Work Text:
———
The ink inside him pressed at his skin, searching, whispering, begging for more. It wasn’t meant to be inside him but he didn’t know how to get it out. He could feel it slide through his body and his skin ached where it pulled, like it would tear and burst open.
The urge deep inside was restless for more ink. It pounded in his mind like the craving was his own. Sammy found himself suddenly at the storage closet again, pained and stretched and desperate, clutching one of the unruined inkwells and raising it haltingly to his lips and drinking, just a little bit, in a crazed, senseless hope that giving in would make this stop.
And it did.
Everything in him relaxed; the thing inside him stopped beating against every wall of his body like a bird trapped in a house.
Unsure, Sammy kept the inkwell with him. Just in case it happened again.
———
It did.
Again and again and again.
At first, he resisted as long as he could, but as the sensation never really lessened, he started drinking a little every time he felt the craving, just to stave off the pain of the ink searching through him that came when he waited too long.
Soon, he would throw it up and be done, right...?
Or maybe, with enough, the ink would be satisfied, would stop searching, would stop trying so desperately to rejoin the rest of it.
It was stupid, the way he kept thinking of it like something alive... but he couldn’t shake it, the sense of thoughts in his mind that weren’t his own.
———
The closet was being refilled. The inkwells were replaced every few days. He didn’t know why, or by whom, but he was terrified to ask and out himself as the mysterious thief they had surely noticed by now. People were already suspicious, and he couldn’t explain why this was happening any more than his coworkers could.
But the more he drank, the more he understood. There was something the ink wanted to find, wanted to be part of again; some alien creature in its perception that he could almost picture, albeit with familiar features from this damn cartoon he was sure his own imagination was supplying. He almost felt part of it himself, though he knew the thought didn’t come from him.
And it was only the ink in the storage closet that linked him to this creature, he’d worked that out for certain; the cartridge of his pen and the interminable leaking from the pipes did nothing to sate his new parasite’s demands. That’s absolutely what it was, he was sure of it; a parasite, trapped inside him. And whether it was vomited up or finally burst out of his skin, it needed to come out. He couldn’t feed it forever.
———
The medication did induce vomiting, as promised, eventually painful and ragged, but no ink came up. Every test came up clear. The doctors told him it was probably already passing through his system normally in that case, and not to worry, a bit of ink isn’t going to kill him.
Sammy had gone pale, no idea what to say, how to explain that he’d been drinking ink for days and it was all still in his body somehow, he can feel it, please, it’s avoiding the tests but surely some test will show it, it moves, it’s alive, it won’t come out and it’s whispering to him and he can’t stop drinking it — he can’t say that to a doctor. So he nodded numbly when they told him to call if he experienced any other symptoms, knowing full well that he couldn’t.
———
It was up to him, then.
Afterhours, locked in his sanctuary away from the closet, Sammy waited out the impulse, the first sign that the ink was restless. He could feel it sliding through his body, first cautiously and curious but then rapid, like a tantrum, violently careless, lancing pain through his guts and an awful pressure all over his body. He second-guessed his plan to let it finally find its way out, unsteady breaths sucked through gritted teeth and shaking arms wrapped tight around himself. If it tore out of him, if it tore anything — he was suddenly sure — he would die.
But it never broke him open. The press against his skin dulled and — oh thank god — he could feel the nausea building in the back of his throat as ink crawled up from inside him for the first time. But he couldn’t hack it up. He coughed and gagged and it did nothing; the ink crawled along sluggishly, moving more like a snake than a liquid, like something too big to fit through his mouth.
He coughed again, harsh and involuntary, struggling for air.
His whole throat filled with churning liquid, his mouth flooded with it, his nose burned with it. It dripped, barely, through his lips but clung thickly to his face. He couldn’t breathe. Hands clawed at his neck and mouth but found no purchase on the thing choking him, his fingers only came through slicked with congealed ink. The urge pumped again through his mind, insistent. More ink. Where is it? Find it. Rejoin it.
He raised the door and stumbled out of the sanctuary, head pounding and dizzy, hand clamped over his mouth in case anyone had wandered back into the recording studio. The thing inside him slipped through his mouth, explored his fingers, content to sit in his airway and use him to investigate while he fought to stay conscious. More ink. It needed more ink. He needed more ink. Sammy scrambled through the halls to the storage closet, fumbling a bottle open and upending the contents into his mouth. Please take it. Please! Did it even understand that it was drowning him?
And it slid down his throat, sated.
He gasped, wet and ragged, coughed and choked and sputtered until his throat was raw, but it was air, at least it was air. No ink came up. He’d sunk to his knees, coughing into his hands and clutching his throat, the empty ink bottle dropped forgotten to the floor as he caught his breath.
That was the last time Sammy resisted. It asked for ink, and he would feed it. There was no choice.
Their thoughts mixed dangerously, trapped together in Sammy’s body. Haunted by his nightmares, the thing inside him started to believe Bendy and the creature it sought were one, and Sammy began to agree. He still felt the ink’s urge to join that strange amalgam, as always, stronger and louder and harder to think over, but they could both feel that they were different, now. Separate. The ink was part of Sammy, and here it could not be part of Bendy... the best it could manage was to serve the creature, until he could finally find them.
The desires of the ink were loud. Everything else he did felt so stupid, so pointless. The front of acting human seemed meaningless, but some part of Sammy counted it a kind of survival, and the ink obliged him. But they were not human, not either of them, shared mind filled with instincts they knew came from their— the ink didn’t have words for things; the one they would serve and be saved by. The closest word it could find in Sammy’s mind was Lord.
The one who would embrace the ink, pull it from this prison of a body, make them both whole.
Set them free.