Wonders of Heresy (Bendy and the Ink Machine)

5- In the Presence of Monsters

Author's Note: The art for this chapter is by Startistdoodles on Tumblr.

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"Show hospitality to one another without grumbling." – 1 Peter 4:9

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It was so strange how she was playing the role of hostess in this world Sammy led her to.

They sat across each other at the small table, each with a small cup of water in front of them. God knows how relieved she was earlier to find that at least one of the three faucets in the bathroom supplied clean water, at least by purely visual standards. However, it was not a shared delight- sort of like offering a hamburger to a vegetarian, it seemed, because he hadn't touched it once.

"You require things I don't; I recall that much."

At the time this fact was revealed, the exhaustion of arguing and- well- entirely giving up to her fate had whisked away critical thinking. But now? She started to see it. Even as his head bobbed slightly up and down so humanly as he stared at the table, observing its many chips and scratches, he still held his glossy form. Sammy was a man- she assumed by now with only slight doubt- but to say he was fully so would mock his existence.

They both seemed content to be silent, even as the discomfort of it all started to pile with a weight capable of breaking the table between them. And so she resumed what she was doing before, a flat pattern of roses rising to face her companion- the back panel of an opening into the rest of the universe.

There was a change here. She glanced up from her phone once she saw in her peripheral that he sharply raised his whole body upward. Like a pulley, it made her heart sink.

"Sammy?"

She didn't know what to say. He just seemed...eternally anxious, agonized; she selfishly wished it didn't make her feel the same way. Heck, saying his name- something he didn't know until he met her- probably made it worse. Her phone went face down on the table, the window of light covered by wooden drapes.

He was standing up now, limbs outstretched as if...as if there was something in the room with them. She spun around to try to see it, but it was just them. It took her a full minute of looking wall to wall to realize the thing clawing at him must be within rather than around them.

She had panic attacks before herself, and one almost overcame her then with the wisdom that her experience gave no valid proficiency in helping another.

Just as she began to approach, hands in front of her but unsure what she'd even do with them, she saw he was looking down at the table. Maybe something was with them after all.

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"My sheep...!"

He regressed in his vocabulary, overcome with the memories and sensations of seeing her bathed in luminescence the last time he left her alone. That...thing. That thing was there before, and it was the source of that capturing radiance.

The knot in his chest was indescribable seeing her reach over to pick it up; it didn't lift with her gentle words.

"Sammy, Sammy...it's okay." She turned the thing to face him. "It's okay."

It was a rectangle, smooth like glass and black like the pipes sewn through the maze of halls. There was a ridge around it where she gripped the thing in her fingers. It faced him like it had faced her, and so he shrunk back, expecting to be taken by the light as she had been before.