71-Looking Back

"All day long he craves for more, but the righteous give without sparing." - Proverbs 21:26

To the man whom she revealed that not only had his search for his son so many years ago led to this darkness, she now said to him that maybe, just maybe, the darkness eventually reached Henry and consumed him too. The possibility that he came back for his father, the dread that since neither human here together have seen him? That maybe he was gone for good?

To all this the ginger merely said:

"I know."

Of course, her jaw dropped.

"You…know?"

As she took a step back in wonder, a hand raised to her chest, he held his own hand- too- still much the same way. What differed, though, was meeting her gaze. Joey's nose was turned down and away from her prying eyes, but it could not hide the slight glimmer of candlelight that revealed so very well how his eyeballs shook in their sockets.

He remained silent, but she simply couldn't stand it.

"Joey…?" Francine whispered, upper body leaning forward almost like it could help her hear whatever thoughts threaded his mind. His mouth slightly twitched back, a tremble in his lip.

It only occurred to her then that maybe he was holding back tears.

"I do, darling," was his calm, hollow answer, staring ahead at the vast nothingness; it was much less scary than to face her. "I do." A subtle inhale, a slow blink. "I could never forget even if I tried."

A noise- not only the gasp but the beginning of a statement- but one that was left unfinished, merely a squeak in the air as Francine found no way to follow up her ideas with no known description. As if he had heard a baby cry in the middle of the night, Joey followed her sharp breath with closing eyes and a soft voice, answering a question she didn't even know to ask.

"He's gone, Frankie."

The palm of one balled fist came to her mouth underneath a brow furrowed in utter disbelief. There was something so, so tender as his expression readjusted to rest upon her; something unbelievable, unspoken, and uncharted in how his wide eyes wrinkled, how his lips parted slightly, and how those golden irises beheld at her as if he saw something she could never.

Despite how much it had to do with her, too.

But she couldn't see that, so the firmness in his worried regard suddenly made her bold to know more.

"Will you…tell me what happened?" A quiet, high-pitched, even innocent inquiry, but it was still something brave indeed.

She hoped he could be brave, too, whatever that entailed to someone who lost so much.

"Now that is something that I don't know, darling," he confessed so unfathomably quietly that you could almost hear his mouth move more than you could hear the syllables of words upon his lips. And as he shook his head side to side in a silent, patient plea for her to stop reminding him of everything he missed, what was uttered next by the man with the softest eyes in the world would only invite the worst.

"I can only assume he died like everyone else."

Now it became clear that the nature of this conversation up till now had meant something very different to the old man than it did to the young woman. She had assumed loss. She had assumed sadness.

But she could never. Ever. Assume this.

Not one death, much less more.

And it being so much to take in at once, she felt her knees buckle and the hand at her mouth press harder and harder until surely it'd leave marks on her skin. Francine tried to sparse this out- Henry, his son. Henry was here. Henry was with a Boris. Both were gone.

And there were others much the same way.

But Francine, oh Francine…even if it was her demise, she couldn't stop herself from empathizing so much that she'd ask what never should have been. Something crossed her mind- something instinctive, from trying to put herself into the shoes of this lost soul lingering in front of her until the end of time.

"…How do you know that?"

And as this was spoken, her hand lowered and a guise of shock became one of skepticism. Not of malevolence, no; she sensed none of that in his words, and he had no reason to lie and keep secrets when the truth of his sins was so bare in the shape of their environment. So it was not suspicion of Joey that motivated a narrowing gaze.

It was a hope against hope that it couldn't be true because there was no way Joey could know.

And what's more, but only for her own sake, no way she could believe anyone before her had died.

And maybe Joey meant not what she feared most. Maybe he meant his boy was merely among the others when the studio itself was dragged into the unholy puddles of eternity. That, surely, would in a sadistic, selfish way make Francine feel better than accepting the taking of human life in the very same way she had feared all along she could be taken as she stood living among the dead.

If Henry was flesh and blood when he was in the studio, that changed everything, and so in this brief interlude of ponderance, she prayed that she wasn't simply the protagonist of his story retold.

His mouth opened but did not speak for the longest moment. Ink stained glasses and the shadow of a black and cream top hat could hardly hide the way his eyes looked back at her- something so, so aware. Shoulders rising and falling with the most conscious lungfuls of breath in the world, Mr. Drew stepped forward in the gloom until the bronze of irises became less like a glitter and more like they themselves truly glowed.

"I know, my dear, because I saw it," he informed her gently, in contradiction to what this all had to mean. "I didn't have a choice in the matter."

And before she could even respond to it, Francine felt a grasp yet again. Gentle at her wrist, the wanderer amid sin noticed it was still a hold firm. And now, she could finally identify that look in his trembling eyes. It was only, purely the greatest of care that honeyed his tongue until it seemed to stick to the roof of his mouth in nervousness of a suitable delivery.

"Frankie-" She felt him come closer before she noticed it with her eyes. "I…I need to emphasize how little I joke of this." A thumb smoothed over the vein right at her wrist, a small bump that suddenly felt so, very vulnerable. "When people have come here, up until you-…they've died." And suddenly, a bit louder, a bit more of a curl in his brow. "They come here, and they die."

Wait.

She realized something.

The heart in her chest pounded. Oh god. Oh fucking god.

What he just said…no, it wasn't that he had to be wrong.

It was that she already knew this too.

Sammy said this himself long ago when he first earned her trust-

"My lord…punished me harshly the first time I tried to offer a sacrifice." He sounded fully haunted by this memory; this sentence alone stained her with dread as well, and yet there was more to come. "And then…my savior stopped me once again from shedding blood. But unlike the one before you, you were…" She felt his gaze over her whole body, observing the marvel of her existence. "You were already dying."

-…She had known from the start that this fate wasn't hers alone.

Shit.

But she had ignored it just to make her living seem less special than it already did as people of ink told her over and over they envied what she had.

And they envied what she had retained against all odds.

The truth that she wasn't special at all besides all but her continuing to live was compartmentalized away; she had to cope with the hurt of everyone else before that of herself, and so she never thought about this key truth of her new world again until today.

So it hit her like a brick.

Suddenly and yet finally, Joey's hand properly pressed into hers amid all her personal chaos, and his other rose to claim her shoulder, Joey pulling himself closer and closer in so that all she could see was him and the veracities of magic and ink held in his wise stare.

And just as abruptly, instead of saying something more to explain all this, it then became his turn to interrupt himself with a gasp.

In response, through the darkness, Francine lifted her gaze inch by inch until it was no longer upon Joey but behind his figure. Amid the murk, the slightly fluttering faces of child-drawn paper were joined by their brother, hardly noticeable at a glance. And at first, she didn't respond; all was so, unnaturally still.

But then came a drip.

And it took nothing more for the most composed man in the world to let out a yelp, pivoting on his heels to face the ink demon just as he came to face them.

Francine saw arms in front of her, Joey throwing them outstretched to his sides. And as her breath was held and his became sharper, clearer, more burdened by the second, a chill shot down her spine like a falling icicle. She came to comprehend that Joey was standing between her and the god of his own design.

A flurry of blinks looked ahead at the beings she believed to understand most and least, and her mind raced to make sense of the lord's unexpected appearance.

And meantime, Joey did what Francine had done not too far before when last facing the threat of hyperventilation. Behind smeared glass, his gaze upon the ink demon was taken by closing lids. Breath by breath, he managed to steady until the slight quiver in his arms and shoulders became as still as the air about them.

Then came the longest second in the world.

…The demon took a step back and the summoned portal took omnipotence incarnate just as it came. All drops of ink faded one by one until the smoky shadows fled into nothingness and the beads upon each former Bendy fan's page shrunk and dwindled out of existence.

Finally, finally, Francine could hear herself breathe again, and the fingers that had come to her chest noticed the racing heart underneath.

But Mr. Drew? He remained as he was, still outstretched, still facing someone who was no longer there.

"…Joey?"

Silence. She watched her own hand rise and curl fingers in front of her until they unevenly unfolded and reached for his turned shoulder.

"Joey…?!" she repeated, desperate for a reply- anything, please, anything at all-!

Then…the shuffle of feet. As he gradually turned to look back at his beloved company, the emptiness left by the ink demon made that very slight pant upon his lips loud and the dawning sharpness upon his expression shine so bright in the dark.

Francine could name this look she gave him, but she did not understand.

Surely, it was determination.

"…You'll be safe, Frankie," he finally spoke, as if he promised a child there's no such thing as monsters. And indeed, the girl he addressed could distinguish the distinct ring of fatherhood in his voice, steadying him until she could feel it try to steady her.

"You'll be safe."