Trois - The Prophet has made a mistake.
/
He'd failed.
He knew this because he had woken in the room he had within the Lost Harbor, as always after each failed loop.
It was the two hundred and seventy-fifth loop for Henry, but the fiftieth loop for Sammy. Twenty-fifth with the prophet trying to help the cartoonist.
Still trapped in this studio. Still trapped in this abysmal body. Still at square one.
Sammy was… honestly exasperated by all of this. Finding out he was in a loop wasn't enough. Assisting the cartoonist wasn't enough. What else could he do? What more could he even give?
He grumbled and lifted himself from the cot he'd been sleeping on. Time to gather his bearings and figure what had gone wrong this time.
Flexing his hands to get feeling back into them, he tapped them in a familiar rhythm. He touched finger to thumb carefully. Index, middle ring… pinkie. Making a baffled noise, Sammy looked down. He stared stunned at his hands and found them shaking but intact. His pinkies were back. But why?
He had done nothing new in the path he followed Henry down! Standing, he pulled some paper and a dip pen from the battered desk and took a seat on a crate.
Okay. Time to work this out. If he wrote it down, he might parse out where he was failing. Why just the missing fingers? Why only one thing and not all at once?
Sammy mapped out what he'd learned. Henry entered the studio. He'd always fall through the floor. Something would cut Henry down. Henry popped back up in moments, like someone turned back the reel of reality and doing so erased the carnage. Alice, losing the Boris clone, theme park, clone fight, Allison and Tom, Sammy not attacking Henry but helping him, Henry crossing the ink river out of sight, and…
Sammy would wake up in this same little room. He settled his chin in his palm, pen tapping in thought.
What wasn't he doing? Was helping Henry by keeping the searchers and lost ones at bay not enough? The prophet let out a hoarse sigh. This wasn't good. What now? What could he do this time that could help his lord now? Help Henry help Bendy... but...
His Lord was the only thing that never seemed to change, no matter what either of them did. Weather Sammy was watching Henry from the dark or running behind him to make sure he didn't fall down a hole, Bendy was still… himself. His lord, the Ink Demon, silent save for grinding growls, indecipherable moans, and uneven footfalls. Nothing he or Henry did could appease Bendy. Nothing could break through and change a thing with the horned beast. His grin never faltered, his wrath never cooled.
Nothing worked… and that burned Sammy up inside. Mismatched fists had splattered him, his neck snapped by painfully sharp claws. He gave, and he gave and… back to the Lost Harbor.
A repulsive idea curled in his mind. How long had he been at the mercy of the demon? How much did he give to have nothing back? Did… oh dear lord, did Bendy even know all Sammy had done for him? Sacrifices! Song! His own fingers at one point, lopped off and tossed into a summoning circle only to receive nothing! Nothing but small stumps at the ends of his hands, unable to play the instruments he had loved, unable to make pleasing music for his lord.
Sammy tapped his pen to the paper, muted brows pinched. The thought occurred to him, the hushed whispers of the ink pushed to near silence as a sad little idea broke through the darkness.
If Henry were here to help Bendy, why did Bendy want to hurt Henry?
Lucid enough, Sammy grit his jaw and pushed up his mask to pinch the bridge of his nose. Er, what remained of it. It made little sense for Bendy to attack Henry when Henry was actively trying to fix all of this and free them. Hadn't that been the point? To help Bendy to set them free? Why was everything met with cruelness? Wasn't freedom what Bendy wanted? Unless…
A sharp pain shot through the ink man's head as he remembered. Fragments of past deaths- Tom taking an ax to his head. The Projectionist ripping him in half. Bendy backhanding him into a wall-
Wait. Sammy hissed in pain and grasped his head in both hands, pen held firm. His back hunched as he relived it all, frozen but feeling every second and movement.
"Betrayed! Abandoned!" The ax flying madly at the dark shape before him. "I trusted you! I gave you everything... and you left me to rot!... Why? WHY!?"
A dark shape dodging and striking back with a pipe. "Come here and put your face in my axe!"
He swung wildly, giving chase with long strides, voice split into dozens. "He said he'd save me. He said he'd set me free! Now I have nothing! NOTHING!"
The pipe made contact and shattered the Bendy mask. Shame and terror pulled threads of sanity taught, tugging them to the point of breaking as Sammy covered his face. "No! Don't look at me! Stay away!"
But the shape drew too close, and Sammy hefted it by the throat. "HA! You lied to me. You said I'd be free. Well, I'm going to free you now." He tossed the shape to the ground, and the ax went up. "Free your head right off your shoulders! Sheep, sheep, sheep... it's time for... sleep."
And in the instant between bringing the blade down and someone driving a blunt blade into his head, Sammy saw not the dark, skeletal Bendy on the ground, but Henry, hands raised in surrender. A clap of lightning before it plunged him into blackness deeper than the ink.
The prophet gasped, fused mouth wide and desperate for air he didn't even need. The pain eased into a dull ache as the fog cleared for one last thing, a memory older than those he'd just come down from… Bendy crushing and abandoning him in the room where Sammy had meant to sacrifice Henry. Over and over. Hundreds of times like it were a game.
Hands ceased gripping head as the cruel truth bloomed in his brain.
What if… Bendy didn't want anyone to go free? Wanted to keep everyone trapped down here in a sepia-toned Hell. For what? Amusement? Sport?
What if… Bendy enjoyed hurting him? His prophet? A creature who wouldn't fight back?
But Henry… Henry was kind. Sammy had seen that kindness while watching from the shadows. A soft-spoken man with flat humor and an enduring desire to help. To find the lost ones and try to bring their humanity back to them, even as they stared with mournful eyes and spoke of nothing. The cartoonist worked to find new ways to reach those almost utterly lost to the ink. To give everything he had in himself to set them free-
Sammy dropped his pen.
How could he be so blind? How in this inked hell could Sammy, the prophet himself, not see the truth to this?
Bendy cared neither way what happened to him. He never had. He wasn't able.
But Henry… The longer he had been with Henry, the clearer his head. The easier it was to think over the harsh whispers of the ink. He only spoke to Henry when the man was at risk, if Bendy was nearing, if they were meeting for the first time in a new loop to go over what was happening where the prophet couldn't see. Henry was always calm with is words, never raising his voice, never raising a hand or ax to the prophet, never-
Never like Bendy.
Sammy rested his forehead on his knuckles and wept quietly in that dark little room.
Damn this form. He wasn't granted the privilege of tears.
How wrong could a man be?
Mask down and mind clear enough, Sammy set out for the music room.
/
Not having Sammy say anything after the first tape didn't give Henry a good feeling. He'd worried that this would happen, Sammy giving up and going back to ambushing him with a dustpan. Was it even an ambush if he knew it was coming?
Still, total silence was new. New meant the ax was out and ready as Henry entered the music department. No chances. Whether Sammy was angry with him or driven madder by the loops, Henry wanted to be ready for it.
"Henry."
The cartoonist spun to find Sammy on the ground floor. Arms at his sides, hands empty of the dreaded dustpan. He hadn't even hit the play button for the sanctuary tape! "Sammy."
"Indeed." Sammy stared hard at the man and clasped one hand over another. "What loop are you up to now?"
Henry squinted. "Two hundred and seventy-five. How many for you?"
"Unimportant." Sammy raised his hands, fingers spread wide. "This number, however." He wriggled the digits of both hands. Had he a mouth, he'd be grinning.
Henry blinked in shock. The missing fingers hadn't been lost on him when he'd seen Sammy the first time. "All ten?"
"All ten." Sammy nodded once before spreading his arms to the man. "Regaining two fingers is more than what decades of servitude under the ink demon have given me. All my prayers ignored. All my pleas rebuffed. The ink blinded this shepherd, but now he sees the light in the darkness for who it truly is!" Hands still outstretched, the prophet fell to his knees. "It was you who will set us free." His palms slammed upon the floorboards. "My lord, how blind I was!"
"Sammy..." Oh, this was wrong. He was as much a true god as Bendy was a true demon. "No, Sammy. C'mon, stand up." He motioned with his free hand, but Sammy had his face to the floor. Henry ran a hand through his hair with a sharp exhale from his nose. "Sammy."
His masked head snapped up. "My lord-"
Henry kneeled, a hand steadying himself with the ax. If he let this go any farther, they might never make progress. "No. Sammy, this is the truth. I'm not a god. I'm a man who's trapped in a world he can't fully understand. I am as lost as you are." He stood and offered his left hand out to the ink man on the floor. "But I want to figure this out together if we can."
"If?" Sammy glanced slowly from Henry's face to the offered hand. The words hadn't missed their mark, but he still let out a cold chuckle. "You say you're not a god, but you made Bendy. You're not a god, yet your presence has restored parts of me after following your path. You're not a god, but you come back from the dead time after time?" The shocked horror at seeing Henry struck down, only for time to stand still and skip backwards to bring him back that first time was still fresh in his muddled mind. "You're the creator."
Henry let his hand drop, flipping the ax to rest over his shoulder. "I didn't make that thing you call Bendy, for one. That was all Joey. That may be Bendy now, but… not the Bendy I made," he finished quietly and stood. "And I don't control coming back. I don't control any of this."
Sammy said nothing. He didn't even budge.
The cartoonist sighed. "Look. You can come with me now, or the next loop, or never. I can't help you if you see me as something I'm not. Think it over, but I can't wait forever, Sammy Lawrence." He turned and left the music department. Hearing no footfalls behind him, Henry did as he had for hundreds of loops; press on.
/
One good thing about Sammy not trying to sacrifice him anymore? No ink demon to run from for the time being. One bad thing about not running from the ink demon? It took longer to locate Buddy Boris.
Henry hoped that Buddy was hiding behind the wall as he had before the loops changed, but that wasn't always the case. While not random, it was harder to pin down. Sammy had followed a pattern out of madness, but Buddy was fighting for survival just like Henry. Survival couldn't afford patterns when you knew some patterns meant death.
It might be days before he actually found the clone. Such was the curse of deviation. On the wall where Buddy usually stood before, Henry found a sigil like the one he'd woken up on so many times. He never got used to falling. The cartoonist leaned in close. Was it drawn with chalk? Where did this place get chalk?
"I wouldn't touch that, little sheep."
Henry spun, ax at the ready to find Sammy not three feet away. He exhaled with a groan as the ink man approached. "Do you want an ax to the head?"
"Mm, too soon for that." He placed an inked finger to the ax and pushed it down. "But those sigils aren't safe for someone like you. Too… human. Were you a monster like me, one touch and you could float through the ink to the destination you choose, but you?" His voice lost its humorous edge. "Well, no one enjoys knowing how the sausage is made."
"Oh."
"Since you seem so keen on doing dangerous things," Sammy cocked his head. "I'll lead."
"To where? I'm looking for my Boris."
"He'll turn up. He always does, doesn't he, old man?"
Old? Sammy had had a decade on Henry when they'd first met! "Am I a man or a sheep?"
Sammy's grin was felt as he said, "You tell me."
The cartoonist drew in a breath and adjusted the ax to rest on his shoulder. "Okay. You wanna come with me? Fine. But if this'll work, we need ground rules."
"Fair enough. You have the floor."
Henry raised a finger to tick off his points. "First, no praising me. I'm just a man trapped here like you."
"I respectfully disagree that you're just a man, but very well." Sammy mimicked Henry with a finger of his own-the pinkie, of course. "Second, do not abandon me."
The cartoonist furrowed his brow, just a little hurt by the request. "Only if you agree to the same."
"You want to shake on it, little sheep?"
"I have a name."
"I know, I've spoken it."
Henry raked a hand through his hair. "Call me Henry. Please."
Sammy leaned close so that his mask took up all the shorter man could see. "Is that the third?"
"No." The cartoonist tapped a finger between the eyes of the Bendy mask. "Third is to not invade my personal space."
"I can't make any promises, Henry," Sammy drawled before rising to his full height to stride past Henry. "Come along, then."
Henry chuckled and followed. "So now you can be loud?"
The ink man raised a hand in response. "Loud footfalls are for your sake. Can't have you having a heart attack, can we?"
"Why make noise if I can see you?"
Sammy paused and picked a wrench from its place on the floor. "Is that going to be the forth rule? Only be loud when you can't see me? I'll oblige. I even brought my banjo." He jabbed a thumb at the instrument across his back and kept walking. The prophet wouldn't admit it, but this was the closest thing to true conversation he'd had in a long time. Sure, they'd spoken in prior loops, but that was more necessity than… whatever they had now.
The cartoonist shook his head and followed.
/
Finally! Things are happening here!