80- Named
"We used to take sweet counsel together; within God's house we walked in the throng." – Psalm 55:14
"Sammy?"
Fogged, distant. It sounded like words muffled through water- no. No. It was ink. And the ink pulled and pulled it away until he sunk to the bottom. He could feel his own heartbeat, first strong and wild then less and less and less.
"Sammy!"
Softer.
"Sammy!"
Softer even. Nearly gone.
"…Sammy…!"
Repeated in his mind until the voice so sweet to his ears belonged to no one.
But that was not the end but the middle, as it warped into something…familiar. It repeated just like that, again and again until something unrecognizable finished its transformation clear as day.
He didn't feel Francine shaking his shoulders, desperate and wide-eyed, but she stopped all the same as he finally moved his head, stared at her without seeing, and then dipped empty eyes down.
A splatter of in fell from his fingers as they found the thing he had thrown down so unceremoniously, so unkindly for what it was.
So, so much.
The bead trailed down the arch of his knuckles, severed where his fingernail should have been, and trailed down the temples of this old, forgotten pair of glasses, slowly dancing around the edge of lenses. It was cupped in the ridge- briefly- before sliding down and then down to the floor. The cracks broken into them swooped over all behind them not like they were simply in front of things but as if it changed the surroundings to be seen through the glass, and delicate lines were drawn over the speckles on Francine's jaw as he raised the object up and past her dumbfounded face.
It was almost sacred, the silence. Hollow, the feeling in the air. Soft, this suffocation, as he held his own glasses in front of gaping, empty sockets until he saw through his own filter again for this first time in a century.
As Francine held her hands awkwardly up and to the sides of her shoulders after removing them from her friend, she didn't see a halo some ways away lift up to see, too.
The change was almost audible, like a string of notes along a piano- light, delicate, new! Incidental music in Sammy's gasps as his expression widened and he made a small, sharp turn of the head towards where he could feel his fingers twingling.
They were musician's hands, ones that he not only knew but remembered used to be complete.
It was almost like Francine saw him inspecting his own body, almost as if she simply couldn't see what he did- that he was transformed. His body was still ink, but something in his soul felt a magic crawl over his body, and his mind he could see skin smooth with calloused fingertips from holding a baton for too long, a shirt barely stained with a inkwell gone rogue.
She watched his hands slap the side of his head, skewing the glasses beneath them as he clawed with not only a desperate but a needing touch, understanding his real face was no longer there but all the same feeling such abrupt, world-tipping reality that he now could recall he ever had it at all.
Small dents formed in his skull where his hands lay so tight, and teeth clenched behind lips that used to be human.
"Sammy?"
And the voice was the same as it was the first time, not his dear friend Susie but Francine.
"I…" he began, beyond belief he could even speak at all, he trembled so much, "I…remember."
Francine felt a drop of ink hit her cheek as he threw his head up, clutching it even harder and screaming a thousand years of someone who thought he was gone forever.
"I CAN REMEMBER!"
Francine with eyes bloodshot from tears felt them sting not with more coming but with her only available reaction for that- a confused squint.
"…What?" Her head tilted with a small, disbelieving shake. "What the fuck does that mean, Sammy…? The hell-"
She continued to peer, leaning in. Sammy either in his overwhelm or in eager patience waited with wide holes in his face as he sensed her moving close, voice nearer as she looked over the sparkling cracks in front of them.
Her brow curled as she stared, and indeed it wasn't only light upon them. As Sammy's mouth stretched side to side in amazement, something like a faded, golden shock of lightning glimmered across the sharp angles before where his eyes would be. Indeed, eyesight was gone, but there was another sense given to him. Before she could say another word, he clasped her by the shoulders with a mania, an excitement Francine had not only seen from her but from anyone in her entire life.
"I KNOW WHO I WAS!" Sammy Lawrence shouted, face twisted between something utterly joyous and awful. "I was…" And here he slowed, breath taken away. A lifetime taken, a lifetime given new, and the first back again on top of the other. All right now, all it ever was, all it would be forever. And despite not being able to read the woman's expression, he gave her his own, and if she hadn't known any better about how his body worked she would think those dents in his head could grow tears.
"Sammy…!" he whispered. So often had his own name been said, and yet it was never his. Not until now, and now it always had been. He winced, clutching her shoulders tight until she felt him leak from her shirt to her skin, and the cold of revelations felt like a baptism even to her. As he broke down and cried, the few facial features he had scrunching into themselves, those spectacles glimmered.
"So…you're…" she stammered, "You…?" Couldn't even find words.
Bizarrely, maybe a magic out of another's control.
It was too much to think about as Sammy Lawrence breathed once again after being buried and left for dead by his own body and soul, too much for the woman beneath his hands, and too much for the other who had chosen to stay silent. No, this man was enough.
"I do!" he affirmed the question unfinished. His voice shook, separated into pieces as truth trembled him to his core and pulled his black lips at their corners. "I remember- a studio! It was this one! I worked there! Music! Cartoons! Jack and Wally- goddammit, Franks!-"
Francine had her back to her, and Sammy couldn't see even if he had his mask through his own speeding return to mind the angel becoming more and more attentive to what was going on, her image fuzzed in the background but not forgotten as she began to gape too.
"-Norman!" And here…quick words soon yet again became slow. And somehow, more meaningful. "Norman…" he muttered, the way his bottom lip tucked in at the last vowel as if he could taste the word. The hum of eternity played in the walls, the pipes drumming fast, low, and slow like names were beginning to crawl up his spine. As they did with Francine when she charged to see her seraph long, long ago, the beings of the studio came up from behind and grabbed him by his shoulders until he nearly fell back with their weight.
"Joey…!" This one was worse. A long history. Not just with this man's soul making the walls but the walls he built and tore down before Sammy's eyes; all the beauty he made and all the confidence he bestowed, all turning out to be a loan instead of a gift that he snatched back into his worn, selfish hands. "He believed in me…!" Sammy let her go, shoulders slinking and hands falling to flex their fingers, twitching with anxiety. "He told me…I could do it. We could do it. That everything would be just fine as long as we believed and pressed on."
And then a veracity came so sharp from his lungs that it could snap a flower stem in two.
"But he couldn't do it without Henry. 'Without Henry, there can't be-'"
But before Francine could speak- could interject and try to weave together these names to the story that was now her own, Sammy once again balled his fists and through him to his head because something had become inevitable. He suddenly, abruptly, horrifically shouted, and it was so terrifying that the woman who had learned to trust this creature made from death was safe to be close to abandoned it with a whimper, flinching back as she and Alice saw the most important name of all strike into him like swords inside his belly.
Indeed, this is what it looked like to understand the nature of one's god.
"BENDY! BENDY! BENDY!"
Finally, the angel stood from her sorrow, causing Francine to gasp once more as she came from behind to grip the mortal's shoulder. Both stood together, but both too were fixated. Certainly, it was different for Sammy knowing as he did then than it was for Alice. Her wounds were old. His were as fresh as could be, and its release wasn't meant for human experience. Such betrayal was not intended for those that were supposed to have mortal lifetimes, not for theatrics over two lifelong acts. And so it was more than twice as hard than it ever should have been.
Finally, he began to calm- bodily anyway. The panic in his voice, it remained. It may never go away now.
"He was…just a cartoon…just a cartoon…until…-"
He was folded into himself, hands moved to hold their sides. His own soma continued to fall on him, and his ink soaked into the paper that covered the floor.
"…I died," whispered Mr. Lawrence, recalling what he should never.
"Sammy…" Not Francine who answered but the one pulling herself closer and closer to the surface of what she had pushed away, what she had envied that Sammy had repressed. In all her fears, Francine looked up and tried to see what was in that voice, but somehow the bottom of black eyes were pinched and the corners of her mouth were pulled in a way that conveyed so much that couldn't be given an emotion the mortal knew in her own heart.
But she could feel the way Alice's grip relaxed, no longer protective but rather…readying herself, either ready to embrace what her former friend put at her feet or preparing to kick it away like she always had for this self-preservation in hell. She had told him what he had done to her, of course, and whether or not he knew it first hand would not change this pain.
He once again filled his lungs like they had never known air, no longer able to hide with his mask gone and memories pinning him where he stood.
"I…was Sammy Lawrence." No longer a fact by logic but a confession. A belief. A faith. "I was…not this." A mantra; his ancient promise that this was not how he was meant to be reborn. His fingers twitched, as if his body was betraying itself in allowing it to be spoken. "I'm not supposed to be this."
And then those sockets drooped too, almost like they were eyes closed, and a hand came over a heart that was not his first, feeling its wretched beat.
"I'm not supposed to be here."
And Alice's touch by this point was so loose and Francine broke free with ease, with no hesitation doing the only thing she knew to do. Nothing could save Sammy from this, but at least the woman could save herself from having to look at him like this a second longer if she buried her face in his chest and pressed her hands onto his back so tight that she couldn't be asked to turn her head up to another that made her so very, very afraid.
The angel simply watched them like this, witnessed the way the prophet born again stood curved with his chin towards the ceiling, like was frozen while jumping out of the ocean where he had drowned, just as he broke through the surface. The woman hugged the statue until Alice almost saw her become like one herself, quiet, noiseless sobs that shook her round, soft body against his narrow, slick one; they grew less and less and less almost like she was trying not to breathe, lest such trembling in her chest would quake him a millimeter more.
And then, the candlelight caught something new. As it did when he first moved before her, it enveloped him now as he came back to life. A second weight may have given herself to be held upright at his front, but it was a counterweight to the one leaning upon him from behind. That from the past and she from the future maybe suffocated him, but they balanced him too, and so maybe Alice shouldn't have taken so much notice as limp arms gradually rose, a palm lovingly staining Francine's hair with its gentle press as another came between her shoulder blades.
"…I'm so sorry, Francine," he whispered. There was a pause, one long enough for his friend to return with a "Why? Why would you be?" but it was left upon her tongue to rot as he smothered her against him, as he wisely, hollowly finally understood. "This isn't where you were supposed to be either."
Francine's eyes were slits, trembling inside her skull with a quiet acceptance, a forgiving horror as someone besides Mr. Drew told her what she had always wanted- that it was okay for her to hurt…even when it seemed like everyone else had more reason to. These two held each other, and both in how the studio warped and harmed them were valid in their suffering, hatred, and reconciliation of it all. Both had lost, and both may never find again.
Sammy was beginning to understand how someone else had lost too.
"Susie," the composer called upon his songbird. It sounded exactly the way it feels when you open a window, and something that blew out with a gust of wind is brought right back safe and sound. It was so serene, so familiar, that Alice didn't recognize it wasn't yet another distressed muttering but rather something new- something cracking open Sammy's door. The creak could almost be heard in the flickering of flames upon wax, all around in the candles of the room.
Her torn lips parted slightly, trying desperately to hold herself in as Sammy's glasses shined over his face and invited her to walk in and join two halves of her time with him in a reunion long overdue. He used to wear them. Every day. He almost looked like himself.
She didn't know what to feel, but she didn't like it.
"…So you must remember," she said as gently as one can spit, taking on Sammy's own previous stance in holding her own sides, uncomfortable with his gaze and with this name that was not hers. "You must see now that what I told you before is the truth. How you hurt me like that after all I did for you."
The voice wavered back and forth between its dual tones, but its tremble was still evident without that. But the horned woman's venom did not leave its sting; she did not like how unchanged he was.
"Coward!" she almost accused his silence, but it was left unsaid as something left her more unsure, sickened, and out of her own control than before. How dare he call her that- "Susie!" He took that from her! Joey took that from her! SHE WOULD NEVER BE SUSIE AGAIN-
As Sammy held Francine in his arms, he stared blindly ahead almost right where Alice's one eye was.
And he smiled.
"No." A gentle reply, even…even soft with laughter. God, how could he?! How could he do this-?!
"I didn't fire you, Susie," he confessed, "Joey did." His face flinched, smile more of a grimace. "And I didn't realize you didn't know until you were already walking away."
And just like that, it felt like a hole was cut out of the angel's chest. They both remembered. That moment where she caught him talking to his new angel, how she covered her face in shame now that she couldn't be Alice anymore. The precursor to her never ceasing to be Alice again as soon as she had that choice.
The sudden, twisting knife so, so much as the stress of a studio already falling apart and losing all its love the climax just before the studio flooded and Joey Drew killed them all, even the ones that weren't supposed to be there anymore. She was going to stay and fight back for what was hers, and that's what she ended up doing for all eternity.
How acceptable was it for her to hear there was something more? And just like that, it wasn't Sammy that had a taste of her loss of faith but she for his. The basis and motivation for everything that mattered…not gone but…different. Dangerously different.
And that's why she didn't dare say a word back, more split than ever as she grit her teeth and had a deathgrip on her own sides, afraid she'd fall apart on the spot.
Sammy exhaled the barest chuckle once more, maybe a tease to Alice but a relief to him. The slightest, almost invisible relief.
And it was enough.
As he felt Francine in his arms, he could hear her soft breath through her nostrils, could sense the small stirs against his torso, but he didn't see the way she looked at all these words and pages around them further and further amazed, it was enough.