Categories: 🐚=nsfw 🔆=series ⛈️=dark contact ☁️: one shot
DUNE
The deer was tired (P.A) 🐚🔆 synopsis: As a guard for the Atreides family, it's your job to make sure their precious offspring was satisfied. Even if doing so got in the way of your true mission.
ATSV
White House Down (H.B) 🐚☁️ synopsis: You and Hobie fuck after he kills the President of the United States: Norman Osborne.
A little of me a little of you (M.O) 🐚⛈️ synopsis: He said it was a canon event. He was obviously lying.
MARVEL
Fables and Parables 🐚🔆⛈️ synopsis: During a study abroad trip, you accidentally trigger a long-time tradition through a simple word: amen.
I love the idea of everything with better bobby being so intense and almost dreamlike, trippy from the beginning. Like being high (lmao) and fading in and out of a meaningful conversation that youre struggling to focus on as you sink into the couch. Meaning to dust a kiss on what you think is your unusually clingy bf’s cheekbone and between one moment and the next, what started as an innocent cheek kiss has resulted in you sliding against the wall until youre sat on that yellow floor, lap full of him as he essentially tries to stick as much of his tongue as he can down your throat. Hands confusedly going to his shoulders and he’s curled around and over you like a python, nosing your pulse with quick, shivery breaths, hand on our nape, and waist, reeling you to him as he pins you to the wall. Him getting the hint of a kiss and taking that to mean he can finally just.. do what he wants. It’s permission, right? You love him too? You must, you initiated contact. And now he can touch and touch and mouth and smell and nose and be the needy, raw animal crawling under a false skin that wants you so so sosososososososososososoossobad so bad so bad
˳ ˳ BETTER BOBBY SERIES.
Reality itself has a different consistency down here.
Time is soft. The edges blur. The hum does something to your brain you can't explain. There's this ambient frequency in this place and it does to your cognition what warm water does to muscle tension. Loosens it. Softens the borders between one moment and the next. Until everything has this gauzy, slow-motion, underwater quality where you can't quite tell where a thought ends and a feeling begins.
You're lying on the blankets and Better Bobby is beside you and he's been clingy today. Clingier than usual anyway. Which is saying something, because his baseline is already I need to be touching you at all times or I will simply cease to exist.
His head is on your chest and his arm is across your waist, his fingers drawing patterns on your hip through your shirt. You're talking. Having a conversation. A real one. But you can't quite hold the thread.
You keep meaning to finish your sentence but the hum is so warm and his weight is so warm... and his fingers are doing that thing where the warmth-that-reads-you is bleeding through the contact.
Not deliberately, just passively. The way a radiator bleeds heat, and your thoughts keep drifting.
"—and I was trying to tell Clark that the shelving unit was—"
Better Bobby shifts. His nose pushes into the curve of your neck between one blink and next. A slow, animal press. Not a kiss. Just... contact. Scent. You feel him inhale.
"—was, um—the brackets were wrong, and he—"
His mouth opens against your throat. Not a kiss. Just his lips. Parted. Resting there. You can feel his breath on your pulse point. Damp. Quick.
"—he wouldn't listen, he never—"
What were you saying? The sentence is gone. It was right there and now it's dissolving the way everything dissolves down here, like sugar in warm water,.
Better Bobby's fingers have stopped drawing patterns and are just pressing now. Five points of heat on your hip. The hum is in your teeth and behind your eyes and you think—vaguely, dreamily, from too far away—that you should probably finish your thought about Clark's shelving unit.
You turn your head. He's right there. His face inches from yours, those pale eyes half-lidded, watching you with that patient, hungry, endlessly attentive focus.
And you think idly I'll just kiss his cheek. That's all. Just a small thing. A punctuation mark. The kind of casual intimacy you used to have with real Bobby, back when touch was easy, back when you could press your lips to his cheekbone in passing and it meant I'm here and nothing more.
You lean in. Your mouth brushes his cheekbone.
And the world tilts.
Between one heartbeat and the next, between the moment your lips touch his skin and the moment you mean to pull back, there's a shift.
The surroundings stay the same. The change is in him. You feel it through the contact point. Through your mouth on his cheek, a full-body shudder that runs through Better Bobby like a current. His hand moves from your hip to your waist and grips and his head turns, fast, faster than a human head should turn, finding your mouth.
It's not the careful learning kisses from before, when he asked you to teach him how to kiss you properly.
This is... this is the thing that lives underneath Better Bobby.
The thing he keeps leashed and gentle and civilised for you. The thing that unravelled the Smiler in the dark to keep you safe. Except there's no threat now. That intensity is pointed at you.
And it's not trying to hurt you. It's trying to consume you. To crawl inside the kiss and live there. His tongue is in your mouth, his hand settling on the back of your neck and he's pulling you into him with a strength that isn't human. He's not pretending to be right now, and you make a startled sound against his lips and he swallows it. Takes it. Wants more.
You're moving. You don't decide to move. Momentum moves you. He moves you.
Your back hits the wall and you slide down it, the yellow wallpaper rough against your shoulder blades, and then you're on the floor with your legs open and he's in your lap—no.
He's not in your lap. He's around you. Curled over and around you like something serpentine, a thing that doesn't have a skeleton the way humans have skeletons. Better Bobby's body conforms to yours at every point of contact, chest to chest, hip to hip, his thighs bracketing yours, his arms closing around you and it's not an embrace.
It's an enclosure. A perimeter. You're inside Better Bobby the way a heart is inside a chest.
Your hands go to his shoulders. Half pushing, half holding, your fingers digging into muscle that flexes and shifts under his skin in ways that aren't quite anatomically right.
He doesn't notice. Or he doesn't care. His mouth is on yours and then it's not. Then it's on your jaw, your throat, the dip of your neck. And he's not kissing so much as tasting, his lips parted and dragging and his breath coming in these quick, shivery little bursts against your skin.
Fast, animal. The breathing pattern of a creature that's been holding itself back for such a long time and has just now found what it wants.
Because that's what the cheek kiss was. You understand that now, distantly, through the gauze of the hum and the warmth and the overwhelming physicality of him everywhere. Everywhere. Around you and against you, his palm on your nape angling your head back so he can get at the full length of your throat.
The cheek kiss was permission. You touched him. You initiated. And in whatever language Better Bobby's instincts operate in, that translated to: yes. Yes, you can. Yes, I want you to. Go.
And he went.
His nose pushes into the soft space behind your ear. He inhales (deep, shaking, greedy) and makes a sound that comes from below his chest, below his lungs, from whatever furnace drives the entity underneath the skin.
The sound isn't pleasure exactly, it's relief.
The relief of a thing that's been starving and just got its mouth on something warm and tender. He noses down the tendon of your throat to your collarbone and mouths at it. Open and wet and artless.
No technique, no finesse, just contact. As much contact as he can get, and his hips press into yours and his hand on your waist hauls you closer, closer, like the laws of physics are personally inconveniencing him by not allowing you to occupy the same space.
"Bobby—Bobby, slow—"
He makes a sound against your clavicle. Not a word. A vibration. A negation. No. No slow. Had slow. Done with slow. Slow was when I was being careful and now you've kissed me and I don't have to be careful. I need—I need—I need—
God, his hands.
They're everywhere at once.
Your waist, your ribs, your hips, the back of your neck, sliding under the hem of your shirt and pressing flat against the bare skin of your lower back.
Warmth hits you like a drug, a wave, and your head drops back against the wall with a quiet moan and the yellow ceiling swims above you. Better Bobby is nosing up the front of your throat with those quick shallow breaths, scenting you, learning you, his lips catching on your skin with every exhale.
He's not performing.
That's the thing that breaks through the haze. The one clear thought that surfaces through the gauze of strange pleasure: he's not performing.
The gentle Better Bobby, the careful one, the one who plays with your hair and says I've got you, baby. That Bobby is a construction. A deliberate presentation.
The thing that's pressed against you right now, shaking, sucking at your pulse, making that raw sub-vocal sound that vibrates in your ribs—this is what's underneath.
This is the animal under the false skin he's stolen. This is what heard your voice through a wall and wanted and has been wanting every second since. Through every gentle hair-stroke, every patient conversation and every careful, calibrated touch.
He wanted like this. The whole time. This raw, this desperate, this artless, graceless, trembling need that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a creature that has been alone in the yellow for longer than human loneliness has a name for and has finally, finally found something warm and alive willing to stay.
The wanting is so big it doesn't fit inside the Bobby-shape. It's leaking out. Through his hands and his mouth. Through the harmonic that's gone ragged and unsteady, the hum destabilised by something it wasn't designed to contain.
He pulls back. Just enough to look at you. His eyes are fully black. No pretence now. No Bobby-blueveneer. Just the entity, vast and ancient and desperate. Looking out of a stolen face at the only person it has ever wanted.
"You kissed me," he says. His voice is wrecked. That deep register, broken open, cracking through the cockiness like light through a fracture. "You—you kissed me."
"I kissed your cheek—"
"You kissed me."
Like the distinction doesn't exist. Like any contact, any voluntary touch, any moment where your mouth chose to be on his skin is the same thing. Total. Binary. You touched him or you didn't and you did and that means—
"You want me," he exhales.
He doesn't phrase it like a question. It's a revelation.
His hands are cradling your face now, both hands, his thumbs on your cheekbones, and he's looking at you with those black eyes and the expression on his face is... it's too much.
Too many things at once. Wonder, hunger, tenderness and that dark, possessive satisfaction and underneath all of it, at the very bottom, something so painfully vulnerable it doesn't belong on the face of something this powerful.
Hope.
The ancient thing in the walls is looking at you with hope.
"You want me," he says again. Quieter now. Testing the words. Feeling them in his mouth. "You—not him. Me. You reached for me."
And what are you supposed to say to that?
What are you supposed to say to a creature that has worn loneliness like a second skin for longer than your entire species has existed, that heard you through concrete and plaster and chose to build itself a body just to be close to you? That has been patient, gentle and careful for weeks because it was terrified of scaring you away and has just felt your lips on its cheek and interpreted that as the end of a famine?
You look at him. At the black eyes and the silver earring and the chain and the scar. At the trembling. The hunger.
You put your hand on the back of his neck and pull him in.
He tips towards you. Like gravity.
His mouth is on yours and the sound he makes is not a moan, it's not a growl, it's that entity-harmonic blown wide open. A resonant chord that fills the hallway and the walls. The hum itself. And he's kissing you, shaking, and his hands are everywhere and nowhere.
He's trying to be gentle and failing, trying and failing and giving up and just... taking. Mouth and hands. That impossible warmth flooding through every point of contact and the yellow walls humming around you.
His body curls around you like something that will never, never, never let you go.
YOUR 'BETTER BOBBY' FIC WAS SO GOOD! if you ever felt inspired would LOVE to read more about them. maybe another entity attacks them and they get separated? and alone and lost, reader can't help but miss the real Bobby ahhh. anyway, love you, thank you for writing!
I'm so glad you're all loving this idea, because inspiration hit me so hard I wrote this in one sitting. Continuation to this. Def let me know if you wanna see more 👀
warnings: horror (finally got to write my true love), and some gore (nothing explicit/implied)
series masterlist.
You've been here long enough that you've stopped counting the hallways.
That, in hindsight, should probably scare you the most. The fact that it doesn't scare you anymore.
The yellow used to make your skin crawl, that specific shade of institutional sick. Now it's just... the colour of home. Better Bobby's taught you that. Through sheer repetition of safety.
Every time he pulls you into a new room and checks the corners before letting you sit down. Every time he angles his body between you and a doorway without thinking about it. Or when he hands you something to eat. You've stopped asking where the food comes from. That's another question that goes in circles every time you try it. He watches you until you take a bite, satisfied, like feeding you is the only task on a list he takes very seriously.
You have a room now. Your room. He found it for you three (days? rotations? sleeps?) ago, deeper in Level 0 than you'd been before, tucked behind a series of turns that he walked so confidently you wondered if he'd planned the route in advance.
It's quieter than the others. The carpet is thicker, the hum lower, and there's a warm patch on the floor near the far wall where some buried pipe must be running. Better Bobby dragged every blanket he'd scavenged into a pile on that warm spot and when you'd looked at him he'd shrugged, one shoulder, earring catching the fluorescent light.
"What? You get cold."
Real Bobby used to steal the covers.
You try not to make the comparison. You try so hard. But Better Bobby makes it impossible because he's everything real Bobby was on your best days. Distilled and concentrated, with all the carelessness burned off.
He touches you constantly. Not sexually, just contact. His hand on the back of your neck when you walk. His chin on your shoulder when you're sitting together. His fingers finding yours in the dark when the lights flicker, which they do sometimes. And in those brief, stuttering seconds of blackness you can hear things moving in the walls and Better Bobby's grip tightens. He says I'm here like it's a fact of physics. Like his presence beside you is as fundamental and non-negotiable as gravity.
It's a Thursday, you think, or what you've decided is Thursday—you've started naming the days by feeling, which probably means you're losing it—when everything goes wrong.
You're walking. Better Bobby's slightly ahead of you, one hand trailing the wall, talking about something. He talks to you the way real Bobby used to, a constant low-level narration.
Except Better Bobby's commentary is about the architecture of this place, which hallways are safe, which ones echo differently than they should. The way the carpet changes texture near certain thresholds you should know about. You're half-listening, comfortable in the drone of his familiar voice, when he stops abruptly.
You almost walk into his back.
"Bobby?"
He doesn't answer. His head tilts slightly, the way a dog would listen toa distant sound. His whole body goes rigid in a way you've never seen before. Better Bobby doesn't tense up. Better Bobby is languid and easy and always, always calm.
"Bobby, what—"
"Don't move."
His voice is different. Stripped of the warmth, the lazy drawl, all the honeyed softness he pours over you. What's left is flat and hard. Something in your hindbrain fires that hasn't fired since you got here because Better Bobby has kept you so safe that you forgot what fear tasted like.
You taste it now. Bright and metallic at the back of your throat.
The lights flicker abovehead. Not the usual gentle stutter or dimming it does at random intervals. This is violent, a seizure of light, and in the strobe of it you spot something at the end of the hallway.
You can't process it. Your brain tries and slides off the shape the way water slides off wax. It's too tall, and wrong. So wrong. It takes up too much space for its size, like it's pressing against the dimensions of the hallway from the inside, and it's looking at you with something that isn't a face.
Better Bobby shoves you behind him. Both hands this time. Hard.
"Go."
"I'm not leaving you—"
"Go. Left, left, straight, third door. I'll find you." He looks over his shoulder at you and his eyes are dark and flat. Ancient in a way that makes your stomach drop because for just a second—just a flicker, shorter than the lights—the thing looking out from behind Bobby's face isn't Bobby, either. "Baby. Run."
You run.
Left, left, straight, except there's no third door. There's no door at all.
The hallway stretches and bends and the carpet under your feet changes from rough to damp to something that feels horribly organic so abruptly you almost skid. You're running and the fluorescent yellow is shifting with you, deepening in increments, and the walls are getting narrower.
The ceiling goes lower suddenly and you realise, with a lurch of animal terror, that you're not on Level 0 anymore.
You don't know when it changed. There was no door, no threshold, no moment. The hallways just... became somewhere else. Like you walked through an edit. A jump cut in reality.
You stagger to a stop. Your breathing is so loud it fills the quiet corridor.
It's dark here. Not quite pitch black, mercifully. There's light, but it's coming from somewhere wrong. Faintly blue, sourceless, the colour of television static.
The walls aren't yellow anymore. They're concrete instead. Industrial. Stained with something you refuse to look at closely. The ceiling is a mess of exposed pipes and dead wiring, and water (you hope desperately it's water) drips in a strange pattern that sets your teeth on edge
It's cold here. You're shaking, you realise a moment too late.
You press your back against the concrete wall and slide down to the floor, pulling your knees to your chest and try to make yourself small. Try to make yourself invisible. Because Better Bobby isn't here and without him you're nothing in this place.
Just soft, warm, alive thing in a place that is none of those things.
That's when you see it. From the corner of your eye.
It assembles itself in pieces in the dark, the way a photograph develops, the way something reveals itself to you only once it's already too close.
Teeth first.
A grin. Too wide and white, wrong, hanging in the blue-black dark about thirty feet down the corridor. Human teeth in a human smile except there are too many of them and the smile is too wide. It's not attached to anything you can see, either. Just the grin, suspended, luminous. The way a Cheshire cat would look if the Cheshire cat wanted to kill you.
It doesn't move. You don't breathe.
Then it's twenty feet away.
You didn't see it move. You didn't blink. Not once. It was thirty feet and now it's twenty and the grin hasn't changed, not even slightly. The same frozen rictus of delight, and you understand with a sick, cold certainty that it's not walking toward you. It's just... closer. Like the distance between you is a thing it can edit. A number it can change at will.
Fifteen feet. The grin widens. You didn't think it could widen.
You can see more of it now, or rather you can see the shape of more of it. The suggestion of a body behind the smile, darker than the dark around it, a silhouette that doesn't quite hold its edges. And the sound. There's a sound now, low and wet, like someone trying to laugh through a mouthful of something thick. A gurgling, hitching, delighted sound.
It's happy to see you. Whatever this thing is, it's so, so happy that you're here.
Ten feet. You can feel the cold coming off it. Not temperature, exactly, something else. An absence. A pulling. Like it's drawing the warmth out of the air between you one degree at a time and feeding the grin with it.
You open your mouth to scream and nothing comes out.
"Close your eyes."
The voice comes from directly behind you.
You didn't hear him arrive. You didn't hear footsteps or breathing or the rustle of fabric. He's just there, the way he's always just there. His hand closes over your eyes from behind, firm, warm, his palm flush against your face, fingers curving over your brow.
"Close them. Keep them closed. Don't open them until I tell you to."
Better Bobby's voice is calm. Completely, impossibly calm. The same tone he uses when he's telling you to go back to sleep after the lights flicker. But underneath it—deep underneath, in a register you feel more than hear—there's something else now. An edge that doesn't sound like Bobby at all.
His hand lifts off your eyes. You keep them shut. You squeeze them so tight you see colours behind your lids. Bright, bursting phosphenes, and you press your face into your knees and you hear him move away from you. Toward it.
Then the sounds start.
You can't categorise them. You won't.
There's a tearing sound. Not fabric, or paper; something denser, wetter, something with resistance. A sound like a dog shaking water from its fur except heavier and it ends in a crack that reverberates through the concrete floor and up through your spine.
The gurgling laughter changes pitch. Goes higher. Then higher still. Then it's not laughter anymore, it's something between a shriek and a frequency. A sound that vibrates in the roots of your teeth, and underneath all of it is a low rumbling that you realise is coming from Better Bobby. A sound no human throat should make, a sound like tectonic plates grinding in the dark.
There's a splash. Something hisses, like water on a hot pan. The shrieking cuts out—not fades, cuts, abruptly, like someone hit a switch—and then there's a long, wet, dragging sound that moves away from you down the corridor and fades into the pipes and the dark.
Silence.
There's a ringing in your ears. Your fingers feel numb, heavy. You're biting the inside of your cheek so hard you can taste blood in your mouth.
Footsteps. Normal ones. The soft pad of sneakers on concrete.
"Okay, baby. You can open your eyes now."
You do. Better Bobby is standing in front of you, looking down at you with that soft, tilted expression. Same white tee. Same denim shorts. Trusty camera over his shoulder. Not a drop of anything on him. Not a wrinkle. His hair isn't even mussed any more than usual. His earring catches the faint blue light and throws a tiny star onto the concrete wall and he's smiling at you, gently, like you just had a bad dream and he's here to tell you it's morning.
There's nothing in the hallway behind him. Nothing on the floor. No sign that anything was ever there at all, except a faint smell. Ozone, copper and deeper beneath that, an almost rotten stench. You try to examine it but it's already fading.
You don't ask. You can't ask.
Your body moves before your brain does. You launch yourself off the floor and into him so hard he actually rocks back a step. Better Bobby, who's never been moved by anything in your presence, who stands in front of horrors like a wall moves this time. Your arms lock around his neck and you bury your face in his chest.
You're shaking. So violently that it's almost convulsive, these full-body tremors that you can't control, and the sound coming out of you isn't crying exactly. It's more animal than that, a high keening thing that you'd be embarrassed about if you had any room left for embarrassment but you don't, you used it all up being terrified.
Better Bobby catches you. He doesn't stumble again. His arms come around you and they're solid and warm. He holds you so tight that the shaking has nowhere to go, like he's absorbing it into himself, and one hand cradles the back of your head, pressing your ear against his chest. His heartbeat is steady, steady, so steady, and how is he so steady, how is he always so steady—
"Shhh. I got you. I'm here. It's gone."
You can't stop. You're gripping his shirt in both fists, knuckles blanching, and you're gasping against his collarbone and he just...
He holds you. Doesn't rush it. Or tell you you're okay or that it wasn't that bad or any of the things real Bobby would say in later months to make you feel silly for being scared. He just holds on and rocks you, the smallest movement, his cheek resting on top of your head.
Your voice comes out cracked and ruined. "What—what was that, what did you— how did you—"
He hums gently. "Don't worry about it."
"Bobby, that thing, it was—its face, it was smiling, it was—"
"I know." He pulls back just enough to look at you. Tips your chin up with his knuckle. That lazy smile, easy and warm and so perfectly Bobby it makes your chest splinter. "I know what it was. It's gone now. Don't worry about it."
"How did you get rid of it?" you rasp.
His thumb strokes your jawline. "Does it matter?"
"Yes."
He looks at you. For a moment something flickers behind his eyes. Something vast and patient and very, very old. Then it's gone, and he's just Bobby again, warm-eyed and soft-mouthed, tucking your hair behind your ear.
"I told you, baby. Nothing gets past me." He kisses your forehead. Slow. Gentle. His lips are warm and the concrete corridor is freezing around you. You lean into him like he's the last source of heat in the world. "Come on. Let's go home."
He takes your hand.
You let him lead you.
He leads you back through the concrete and the pipes and the blue-dark, his thumb rubbing circles on your knuckles, and you don't look behind you.
Not even once. Because whatever he did in that corridor is something you have decided you don't need to see the aftermath of, and also because some part of you—the part that still thinks clearly, the part that Better Bobby hasn't quite reached yet—understands that there is no aftermath.
That whatever Better Bobby does to the things in the dark, he does it completely. He doesn't leave evidence. He doesn't leave remains. He unmakes them, and he does it wearing Bobby's crooked smile, Bobby's silver earring and Bobby's cut-off shorts like a costume. Like a skin, like a love letter written in someone else's handwriting.
The concrete gives way to carpet. Just as abruptly. The blue darkens to yellow again. The cold lifts. The hum returns, and for the first time ever you're grateful for it. The way you'd be grateful for the sound of traffic outside your apartment window because it means you're back in the world, or at least, back in the only world you have left.
Your room. The warm patch. The blankets.
Better Bobby guides you down, wrapping the blankets snug around you. He tucks himself behind you and you press back into his chest, his arm winding around your waist. You're still shaking faintly, these little aftershock tremors, and he absorbs every single one.
"Sleep, baby. I'm right here."
And you close your eyes and you think about real Bobby.
You think about the apartment in Santa Clara. The kitchen counter where he used to roll joints with the window open because you didn't like the smell building up inside. The way his camera equipment colonised every flat surface, cables and lenses and that one light diffuser he was so particular about. You used to complain it and he used to say babe, genius needs room to breathe and you'd throw a dish towel at his head while smothering a grin.
You think about the night you fell in love with him. Not the day you realised it (you'd known for a while by then) but the night it actually happened.
You sitting on the hood of his car in a parking lot off El Camino Real, sharing a joint, and he'd turned to you with the camera for once not in his hands and said, so disarmingly, you're the most wonderful girl I've ever met, and his face looked stripped of its usual cockiness. Bare. Scared. Young.
He was so young. You both were.
You wonder if he's sitting in that apartment right now with the TV on and the lights off, not really watching, just existing in the space you used to fill.
You wonder if he's looked at your toothbrush in the holder next to his. If he's opened the fridge and seen the leftovers you made two nights before you vanished (was it two nights? you're losing track of the real timeline, it's blurring at the edges, and that scares you more than the grin in the dark) and whether he ate them or whether they're still sitting there. Slowly going bad, a small decomposition that mirrors something larger in your life.
You wonder if he's picked up his pager. Scrolled to your name. Stared at it.
You wonder if his thumb hovered over the button the way it used to hover over the shutter release—that perfect hesitation, that half-second of do I or don't I—and whether he pressed it or whether he set the pager down and rolled over. Told himself he'd deal with it tomorrow the way he's been telling himself he'd deal with you tomorrow for months now.
You wonder if somewhere under the indifference and the exhaustion and the slow-growing cruelty there is still a version of Bobby who filmed you sleeping because the light was good. Who cut a Metallica shirt into a crop top with kitchen scissors and held it up like a trophy. Who said hold still, the light's doing something crazy on you and meant I love you, you're beautiful and couldn't say it any other way.
You wonder if that Bobby still misses you.
You wonder if he'd ever come looking.
Better Bobby pulls you closer. His mouth finds the spot behind your ear. The one real Bobby discovered during your second date together. The one that makes everything go quiet inside your skull.
"You're thinking again," he murmurs.
"I know."
"About him."
You don't answer. You don't have to.
Better Bobby is quiet for a long time. His breathing is slow and even against your back. The lights hum their tuneless hymn in your ears. Somewhere deep in the walls, something moves again, and you tense at the scraping sound.
Better Bobby's arm tightens around you. A reflex, instant, protective, the one thing about him that never feels performed.
"He's not coming, baby," he says softly. He doesn't say it meanly this time, either. Not triumphant. More so sad. Almost like he wishes it weren't true, for your sake. Because even this thing that wears Bobby's face and unmakes grinning horrors in the dark doesn't want to watch you grieve. "You know that."
Later, as an adult, he would wonder if he had invented this nurse, if he had conjured her out of desperation, a simulacrum of kindness that was almost as good as the real thing. He would argue with himself: If she had existed, truly existed, wouldn’t she have told someone about him? Wouldn’t someone have been sent to help him? But his memories from this period were something slightly blur-edged and unreliable, and as the years went by, he was to come to realize that he was, always, trying to make his life, his childhood, into something more acceptable, something more normal. He would startle himself from a dream about the counselors, and would try to comfort himself: There were only two of them who used you, he would tell himself. Maybe three. The others didn’t. They weren’t all cruel to you. And then he would try, for days, to remember how many there had actually been: Was it two? Or was it three? For years, he couldn’t understand why this was so important to him, why it mattered to him so much, why he was always trying to argue against his own memories, to spend so much time debating the details of what had happened. And then he realized that it was because he thought that if he could convince himself that it was less awful than he remembered, then he could also convince himself that he was less damaged, that he was closer to healthy, than he feared he was.
i love Sophie please don’t misunderstand me but she was in just one episode plus the phone call at Shane’s parents’ house I just feel like Ksenia was so dynamic and moved through so many moments so well i know it was all in Russian idk if that made a difference but I’m kind of sad she didn’t win
i like your platonic friendship do you mind if i view it through a lens that might support a homosexual reading of your relationship? you don't need to change anything and this doesn't belittle or undermine or ignore your real feelings for each other. i just think it would be cool if you fucked
picture this it’s shane’s first time in a centaurs locker room pregame. captain ilya is giving his pregame pep talk in typical rozanov fashion. shane is discovering something about himself in real time watching ilya yelling and getting up in the guys faces making them nod in agreement to his words. ilya gets to shane as he’s rambling on about “i want to fucking win!” and then is like “you get that, hollander?” and shane is nodding slow and dazed and a “yes, sir” comes out without thought and then ilya and shane are staring at each other in complete silence for a long second heavy breathing before someone clears their throat and ilya snaps out of it and goes back to his hype speech.
at home afterwards, they go to their bedroom and they just stare at each other in the entry way because the sexual tension has been doing all fucking night and shane drops a breathy “what now, captain?” and Ilya just leaps at him and fucks him so possessively and with so much force Shane has finger print bruises and can feel it for days after
sometimes u go to a ship’s ao3 page and the top 10 fics are like “what if these guys were 2 completely different guys but had the same actors’ faces and character names”
I saw a post about Shane and Ilya being sad that they can't thank each other in their acceptance speeches like other can with their spouses and it got me thinking:
Ilya wins his first awards and hes got nobody he really wants to thank after his team and coach cause he he hates his family but he knows his speech is too short so on impulse he goes "And I want to thank Shane Hollander for being slightly worse than me this season". Everyone knows it was going to one of those two, so everyone thinks hes an asshole to say that but whats new so it works for him. But from then on it then becomes a bit for both of them to thank each other in their speeches in a snide way as a reason they won.
Shane winning the Art Ross Trophy (Awarded to the player who leads the league in total points at the end of the regular season). and going "special thanks to Rozanov for missing at least 5 shots this season, he was a huge help"
Ilya winning the Conn Smythe Trophy (Awarded to the most valuable player for his team in the playoffs.) "Just want to give a quick shout out to Hollander for getting knocked out in the second round this season. Must hate to see me up here."
They find a way to mention the other in their speeches every time all the time.
SOMEBODY needs to write something about how ilya’s villainy is a love language. you wanna be a god? you wanna be a hero? well you’re going to need a villain to do that. the dirtier i play, the more violent i get, i lay those at your feet. i want you to hear how much i love you when the crowd screams that they hate me. you wanna be the good guy baby, you’re gonna need a heel.
i don't care if i sound like a complainer or im beating a dead horse, but all the promotion that tvl is getting—the magazines and episode-breakdown couch convo/podcasts and in-universe commercials and live concerts and tons of alternate previews and fucking fashion designer collaborations—compared to the next to nothing that the previous two black and brown-led seasons got really feels purposeful. like amc got their audience built off of their diverse cast, and now they're shifting to a whiter brand, perhaps what they'd wanted to do all along, and are doing their best to advertise that as much as possible.
I might be a bit too optimistic and maybe naive in trusting the showrunners but could all this promo be meta? I keep thinking about Daniel in the first teaser saying that people care more about the white guy. And then Sam saying something recently about the oversaturation of his image. Just a thought but I feel like all of it is a bit too on the nose.
when i encounter some sort of ironic metatextual thing/commentary, i always ask myself: is there material difference between endorsement and criticism in this case? or in other words, what exactly this meta thing is trying to achieve and is this artistic decision more important than material consequences? because if the end result is the same, i don't think it matters if this was an ironic "meta" thing or simply a bad (racist/misogynistic/homophobic etc) decision.
the marketing could be meta. or it could be not meta. the end result is the same: actors of color do not get recognition and attention on the same level the main white actor does. s1&2 did everything to boost sam reid's presence in the show and marketing, even when lestat barely had any reason to be in the narrative. s3 marketing does everything to downplay the importance of jacob, assad and delainey and there are very clear negative consequences to it.
if amc respected bipoc, it'd find a way to keep their presence in the marketing without hurting any kind of "meta" vision of it. they could put up ominous clips of ghost or hallucination of claudia lurking behind lestat or haunting louis. they could make more silly in-character interviews like they did with "documentary outtakes". they still could show more of louis and armand in the official trailer. they simply could talk more about the first two seasons and encourage people to watch it instead of downplaying any connection between iwtv and tvl.
as it is now, the actors of color who carried this show do not get nearly as much exposure, attention from the news outlets, public and industry professionals. they're all actors, it’s how they get new interesting big roles and recognition for their work. do you see the problem here? no matter the intention, the material result still sucks ass. in fact, i believe many networks has started covering their asses with "meta" excuses and that's why i no longer fall for them.
