81- Because I Do Adore You
"Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life."– Isaiah 43:4
There was something Joey told someone else a long, long time ago:
"They can be...unkind," he said, brow furrowed. "Even if they don't want to be. Because they believe they will always hurt others, even if they try not to. And such an assumption will indeed always circle them back to hurting others, because that is their being. Even if you shake them by the shoulders and tell them this isn't true, they will justify it themselves. They're righteous in their own toxicity."
His words were...hollow. Like wind through the hole in a tree. It was less like he was talking to someone in particular and more like he was narrating something in a story.
"And coming across them, knowing this, you want to save them. But darling, that might just take you down too."
He had no idea he was detailing his own demise, a fortune teller for everything he never wanted to be.
There was a time he wasn't like that, though.
There was a time…but maybe it was long gone.
Now, Francine had noticed it before, but only in passing- like accepting that the attic will have dust, or that grass will have morning dew. In the same way, Joey's office had paper. It covered everything, not like a wrapping but simply in...a loose existence, like you fell asleep under a tree in spring and woke up in late autumn, all the leaves surrounding you but not yet carried away by winter's wind. And thus, once she knew what these flimsy remnants of life held within them- once she stared at plenty of them long enough- nothing was special about them anymore, not individually. A collective phenomenon, we take little time to pick up every severed leaf fallen upon the ground because we know why leaves fall; Francine knew why papers were kept.
She was wrong.
This was her third time here, and she was introduced to the ways of this realm, this…tiny, infinite space both empty and full. A place she had assumed was a variation of Joey's "prison." And all that was left of it now was a shrine to what he had adored, the reason why Bendy existed in all his awful glory. Children. Adoration. Creation. Inspiration. The latter three were given back and forth by the first, and regardless of age Mr. Drew loved them almost as his own.
…And sometimes he did entirely.
These drawings were pinned to his cage in beautiful remembrance of how far, far away he was from everything he wanted, everything this was supposed to be for. And there were so many that Francine simply never thought to look at the ones laid like shifting, thin bricks under her feet, or scattered on his desk like torn newspaper. It wasn't till now, with her eyes faded red and sore from the tears he made her shed, that she began to see what else Joey kept sacred here. As Sammy inhaled and exhaled, catching his breath after holding in for years on end, her eyes were caught as her cheek pressed against his cold, damp chest and was forced to study the floor.
These things were different.
"Guys?"
It was more the tone than the word that begrudgingly got the attention of a withering angel and an accursed songwriter, either not having heard it before or having not heard it in good time.
"What…-" Francine began to murmur, brow knitted as she gently pushed her cheek off of Sammy's cold, cold chest, "-Is…all this?"
And oh so hesitantly, Sammy let one of the only things he knew was here go, so that she could leave with waves of curiosity and come back with understanding anew. Maybe she could bring something to fill him again, was a sharp, brief sting that came to him without words.
"…What do you mean?"
Her knees bent in the candlelight, hands curled over them as she leaned to view the dim floor. Hair dangled past a frown, and a gleam on her eyes revealed how sharp they were pinned to the ground. There's a…certain emptiness that doesn't feel empty at all when you see something you shouldn't, like when you go through a book and begin to realize it's a diary hidden in plain sight, like when you turn the corner of an alley to hide from the rain and glimpse past blue brick walls someone stealing a kiss like a thief in the night. Something that maybe shouldn't matter to you, but you care all the same.
A detachment- just enough so- with a pang of empathy can do wonders for seeing through lies...
…And it turned out, so much more.
Unspeakable- literally unspeakable; she couldn't find words it- and incomprehensible things. Pictures meant to be text and text meant to pictures- that's the only way she could describe how scrambled she felt to see them. And the indentations upon the paper were bleeding their ink, and the ink ran off the pages and glues the floorboards beneath together.
A room built upon ritual, myth, and incantation. Of course, the origin of instability would end up being the most stable.
"…Well?!" Francine heard the angel inquire anxiously, voice shaken but eager with the disjoint in topics.
She didn't look up, and maybe she couldn't with how mesmerized she was when she answered, "They're…things. Weird things- I mean. I can't- I can't even read them…!"
Her eyes followed the dried stain that bled from what must have been one letter of a word and saw it trace beyond her toes, across page and page and page. She followed it, standing up and walking in a trance; maybe it was, indeed, a hypnosis because it seemed to walk her around…around…around….in a circle, a shuffle under her feet with every step yet not being pushes out of place. She straightened her neck with her chin still angled down, and even the air about her was so thoughtful that Sammy took notice.
Feeling Alice by his side, the prophet reborn to preach yet again asked her what their friend was doing, but the seraph said not a word. Lips painted black parted, and half a face gaped with the kind of discomfort that only comes with discovering why you are who you are.
And the more Francine stared, the more she saw that she was no longer certain if the words had bled to form it or if it was the other way around. A headache burrowed into her skull with how hard she was staring and contemplating, and decisively, she stuck the tip of her shoe and dragged one paper with it.
As the paper slipped out, the ring remained, like it was a shadow instead of a stain.
Far too like the ink demon.
She felt something not meant for human hearts come onto her shoulders and grip them tight.
"Francine?"
Sammy had called for her again, and Alice stood there in wait, and again, she did not reply. The holy- or perhaps its other- often takes breath away.
And that force upon her would either push or pull.
…It pulled.
"It's…a circle." And then more quietly, more for herself: "But what the fuck is it…?"
"FRANCINE-"
She turned, finding eye sockets that almost seemed to have a brow with which to curl with worry behind those cracked glasses. An outstretched hand reaching blindly ahead stayed in the air a bit, before the four fingers slowly folded and fell to his side alongside a growing expression of unease. He knew Joey now- there was a reason to be anxious of the place that was his.
"Francine, just-…be careful. Please."
And as both he and Alice turned their chins up the tiniest bit- the most minute, instinctive agreement that despite wanting to drag her away, she wouldn't and shouldn't be stopped anymore- Francine briefly shut her eyes, squeezed them to compose, and opened them again with an assuring nod.
But something didn't feel right to Alice, and so just in case, she took a step forward-
And simultaneously, so did her opposite. Francine walked to the center of the ground marked for damnation, bent over, and began to move the papers to see what was underneath-
"Oh my god-!"
A soft exclamation, but one wholly filled with shock. A hand was thrown over her mouth- deadening the tail end of her words- and the woman reflexively stood back up and scuffled back on her feet. The guardian angel was quick to give her something to bump into, her chilled, black arm wrapping in front of her collarbone as the hand of it gripped the girl's shoulder and the other hand pulled back at her dangling wrist.
"What?!" Sammy returned with an equally hushed but panicked voice. He twitched his head around, listening for a sign of anything new, but as Francine felt her jaw drop, Alice overlooked her shoulder and could see the same that she did.
It was dark. It was yellowed. It had been buried for years, but it couldn't hide any more, and Francine pulled her hand down as what it was, in her mind, now begged the question of what it did.
Feeling her heart race no longer in disgust but in awe, she uncovered her own mouth and stared.
"It's blood…!" Francine finally answered, and she- shoulders surely shaking from the draw of her breath- looked up to Alice in warning before she pushed out of her hold. The angel allowed this and took another step back to let the woman finish what she started.
The hand over the papers hesitated an inch in the air before touching them again, a dull, reddish stain in a splatter across…something…in view just in front of them. She pulled in her bottom lip, eyes minutely shifting back and forth in an unconscious mind's debate of whether or not to touch proof that man should never touch certain things at all. She saw her fingers unevenly begin to curl out in reach, and with one firm swallow, she opened her mouth and carefully pulled the wrappings of a mummy away.
It seemed timeless, how long this effort took, feeling like forever but then as if it was a blink of the eye once it was all done. Sammy heard an exhale from his friend, and he anxiously did and undid fists at his side as he awaited to hear what this was.
She stepped out of the ring, the moved papers still allowing it to be kept perfect and unbroken, a seal unfortunately inseparable by hands.
Looming in front of them was the first ritual circle, the same one behind the cutouts, the one once under Francine's bleeding feet. It was drawn in black, its edge fenced by the inky circle. In the middle, Francine left intact that one discolored sheet- the one red with humanity like she- and surrounding it was…
"Handprints…-" she whispered, "And claw marks…!"
Like someone dipped a cartoon's and then a monster's paw in ink, stains so thick they still looked wet were smeared across the floor. There was more ink, too, like something that had that liquid instead of blood was left to bleed out onto the delicate, thin symbols upon the wood that loosened the boards nailed up between worlds.
"This is where he came from."
Francine didn't- couldn't- even turn her head away to hear the seraph speak, and Alice was the same. But-
"GOD-DAMMIT!"
But that she could, a sharp gasp as Sammy threw one hand to his head, right above gleaming glasses that barely covered sockets wide with unbearable upset. It was more than blindness that allowed him to pace back and forth like the two women weren't there.
"I knew it! I KNEW IT!" the new man began to shout, "He had these books and he had these things and he had these bizarre, bizarre things he said! He said-! He didn't miss Henry! He didn't have to! It would be taken care of-!" he seethed, baring teeth, "He said Henry was coming back! And of course, I didn't believe him- not after all I heard him say to him when this all started-!"
He didn't, of course, notice Francine furrow her brow less and less in worry and more and more as she began to pick up what Alice hadn't.
"He said to me that fate was like a machine! It could only work so long before you have to patch it back up! No, you fool! YOU messed it up! YOU drove him away! And now it's KILLED US-!"
That last shriek faded into the air as his voice was stolen away, squeezed out as two hands gripped upon each of his forearms. She allowed him pause to catch his breath, and so he did, it being his turn to feel the rise and fall in his shoulders second by second as someone else held him.
"…Sammy?" Francine asked in that voice- the one high-pitched every time she found something new where she shouldn't.
…
…
"Yes." A statement, not a question. He wasn't ready for this, but he accepted it anyway.
"…How much do you remember?"
And while Alice sneered behind her, not yet revealing the pit in her stomach, Francine made it so Sammy was thinking the exact same thing as she and her. And it for him was so, very much. He literally softened in her touch, and those sockets of him relaxed with a returning slouch.
"…Everything," he discovered with a whisper, "Like it was yesterday."
And that's why Alice was so unhappy, because she was always the one that held their past safe and sound, and she found that he was recalling things that with the toll of 80 years she could not.
Francine exhaled herself, looking down at the waist of his pants where his nervous, melting self-collected and leaked over onto the floor drip by drip. She was inevitably drawn in by the sight of the engravements both on the floor and in writing, by sacred text and then the art of children, and…
She had to know how one led to the other so very, very badly.
"Tell me."
And so he did. It was jumbled, a narrative that didn't start from the beginning and skipped back and forth as strings tied events together like a conspiracy theorist's board or a spider that made a web so big it couldn't find its way out, but it was as complete and as trustworthy as someone who had just lived through it. Sammy told her and reminded Susie about how Joey used to be the most loving man in the world, how the sun seemed to shine through him because he made it seem like you shined it onto him with your own eyes. How proud he was of everyone- genuinely, sincerely delighted to know you and to be with you.
How by all appearances, he may have been the best man to have ever lived simply because he believed you were your best, too.
About how Sammy overheard the conversation of when Henry was wondering what it would be like if he moved away someday, and something not even Joey knew about till then came out of the old man's soul. And it wasn't wrong to be afraid, Francine knew, but Sammy told her that Joey was so much so that it almost seemed like every other part of him up till then had been a liar. No one knew or ever guessed once they handed their hearts over to him that Mr. Drew maybe wanting to be your foundation didn't always have one of his own, and him crumbling apart would make you crumble too.
And feeling the world shake under his feet, Henry looked over the horizon and ran the other way, leaving Joey to grip onto the edge of his cliff and out of sight.
The rest that stayed to watch Joey dangle were dragged right down, too, with his desperate, possessive hands.
A slow landside that Sammy saw coming. The stress in his eyes, the sting in his voice- they didn't exist before, but did now, and one would expect and even forgive such because it was Mr. Drew, the man who had always wanted the best for them. He still did, but what the best came to mean, of course, was something besides what really was entirely.
Sammy the prophet warned them, and yet he couldn't leave himself. He couldn't leave them behind; he couldn't leave Susie behind. Joey's angel used to believe in him, even when he didn't believe in himself.
He did, of course, believe in something else.
They just didn't know it until something else took them all away.
…
…
…
Francine walked over to the desk behind them as Sammy finished, overlooking what was left of the office, and found these too were the same as Joey left them. And just like with the things upon the floor, she spread her palms over these pages and pulled them away to read the rest of this story. They found scrawlings that read over and over:
"I miss him…I miss him…My family...My family"
"She wouldn't have wanted this, couldn't have wanted this. I'll bring them back. I'll bring him back, and then we'll be whole again."
"I need Linda to smile again. She's supposed to smile again."
And given the nature of the heart of Joey Drew, it was indiscernible and didn't matter if these were right from his mind like the rest of this universe or if he had written these himself before it was even unleashed for others to bear.
And then, most of all, somehow in its own tone of voice:
"This can be fixed."
And then they could see his then pen had drawn his feelings in an entirely new way, notes and questions and studies until worries and fears devolved into belief- belief that what he had already believed in was forever true. It wasn't a fault in him or even Henry, but rather the universe itself with its fragile thread of magic weaving through life needed to be pulled and mended again like the sewing of a quilt falling apart at the seams. Francine read them out loud, described them for Sammy as Alice looked over her shoulder too. Her fingers nearly clawed into the table as she curled them in dismay upon finding the final, decisive page open in a tome left upon the seat that detailed how to connect two souls as kin forever. It asked for blood, it asked for ashes, and it asked for something that Joey wrote he did not have.
And so, of course, he used something else instead, and so a ritual meant for consented comradery became a violation. Joey didn't have a piece of Henry to give without him, and for his betrayal in trying to use something else that mattered to his son, Joey and every last inch of the life he had left was killed, and the only family he'd ever see again was the one he accidentally created himself, born right behind where the three trapped souls stood this very moment.
"We have to do something," she decided.
And so, they must.
They gathered the few things Joey left of theirs, Sammy's glasses upon his face, an ax in Alice's hands, and all the bits and pieces of Francine's old life centered behind her back, placed carefully in the shelves of someone who didn't want to let anyone else go. They were to stay, because unlike Joey, letting go was something she could do.
"Are you sure you remember?" the woman hesitantly asked Sammy, tone both bold and frightened all at once. But of course. She remembered how she felt opening the door into the unknown from the second she came to the studio looking for someone. It felt exactly as it did back then as it happened all over again.
"Yes," Sammy confirmed, a small nod as a frown stretched and showed teeth. "There was a room that I…was led to…when you followed the ink demon, Francine; the mask- it hid much of it from my sight but…I remember. There were things in there with his name."
"Well, we'll tell you what we see, and you point us where to go," Alice returned- but not without a scoff. "If you do remember and aren't just going to get us all killed."
Francine, solid and resolute with eyes that trembled in her sockets, gave Alice a look. The angel's one eye narrowed.
"Are you sure you want to come? Don't you want to stay safe? If he-" And she choked right up before finishing speaking the worst.
The young woman returned it with a nod. "Yeah. Of course." And then like dusting snowflakes off her head walking across the road one icy day, she shook her head to be rid of trepidation. This was better. This was better than waiting for something to happen to her instead of for her to make something happen. Not again. Never fucking again.
"I have to."
She checked her jeans one last time to make sure her phone was there, and then satisfied, her soft hand came to hold his wet one yet again, feeling like it was meant to be for a final time.
"Lead the way," she said to the blind man, and yet she was the one that opened the door. The knob turned and she let go, allowing an invisible pull to swing it open for them to escape this cage.
And seeing Joey had left them something to look for after all up ahead, Sammy's mask was left scraped and torn as it leaned next to the doorway and watched the three break the barrier of a haven. It was meant to keep them safe, but how can someone be safe at all if it's not by own their choice?
Three people their god loved like his children left to look for what was left a fourth. And his name…
…Was Henry.