Chapter Text
Down in the pub room, the crackle and hiss of radio static cuts through the air. A young man we know as one Mister Daniel Lewek, and whose coworkers know as simply “Buddy”, sits hunched over at a table, fiddling here and there with the dial.
“Come on, I just wanna finish this one song…”
Between bursts of white noise he can hear a certain lovely trill, and behind it, the angelic harmony singing along. If only he could just...get it...almost! He’s almost got it! Just nudge the antenna a fraction of a fraction to an inch to the right, and
“ART DEPARTMENT!”
The door swings open with a bang, and Daniel jumps out of his seat so suddenly he forgets to let go of the radio antenna, yanking it up with him and throwing the whole set to the floor! The set lets loose a horrible screech that has both him and the intruder covering their ears before it returns to the crackling empty air of before.
“ART DEPARTMENT!”
“Oh…”
It’s one of the other workers from writing, who’s now barreling down the stairs two at a time. Daniel doesn’t know his name offhand but recognizes him from doing script runs and other tasks. He fumbles with the radio, trying to hide the damage under the table.
“Buddy, what are ya doing down here? Miss Lambert’s about to kill someone, she’s been looking all over for ya.”
“Oh uh I got in a little early this morning, and I was just down here on my break looking for a radio to listen to. I know Mister Lawrence doesn’t like to be disturbed during recording and all—”
“Yeah yeah just get yer tuchus up there, we got a real problem.” He pulls Daniel in by the shoulder, close enough that Daniel can smell the coffee on his breath.
“Some of the guys up there have completely lost it, I mean lost it. They just stand there staring at the radio and will not move no matter how hard ya shake ‘em. Heard something about too much ink fumes, they just need fresh air—fresh air my ass! It’s not natural, it’s like they’re under some kinda spell or something!” He gives Daniel a firm pat on the back that nearly sends him flying.
“So! We need you to pull some of their slack. Whatever you can do. Any mistake you make, Miss Lambert or Mister Stein can fix it. Don’t blow this, kid.”
And with that, he’s off! He flies up past the old wing, through the miniature labyrinth to the nearest empty desk, and settles in to work. It’s not his choice that he sits in the corner, but he can see the abandoned frames and script and it’s enough to work with. With caution and yet barely restraining his fervor, he sets pencil to paper, forming arcs and curves, the only sounds in the room graphite and rustling sheets.
Meanwhile, in the downstairs break room, one Abby Lambert is two eraser shavings away from ripping her hair out. Beside her are one Mme Lamont, and Wally, the Janitor.
“What’s wrong with them? They’re just frozen like statues! But they’re still breathing! Are they asleep? Their eyes are open? Kind of? But not? WALLY! Give me your bucket!”
“Uh, okay?”
The janitor hands her his trusty pail, and the frazzled woman fills it with her bewildered screams. Mme Lamont stands simply shaking her head.
“Abby, please sit down before you give yourself a stroke.”
“DEADLINES DON’T SIT DOWN.” Miss Lambert continues screaming into the bucket. This is going nowhere.
“Alright, we do this my way,” Mme Lamont declares. “Wally, your belt please?”
“Why?” He asks, despite obeying without question.
“We have already tried the “hypnosis snap them out of it countdown”, we tried jostling them and startling them. If they won’t give up this game, I’m going to beat it out of them!”
“WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, THAT IS VERY ILLEGAL. And my pants are falling, so let’s maybe not commit any felony-misdemeanors.”
Wally has nothing against shenanigans, like any good-natured hooligan. But a gentleman has to draw a line between good-natured hooligan-ery and indecency somewhere! Like indecent exposure.
Mme Lamont seems to consider his protest for a second.
“Very well. Keep your belt on.”
“Thank you, ma’am!”
“Abby, please come out of the bucket. Tell us what exactly happened when you found them like this.”
Abby lets the bucket fall to the floor. None of the entranced animators even so much as flinch.
“Nothing! That’s just it! They were late coming in, so I came looking for them. I knew they usually come down here in the mornings, so I come down the stairs, and they’re just standing here! Staring off into space! The radio’s left running so I shut it off on them and they don’t even react!”
“Did you try turning it back on?” Wally asks. Abby glares at him with such ferocity that she could concentrate her stare into a laser beam and vaporize him on the spot, such that only a scorch mark where he stood would remain. Mme Lamont makes her way over to the radio and switches it back on, it has to be better than standing here arguing.
And the siren swallows them whole.
Back in the artists’ wing, Daniel is hard at work. In no time he’s tearing through frame after frame, each character seamlessly redrawn and flowing. Look at him go! This could just be his chance to show Miss Lambert he’s ready! A song inches forward on his tongue, one he heard a few nights ago on that same radio show he was trying to tune into just moments ago. The memory of its singer warms him, and he dives into song, a repetition of what few lines he can remember. He pauses only to crack his wrist, and it’s just at that moment he happens to look at the clock.
“Oh my God.”
A bit more than half his day, in pure silence, has passed. Half the workday gone, and he’s still alone in the room. He looks down at the desk. Thirty sketches sit in front of him. He stacks them into a neat pile and flips through them to see the fruit of his work.
Looking now, he can see where the lines are uneven or wiggly, remnants of chicken scratch left behind. On several of them, Bendy is missing an eye or the eye is too high, too low, cockeyed in a few magnificent cases. The demon seems to defy gravity as well, floating up and around the page one frame only to be weighed down the next few. This is beautiful. Daniel wants to rip them to shreds and stuff them into the bottom of the break room garbage can, under lunch wrappers where they’ll never be found. He wants to take them home and fix them, try again, turn them in like a late homework assignment in his school days. His stomach growls.
Well, no use crying on an empty stomach.
“I’m not crying!”
Right, so those are allergy tears. Not the frustration of having a steeper learning curve than you expected, or anything like that.
Daniel shoves the frames under a blank sheet and leaves for his lunch break.
In the pub room he returns to the poor radio he so abused that morning. He sets it back up on the table, straightening the antennae and popping the loose dial cap back on, mumbling an “I’m sorry” to it with every touch. He’s back to the screeching static of before, tuning the poor thing to find a rebroadcast of a show that probably already ended. And that’s assuming it isn’t broken entirely.
“I didn’t mean to drop it! If someone hadn’t startled me!”
Quite. Anyhow. With patience and a steady hand (and the other braced on the radio itself) the white noise gives a loud POP!, and Daniel is tuned back in, well done!
“Shush, I’m trying to hear!”
Fine, then, narrate your own story.
A dialogue comes over the radio.
“Sing it for me!”
“Darkness, darkness, always comes…”
Another burst of static, a POP!, and clear as day, the voice comes through, singing, singing, once quiet but now louder and confident.
“The lamps that lit, the night bells rung…”
Daniel’s enraptured by the voice as a child by a moving picture. He leans forward in his seat subconsciously, in minuscule movements. The words seem to flow through his ears, down his spine and straight to his chest, and he feels...safe. Embraced, almost, as if the man's voice could reach him from the other side of the broadcast and wrap around him like a fog.
It's barely a flash but he remembers an old photograph of his parents, when his dad was still alive, and how instead of laughter or jubilation, they just seemed to be at peace with each other. Like they were meant to be there in that moment and, somehow, they knew it.
He wonders if there are different kinds of warmth for different people. He thinks so.
Now Daniel has gone through this entire thought process in a matter of about two and a half seconds, what with thoughts being much lighter and faster than the average human body. Beyond that he just sits and listens, trying to etch every word into his memory. He’s so focused on the singing that he’s completely tuned out to the world.
“Daniel! DANIEL!”
Grant comes careening down the hall, nearly giving himself whiplash as he skids around the door frame. Very nimble for a man his age! Though not old by any means, you’d think the knee pain or something in the back would be kicking in around now.
“Daniel, we have a huge problem. Someone put a hypnotist on the radio and—Buddy?”
Daniel is lost, head tilted to the side and an unconscious grin across his face. He is not asleep like the others, no.
He is listening.
“You feel it too. It’s not normal. This isn’t just some stage hypnotist. This song.”
Daniel reaches out for the radio. He is not listening. Daniel? Daniel! Someone’s talking to you!
“Isn’t he wonderful?”
What?
“What?
“What do you think he looks like?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I listen to him at home, when I can. One of my neighbors has a radio and they play it really loud late at night when they can. Especially when the show comes on.” Daniel gets a shine in his eyes and he’s somewhere else entirely now. Not in the studio, not in New York, possibly not even on Earth.
“His name is Julian. He lives in Paris with the rest of the show’s cast and he wants to sing on the show. He sings so beautifully, Mr. Cohen. Oh, if you only heard him. He’s been on a few times. His name is Julian. Did you hear him singing, Mr. Cohen?”
It is at this point he turns to look to Grant, still lost wherever he is.
“The first time I heard him, he was so quiet. But I leaned in closer to the window, and I could make out his voice, and I can always pick it out now, in the show. The first time I heard him sing there were fireflies all over the street, and I thought it was so pretty I wanted to put them in a jar with the words to his song, but I can’t remember all his words. I’ve tried so hard.”
Grant doesn’t know how to respond to this. On one hand, normally he’d be delighted to see the lad so passionate about something, and from what little he did hear of the peculiar radio show it was...interesting. But on the other hand...
“Daniel, he’s hypnotised the entire art department and half the music department.”
Daniel snaps out of his trance and his eyes shoot wider than moons.
“What?” His voice is very small.
“His song put a department and a half under a trance.”
Daniel is very quiet for a moment. The shock drips from his face as it morphs into the look one gets when they’re remembering something very specific. What are you remembering, Daniel?
“It’s like putting someone to sleep right? Has anyone tried water?”
And this is how they find themselves freeing their colleagues: firstly, by freeing Wally with three cups of water (two partially missed and one to the face), after which Grant declares,
“We’ll be here until shabbat at this rate.”
followed by Daniel’s brilliant idea of an excessively long garden hose,
“We could slide it in through a window—but wait, then everything would get all wet,”
concluding with Wally’s stellar plan to cover up all the music sheets and instruments with a tarp, then trigger the sprinkler system. The tarp in question turns out to be several coats belonging to the workers, and Grant and Daniel have only just moved all the music sheets underneath them when Wally climbs on a chair like a painting of Napoleon, and lights a match directly underneath the smoke detector.
And the rains come and they pour. Not for forty days, but about forty seconds or so. Which is how Daniel finds himself now in the bathroom with Sammy, who is wringing his hair out like a mop, attempting to help dry the music director with a curiously small hair dryer.
“We kept the instruments dry. And the papers.”
“Yes, thanks.” Sammy grumbles. Yes, everything may be safe, but time is still lost. A day’s work is a day’s work, after all!
“He didn’t mean to do it.”
“Huh?” Sammy pauses in his grooming.
“Julian, the guy on the radio. You can’t hear it in the trance, but at the very end of the broadcast you can hear, he frantically apologises to everyone, trying to get them to wake up. He wasn’t trying to hypnotise anyone. It was an accident.”
Sammy hums and resumes drying his hair.
“He needs to be careful. A lack of control like that is dangerous,” he pauses. “Great violin player though.”
“What? Oh, no, he doesn’t play violin.”
“Viola? Curious. Viola is strictly an accompanying instrument.”
“It’s banjo.”
Sammy loses his balance and smacks his forehead into the mirror.
“He. What.”
“He plays the banjo like it’s a cello.”
“...Well. That’s...certainly something.”
Sammy takes the hairdryer from the gofer so he has something to ground himself to reality. Daniel takes this as his cue to leave. He calls over his shoulder,
“You should hear the singing handsaws!”
Sammy drops the hairdryer, and the chassis shatters on the tiles.
Daniel is awake late into the night. It has been a strange day, and he can’t sleep after a strange day. Either that, or he has a certain someone on his mind.
“Wally could have started a studio fire! I could have lost my job!”
Not what I was talking about, but fair point.
Anyway, Daniel sits at his window staring blankly out at the cityscape. He doesn’t have a clock, but the city is bright, the sky is dark, and below the apartment cars are honking. The city that never sleeps. Daniel looks up to the sky and it’s there that he sees it, hovering just below the windowsill of the upstairs neighbor.
“Fireflies!”
There’s a few of them buzzing about. One in particular hovers very close to the building, doing crop circles in the air before coming to land right on the window ledge next to him. Daniel can’t believe his eyes.
“Wh—hello there!”
His empty stare becomes a delighted toothy grin as the firefly hovers around his head, crawling on the windowsill, flying, crawling, hovering, flying, rinse and repeat. He wishes so desperately with every part of his soul he could capture this sight, this feeling in a bottle, show it to Dot, and send it over the sea to the voice in the Eiffel Tower.
In some stroke of divine inspiration, Daniel remembers the paper in his pocket. He pulls out a crumpled slip, more of a spitball really, and sets to work smoothing it on the window ledge.
It’s one of his unfinished frames. The construction lines were completely off and the composition was too high from the others, so he scrapped it. Where Bendy is supposed to be running, his arms look like he’s reaching for something.
What is he reaching for, Daniel?
He pulls out a pencil and begins to draw.
In the corner he marks out the curves and lines of a firefly.
He gives them the happiest smiles he can imagine. Incidentally, he’s wearing the same one now, looking dazed and rather dopey.
In the white space around them, he begins drafting a letter.