusingly at Henry.

"I know, I know, it's my fault, but we need to get down there now! Do you have a rope or, or something?"

He's stuttering, nearly incoherent for the first time in a long time because this is brand new, exciting in that way like at the top of a roller coaster ready to plummet. Terrifying and horrible and free.

Tom fumbles at a compartment in his robotic arm, pulling out a length of rope that is maybe long enough to make it all the way to the bottom. He ties it to the doorframe and lets it drop, then without reluctance pushes Henry closer to the edge.

It's not a request. Henry takes the rope.

Inching down the line is slow and torturous. There's nothing to protect his hands from rope burn and, even for his decent physical shape, the descent works muscles in ways they've never been used to. Tom is also pacing impatiently at the top, shaking the floorboards just enough that the rope wiggles precariously. But he's making good progress, and he's quietly proud of that.

Henry makes it about halfway down when Alice starts screaming.

The sound makes him jerk sideways and almost let go entirely. Tom must have heard it too, because then the rope creaks in a way it's not supposed to as the toon clambers on and adds his own weight. They both slide down as fast as they dare.

When Henry sees the inky pool below him, he releases his hands and feet and falls the rest of the way. Hard on his knees, sure, but that doesn't matter.

Alice isn't screaming anymore.

Tom is still climbing down though, and he can't land in the ink, so Henry grabs the end of the rope and carries it with him to the wooden steps on his right. It's here that he can see how Alice might have survived the fall; her sword is stuck in the ground, its hilt easily clearing the dark basin. She probably landed on it like that.

He only takes a few seconds to appreciate this because Tom has finally gotten close enough that he can jump to Henry's position, which he does easily. They rush out of the room together.

By the time they finally reach the far end of the lobby, it's too late.

Henry knows the ink demon likes to spawn nearby when he picks up the first pipe. He still hasn't physically seen him yet, so he's been thinking it wasn't actually dangerous.

He thinks this right up until they find Alice.

She's been torn apart – there's no other way to describe it. The mass puddle of ink left all around her tells them that she didn't have the luxury of bleeding out quickly, either. Whatever happened here, it was done very painfully.

Tom collapses beside Alice with a clank of his prosthetic, unable to make another sound. He quivers just a little bit as he picks up the biggest part left, the one still connected to her head, and cradles it close. The quivering stops only because Tom closes his eyes.

Henry looks away, and it's then that he sees the trail of ink leading from her body to a wall four feet away. His brain stalls as he stares at what Bendy has left behind. Something ugly twists in his gut.

This wasn't just a one-track urge to attack whatever moved, a mindless call for violence. There was nothing mindless about it.

The wall is dripping ink words, fresh and angry and jagged.

BETWEEN US

It's the 13th time around, and Henry knows this for a fact because Tom killed him that last round and he wakes up in front of the exit door instead of a Bendy statue.

He stands there for a good thirty seconds, dazed and swaying on his feet, before promptly trying to escape again. It's futile as always – the damn thing won't budge no matter how much he works the lock or pounds at the door. He screams and threatens and begs for Joey Drew because he knows that man has got to be listening, has to know what's going on, but nothing comes of it.

Not even the stupid whistling.

Eventually Henry gives up – as he usually does – and then starts the whole spiral over again – as he always does. He thinks that maybe that last run was just a glitch in the system, maybe a 1-in-a-million chance that he happened to catch, and that it's gone now.

This thought is thrown out the window when he runs into Alice and Tom again.

Before now, they have been shocked by his appearance and wary of his intentions, but ultimately the three would always come together within a few days (…?) of meeting. This time, they save him from the corrupted Alice, as expected.

Then they lock him in a cell, which is completely unexpected.

Alice is more hesitant to trust him than she was before. Tom is openly hostile and brandishes his axe like it's going to scare Henry. It doesn't.

What does scare him is that they leave him for dead when the ink demon shows up, which has never happened before. He knows about the hidden pipe behind the wall only because he'd explored it on a past run, back when his friends still trusted him.

So he escapes, and he encounters Sammy alone, and learns that Alice and Tom are still willing to trust him, albeit reluctantly. He asks them why; why don't you trust me, why do you trust me now? But Alice can't come up with anything beyond that she's feeling conflicted, and Tom just glares until Henry loses his nerve.

When Alice asks Henry to take the lead, he does so without protest, afraid of changing anything else right now yet eager to see what changes have come up now anyway.

The writing on the wall isn't there. Bendy doesn't act more or less aggressive than he's always done. It's as if the only indication of difference is Henry's relationship with his toon friends.

It's enough for him, knowing there's still hope he can change something, even in a small way. But images burn in his mind – of Alice splattered into ink chunks, of Tom murderous in his grief, of furious words scraped into wallpaper – so he doesn't try it again for a long time.

It's about the 95th time around that Henry finds a way to make invisible ink.

It is during one of his more daring routes, when he's so bored that he's doing everything he can to piss off the inhabitants of the studio, barring the ink demon. When he steps off the creaking gondola lift and moves into the next hallway, the hallucinations of grabbing hands reach out to him as they always do.

He's gotten close enough to be touched in past runs. Hell, he's let them touch him, tried to touch them back. Nothing ever came of it except feeling grime on his body where nothing could be seen. This time though, he's daring enough to try something else.

He grabs the nearest wrist and pulls hard.

The entire arm is torn off from its owner and falls slack against Henry's body. He stumbles, caught off guard by the release of force, and stares at a lump of mass that he can still feel in his hands, even when the hallucination wears off and the arm supposedly disappears.

Henry hefts it between his palms, bending invisible fingers and wondering what he's supposed to do with the thing. It still feels just as grimy as always and the sensation makes him shudder. He ends up tucking the arm under his left armpit and trudges on.

As a joke, he finds a wall near the carnival hub, where he has to distract three Butcher Gang members, and awkwardly uses a finger from the ghostly severed arm to trace a few words out. It's hard to hold and he's pretty sure he used 'to' instead of 'too', but he doubts anyone is going to notice considering he can't see the message.

A few hours later he's sitting in a cell, and Alice offhandedly mentions a weird glowing message she saw through a glass panel in a room upstairs. Henry, having long-since discarded the arm and forgotten about the joke, asks her what it said.

"It was so strange," she hums, dreamlike. "The words were bunched together and I think it had a word wrong, but I've never seen handwriting like it. It said, 'Dreams too big and you will fail'. What an odd message, don' t you think? Henry?"

"Oh, yeah, absolutely."

The next time he's going through the studio, Henry wastes no time in taking every glass window he can find into that room, where he looks at that one wall through each pane. By the eighth try he's about ready to give up, but then a glass square shows him the message, shining and messy and still very much intact.

It's almost relieving, if he's honest with himself. This is something only he knows about, that only he can do, and it seems to stick even when he's repeating the sequence. So he goes back to the 'shadow hallway' as he's dubbed it, and doesn't hesitate to rip another arm out of the wall.

Henry starts leaving messages for himself everywhere, and clutches the special glass pane like it's a lifeline. He spends two hours creating a little frame for it in Lacie's workshop and steals spare lightbulbs out of several supply closets to give it pizazz. A handle is eventually added when he almost drops the thing as he's chased by a Searcher.

He tallies every round through the studio in that first hallway, pretty sure he is close to the magical 100th only because that's what his gut is telling him. This fact is discouraging, even when he has the ability now to keep track of it all. Sometimes he'll go ten loops through without writing anything, and then he'll find something he forgot he did and it brings a rare chuckle to his lips.

On his 179th run, he's writing "WHY AM I DOING THIS" beneath one of the triple pipelines he has to fix for the corrupted Alice. It's taking forever, and he's really pissed off for once, so he gets so focused in the message that he doesn't realize how deathly silent the room has gotten.

Henry is fixing the lone 'I' because he's not satisfied with it when suddenly an inky, wispy pattern splashes across the pipes like a death sentence. Dropping the invisible hand in shock, the man whirls around to find Bendy himself looming right behind.

The ink demon rasps, head slumped forward in broken puppetry and deadly hands limp at his sides. He stands less than a foot away and could kill this human in barely a second. His eyes aren't visible, have never been visible, but Henry knows that he is being studied.

Then the head lolls to the side, in the direction of the looking glass still in Henry's left hand. The grin vibrates as it always has, but there is a growth to it that's sharp and unpredictable.

Henry doesn't know what to do. In all the time he's been here, Bendy has only expressed cruelty and bloodshed. What times he's felt pity or sympathy is often snuffed out by multiple horrific deaths, usually of either ink suffocation or a snapped neck.

Right now all he feels is fear.

Bendy has yet to kill him, so the man slowly lifts his looking glass in an attempt to keep the his attention on it. The demon doesn't move and doesn't acknowledge that Henry has moved, so he takes it as a good sign.

Once the glass is at chest level, he's not really sure what else to do. His nemesis hasn't even twitched. Cautiously, aware he is on borrowed time, Henry extends his hand out and offers the thing to his twisted creation. Bendy looks at him. Looks at the tool.

Then he takes it.

Henry blinks, arm still outstretched, as the demon's gloved hand pulls the looking glass away without touching human skin. With a delicate grip in dark contrast with his history, Bendy holds the thing between three fingers and turns it upside down so that the glass seems to magnify his smile. But then Henry realizes that's not because of the glass, it's because Bendy's smile is actually growing.

"No –!" He has just enough time to blurt out before the demon smashes the tool against his temple, knocking Henry to the ground.

His ears are ringing and something leaks out of his nose with the smell of copper. He stares in a blurry haze as the looking glass is dropped in front of his face in a shattered heap. Bendy groans somewhere above him, and then there is a gloved hand poking at his bruised temple.

Henry locks his jaw to keep from crying out as the ink demon taps at the glass shards stuck in his hair and scalp and ear, pressing them into bleeding and agitating his senses even further. Then the touch disappears and Bendy stalks off without another word.

By the time the man's blood stops pounding and he can sit up without falling over again, a Piper comes screeching and bashes his head in. He wakes up at the exit door instead of a Bendy statue, and comes to the realization that he's not carrying the looking glass by default anymore. He thinks it's lost forever until he's stuck back in that stupid holding cell however many hours later and Alice shows the device to him like it's just another mystery of the studio.

It's in this way that Henry learns two things.

The first is that Bendy can also manipulate changes in the loop, because from this moment the looking glass is only available through Alice; sometimes it respawns with him at the beginning and other times he has to meet her again to get it back.

Whether the ink demon is aware he can initiate these changes is up in the air, as is the question about how much he can change at a time. But he's just sporadic enough that this would be impossible to find out without a lot of trial and error, and Henry isn't desperate enough to ask him for help.

The second thing he realizes is that Bendy is a jealous, jealous creature. He didn't like the fact that Alice joined him instead of Henry all those runs ago. He also apparently didn't like that Henry was too busy playing with invisible ink to give the demon a proper chase scene.

Well, Henry decides as he hums to the radio in Sammy's office, if he wants my attention, he's got it. Let's see how long that lasts.

Things get more aggressive for a while.

Where once the trapped man was willing to test everything except the ink demon, now it's his only goal. He's out to annoy, provoke, irritate, and confuse Bendy at every possible moment. In turn, his nemesis gets more creative in his annihilations.

Henry traps Bendy under the elevator, so Bendy drops him down the elevator shaft. Henry shoots Bendy with the Tommy gun from atop staircases and balconies and hides before he gets caught, so Bendy waits patiently next to the Little Miracle Station until the man is forced to come out for food, then promptly crushes Henry's ribcage with the gun's butt because he doesn't know how to pull its trigger. Henry waits to destroy each cardboard cutout until Bendy is already in the room, so the ink demon corners Boris and pulls him apart while Henry watches in horror from a Station.

Henry shows Bendy why he shouldn't look for attention, and Bendy shows Henry why he shouldn't be underestimated.

So it goes, back and forth, forward and rearward. Man and ink demon trying to destroy each other in their own ways. For superiority, perhaps, or to prove a point, or simply just to break out of that never-ending boredom, that bottomless sense of ink and despair.

It's about the 450th (…?) time around that things begin to crack.

The throne room is quiet when Henry slips in through the front door with a bag over his shoulder. He knows for a fact that he's a lot earlier this time, so Bendy isn't due here for at least two minutes.

Fine by him; he's trying a new approach.

He puts the bag on the ground and pulls out one, five, fifteen audio logs. They're bulky and weren't very fun to tote around for this long, but it's something he hasn't tried yet which makes it worth doing. Once they're all out the man sits down cross-legged and starts sorting.

Five from Wally Franks, set together on his far left. Thomas Connor over here, a little closer to the right. Lacie and Bertrum, Shawn and Norman, Grant and Jack. The Susie and Sammy tapes get put back into the bag after a moment of consideration.

He hasn't brought any of Joey's.

Then Henry plays them all at once, creating a raucous blend of sad voices, angry voices, confused and concerned voices. It hurts his ears, but he remains patient in his spot. Soon enough, two pointed horns appear from behind the throne as Bendy pulls himself up. He cocks his head very slowly, as he has always done, but instead of transforming again, he slinks around the chair with a throaty hiss.

Henry stays sitting with his arm crossed and one eyebrow raised, as if daring the demon to make him turn off the racket. He doesn't flinch even as Bendy steps forward and tilts his upper half into an arc, matching his grin parallel to his nemesis'. The creature wheezes into Henry's face, tossing scraggly bangs into the air above his forehead.

In all honesty, the man fully expected this exchange to go differently. Surely playing most of the audio tapes at once would be annoying enough to warrant a new creative death. And in the beast's own lair too – how disrespectful! He figures it's just a matter of time until cold hands are around his neck.

But then one of the shorter tapes stops playing, and Bendy has a full body spasm. He makes a strange gasp low in his throat and points at Henry, who only raises his other eyebrow in bemusement. Another tape stops and the gasp becomes a dangerous rumble.

Not sure what he's looking at, Henry reaches out carefully with one hand and presses play on the two stopped tapes. As they rejoin the voice cacophony, Bendy retracts his finger and stops rumbling. He drops onto the ground with a heavy thud and nearly mirrors Henry's crossed legs. They jut out too much and his knees are tangled high in the air, but it's the thought that counts.

So they sit together like that. Every time a tape is done, Bendy points at Henry and Henry obliges by starting it up again. At one point his foot falls asleep and he's pretty sure both of his calves will cramp the minute he moves. The ink demon just sits with his hands laying limp against his feet, and pants.

Eventually this gets to be too much for even Henry to bear, so he stops replaying the tapes and shakes his head 'no' when Bendy starts rumbling. The creature lets out a large huff, as if Henry is a disobedient child, and then stands up abruptly. His hands begin stretching into claws and the glove pops clean off, which Henry takes as his cue to get up and run.

His legs cramp up as soon as he's off the ground, and he wakes up two doors back with the memory of a quicker, less painful death than usual.

It's about the last time around that someone finally snaps.

But it's not Henry.

The ink demon is already in the throne room when Henry arrives. It surprises him into falling backwards on his butt; Bendy has never, ever made his appearance early, no matter the run.

"Hey buddy," Henry says warily, fingers tensing into the floor. His nemesis is already transformed into the more monstrous version of himself, all arms and teeth and nothing else.

Or – maybe something else, because Bendy moans in a tone Henry has never heard before. It's low and despondent like a sickly animal. Which is pretty similar to what he is, really.

Henry doesn't know how to take this latest development, so he simply sits on the floor with his sack of audio tapes like he's been doing for the last twenty loops or so. He starts to pull one out but a giant maimed hand grabs ahold of the bag and tugs it away with frail finality.

Bendy drops to his elbows and lays his chest on top of the sack, crushing the tapes effortlessly. He points at Henry. The man doesn't understand. Bendy moans again, louder this time, then turns around and grabs the Joey Drew tape with a single stretch. He brings it around and drops it on the floor between them.

Henry stares at the tape, hesitant to turn it on, and looks up into the pointing finger of a subdued ink demon. Knowing that demand by heart, he presses play almost grudgingly, and his shoulders rise to his ears as Joey's voice echoes in the room. He fights the urge to look at all the TV screens.

Bendy listens to the entire message without a sound. His breathing is labored as usual, but he has slowed it just enough that it's barely audible under the recording fuzz. When Joey's declaration of 'The End' comes out, the ink demon curls in on himself and keens.

At this point, Henry really isn't sure what to do. He decides that the Drew tape isn't doing either of them any favors and shoves it aside, bringing Bendy's attention back to him. The man sighs and runs a hand through his hair.

"Listen, uh…I don't know what you want from me. I really don't." He stares at his creation. "I don't know what Joey wants either, I guess, from both of us. Maybe we're stuck here forever, or maybe we'll escape someday. I don't know. All I know is that I'm tired of doing this over and over. I'm tired of fighting."

He looks at Bendy, who hasn't uncurled yet.

"It looks like you're tired of fighting too."

Bendy keens again.

With another sigh, Henry stands up and stares down at the crushed tapes. Something wiggles at the back of his mind; something he remembers finding a long, long run ago.

"You know, there's one more I haven't shown you yet."

The ink demon shifts and it's enough to keep Henry going.

"It's a long trek from here. Honestly, I'm not even sure we can reach it at this stage. But we can try if you'd like."

He waits patiently as Bendy considers this. The creature's lips pull back, showing more teeth than ever, but Henry is well aware this is a sign that he's pleased. The man takes a step backwards without taking his gaze away from the ink demon.

"You, uh, wanna help me find it?"

There is a hiss in response that almost sounds like 'yes'.

They walk side by side, two long-time enemies with more in common than either has wanted to admit. The elevator doesn't work at this point in the story but that's okay, because Bendy knows almost every secret way upstairs and Henry has found the rest of them.

The tape is hidden away behind the Projectionist's lair, through stairs and shadows and waist-deep ink. But neither of them have been afraid of these things for a very long time. Henry picks it up from its isolated space on the table, turning it this way and that. He considers just playing it here, but doing that doesn't feel right, so instead he tucks it under one arm and takes Bendy's curled claws with the other.

He leads the ink demon back up, all the way to the first floor where the nightmare always begins, and miraculously finds his old work desk completely intact. He runs his fingers along the edges and invites Bendy to do the same, which he does. Then Henry places the audio tape on the desk and sits in the neighboring chair with a slow exhale.

Bendy sits on the floor. His shoulders still clear Henry's head with ease.

Then the creation reaches forward, tentatively, and manages to start the tape. A familiar voice washes over both of them as they sit close enough stay in their respective space, if they want. Bendy leans his head against the back of Henry's chair. Henry sets his hand at the base of Bendy's horns.

"Only two weeks into this company and already it's gotten interesting…"

A/N: I FINISHED IT. I was so pumped to finally put words to my feelings for the last chapter of BATIM, right up until I started writing. For some reason I was always really close to finishing this thing and then either I'd have to go do something else or I'd realize that the story wasn't done being told. But it's here, and I'm finally happy with it so HA. I might do more with this someday, detail a few of the other runs or explore something else in BATIM, but for now I'm done. The end.

Thanks for reading! Have a great day :)