This fic contains brief mention to past, serious self-harm.

It had been almost a month since they'd left the studio, and Sammy's brain was finally starting to accept that it wasn't a dream. He was getting used to colors again: red, and green, and blue - colors other than the ever-present yellow and black of the studio, the aged paper and the dripping ink. He was adjusting to what it was like to have skin, so used to the constant coating of ink that he'd almost forgotten the rest of him underneath it: bones and hair and skin, human. There were still times he jolted awake, expecting to be surrounded by Bendy cutouts and burning candles, so deep underground he'd never see the sun again, but they came less often, now.

He owed it all to Henry. Henry, who had come back for him, even after the terrible things he'd done in his ink-induced madness. Henry, who had dragged him to the upper levels of the studio, scrubbed the thick, gooey half-dried ink off of him and led him out of the studio, who had been patient as the ink fumes cleared from Sammy's head and left him saner than he'd been in years.

Henry was older, now; Sammy had aged perhaps five years in the last thirty, the ink preserving his body at the cost of his mind, but Henry had lived all of them. There were lines across his face, and his hair had gone gray and thinned.

Sammy wasn't entirely the same as he had been before, either; in old photos Sammy's hair had been brown, and his eyes a light color, maybe blue—he could never quite remember, and neither could Henry. His hair and eyes were black now, stained from the ink, and that was ignoring the stains left in his mind completely. But he was out of the studio, could walk around in public and see other people. He'd been alone in the Music Department for so long, he doubted he'd ever see another person again…

Henry was letting Sammy stay with him, for the time being. After what he'd been through in the studio, Sammy doubted Henry wanted to be alone either, so it worked out for both of them. Henry's place was small, but nice, his sofa softer than anything Sammy had slept on since the studio collapsed. He even had a piano, dusty as it was from disuse.

Sammy was rusty, years without practice having taken their toll, but he'd always been a pretty good pianist, and he was trying to get back in shape, practicing whenever he could. He had some vague notion of becoming a live performer at some ritzy restaurant, making music surrounded by people instead of away from them as a way to start standing on his own two feet. He didn't know if he was quite good enough for the job, but Henry, at least, seemed to like what he played.

Sammy couldn't stand to play the music he'd written for the studio, not after everything that had happened in there. He'd been improvising instead, coming up with simple tunes that he didn't have to think about as he played them. But Henry had brought him back a book of sheet music a friend had given him, and Sammy wanted to give it a try. He'd selected a song, reasonably simple but more challenging than the simple tunes he'd been improvising, and sat down to play it one quiet weekday afternoon.

It was like coming home after a long day, familiar and comfortable. Sammy's fingers flew across the keys without conscious thought, dancing from one end of the piano to another as music filled the air. Henry's piano wasn't anything special, barely in tune with keys sticky from spilled liquids, but at that moment, the music it was making sounded more beautiful than anything Sammy had ever played on the expensive piano at the studio.

And then he missed a note.

The carefully constructed melody crashed to pieces in the air as Sammy stopped playing. He could have sworn he'd hit that note, so what had happened?

He looked down at his hand, still positioned over the keyboard, and his eyes fell on the rough, ugly scar on the edge of it, tracked out to the finger that wasn't there.

Of course. He'd tried to hit the key with his pinky finger on instinct.

Of all the things he'd done in the studio, this was the one he regretted the most. He'd intended to do a lot of despicable things, tried to kill Henry, but this was one of the few terrible things he'd actually followed through on.

In his obsession with Bendy, he had come to hate the fourth finger on his hand, a mark of mere humanity as opposed to the perfection of his Lord and the other toons with their minimal three fingers each. So Sammy had taken a fire ax and chopped the extra finger off each hand as part of a ritual he'd devised himself.

Some days Sammy worried that his behavior in the studio had been of his own will, that some part of him still believed in those things and would do those things again, if given the chance. But this was something he was certain no part of him would ever do. He was a musician, down to his bones, and that was a job that required every finger it could get. He would never willingly remove one of them while he was in his right mind, much less laugh himself through the pain as he imagined he brought himself closer to the image of the one he worshipped as a god. The Prophet of Bendy-that hadn't been him.

He was better off than others that had been in the studio, he knew. Wally... Susie...Norman. Henry had told him about what had happened to them. He had at least been lucky enough to make it out of the studio alive.

But he still found himself looking at the scar, the missing finger. Sammy had made it out of the studio, sure, but there was so much of himself he'd lost there, too.