strawberries in the rain

gerald :D

[geraldsmochi]

About

hi!!!

you can call me rose :] she/her

18+

i kinda just reblog stuff i like and talk abt random stuff 😻🙌

i love kpop and my ult is niki 😋😋

other interests are:

obey me

twst

mcu

dc

stranger things

steven universe

Harry Potter

lit rally can’t think of anything else

however i will edit this when i do

that it for now <3

[qamar2026]

I write these words with a broken heart. To those who read this and choose to ignore it, you can simply scroll past, but I am living through the most difficult moments of my life. My husband is slowly dying before my eyes. Due to a severe head and jaw injury, he has been unable to eat or drink for over a week, his weight has dropped to just 39 kilograms, and he is suffering from severe, life-threatening malnutrition.

[qamar2026]

The doctors confirmed he needs urgent surgery, but we can't afford the operation and treatment. I feel helpless watching him weaken day by day, while time is running out.💔

chuffed - Vetted#53

[qamar2026]

I'm not asking for the impossible; I'm simply asking for a chance to save his life. Please, if you can't donate, don't hesitate to share our story. It might reach someone who can give him a new lease on life.💔🙏

[asirentail]

Gonna say something that might bite my ass in hindsight but

Sometimes I wish (some) people would understand that Erik is one dude making all this.

One guy making the audios.

One guy editing the audios.

One guy posting the audios on not one but two platforms and keep up with everything on both platforms.

And one guy trying to keep everything sorted, plus the timeline/quiz/merch website.

Not including his own personal life because bro has a job, has a husband, has a house and all that to keep up with too, and now the stuff with his family, and his own medical stuff.

That guy has a lot on his plate.

Give him the fucking time and space, for fucks sake.

[satolune]

─── 𑣲⋆ TWENTY WAYS to make a nerd yours ⊹ ࣪ ˖

୧ ‧₊˚ a guide to making 𝓖.𝐒𝐀𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐔 yours ♡

꒰ 𓏲๋࣭࣪˖🌷.ᐟ Satoru Gojo is the loudest, prettiest boy on campus — and secretly the biggest nerd you've ever met. You make a list of twenty ways to make him yours. It works better than expected. ꒱

ᘛ ꒰ satoru gojo x reader | university au | fluff, crack-ish, mutual pining, 3.4k wc. no real warning, this is pure fluff. art by @/to00fu dividers by @uzmacchiato and @pixopix ྀིა

Gojo Satoru did not look like a nerd. That was the first thing you had to get past.

He was six-foot-three, white hair that looked like he'd bleached it out of spite, and a jawline that made underclassmen forget how to walk in straight lines. So the first time you sat next to him in Intro to Theoretical Physics and watched him correct the TA's derivation on the whiteboard— politely, cheerfully, in a way that made the TA visibly reconsider their choice of career— you assumed it was a fluke. A pretty boy who got lucky on one problem set.

It was not a fluke. It happened every single week.

By week four you knew: underneath the sunglasses he wore indoors "for the bit," underneath the easy charm and the way he called everyone "sweetheart" like it cost him nothing, Gojo was the single biggest nerd you had ever met in your life. He annotated his textbooks in four colors. He had a ranked opinion on which university library floor had the best "ambient silence." He once spent twenty minutes explaining the Fermi paradox to a girl at a party who had asked him, literally, where the bathroom was.

And somehow, against every instinct you had about self-preservation, you'd fallen for him anyway.

The problem was that Gojo Satoru was completely, catastrophically oblivious to the fact that you liked him. Not because he was dumb— the man had a 4.0 and could recite pi to sixty digits when he was nervous— but because emotional self-awareness was, apparently, the one subject he'd never taken.

So you did what any reasonable person would do. You made a list.

Not a real list, not at first— just something you texted your roommate at 1 a.m. after he'd walked you back to your dorm and then said "anyway, goodnight, study buddy!" like a golden retriever who'd just learned the word "goodnight." But it grew. Item by item, week by week, you built yourself a plan. A syllabus, if you wanted to be annoying about it. A plan for how to make a nerd— your nerd, if you had anything to say about it– fall for you back.

Here's what the list looked like, three weeks later, mostly executed and slightly out of order:

1. Ask him to explain something you already understand

Not because you need it explained. Because Gojo lights up like a Christmas tree the second someone asks him a real question, and there is nothing in this world cuter than a six-foot-three man drawing a diagram of quantum entanglement on a napkin at 9 p.m. because you asked "wait, but how does that actually work?" He'll talk for eleven minutes straight. You will not understand half of it. You will not care.

2. Bring him coffee exactly the way he takes it, without asking.

Oat milk, two sugars, and— this is important— he needs it slightly too hot, because he likes complaining that it burned his tongue and then drinking it anyway. The first time you showed up to your study session with his order memorized, he stared at the cup for a solid five seconds like you'd handed him a diamond instead of a four-dollar latte.

"You remembered," he said, and for once he didn't sound like he was performing anything.

"It's not that hard, Satoru."

"No," he agreed, still staring at the cup. "I guess it's not."

3. Steal his hoodie and never give it back.

This one is less a strategy and more just theft, but the effect is the same. You took it during a group project when the library air conditioning decided finals week was a personal vendetta, and you simply forgot to return it. He noticed. He did not ask for it back. He instead started "accidentally" leaving other sweaters at your dorm, like he was building a small collection of hostages in reverse.

4. Beat him at something. Anything.

Gojo has never lost gracefully in his life. He is aggressively, hilariously competitive about things that do not matter, like Mario Kart, or who can name more moons of Saturn, or whose flashcards are better organized. Beat him once— just once— and watch a switch flip behind his eyes. He will demand a rematch. He will demand several rematches. He will, three rematches later, forget that he is supposed to be trying to win and just start trying to make you laugh instead.

5. Notice the thing he's insecure about, and don't make a big deal of it.

Underneath the confidence, Gojo has Opinions about his own eyes— the pale blue, the way people stare, the way strangers sometimes ask invasive questions like he's a museum exhibit. You noticed early that the sunglasses weren't entirely a bit. So you never once commented on his eyes unless it was in passing, the same way you'd mention someone's nice handwriting. Ordinary. Unremarkable. Just a fact about him, not a headline.

He clocked that you'd clocked it. He didn't say anything. But he started taking the glasses off around you more.

6. Let him info-dump. Then remember what he said.

Two weeks after the Fermi paradox incident, you asked him— out of nowhere, mid-lecture— "okay but statistically, if the paradox holds, doesn't that actually support the idea that we're early, not alone?" He turned to look at you like you'd grown a second head. A good second head.

"You remembered that?"

"You explained it for twenty minutes to a stranger looking for the bathroom. Of course I remembered."

7. Make him carry something heavy for you.

Not because you need the help. Because there is a specific, devastating satisfaction in watching Gojo Satoru— who could probably bench-press the entire physics department— insist on carrying your grocery bags, your laundry basket, your six textbooks, all at once, while pretending it's nothing, while very obviously flexing about it.

8. Show up to his study group uninvited and stay anyway.

He runs a Tuesday night study group that is, allegedly, "for anyone who wants to come," but somehow the same three terrified freshmen show up every week and leave within the hour because Gojo cannot resist turning every session into a TED talk. You started showing up too. You did not leave within the hour. By the third week, he'd started saving you a seat next to him without being asked— the one by the outlet, because he'd noticed your laptop charger was fraying.

9. Text him something dumb at 2 a.m. and let him overthink his reply.

You know this one works because your roommate is somehow also friends with his roommate, and the intel came back within the hour: Gojo spent eleven minutes composing a response to your "ok but if a vending machine gains sentience is it a philosophical zombie or just annoying" text. Eleven minutes. For a joke. He sent back four different drafts before landing on one, and it was still unhinged.

10. Compliment his handwriting, not his face

He gets told he's hot approximately nine times a day, by everyone, including strangers on the bus. It means nothing to him anymore— it's just weather. But tell him his lecture notes are genuinely, freakishly beautiful— every equation boxed, every margin annotated in four colors like he's illuminating a medieval manuscript— and watch him go quiet in a way he never does when someone calls him pretty.

11. Let him see you fail at something.

Gojo doesn't actually want a girl who has it together 100% of the time— he wants someone real, though it took you a while to realize that. The night you completely bombed a presentation and cried a little in the stairwell after, he didn't try to fix it or hype you up with empty noise. He just sat down on the concrete step next to you in his very expensive jeans and said, "okay, worst professor you've ever had, go," and let you complain until you'd laughed the tears away.

12. Ask about his family. Actually listen.

He deflects hard whenever anyone brings up the Gojo name, the money, the expectations. Most people either fawn over it or pretend it doesn't exist. You did neither— you just asked, once, gently, "is it heavy? Carrying all that?" and let the silence sit instead of filling it. He didn't answer for a full minute. Then he told you more than he'd told anyone all semester. He told you about his twin.

13. Give him a nickname that isn't about how he looks.

Everyone calls him "Six Eyes" as some ironic school-wide joke about how much he supposedly sees. You started calling him "Professor" instead, low and teasing, every time he got insufferable about a fact nobody asked for. He complained about it constantly. He also, notably, never asked you to stop.

14. Show up to his dumb extracurricular thing

He's in the university's astronomy club, which meets on the roof of the science building at ungodly hours to look at things you cannot see because of light pollution. You went once, mostly out of curiosity, and ended up going every month after, wrapped in his stolen hoodie (see: item 3), while he pointed at smudges in the sky and insisted, with total conviction, that one of them was definitely Saturn.

"That's a plane, Satoru."

"It's Saturn, and I won't be taking questions."

15. Get jealous. Badly. On purpose.

You are not proud of this one, but it worked, so it's staying on the list. A guy from your seminar started sitting suspiciously close to you during group work, and Gojo— usually the most chill, unbothered person alive— suddenly developed a burning need to sit in on your seminar "for fun." He is not enrolled in your seminar. He does not need to be there. He was there anyway, arms crossed, radiating an aura your professor mistook for academic passion.

16. Take care of him when he forgets to take care of himself.

For someone so smart, Gojo is disastrous at remembering to eat during midterms. You started leaving snacks in his backpack without telling him— protein bars, the specific brand of gum he chews when he's anxious, a note sometimes. He never mentioned it directly. He just started leaving you snacks back, an unspoken little economy of care neither of you would put a name to yet.

17. Let him walk you home even when you don't need it.

It's fifteen minutes out of his way. He does it every time anyway, sunglasses off, hands in his pockets, talking the entire walk about nothing and everything, and you've started timing your goodnights to be a little longer than they need to be.

18. Catch him staring, and don't look away first.

It happened in the library, over a stack of shared notes— you looked up and he was already looking, not at your notes, at you, and for once in his entire dramatic life he didn't have a single word ready. You didn't look away. Neither did he. Somebody's highlighter rolled off the table and neither of you moved to catch it.

19. Tell him, out loud, that you like the nerd version of him best.

Not the flirt. Not the golden retriever performing for a crowd. The version that gets quiet and intense over a whiteboard, that memorizes the digits of pi when he's anxious, that lit up over a napkin diagram because someone finally asked him a real question. You told him this on the roof, under his fake Saturn, and he went so still you thought you'd broken him.

20. Kiss him first.

Because he will never, ever make the first move— not out of fear, but because some small, stupid, sincere part of him doesn't believe someone like you would actually want someone like him, underneath all the noise. So you have to be the one. You kiss him on the roof, hoodie sleeves pulled over your hands, his ridiculous fake constellation still glowing faintly behind him, and he makes a sound against your mouth like every ounce of composure he's ever performed just short-circuited at once.

When you pull back he's staring at you the way he stares at a problem he's finally solved— stunned, delighted, a little smug that he got there at all.

"Say something smart, Professor," you tell him, breathless.

"Give me a second," he says. "You broke my working memory."

[shymagnolia]

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

[shymagnolia]

okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post

[flagellant]

…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment

likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post

[coffee-or-hot-cocoa]

i need all the help i can get for finals

[finnglas]

Hey so

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

This might be the real one, y’all.

[avhira]

I could use some luck

[the-darklings]

𓈒 ˳ ˳ 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐁𝐎𝐁𝐁𝐘 𓈒 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓 6.

pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby(bb) wc: 16.3k 🚬 contents/warnings: emotional manipulation, emotional neglect in a past relationship, internalised self-blame, discussions of infidelity, grief and loss, emotional dependency, body horror, strong violence, psychological horror, fear of abandonment, existential/cosmic horror, angstttttt. notes: Strap in. This one is gonna be uh... fun! (thank you so much for your ongoing support btw, love you guys lots!!!).

📹 better bobby series masterlist.

You move before the thought finishes forming.

Your arms lock around BB from behind, tight around his waist, your hands fisting in the torn fabric of his shirt. Your face presses into the space between his shoulder blades, breathing hard. His body stands rigid under your grip, every muscle locked, the whole of him vibrating with a fury so potent you can feel it sinking into your own body.

He's burning hot for once. Hotter than you've ever felt him before, the cool skin scorched away by whatever he's become in the last however-many-hours, and the heat radiates through his tattered shirt and into your cheek, your palms, and the insides of your wrists where your pulse hammers against his spine.

“Stop,” you plead into his back. Into the ruined fabric, that hum that's pouring off him like radiation. “BB, stop. Don't hurt him.”

Bobby is kicking, his feet scrabbling against the wall behind him, his sneakers leaving black marks on the plaster, hands clawing at BB's wrist with a frantic, oxygen-starved desperation.

His face is darkening now, the veins in his neck standing out like cords. The sounds coming from his throat are wet and crushed. Because they're sounds of a body being denied the thing it needs most, but BB's hand doesn't loosen. It’s a closed system, a vice with a pulse rate of zero.

“He doesn't belong here.” BB's voice is gravel and sub-bass, the human register shredded, the words coming from somewhere beneath his chest. “This is my territory. You’re my—”

“You promised me.”

Your voice breaks on the word. Cracks open, raw and wet, and you press your forehead harder into his back, feeling the vibration of him against your skull and your arms tighten around his waist further. You hold on the way you held on in the meadow, in the nest you’ve shared.

“You promised you wouldn't hurt me, BB. And this—” Your voice drops, shaking. “This would.”

BB goes still.

The fury doesn't leave. You can still feel it, coiled, massive, a thing with its own gravity sitting inside his ribcage, pressing outward against the seams of him. But the stillness settles over it like a lid over a flame. His breathing—the breathing he doesn't need, the breathing that's been coming in ragged, animal bursts—slows. His shoulders drop by a degree, and the heat recedes, fractionally, from scalding to merely unbearable.

His hand opens.

Bobby drops down.

He hits the floor hard, knees first, then hands. Then he's on all fours, gasping, dragging air into his lungs in long, shuddering, tearing inhales that sound like they're being pulled through a crushed straw. The colour rushes back into his face all at once, from white to red, the blood flooding back into tissue that was seconds from permanent damage.

Kat is on the floor beside him in an instant, her hands frantic on his shoulders, his face, checking his throat, his pulse, and she's saying his name (Bobby, Bobby, breathe, look at me, breathe) and Bobby is coughing and gasping, his eyes streaming. The red marks on his throat are already darkening into bruises that will look, by tomorrow, like a handprint painted in purple and black.

You let go of BB, stepping back.

One step. Two. Putting distance between your body and his, and BB turns to face you, his hand lifting instinctively, reaching for your face, any part of you he can touch to confirm you're whole, and you step back again.

His hand halts mid-air.

You've seen BB confused many times before. You've seen him curious, amused, predatory, ancient, tender, wrecked with wanting. But you’ve never seen BB wounded.

His hand hangs in the space between you, reaching for a face that pulled away, and his eyes—still black around the edges, the warmth fighting its way back to the surface through the damage and the fury—registering the distance you've put between your bodies. Reading the enormity of your retreat with a precision that leaves no room for misunderstanding.

You stepped back from him.

You. The person who named him. The person who leaned into his forehead kisses and fell asleep against his cool chest and taught him to dance in a kitchen he built for you. You stepped back, and the distance is a sentence he can read, and the sentence says I don't trust you right now.

His hand drops to his side.

“What the fuck.”

Bobby. On the floor. Coughing, gasping, one hand on his throat and the other braced against the floorboards, and he's staring up at BB with an expression that’s blown past fear and into something else.

Incomprehension, horror, the cognitive whiteout of a man looking at his own face on a body that just tried to kill him.

“What the actual fuck,” Bobby says again, louder this time.

The choking has left his voice shredded, hoarse, each word dragged across damaged vocal cords. He gets to his knees. Kat's hand grips his arm, trying to hold him down, but he shakes her off and gets to his feet, his legs unsteady but his eyes are locked on BB. His jaw pulses, hands fisted at his sides, and he’s staring at his own face and finding a stranger peering back.

“That's me.” Bobby's voice is climbing, ragged with disbelief. “That's—that's my face. That's my face. Why does it have my face?”

BB's jaw tightens. The ancient thing flickers behind his eyes. A flash of contempt, of possessiveness, of the territorial fury that just had Bobby pinned three feet off the ground.

He looks at Bobby the way you'd look at a counterfeit of yourself. A draft. A rough sketch someone made before the final version.

“Answer me!” Bobby surges forward even as Kat scrambles to grab his arm. He shakes her off again without looking. “What are you? What the fuck are you?”

“BB.” You say it before you can stop yourself, before the anger and the hurt and the betrayal can seal your throat. The instinct to name him, to give him the dignity of the identity he let you choose for him, is still there underneath everything else. “His name is BB.”

Bobby stares at you both. The information moves across his face in parts. Confusion first, then processing, then a slow, horrible understanding that reorganises his features into something you've never seen on him. An emotion beyond anger, beyond hurt.

“BB. That BB? What kind of name even is that?” Bobby demands.

BB’s nostrils flare. “It stands for Better Bobby.”

Suffocating silence folds over the room. Kat’s mouth pops open in your peripheral, and you suck in a breath of your own.

“Better Bobby.” The real Bobby laughs. A short, ugly sound that's closer to a bark than a laugh, the kind of noise a person makes when the absurdity of their situation has exceeded their capacity for rational response. He barks out another laugh, then, “Better Bobby. Are you kidding me?”

BB's lip curls, a flash of teeth appearing. “I didn't choose the name for your benefit.”

“No, you just chose my face. You stole my face and my—and my—”

Bobby's gaze cuts to you, then back to BB. The calculation happening behind his eyes is visible, mechanical, each variable slotting into place with an almost audible click, and you can see the exact moment the picture completes because Bobby’s expression doesn't crumble; it hardens. Sets. His jaw locks and his eyes go bright and hot, the hurt underneath the anger so vast it makes the anger look like a puddle on an ocean.

“You've been down here,” Bobby begins, his voice pitching quiet. The dangerous quiet. The one that comes right before the blade. “This whole time. Down here with that.” He points at BB accusingly without looking at him. “With some thing wearing my face. A cheap copy—”

BB snarls. Low. A sound that makes the fractured windows rattle. “I'm not a copy—”

“—while I sat in a basement for seven months talking to a fucking wall, thinking you were dead." Bobby's voice cracks open, choking. "While the cops thought I killed you. The tapes went blank, and your face disappeared, and everyone forgot you existed. I thought I was going crazy because I was the only person left who remembered what you looked like—”

He's shaking. Full body vibration.

His hands tremble at his sides, and his jaw is trembling, and the chain at his throat is shimmering with movement. He’s a man coming apart at every joint because the grief and the fury are feeding each other in a loop that's spinning too fast to control, only amplifying the hurt beneath.

Each word comes out hotter than the last, each breath shorter, and Kat is standing behind him with her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide like she’s never seen Bobby like this because Bobby doesn't do this.

Bobby deflects; he bites. Bobby is the one who turns his pain into a joke or a weapon. But Bobby doesn't break. Except he's breaking. Right now. In a pink house on Level 974, looking at his own face on a monster and the woman he loves standing between them.

“Terrence forgot you.” Bobby's voice cracks on the name. Pure pain that sinks between your ribs. “Terrence. Our best friend, remember him? The only person who believed me when the whole neighbourhood decided I was a killer. He sat with me in bars and told people to back off and drove me home when I couldn't drive, and he was the last one—the last person besides me who still said your name. And then one day I said it, and he looked at me like I was speaking a different language. Like the word didn't mean anything. Like you were—like you'd never—”

He presses the heel of his hand into his eye. The old gesture. The grinding-the-tears-back gesture, brutal and effective. “I watched him forget you. In real time. I said your name and I watched it fall out of his head and he looked at me with this—this pity, like I was talking about someone who never existed. And I wanted to grab him and shake him. Scream she was real, she was REAL, I loved her, and she was real—”

Bobby sucks in a breath so hard his whole body jerks with it.

“Eighteen months,” Bobby croaks out hoarsely, the shaking getting worse. “I nearly died waiting for you. I stopped eating, stopped sleeping. I sat in that basement until my back seized up and I couldn't stand straight, and even then I went back. I kept going back, and you're here. You've been here this whole time. Completely fine. With him. Letting him—wearing my face while he—”

Bobby can't finish the sentence. His hand comes up and covers his mouth, his eyes squeezing shut, and the sound Bobby makes behind his palm is tiny and wrecked. You shouldn't be hearing it, but you can't stop hearing it.

“Bobby—” Kat whispers, reaching for him.

“Don't touch me.” He shakes his head, opening his eyes.

And the expression on his face is the one from the doorway, the one you never saw because you were the one walking away. The expression of a man watching the person he loves leave and being unable to say the thing that would make them stay. Except now it's worse because you didn't leave. You were taken. And what took you gave you a version of him that does all the things he couldn't.

Then, in a dazed whisper, “Did you fuck him?”

The question lands like a grenade. Kat visibly flinches. BB goes rigid in your line of sight, and you feel numb shock slacken your expression.

“Bobby,” Kat says sharply. “This isn’t the time—”

“Did you fuck him?” Bobby's voice cracks, splitting, the words coming out jagged and shaky because he can't control himself. “This thing that stole my face—did you let it touch you? Did you let it—” He gestures at BB, at you, at the space between your bodies. “Were you playing Barbie and Ken down here with my—with a goddamn copy of me while everyone back home thought you were—”

He stops, pressing both hands over his face. His shoulders heave. Once. Twice. The sound he's holding back is massive, and he still won't let it out. He won't. Because he’s Bobby Franklin, and he doesn’t cry in front of people, not even now, not even here, when the girl he spent seven months talking to through concrete is standing five feet away next to the thing that kept her.

“They all thought I killed you. Our neighbours. Our friends. Clark. Strangers on the street. They'd look at me, and I could see it. He did it. The boyfriend did it.” Through his hands. Muffled, reedy, barely controlled. “Months of that. Of carrying that and going to the store every night, sitting on the floor and talking to you because it was the only thing—the only thing—that kept me—” His hands drop. His face is red and wet, ruined. “And you were here. Did you even try to go home?”

The room vibrates. The hum, the tension, the emotional charge of three people and two entities standing in a space too small for the volume of pain it generates.

You stare at Bobby's wrecked face, those bright, glassy eyes, his shaking hands. The man who loved you and couldn't say it and sat on concrete for seven months saying it to a wall instead. The man who grunted at your goodbye. The man who let you stand in a doorway feeling invisible. The man who came through the wall to find you.

“You moved on too,” you say lastly.

Quiet. Cold. The voice the Backrooms gifted to you. The flat, unmoved, survival-voice, the one that doesn't shake because it can't afford to do so.

Bobby's mouth opens. Closes. His features spasm like you’ve struck him despite the distance between you.

“You moved on too, Bobby. You're standing here with her—” you gesture at Kat, who shrinks back— “shielding her with your body, doing all the things you stopped doing for me. And I'm supposed to—what? Feel guilty? Because I survived? Because I found something down here that you couldn't be bothered to give me up there?”

“That's not—”

“You left first.” The words tear out of you before you can weigh them, before the part of you that knows this isn't entirely fair either can catch up to the part of you that’s been carrying this for months and is finally, finally letting it spill. “You left me in that apartment, Bobby. You left me standing in doorways waiting for you to look up. You left me lying next to you in bed wondering if I was still visible. And I don't know why. I've never known why. I loved you more than anything I've ever—”

Your voice fractures, words catching in your windpipe. You press your knuckle against your mouth, mouth wobbling, try your hardest to breathe through it.

“I loved you,” you repeat, steadier, lower. Your anger holding the grief upright the way a spine holds a body. “More than anything. And I didn't need to hear it. I never needed you to say the words, that’s the thing. But I used to feel it. In how you touched me and kissed me and held me. In how you looked at me in the morning. And then you stopped. You just… stopped. And it wasn't sudden. It was slow. So slow I didn't even notice it happening until I was already standing in it. This—this absence. Where you used to be. And I tried to talk to you about it, and you said don't be dramatic, and we're fine. I tried again, and you turned up the TV. I stood there in the kitchen watching the back of your head, and I thought—”

You choke on the words. Your eyes burn, but the tears won't come because the anger has dried them at the source.

“I thought maybe this is what love becomes. Maybe this is normal. Maybe I'm asking for too much. And I made myself smaller and smaller and smaller to fit inside whatever you were still willing to give me, and it was never enough. I didn't know why and you wouldn't tell me—”

“I was scared.” Bobby. Raw. Stripped to the bone. “I was so scared of how much I—”

“I don't care.” Flat. Final. Your voice hardens despite the thickness of your voice. “I don't care that you were scared. I was scared too. I was scared every single day that you were going to wake up and decide you didn't want me anymore and instead of telling me that. Instead of saying I'm terrified and I don't know how to love you without losing myself… you just stopped. You made me feel so alone. I used to talk to the walls at Clark's store because the walls were better company than you were.”

You suck in a ragged breath. It shakes on the way in, steadies on the way out. Bobby’s peering at you wide-eyed, his mouth parted, tension between you thrumming. You exhale, chuckling shakily, pained.

“And the worst part, Bobby?” you pose, not waiting for a response. “The worst part is it took me disappearing for you to care. It took me falling through a wall and vanishing from the face of the earth for you to sit down and say the things you should have said when I was standing right in front of you. You had me. I was right there. Every day. For years. And you couldn't be brave enough to tell me you loved me or hold me like you needed me. But the second I'm gone—the second you can't have me anymore—suddenly you're on a concrete floor pouring your heart out to a wall. Suddenly you remember how to feel.”

Bobby flinches. Full body, his blue eyes bright and shining. Like you've hit him again.

“And you want to know the thing that really kills me?” Your voice is shaking now, the anger fracturing, the grief bleeding through the cracks again. “I was working the late shift alone. In that basement. Alone, Bobby. Because you stopped coming. You used to come keep me company, and you stopped. I was down there by myself, sorting inventory, and that's where it happened. That's where the wall took me. And if you'd been there… if you'd just walked through that door one more time, if you'd come to the store instead of staying on that couch…”

You shake your head, glancing down. BB jerks, like he’s fighting an urge to reach for you, to comfort you somehow. “I wouldn't have been alone when it happened,” you go on, lifting your head again. “I might not have been standing in front of that wall at all. You want to know who's to blame for me being here? It's not the Backrooms. It's not BB. It's the fact that the man I loved couldn't be bothered to keep me company like he used to.”

The silence that follows is absolute. Suffocating. The hum drops to its lowest register.

Bobby stares at you. His face is open in a way you've never seen before. No armour, no grin, no deflection. Just Bobby. The raw, messy human underneath all the performance. And the expression on that face is not anger. It's devastation.

Because he’s just heard the exact truth he's been telling himself for eighteen months spoken aloud by the person he failed, confirmed, verified, stamped and sealed.

Kat stands behind him, her arms heavy at her sides, face tight with an attempt to hold her composure. She’s just learned the full dimensions of the wound she's been dressing for over a year and finally understands it goes deeper than she knew.

BB watches you with an expression you can't read. His black-edged eyes roam over your face, cataloguing the anger, the grief, the terrible release of words held back for so long. His hand twitches at his side again. The instinct—to reach, to touch, to soothe—still running underneath the barrier you imposed.

“Come with me,” BB urges, his words low. His hand lifts again, reaching for your elbow. “You don't have to stay here. Let me take you—”

“Don't touch me.”

BB's hand freezes midair.

“You're no better.”

You watch the impact of your words jolt through him. The way BB’s whole body registers it, a flinch that travels from his face through his shoulders to his hands. He absorbs it the way Entity X absorbs damage, except this doesn't regenerate. This is a cut that stays.

“You—” BB starts, his brows furrowing. His confusion is genuine, nothing performed in it. There’s no curious tilt he does when encountering new concepts, but real confusion, the bewildered processing of a being trying to understand what went wrong.

“Did you know?” you bite out.

You ask it quietly, peering at his face. Bobby's face. The face that heard you through a wall and chose to want you, that built you a kitchen and kissed your forehead and promised you things and held you while you cried.

“Did you know Bobby was out there? For months. Did you know he was looking for me? Sitting in that basement, talking through the wall. Did you hear him, BB? Did you hear him saying he loved me while you were holding me and telling me it was all his fault?”

BB's expression goes smooth.

The warmth and confusion drain, followed by wounded bewilderment. What's left is closed. Perfectly, terribly closed. The face flattening into something that's neither Bobby nor BB but something older, something that predates both of them.

You laugh. A short, bitter sound, no joy in it.

“Yeah,” you exhale. Shaking now, because anger can't hold your grief forever, the frame is buckling, and you can feel the tears starting to press against the backs of your eyes like a tide against a wall. “That's exactly what I thought.”

The room is quiet.

Bobby is on the floor with Kat's hand on his shoulder and bruises darkening on his throat. BB stands in front of you with a closed-off face and a frozen hand, the ruins of every tender moment you've shared settling around him like a ring of ash. Mr Kitty lingers in the corner, his dark shape motionless, his blank face oriented toward the centre of the room with the patient, unhurried attention.

“I need time,” you say, your voice thin. “I need… to think. I can't—I can't be in this room right now.”

You spin on your heels, walking toward the staircase, your bare feet on the floorboards. You clutch your notebook against your chest, your shoulders set in a rigid line, your chin up, and your eyes burning, but you don’t cry.

You will not cry. You’ll walk through this door and find a corner of this level that doesn't contain Bobby or BB or Kat or anyone else, and you’ll sit down and breathe.

You’ll figure out what is left of you underneath all of this wreckage.

BB moves after you. You hear it more so than see it. The shift in air pressure, the displacement, his body orienting toward yours the way it always does, the magnetic pull that has governed his movements since the first day. His footstep on the floorboard behind you.

Mr. Kitty steps into his path.

The tall dark shape moves from the corner to the centre of the room in a single fluid motion, interposing itself between BB and the door, between BB and you. Mr Kitty doesn't speak. Simply stands there. Immense, faceless, filling the doorway with the calm, absolute certainty that informs everyone, silently, that no one is getting past him.

BB snarls.

The sound fills the room, saturating it. Harsh, emotional, stripped of the controlled fury from earlier. This isn't the predator defending his territory. But something hurt and desperate, unable to reach the only thing that makes the hurt bearable, and the snarl carries all of it—the confusion, the desperation, the agony of watching you walk away from him and being told he doesn’t get to follow.

“Get out of my way.”

BB's voice is low. Vibrating. The hum in the walls responding to him, the floorboards creaking around you, the cracked windows rattling in their frames. The power coming off him is palpable. A pressure change, a density in the air, the room bending around the force of an entity that’s existed for longer than these walls have stood.

Mr. Kitty doesn't move.

The house begins to vibrate.

A deep, foundational tremor that runs through the floor and up through the walls and into the ceiling. The scones on the counter rattle. A crack appears in the plaster above the kitchen doorway. Two forces pressing against each other. BB's vast, ancient fury and Mr. Kitty's quiet, absolute sovereignty over this level, this house, this ground.

Mr. Kitty may not be as old. May not carry the same raw, limitless power that BB channels from the Backrooms itself, but Level 974 is his. The pink walls and the Hello Kitty figurines and the golden light.

His domain, his territory, his rules.

And in this space, on this ground, Mr Kitty doesn’t yield.

The vibration deepens. The figurines on the shelf chatter against each other. Bobby grabs Kat and pulls her toward the corner, away from the two entities locked in their silent standoff.

“Enough.”

Your voice. From the doorway, looking over your shoulder at the room. At BB, rigid and his mouth snarling, at Mr Kitty, immovable and calm, at the house shaking around them.

“Stop it. Both of you. Right now.”

BB's eyes are black, wild, fixed on Mr. Kitty's faceless head with a fury that has nowhere to go.

You look at BB.

It's the look that stops him. Your eyes on him, meeting his, and the expression in them—cold, hurt, closed, the warmth he's spent months earning withdrawn behind a wall he can't charm or claw his way through. You look at him the way you looked at Bobby in Santa Clara, in the doorway, in the kitchen, during all those conversations he refused to have.

“Leave me alone,” you say coldly. “I mean it, BB. Leave me alone.”

The vibration cuts out.

The house settles around you into eerie silence, the figurines stilling. The crack in the plaster stays but doesn't spread further.

BB's snarl dies in his throat, not released but swallowed, pushed down into whatever deep place he stores the things he can't process. His fury collapses inward, his features rearranging not into Bobby's easy mask but into something fragile and deeply, fundamentally lost.

Because he’s just been told by the only person who matters to him that he’s not wanted here.

Mr. Kitty steps aside.

You walk through the door, up the stairs that don’t make a single creak, and don’t look back.

BB does not follow.

The bedroom is pink.

Every surface of it. The walls, the ceiling, the bedframe, even the dresser with its rows of small ceramic figurines. All Hello Kitty, some with bows, others with tiny painted expressions of vacant, cheerful contentment that feel deeply wrong in a place where nothing should be cheerful.

The bed is covered with a pink duvet and pink pillows, a stuffed Hello Kitty the size of a small child propped against the headboard. You’re sitting on the edge of said bed in this aggressively pink room, clutching a pillow to your chest and crying so quietly your body barely moves.

You washed your face in the bathroom with shaking hands. The soap smelled like strawberries, which is either a kindness or a coincidence and in the Backrooms you've stopped trying to tell the difference. You scrubbed the tear-tracks and the grime and the black residue of Entity X's blood from your skin, and you looked at yourself in the mirror, but the face peering back at you was thinner than you remembered. Sharper. Older in a way that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with the kind of living you've been doing down here.

You looked at your own face, and you didn't recognise the expression on it, and then you did, and that was somehow worse.

You press the pillow into your chest, tears soaking into the fabric, leaving dark spots as you wipe them with the back of your hand.

A plate appears on the bedside table.

Cookies. Round, golden, slightly uneven. Arranged in a careful circle on a pink ceramic plate with a Hello Kitty border.

You didn't hear Mr. Kitty enter. You never do.

He's simply there, filling the corner of the room, his dark shape folded into a crouch that brings his smooth, featureless head level with the top of the dresser. His long arms drape over his knees. The posture is oddly casual for something that nearly went to war with a fellow ancient entity an hour ago.

You glance at the cookies. A wet, exhausted laugh escapes you. Because there's a faceless being the height of a doorframe crouched in a pink bedroom offering you baked goods, and this is your life now, apparently.

Are you feeling better, little one?

His voice settles into your skull with that warm, furred pressure, gentle and unhurried. Little one. He's been calling you that since the third time BB brought you to 974, and the tenderness of it used to make you bristle. You're not little, not a child, not something to be diminished with a pet name, but you've come to understand that little is relative.

To Mr. Kitty, everything is little. The Backrooms are little. Time is little. The enormous, life-destroying pain you're feeling right now is little. Not because it doesn't matter but because it exists within a framework so vast that even devastation is a passing thing for him.

“No,” you answer honestly. “I feel awful.”

Mr Kitty's head inclines. A slow, measured tilt that you've learned to read as acknowledgement. He doesn't offer comfort. He doesn't say it'll be okay or this too shall pass or any of the empty phrases that people deploy when they can see someone hurting and don't know what else to do.

“Have you ever experienced anything like this?” you ask, wiping your eyes with the heel of your hand. “This mess. This kind of—”

You gesture vaguely at the room, at yourself.

No.

A pause.

I'm not human.

You stare at him. His blank face gives nothing back. The delivery is so flat, so matter-of-fact, so completely devoid of inflection that it takes your exhausted brain a second to register that the seven-foot faceless entity crouched in a bedroom full of Hello Kitty memorabilia has just delivered the driest possible response to your question.

You snort wetly despite yourself, wiping your nose.

“Is everyone okay? Out there?”

The humans are safe. They've eaten. I've provided almond water. It helps with the psychological effects of prolonged exposure. The mind frays here. Theirs will fray faster than yours did. A pause. The blank head angles slightly, as if consulting a source of information you can't perceive. The older man… he was located. But he refused to come with my guidance. He's making his way back toward the entry point on Level 2. Alive, as far as I'm aware. Frightened. But alive.

“Thank you.” The words come out thin. Insufficient. You're thanking a being older than human civilisation for babysitting your kinda-boyfriend and his new girlfriend while tracking down your former employer through an interdimensional nightmare. “For all of this. For letting us—”

You're welcome in this house. You've always been welcome.

Your fingers dig into the pillow. “What about BB?”

Mr. Kitty's head tilts again. The angle is different this time, sharper, more deliberate.

The Backrooms are in disarray. An observation, not a complaint. Entity X's presence has had an unusual cascading effect. Smilers are ranging further. Skin-stealers have been reported on levels they typically avoid. Another pause. His faceless head angles toward the window, toward the levels that stretch below and above and in every impossible direction. Your boy is clearing up the mess.

Your boy. Indulgent, slightly bemused. You don’t correct him, not even now.

Entity X seems to have an unusual ability to affect other entities. Amplifying their aggression. Destabilising their territorial patterns. As if its presence is contagious. An emotional frequency that spreads through the hum, agitating everything it touches.

You think about Entity X. About the burning yellow eyes that never looked away. About the argument it played through the walls to lure you out. Why that conversation? Why your argument, specifically?

Why did it know what Bobby sounded like when he was shutting you out? The questions stack up in your head the way the entries stack in your notebook. Pattern without explanation. You can feel the shape of it, the edges pressing against the inside of your skull, but the centre won't resolve.

“Why me?” you ask, peering at Mr Kitty. “Why does it want me?”

Mr Kitty is silent for a long moment. His blank head angles toward you with that sharper tilt. As if he's reading something written on you in a frequency only he can perceive.

I have a theory. Measured. Careful. But theories without sufficient evidence are just stories. And stories can be dangerous in a place that listens and can make them a reality.

“Tell me.”

When you're ready to hear it, little one. When the answer won't do more harm than the question.

The deflection is gentle but absolute, and you know better than to push. Mr Kitty doesn't withhold out of cruelty. If he's not telling you, it's because the telling carries a weight he doesn't think you can hold right now.

You file it away. Another entry in the private section of the notebook. Another question with no answer.

“Has it—is it gone?”

Retreated. Very suddenly. For reasons I can't determine. Mr Kitty's face tilts back toward you. That concerns me more than its presence did. An entity of that power doesn't retreat without cause. It either ran into an unexpected problem, or it decided to wait for a better opportunity.

The words settle on your shoulders.

You sit for a moment longer. The pink room. The cookies. The faceless being in the corner, patient and still. The faint sound of voices from the living room floats over. Low, murmured, too indistinct to make out words. Bobby's voice. Kat's voice. Talking about you, probably. Talking about what comes next. Discussing whatever people do when the world has ended, and they're sitting in a pink house eating scones and trying to pretend their worldview hasn’t just shattered.

You reach for a cookie. Bite into it. It's good. Buttery, slightly sweet, with a texture that's almost right. The Backrooms' version of homemade, close enough that your tongue can't argue.

“I can't hide here forever,” you mumble, chewing. Your voice is scraped raw, and the cookie is doing nothing to fix that, but it's doing something for the rest of you. The simple, animal act of eating, of taking a thing and putting it in your body, of fuelling the machine. “Even though I want to.”

Mr Kitty says nothing. His blank face radiates with the particular silence that means I agree, and I'm glad you arrived there yourself.

You stand, pressing your palms against your eyes. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. In. Out. The way you breathe before entering a new level, before turning a corner in an unmapped corridor, or opening a door whose other side you can't predict.

The survival breath. The steadying edge you didn’t have back in the real world and only developed here. The willingness not to run away and hide.

You wipe your face one final time. Set the pillow down. Pick up the notebook from the bedside table where you placed it beside the cookies, pressing it against your chest. The weight of it is familiar, grounding, the only possession you have that still feels like yours.

“Thank you, Mr. Kitty.”

Eat another cookie before you go. You’ll need it.

You do as he instructs, then open the bedroom door. You walk down the short hallway of Mr. Kitty's house, past the framed Hello Kitty prints and down the stairs, stepping into the living room.

Bobby and Kat are sitting at the kitchen table.

Their heads are bowed. Close together. Kat's hand is on Bobby's forearm, and Bobby's other hand is pressed flat against the table, fingers splayed, bracing himself.

They're speaking in low voices. You catch the edge of a word. Your name, maybe. Or something that used to be your name before it became something else.

Bobby spots you first.

He stands immediately, like the sight of you alone gave him an electric shock. The chair scrapes the floor. His face is a mess of competing expressions: relief, tension, the careful, wary hope as eh drinks you in. The bruises on his throat have deepened. Dark purple against his tanned skin, four finger-marks and a thumb-mark, BB's handprint developing like a collar on his neck.

You catch the flicker across Kat's face, brief and involuntary. The subtle tightening around her eyes, the tiny pull at the corner of her mouth.

She was saying something to Bobby, and you interrupted it, and the hurt of being interrupted is tangled up with the hurt of being here at all, of sitting in a nightmare for a man who’s looking at another woman with that expression. That searching, desperate, is-she-okay expression that Kat has probably been working for months to earn, and you just walked in and collected without trying.

You see it. You look away from it.

You wrap your arms around yourself. One hand on each elbow, holding yourself together.

“You need to leave,” you tell them flatly. “Both of you. Right now. The Backrooms aren't safe for humans. They were never safe, but right now they're worse. Entity X destabilised everything. Every entity on every level is more aggressive than it should be and you don't have the training or the knowledge to survive that.”

“I'm not leavin' without you.” Bobby. Immediate. Jaw set, chin up, the Bobby-stubbornness that looks like courage and has always been, underneath, a different kind of fear. “I didn't come through a wall, walk through hell and get choked out by my own doppelganger to leave you down here alone. No way in hell.”

You level him with a flat look. The one you learned living here. A part of you wants to remind Bobby that he tore into you less than an hour ago, but he's calmer now. Past the initial, ugly shock.

Bobby surprises you by holding that look.

For a moment that stretches into two, then three. Then his jaw flutters, his gaze dropping, and you see it: the fight leaving him. Not because he agrees, or wants to, but because the woman standing in front of him is not the woman he lost.

The woman he lost was standing in a doorway with her keys and her heart in her eyes, waiting to be seen. The woman standing in front of him now has a notebook and a survival instinct, and she's not waiting for anything.

“BB,” you call out.

The air shifts. Between one breath and the next, there’s a displacement, and the pressure changes in your sinuses.

BB stands at the edge of the living room like he's been there the whole time, like he materialised from the wall, which he probably did. He's more put together than the last time you saw him. His face reset, the fissures sealed, the eyes back to Bobby's blue with only a thin ring of darkness at the outer edges. The black blood is gone. The torn shirt is the same, but he's cleaned the rest, reassembled the human costume with great care.

He looks at you and his whole body orients again. That magnetic pull, that compass-needle pivot, his weight shifting forward onto the balls of his feet, his chin lifting, his eyes searching your face with a hope so raw it makes your heart ache.

Because you called him. And the part of BB that lives underneath the fury and the ancient power and the territorial instinct—the part that learned to kiss you in a kitchen and asked am I doing it right and pressed his lips to your forehead because you taught him that tenderness—that part heard his name in your voice and came running. And he’s standing in front of you now, practically vibrating with a desperate, transparent hope that calling means forgiving.

It doesn't. He can see that too. The hope flickers. Dims. Holds, just barely, at the edges.

“I need you to take Bobby and Kat out,” you tell him calmly. The survival voice. “Back to the real world. Through the wall in Clark's basement.”

BB's expression morphs. A crease appears between his brows, a tightening at the corners of his mouth. He glances at Bobby, at Kat, and the glance carries a weight that isn't quite hostility. Closer to resignation.

“I can't,” he says.

“BB—”

“The path is gone.” He says it plainly, without the smooth, closed expression he wore when you asked if he knew Bobby was looking for you. “Entity X destroyed sections of Level 0 during the fight. The corridors between here and the adjacent entry point to the storage basement on Level 0 are collapsed. The hum no longer reaches those sections. They've been severed from the level entirely.”

You can feel everyone staring at BB as you absorb his words.

“Then find another way,” you say. “There are other exits. Other entry points. You've said—”

“The only feasible exit I can guarantee right now is the M.E.G. outpost.” BB's eyes are on you. Only you. Bobby might as well be furniture. “The one on the far side of Level 4. But the direct path from here is gone. We'll have to go through the Poolrooms, and cut across to Level 4 through the threshold at the deep end. From there it's a straight corridor to the outpost, but that corridor runs through a section of Level 4 that's been unstable since the cascade.” He pauses, weighing his words. “The Poolrooms should be passable. Level 4 is the risk. Entities might shelter there because the layout gives them cover. Under normal conditions it's manageable. Right now, with the aggression spike, it'll be hostile.”

You run the route in your head.

Level 974 to the transitional stairwell. Through the Poolrooms, warm chlorinated water and blue tile, a level you've mapped partially, three pages of the notebook dedicated to its spanning layout and the way sound carries across the surface.

You know the Poolrooms. BB took you there multiple times. You used them in the past for hygiene and a change of scenery both.

The water was warm, and the light was washed-out blue, and nothing lived in it that wanted to hurt you, at least not then.

From the deep end threshold into Level 4. The endless office complex, the one that looks like every corporate building you've ever been in hollowed out and stretched to infinity. Dark. Echoing. Full of cubicles and conference rooms and hallways that dead-end without warning.

You've only been there once, briefly, and your notes on it are thin at best.

Half a page, a rough sketch, a warning symbol in the margin.

“How far?” you ask.

“Through the Poolrooms, it's distance without danger. Level 4 is the gauntlet. Maybe an hour on foot, if the path holds without shifting and nothing's nesting in the corridor.” BB's expression goes tense, focused. “I'll clear what I can ahead of you. You navigate.”

“Wait, who's M.E.G.? What’s Poolrooms?” Kat’s voice floats over from the table, cautious but steady. “What even is that?”

“Research group,” you reply, turning to her. It's the first time you've spoken to her directly without anger in your voice, and you can feel the shift, the effort of treating her like a person instead of a scapegoat to your jealousy. “Explorers. They study this place. Map it. They've been operating down here for… I don't know how long. But they're organised. They have resources.” You pause. “I think they can be trusted. It might be the safest option.”

Kat nods, quick and decisive. The relief on her face is visible. Not at the thought of leaving you behind, or at winning some unspoken competition, but at the prospect of a plan. A structure. An exit with a name and a direction and people on the other side who might know what they're doing.

Kat is a practical woman in an impractical situation; you can tell as much, and the offer of practicality is the first solid ground she's stood on since she climbed through a wall in Clark's basement.

“Fine,” Bobby says quickly, his voice rough. “M.E.G. Great. Let's go.” He pushes off the table. “All of us.”

You inhale deeply. “Bobby.”

“I said I'm not leaving without you.” Louder. More determined. The Bobby-edge again, the blade under the casual, except there's no casual left. It's all blade now, all sharp. “I'll go with Kat. But I'm not walking through some—some exit and leaving you in this place. I'm not.”

BB's lips peel back. A flash of teeth behind the Bobby-mask, involuntary, predatory, the territorial snarl surfacing before he can catch it.

The sight of Bobby refusing to leave you, refusing to relinquish, insisting on staying close to the thing BB considers his triggers something primal in the entity underneath.

He catches it at once, swallowing over it. His lips close over his teeth, jaw clenching painfully. He doesn't speak. Just stares at Bobby with the flat, unblinking intensity that tells you he’s choosing, with considerable effort, not to put Bobby through another wall.

Bobby, to his credit, ignores him. Pointedly and aggressively, with that specific brand of human stubbornness. Bobby will not look at BB. Will not address BB. Only pretend that the thing wearing his face is not standing six feet away radiating enough barely-contained fury to crack plaster.

This is Bobby's version of control: the refused glance, the turned shoulder, the full-body declaration that you do not exist to me deployed by a man who’s terrified and is handling it the only way he knows how.

BB turns to you.

His expression changes immediately. The snarl evaporates. The territorial fury, banked. What replaces it is… you haven't seen this expression on him before. Grim. Drawn.

“The Backrooms are more dangerous than they've been in—” He pauses, choosing a unit of measurement you'll understand. “A very long time. Entity X's effect on the other entities hasn't fully dissipated. Level 4 will be a problem. The interior section between the threshold and the outpost is normally dead space. Empty offices, dead lights, nothing worth hunting in. Right now it's contested. Things are sheltering in the cubicle rows and conference rooms because the layout gives them cover, and they're angrier than they should be.” He twists his head, and you hear a crack follow the near reptile movement. “I'll move ahead. Clear what I can. You bring them through behind me. Move only when you’re certain, and stay together.”

You look at him. Really look, for the first time since earlier. Past the anger, and the betrayal, past the closed-off face and the too smooth expression and the omission that restructured everything between you. You look at BB, and you see—

He's thinner somehow.

The word isn't right, but it's the closest you have.

The Bobby-suit fits differently. Looser. The cheekbones more prominent, the jaw more defined, the chain at his rebuilt throat sitting lower against collarbones that press closer to the surface than they used to. He looks worn in a way that has nothing to do with clothing and everything to do with consumption.

And you understand, then, that the fight with Entity X and the sustained lockdown and the perimeter patrols and all the emotional turmoil earlier have been drawing from a reserve that isn't infinite.

As if even ancient things have a fuel line and his is running lower than you've ever seen it.

You choke the worry back. Push it down. Below the anger and the hurt, into a place where the things you can't afford to feel right now go to wait.

“Fine,” you say. “The M.E.G. outpost. Through the Poolrooms, across Level 4.”

You turn to Bobby and Kat. Bobby is standing by the table with his arms crossed and his jaw clenched rigid, staring at a random spot just past BB’s shoulder.

“Grab anything useful,” you instruct. “The almond water Mr. Kitty gave you if there's any left. Take that, don't spill it. Anything you can carry that isn't too heavy.” You glance at Bobby, stopping him in his tracks when he tries to approach you, his mouth open. “We're leaving right now. Not in ten minutes. Not after another argument. Now. Every second we stay is a second Entity X might come back and cause more damage.”

Bobby sucks in a breath, but the argument dies on his tongue. You watch it happen. He could spit back a thousand arguments, but you’re the one speaking and he hears the authority earned through months of exploration, notebooks, and close calls.

He doesn't trust the Backrooms. He doesn't trust BB. But somewhere underneath the hurt and the anger and a thousand unspoken things, Bobby Franklin still trusts you.

He grabs the water from the table without a word, shoving it in his jean pocket. His camera is gone—left on the floor in the junction room on Level 0, the first camera Bobby has ever abandoned—and his hands look wrong without it. Empty. Painfully exposed. Like a man missing a limb he didn't know was prosthetic until it was gone.

Kat gathers the remaining almond water, tucking what food she can into her hoodie pockets. Practical. Quick.

“Let's go,” you say.

You don't look at BB or at Bobby when you say it. You look at the door, at the path beyond it, at the route in your head that threads from 974 through the transitional stairwells to the Poolrooms and across Level 4 to the outpost, and you start walking.

They follow.

“Stay close to me at all times. Don't touch the walls and don’t trust any voices you might hear.”

Your voice rings flat. Instructional. Bobby and Kat fall into step behind you. Bobby first, Kat behind him, the formation you established at the threshold of Level 974 and haven't had to explain because the hierarchy asserted itself the moment you started walking.

You lead. They follow.

The notebook is open in your hand, a pen gripped in your other, and you're annotating as you move. Small marks in the margins, corrections, new landmarks added to half-finished maps.

The stairwell between 974 and the Poolrooms is narrower than you remember. The lights are different. Dimmer. The hum is carrying a frequency you've never heard before. A low, dissonant undertone, like a second voice buried beneath the first, and you don't like it.

Something skitters in the walls.

The sound is dry and rapid, claws or teeth or something with too many joints moving through a space between surfaces, and it tracks your group for three corridors before fading into the deeper dark.

Bobby's breathing changes behind you. Faster. Controlled, but faster. He's holding it together for now, jaw locked, hands fisted, the physical performance of calm layered over a body that is screaming at him to run.

Kat grabs the back of his shirt, her knuckles blanching from how hard she grips. He doesn't shake her off.

The stairwell descends, the air changing the lower you go. Warmer, carrying a chemical sweetness that prickles in your nose and coats the back of your throat. Chlorine.

The smell of it hits your chest like a memory: public pools in the valley, summer afternoons, the way the chemical tang used to cling to your hair for days. Except this chlorine is wrong. Too sweet, too warm. Like the Backrooms took the concept of a swimming pool and replicated it from the smell up, getting the details slightly off.

“What is that?” Kat wonders from behind Bobby, her voice raspy.

“Chlorine,” you answer. “We're close to the Poolrooms.”

“Right. The Poolrooms."

You don't answer. The stairwell opens up, and Level 37 unfolds in front of you.

Water. Everywhere. Still, warm, impossibly blue; a type of blue that doesn't exist in nature, that sits somewhere between swimming pool and bioluminescence, casting its light upward onto tiled walls and low ceilings and pillars that descend into the water at regular intervals.

The room is vast, the ceiling dipping low. The combination creates a sort of compression. Intimate and infinite at the same time, the sense of a space that goes on forever in a room you can almost touch the top of. The water is clear to the bottom. The tiles beneath it are white, clean, pristine, stretching into a distance that the blue light eventually swallows.

No sound except the dripping water. The gentlest possible lapping against tile, rhythmic, hypnotic, the sound of a surface that is barely being disturbed by something you can't see. The hum is different here. Softer, rounded, the dissonant undertone from the stairwell dissolved into sound almost musical.

The Poolrooms absorb aggression the way water absorbs heat. BB was right. Nothing agitated shelters here.

“Jesus Christ,” Bobby says quietly, staring at the water with wide-eyed awe.

You wade in first, and the water is mercifully warm. Body temperature, lapping at your ankles, then your calves, then your knees as the floor descends in a gentle gradient. Your bare feet find purchase on the tiles below.

You've been here before and know the depth map. There’s shallow sections that hug the walls, and the deeper channels between the pillars which intercut with the point near the centre. That’s where the floor drops and the water reaches your waist, the blue light intensifying until the whole room looks like the inside of a sapphire.

Bobby and Kat follow behind you. Slower, less sure.

Kat gasps when the water reaches her thighs. Bobby is silent, wading after you without a word. He scans the surface, the pillars, the low ceiling, and you can see him searching for threats the way you used to. With that raw, untrained hypervigilance you had in the beginning when you could tell something was wrong but didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what.

You navigate by the pillars. Third from the left, then straight, then angled right toward the far wall where the tiles change colour. White to grey to a faint, barely-visible green that marks the deep-end threshold.

BB showed you this path. BB walked it with you, his hand at your back, his cool skin a contrast to the warm water.

And BB's presence now is a pressure at the edges.

You can't see him. Haven't seen him since you left 974. But you can feel the evidence of his passage all the same. A corridor that should have been obstructed, clear. A sound in the distance that starts hostile and cuts out abruptly.

Then a silence that follows when something deadly, fast and ancient has moved through a space and left nothing alive behind it.

He's ahead of you, running interference, clearing the route the way he said he would. And even through the hurt, the reliability of it—the kept promise, the maintained commitment to your safety—swells a lump in your throat you can’t quite swallow over.

Behind you, Kat mumbles something, a joke maybe, chuckling weakly even when Bobby doesn’t join in. His reply is swallowed by water churning around your waist.

“How long did it take?”

You say it without turning around. Your voice carries across the water, bouncing gently off the tiled walls, and the acoustics of the Poolrooms give it a quality that sounds almost peaceful, almost conversational.

Bobby's wading pauses. A half-step. Then he catches up. “What?”

“Before you slept with her.”

Behind Bobby, Kat makes a small, indignant sound, an inhale that she catches in her throat, and then silence again. Just the three of you wading through water in a room that shouldn't exist.

You wait for the usual: the blade, the joke, the easy redirect, maybe even anger. But he surprises you again.

“Fifteen months.” The damaged vocal cords give the words a rough, scraped quality. “After you disappeared. Not after—not after the store. Not after Clark kicked me out. Months after that. She'd been...” He trails off, water sloshing around his hips. “Kat was just there. Every day. And I was—I wasn't okay. I wasn't anything close to okay, and I thought I’d never see you again. And one night I just—” He pauses, breath catching in his chest, refusing to look at you or at Kat while he speaks. “Fifteen months. It took fifteen months.”

Your stomach turns. A slow, visceral roll, nausea that has nothing to do with the chlorine and everything to do with the number.

Fifteen months of absence before the body you loved pressed itself against someone else.

Fifteen months of grief before the hands that used to find the small of your back in a crowd found someone else's waist in the dark.

You do the math. You can't help it. The inventory brain, the cataloguing brain, calculating: he thought you were dead. Everyone had forgotten you. The tapes were blank. Fifteen months is a long time when grieving. Fifteen months of believing the person you love is gone is a long time.

The math doesn't help. Not even a little bit. The pain blooming in your chest is too blinding and too scalding to lean on logic right now.

You nod. Once. Keep wading, your teeth sunk into your cheek to stop yourself from being petty, trying your hardest to understand.

“Did you?” Bobby asks. His voice is different now, quieter, stripped of the combative edge from earlier, carrying instead a fragility that doesn't suit his face. “BB. Did you—with him?”

“No.”

Bobby exhales. A breath he's been holding since Mr Kitty’s house, maybe longer, released through his nose in a long, shuddering stream. The relief on his face is naked and immediate, and you can see it from the corner of your eye even without turning to look at him.

“I taught him to kiss,” you admit, still staring straight ahead. At the pillars, at the blue, at the threshold approaching in the distance. “But it took months. He didn't… he'd never touched anyone. Never been touched. I taught him to dance first. Then the kiss.”

Bobby lets out a soft, bitten scoff. Air pushed through his teeth, his head turning away, and you brace for the quip, for Bobby's deflection mechanism deploying against the image of his own face learning to kiss from the woman he loves.

But the scoff dies without becoming a sentence. It lacks heat., and it lacks edge. It's just a sound a man makes when he's hearing something that hurts in a way his defences can't react against.

When you glance at him, Bobby's face is sad. Not angry like earlier, just sad.

The anger burned out somewhere in the Poolrooms, extinguished by the tranquil water and the washed light, and what's left is just Bobby. Heartbroken. Worn to the bone by grief and stress. Looking at you in the blue glow with his eyes full and his jaw loose, his whole face creased with emotion Bobby Franklin has spent his entire adult life refusing to let sit on his features unchecked.

He opens his mouth. His lips form the beginning of a word—your name, maybe, or something else, something that's been sitting behind his teeth for eighteen months waiting for you to be close enough to hear it—but you turn away. Keep walking.

The water parts around your waist and the threshold is ten metres ahead, and you keep walking because if you stop, if you let Bobby say whatever he's about to say with that face in this blue light, you will not be able to handle it.

You're not going to have this talk with him now, while Kat is right there.

“We're close,” you say instead. “The threshold is at the deep end. Keep your heads up.”

Level 4 is wrong.

The threshold deposits you in a corridor that looks like every office building you've ever been in.

Fluorescent-lit, drop-ceiling, grey carpet, cubicle partitions stretching into a distance that the lights don't fully reach. It should be mundane. It should be the most boring level in the Backrooms. An infinite corporate complex, all right angles and fire exits that don't actually exit and conference rooms with whiteboards still carrying the ghosts of meetings that never happened.

You've seen it before. Your notes describe it as low-threat, low-entity, dead space.

Your notes are wrong.

The lights flicker. Every third tube is dead, creating pockets of darkness between the lit sections, and the darkness is too deep. A dense, weighted thing. The cubicle rows stretch to the left and right, and the partitions are higher than you remember. Head-height, blocking sightlines, creating corridors within corridors, and the air smells like old paper and burnt plastic.

“Stay behind me,” you whisper, your heart rate picking up even as you fight to keep your tone level. “Single file. Don’t speak above a whisper.”

Your feet carry you through the cubicle rows. Past desks with dead monitors and phones with their receivers off the hook, and coffee cups with something growing in them that you don't look at closely. The carpet muffles your steps. Bobby and Kat are ghosts behind you. Silent, moving when you move, stopping when you stop, their breathing controlled, shallow, and terrified.

There’s sudden movement in the cubicle row to your left.

You freeze. Hand up, the signal you developed on Level 1 with BB, palm flat, fingers spread, stop now. Bobby and Kat stop at once.

The movement continues, a shape passing behind the partition, visible through the gap between the top of the cubicle wall and the drop ceiling. Tall. Hunched. Moving with a liquid, boneless gait that doesn't match any anatomy you've catalogued. It passes through the row parallel to yours, separated by one partition, close enough that you can hear the sound it makes. A wet, clicking respiration, each breath accompanied by a small pop, like a joint dislocating and relocating with every inhale.

It passes, the clicking fading into the background as it goes. You count to thirty before you move again.

Two more corridors follow. You pass a conference room with the door ajar, and inside you spot something that looks like skin draped over a chair. Smooth, pale, and gently rising and falling with a respiration you can see from the doorway. You steer them around it. Wide. Bobby's eyes find it through the gap, and his face goes grey while Kat presses her face into his shoulder and doesn't look.

The evidence of BB is everywhere.

A corridor that ends in a smear of black against the wall. Fresh, wet, still dripping. A fire exit door buckled inward from a force applied on the other side, the metal warped around a handprint that's too large to be human. A section of cubicles reduced to kindling, the partitions shattered, the desks overturned, and in the centre of the wreckage a shape. Crumpled and motionless, its limbs arranged at angles that suggest it was alive when it was rearranged and is not alive now.

You don't let Bobby and Kat see this one. You route them around the long way, through a break room with a vending machine that hums with a frequency that makes your ears ring.

The M.E.G. outpost is close. You can feel it.

A shift in the hum, a thinning of the air that means a threshold is near. The levels get permeable around outposts, BB told you once. The boundaries soften.

You round the corner into a wider corridor—open-plan, the cubicles giving way to a broad hallway with glass-walled offices on either side—and you see the equipment. Monitors. Cables. A mounted camera fixed to the wall at head height, its red recording light blinking steadily. Sensor arrays bolted to the ceiling tiles. Data collection equipment arranged along the corridor walls with the organised, labelled precision of people who’ve been here a long time and plan to stay.

“M.E.G.,” you say, exhaling. The relief that pangs your chest is almost physical. A loosening in your shoulders, a softening in the grip of your hand on the notebook. “We made it. This is their monitoring station. The outpost should be just ahead. We just need to—”

The hands come from behind you.

Three sets. Gloved. They grab your arms, your shoulders, the back of your neck, practised and coordinated.

You're yanked backwards off your feet, and the notebook hits the floor, your spine slamming against a body wearing tactical gear, a muffled voice barking something clipped into a radio, and the hands are everywhere. On your wrists, pinning your arms, dragging you sideways toward a section of corridor you haven't mapped.

These aren't M.E.G.

The gear is different. Same black from the first attack, not yellow. No patches, no insignia, no identification. The faces behind the balaclavas are blank and professional, and they are not studying you. They’re collecting you, the way you'd collect a sample they failed to collect the first time around.

Bobby's scream rips through the corridor.

“GET YOUR HANDS OFF HER—GET OFF—”

He's fighting. You can hear it behind you, the sounds of a man throwing himself at something larger and better-armed, the crack of a fist against body armour, the grunt of impact. Bobby's voice, raw and shredded and operating on pure adrenaline, screaming obscenities that echo off the walls while someone restrains him.

“Leave them,” one of the agents says into the radio, his voice clipped, indifferent. “The woman is the objective. Leave the other two for the others, it’ll buy us some time.”

For the others. The words register with a cold, clinical clarity. Leave Bobby and Kat in a Level 4 corridor swarming with agitated entities and walk away. Leave them to die. Leave them as discarded variables in whatever equation these people are solving, the irrelevant remainder, the human wreckage.

Your rage swells to near blinding.

A sudden, massive, tidal expansion in your chest, filling every cavity, pressing against your ribs and your throat and the backs of your eyes.

The agent's hand is on your arm, and the grip is iron and Bobby is screaming. Kat is somewhere behind you shouting, and these people are going to leave them here to die. And the anger is so total, so complete, so enormous that it bypasses your brain entirely and becomes a physical thing, a vibration, a frequency—

The hands holding you fall off.

You stumble forward. The grip just… released. You spin, expecting to see BB, expecting the displaced air and the black eyes and the sound of the hum—

The agent who was holding you is staring at his hands. What's left of them anyway. His gloves end at the wrist, and below the wrist there is nothing. Smooth and cauterised, the flesh sealed as if the hands were never there to begin with.

He hasn't started screaming yet. The shock is still travelling from his eyes to his brain to his vocal cords.

You turn.

Entity X is standing in the corridor behind you.

The fluorescent lights are red again. That deep, arterial crimson that transforms the office corridor into a living organism. Red light pulses, filling the hallway from floor to ceiling, its matte, leathery skin absorbing the crimson until it looks like the corridor itself has grown a body. The featureless face is smooth and wrong, but then the eyes peel open again at your presence, and the burning yellow fixes on you at once.

On you. Only you. As always.

You stumble backwards, your heel catching a cable on the floor. You barely keep your feet.

Entity X is three metres away, and it reaches for you—the arm extending, elongating, the joints clicking with a sound like knuckles cracking in an empty room—and its chest produces a noise.

Low. Gurgling. A wet, clicking sound that lives somewhere between a purr and the settling of bones, repetitive and rhythmic and deeply, fundamentally wrong in a way that your brain can’t place.

It's a sound without analogue. A sound that a body makes when it has no face to express what it's feeling and must channel everything through the mechanics of its torso, and the sound is fixated. Directed at you.

The audio equivalent of the eyes that never leave.

“Get away from me.” Your voice comes out harder than you expect. Sharper. The fear is there. Your heart is slamming, your palms are slick with sweat, your legs trembling beneath you, but your anger is louder. The rage that swelled in your chest hasn't receded. It's sitting right behind your teeth, and when you speak it comes out as a command, not a plea. “Leave me the fuck alone.”

Entity X cocks its head.

The motion is slow. Curious. The massive featureless head tilts to one side with an almost canine quality. It’s almost the same tilt BB does, just wrong, and for one terrible second the gesture looks interested. Like it heard you. Understood what you meant. Like your anger registered as something other than a feeble attempt at resistance, and the fury in your voice is a thing it recognises, that it wants.

The agents regroup behind you. Three of them. The handless one is on the floor, in shock. The others raise weapons. Compact and military-grade, and open fire.

Entity X doesn't look at them.

The bullets hit its torso and sink into the matte skin like stones into mud, and Entity X's arm sweeps sideways, casual and unhurried, the way you'd brush a fly, and the agent closest to it comes apart.

Messily. The one behind him fares worse. The sounds are wet, almost mechanical and over very quickly, leaving nothing but puddles of gore on the floor.

Entity X does all of it without moving its eyes from you once. Bored. Performing violence with the same disinterested efficiency that a human swats insects. The agents are not a threat, not an obstacle, not even a distraction.

Entity X silences them and returns its full focus on you, and the clicking sound continues in its chest, steady, rhythmic, almost gentle.

BB arrives like a thunder crack.

The air splits around you, the pressure wave alone knocking you sideways. Kat hits the floor rolling, and Bobby staggers into the glass wall of an office.

BB hits Entity X at full force, and the two of them crash through the corridor wall and into the space beyond. Cubicles disintegrate around them, ceiling tiles raining down, and the fluorescent tubes shatter in cascading waves as two things too large for this hallway tear it apart around each other.

BB's hand finds your shoulder. Between one collision and the next, between heartbeats. He's there, beside you, in front of you, his black eyes wild and his damaged face cracking, his grip on your shoulder bruising.

“The outpost. Go. Now.”

You run, reaching for Bobby blindly.

Bobby is already moving, Kat's hand in his, pulling her along, his legs unsteady but functional, his face a mask of focused terror.

You grab the notebook from the floor as you pass it, scrambling on your hands and knees. The three of you sprint down the corridor toward the monitoring equipment, toward the thinning in the air that means exit.

You spot them in the distance first.

Yellow suits and masks on. Four of them, clustered at the far end of the corridor around a section of wall that looks slightly different. Smoother, carrying a faint shimmer that you recognise as the visual signature of a no-clip point.

M.E.G. operatives. Real ones, in their trademark gear, and they're waving at you, frantic, urgent, beckoning you forward with the full-body gestures as the fight behind you intensifies.

Bobby's hand closes around your wrist, pulling you forward, and you're running together, his callused fingers locked on your pulse point.

For about three seconds, it's the parking lot at Clark's store, it's the apartment doorway, it's every moment he should have reached for you and didn't. Except now he's reaching, his hand is on you, now he's pulling you toward safety with a bruising grip that says I’m not letting go—

Entity X's hand closes around Bobby's torso.

The grab is sudden and massive, an arm extending from the wreckage of the corridor behind you, reaching over your head, the joints clicking in rapid succession as it unfolds to its full, telescoping length.

The clawed fingers close around Bobby's ribcage and lift. His hand tears from your wrist. His feet leave the ground. His body rises—up, up, Entity X hoisting him like he weighs nothing, his legs kicking, arms flailing, his face contorted with a terror so complete it erases everything else.

Entity X holds Bobby in the air and looks at you.

The burning yellow eyes, fixed. The clicking purr in its chest, steady. Holding Bobby in one hand the way you'd hold up a lantern, displaying him, presenting him, showing you the man in its grip and watching your face to see what you'll do.

“Let him go!” You slam your fists against Entity X's arm—the matte skin fever-hot and yielding and horrifyingly close to organic—and the contact sends a jolt through your system that feels like recognition, like touching a live wire, like something in Entity X's body responding to something in yours. “Let him go, put him down—”

Entity X peers down at you, his head tilting. Curious. Reading. The same interested quality from before. Your hands are on its arm, and it's letting you hit it, absorbing the blows with the patient stillness of a thing that wants to see how far the anger goes.

It throws Bobby.

A casual, underhanded toss, its wrist flicking, the arm releasing, Bobby's body sailing through the air of the corridor and hitting the wall near the no-clip point with a sound that empties your lungs. He crumples. Slides down the wall. You lurch towards him, but Entity X’s clawed hand closes over your throat, yanking you back toward it.

Kat's scream is a bright, piercing thing that cuts through the red light and the clicking, and the M.E.G. operatives move. Two of them grab Bobby under the arms, a third seizing Kat, who was running toward him, dragging them toward the shimmer in the wall.

Bobby is dazed.

His head rolls to one side, his eyes unfocused, blood from a gash above his eyebrow streaming down the side of his face. But he's fighting.

Even concussed, even barely conscious, his hands are grabbing at the M.E.G. operative's jacket, his body lurching back toward the corridor, back toward you, and his mouth is forming your name.

You can see it, can read it on his lips, the shape of the word you taught him to say in a hallway in high school in your junior year, and his eyes find yours through the blood and the chaos and the red light and for one second the corridor contracts to the width of that gaze.

You and Bobby. Looking at each other across a distance that is about to become permanent.

The M.E.G. operatives haul him through. Bobby's reaching hand—the same hand that dropped a camera for you, that grabbed your wrist, that used to find the small of your back in a crowd and cup your face before he kissed you—disappears through the shimmer, still reaching. Kat follows, and the wall smooths over again. The no-clip point seals.

They're gone.

Entity X stands behind you. The clicking sound in its chest shifts, lowering, a frequency that almost sounds satisfied. It adjusts its grip on you.

BB's fist connects with the side of Entity X's torso.

The impact sends the massive red body sideways, slamming into the corridor wall with enough force to buckle the drywall and shatter every remaining light tube within a fifty-foot radius.

The red light dies, plunging the space into darkness lit only by Entity X's yellow eyes and the faint, colourless glow leaking through the cracks in BB's ruined face.

BB's hand finds your shoulder.

The world folds.

The displacement dumps you onto the grass of Level 14, and the impact is soft, yielding, the earth absorbing you the way the Poolrooms absorb sound.

You land on your hands and knees, and the grass is cool and damp against your palms, and you gasp. Pull air in through your teeth. Your lungs are burning. Your ribs ache from the displacement, from the running, from the screaming, from the hours or minutes or however long it's been since you ate a cookie in the pink bedroom and walked into the worst day of your life.

BB is beside you. On his knees. His hands on your arms, your shoulders, running over you with that focused, diagnostic urgency. He’s checking for injuries, for broken things he can fix with his hands, because the broken things he can't fix are piling up faster than he can count.

His fingers press against your ribs. Your wrists. His eyes search your face with a desperation that’s stripped away the last of the Bobby-mask. What's looking at you is BB, just BB, the cracks in his face leaking that pale light, his jaw pulsing, his mouth pressed into a tight line.

“You're not hurt,” he says. Half-statement, half-question, his hands lingering on your shoulders. “Tell me you're not hurt.”

You shake your head because you can't speak yet.

The breath is still caught somewhere between your diaphragm and your throat, snagged on the adrenaline. On the afterimage of Bobby's reaching hand disappearing through the wall, and the sound of Entity X's clicking purr.

You fall back onto the grass, press your palms over your eyes, and breathe. In. Out. In. Out. The stream somewhere behind you moves over its stones with the gentle, trickling sound while golden light drips over your shaking hands.

It takes minutes. Several.

The shaking subsides in stages. Hands first, then arms, then the deep tremor in your core that's been running since since the red light, since the first time you heard Entity X's clicking in the corridor and knew, with a certainty that bypassed logic, that it was coming for you.

The shaking stops, your breathing evening out. Your hands drop from your face, and the meadow is still there. All of it. The tall grass, the fallen log, the amber sky that never changes. BB sits across from you with his knees drawn up and his forearms resting on them and his face wearing the careful, watchful expression.

You rub your face. Drag your fingers across your eyes, your cheekbones, the tight muscles at your jaw. Working off the edge. Pressing the panic down into the place where it can be stored and processed later, when BB isn't watching, when the aftershocks have enough room to shake without an audience.

“Entity X is gone,” BB says quietly after another moment, testing. His voice is low and rough, stripped of its usual easy warmth. “They retreated. Again. Whatever he wanted—” He looks troubled, genuinely so. “Bobby and Kat are through. The M.E.G. have them. They're out of the Backrooms.”

You nod, staring blankly at the grass between your knees.

“You did it.” Softer now. Almost gentle. The voice from the kitchen, from the dance, from the mornings he'd say hey, baby and the world would shrink to the width of his full mouth. “You got them through. They're safe because of you. And I can—I'll rebuild. The apartment. The sublevel. I'll find Entity X and after I've dealt with it, we can—”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

BB falls silent.

A bird, the same small brown bird, or one just like it, lands on the branch above the fallen log and tips its head and watches you with one bright black eye.

“About Bobby.” Your voice is calm. Scraped clean of anger, clean of accusation. Just the question, unadorned, sitting in the air between you. “You heard him. Through the wall, same as me. For months. You heard him looking for me. You knew he loved me. You knew he was sitting three inches away from the entry point, saying the things I needed to hear.” You look at BB. His face, Bobby's face, the face you touched and kissed and studied in firelight and fluorescent light and the blue glow of the Poolrooms. “Why didn't you tell me, BB?”

BB is quiet for a long time. The bird chirps a few times in the tree above. The amber light paints his cracked and healing face, and the tense silence between you fills with the full weight of every answer he could give and the inadequacy of all of them.

“I heard how lonely you were.” Picking through the words the way you'd pick through wreckage, testing each one before putting weight on it. “Before you came through. When you were alone in the basement, on the late shifts. I heard what loneliness sounded like in your voice. And when you were here—when you cried, when you talked about him, when you said he stopped seeing me—I thought—” He falters, shifting in such an shy, human way you almost soften. “I thought we were the same. That our loneliness was the same. Mine and yours. And that I could—”

“That's not what I asked,” you intone coolly.

BB flinches. His fingers curl against his forearms, pressing into the fabric of his ruined shirt as he ducks his head lower.

“BB. Tell me the truth.”

BB's face visibly contorts with pain, his features rearranging around an admission he's been carrying for months the way you carried your anger. Not smoothing over. Not closing off. Just hurting.

“I knew you still loved him,” he admits, barely above a whisper. His eyes fix on the grass, unable to look at you. “I could hear it. Every time you said his name. Every time you cried about him. Every time you talked about the apartment, the mornings you shared, the way he used to look at you. You never stopped loving him. And I—” His voice thins, fraying. “I thought if you knew he was looking, if you knew he was right there, you'd leave. You'd go back through the wall and I'd—”

He stops, swallowing thickly. The sound is audible. The borrowed mechanism of a throat that doesn't need to swallow performing the gesture anyway because the emotion behind it is real even if the body isn't.

“I know it was selfish,” he adds in a hushed whisper.

You gaze at him blankly for what feels like a small eternity.

“You didn't just withhold it.” Your voice is steady, but your hands are shaking again. Anger and grief coiling together so tightly you can't separate them, can't feel where one ends and the other begins. “You used my loneliness. You heard me at my lowest, and you leaned into it. You built a life around my isolation because as long as I was isolated, as long as I didn't know there was something to go back to, I'd stay. With you. That's not love, BB. That's keeping.”

BB's head snaps up. His eyes are bright and wounded, but the expression on his face is gutted. Sheer hollowed-out devastation of hearing the worst possible interpretation of the best thing he ever did and recognising, with a clarity that makes his whole face crumble, that the interpretation isn't wrong.

“That's not—” he starts shakily. Tries again. “I didn't—I wasn't trying to—”

“But it's what you did.” Quiet. Final. “Regardless of what you meant. Regardless of how well you meant it. That is exactly what you did. You heard a woman crying about being invisible, and instead of telling her she was being looked for, you made yourself the only thing she could see.”

The amber light falls on his struck face, and the cracks in it have stopped leaking, the damage from the fight slowly closing, and the face that's left is Bobby's, wearing an expression he never wore.

Raw and open, and so deeply, completely sorry that the air around it seems to bend.

“You were happy,” he says quietly. Almost to himself. Like he's testing the memory against the accusation, holding them up side by side to see if they can coexist. “You started smiling again. Laughing. When we walked through the Poolrooms the first time, you laughed at something I said and the sound—” His voice catches. “The sound was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard. I thought—I thought I was fixing it. The loneliness. The pain. I thought if I could just—keep you safe, keep you close, give you everything he didn't—you wouldn't need to go back. You wouldn't want to. And that would be enough.”

Your eyes burn, tears pressing forward, hot and insistent, and you clench your jaw against them.

Because you can hear his sincerity. The genuine, unperformed, unhuman sincerity. He heard you cry through concrete and decided, with the full weight of its ancient and limited understanding, that the solution to your pain was its presence. 

BB didn't think he was trapping you. BB thought he was saving you.

The distinction doesn't make it okay. The distinction makes it worse because it means the thing that hurt you was trying, with every tool it had, to love you well. And its best tool was deception.

“You should have told me.” Tears are falling now, and you don't wipe them. “You should have given me the information. All of it. And then you should have let me choose. Even if the choice was leaving. Even if the choice was him. You should have let it be my choice, BB. That's what love does. It doesn't decide for the other person. It doesn't curate the options to guarantee the outcome you want. It gives them everything, and it lets them choose, and it survives the choosing, even if the choice breaks it.”

BB says nothing. His eyes fix on yours, and his expression is accepting. Terrible, slow, grinding acceptance. The kind that arrives not all at once but in layers, each one heavier than the last, pressing down on whatever passes for his heart.

“I didn't want to lose you,” he whispers, his voice catching. “I'm sorry. I—I didn't want to lose you.”

You sit across from the being who built you a kitchen and taught itself to kiss and pressed its mouth to your forehead every morning so it could lie to you with every tender gesture because the truth would have set you free and freedom was the one thing it couldn't give.

You breathe in, glancing up at the sky. At those breathtaking gradients of gold and amber, laced with violet at the edges. The sky that never changes, the eternal late afternoon of a level called Paradise that exists inside a place that shouldn't exist at all.

You look back at BB.

“Do you know why I stayed?” you ask softly. “In the beginning. When I found out you weren't actually Bobby. Do you know why I didn't run?”

BB's face tightens, and the pain that crosses it is visible, bright hot.

“Because of the face,” he says, low and pained. The words dragged out of him like splinters from beneath the skin. “Because I look like him. Because you love him. Because you wanted him—always him, always Bobby—and I was close enough.”

Your eyes fill. The tears spill over fresh, tracking down your cheeks, and you stand. Cross the distance between you. Close it. Three feet. Two. One. Until you're standing in front of him and he's looking up at you from the grass with Bobby's blue eyes and BB's anguish and the meadow light on both of you.

You touch his face.

Your fingertips on his cheekbone. The line of his jaw. The scar from the cabinet door that happened to someone else's body. Your thumb traces the corner of his mouth. That corner where the grin starts, the lopsided one, the one that's his and not Bobby's.

BB makes a sound. Low. Wounded.

A vibration that starts in his chest and comes through his throat as something between a sigh and a moan. His eyes close and his head turns into your palm, nuzzling closer. Desperate, pressing his face into your hand the way he did the first time you touched him. The sound he's making is continuous, a keening that he can't seem to stop, and his hand comes up and covers yours on his cheek and holds it there, feeling him shake.

“It was never about the face,” you choke out, your voice breaking. The tears fall freely now, and you let them. “It was you. Just you, BB. The way you listened. The way you learned me. The way you held me like I was the first thing you'd ever wanted to hold. The way you asked am I doing it right after kissing me, and the answer was always yes. It was always just you.”

BB's eyes crack open. Wet. Bobby's blue, glassy with a moisture that shouldn't be there, that his body doesn't produce, that has no biological mechanism to explain it… and yet. His lashes are dark and clumped, his eyes full and the expression in them is so devastated, so completely and utterly undone, that you have to look away.

You pull your hand back.

BB makes another sound. Louder. A moan that cracks open midway through and becomes something raw and guttural, a noise that comes from the place beneath the face, beneath the voice, from whatever vast and ancient thing lives at the core of him and is now experiencing, for the first time in its incomprehensible existence, the human agony of being left by the person it loves.

“No,” he breathes. “Please. No, no.”

You lower your head. “Take me to the M.E.G. outpost.”

“Please.” His hand reaches for yours but catches only air. You've stepped back and his fingers close on nothing and his face—Bobby's face, BB's face, the face that learned to smile because you smiled first—contorts. “Don't. Don't leave. You can't—I'll fix it. I'll tell you everything, I'll never keep anything from you again, I'll—”

“BB.”

“—the apartment, I'll make it better. I'll find Entity X and end it, and you'll be safe. You'll be safe forever, I can keep you safe, please, I can—”

You can barely speak. “BB. Stop.”

He stops, his mouth trembling. The word he was forming dies on his tongue. His eyes rest on you, wide and wet, terrified.

“All that's waiting out there is a life that hurt you,” he blurts out, desperate. The words tumble, tripping over each other. BB, who is rarely inarticulate, is now struggling to assemble sentences fast enough to change the outcome. “Illness and old age and people who forgot you and—and a man who didn't see you until you were gone. That's what's on the other side of the wall. You’ll d-die. I… no. Please, no. Not you, not you.”

Your heart is ripping apart. A physical sensation of something in your chest being torn in two directions at once, the fibres separating, the tissue rending.

He's right. He's right about all of it. The world on the other side of the wall is the one that hurt you. The one that made you invisible. The one that let you stand in doorways waiting to be loved and answered with grunts and cold sheets and blank tapes that erased your face. There is nothing on the other side of the wall that is gentle the way BB is gentle, nothing that listens the way he listens, nothing that will press its mouth to your forehead every morning and hold you through the night and learn your name syllable by syllable.

But it's your life. The miserable, broken, painful, mortal thing. Yours.

“If you love me,” you say in a quiet rasp, each word costing a piece of your heart you can feel being subtracted from the centre of your chest. “If you love me the way you say you do. If that promise you made me meant anything at all, or the name I gave you meant anything... then you'll let me leave.”

BB stares at you. The tears—his tears, not Bobby's, the moisture that has no biological origin and exists only because the grief demanded a vessel—tracking down his cheeks, and where they fall the skin glows. Faint. Luminescent. A soft, shimmering iridescence that blooms along the tracks of the tears like bioluminescence, like foxfire, a visible signature of an inhuman emotion marking inhuman skin.

His agony written on his face in light.

BB reaches for your shoulder slowly. His hand is gentle, his touch almost absent.

The meadow folds around you, your stomach lurching. The golden light compresses, narrows, and when the world straightens again, you're standing in the corridor on Level 4.

The monitoring equipment. The cameras. The wall with the shimmer. The remains from operatives are mostly gone. Absorbed by the Backrooms, consumed by the level itself, the corridor healing over the evidence of violence the way skin heals over a wound. A few remain. Dark shapes at the periphery that you don't look at.

The no-clip wall is there. The shimmer and behind it the real world. A place where it rains, and people eat hotdogs and phone calls go unanswered. Where love atrophies through neglect and everyone you've ever known has forgotten your face.

And BB's hand rests on your shoulder, trembling openly. A hand that was built to hold on, that heard you, chose you, kept you, loved you and lied to you, and is now standing in a corridor doing the one thing it has never done.

Letting go.

His hand lifts from your shoulder.

You feel the absence instantly. The place where his palm was goes cold, the last physical connection between your bodies dissolving into air.

“Please,” he rasps behind you, low and shaking, stripped of everything. The charm, the cockiness, the ancient resonance, the hum's harmonic, all of it gone, the voice of a thing that has been reduced to its simplest possible setting: a being, in a hallway, begging. “Please stay. Please don't leave me alone again. Please.”

You turn, walking toward the wall. Your notebook tight against your chest.

“Please.” Louder, more frantic, the word cracking. “I'll be better. I'll tell you everything. I'll never lie to you again. I'll—I can change. I can learn. You taught me how to dance and how to kiss. How to hold you. Teach me this too, teach me how to let you be angry and still stay, teach me how to—”

You keep walking. The shimmer is close now. Five metres. Four.

“Please don't go.” His voice is climbing. Not in volume, in pitch. In frequency. The human register giving way to something else, something that vibrates in the walls and the floor, fillings in your teeth. “Please. I can't—I'll be alone. I'll be alone again. I was alone for so long, and then you were there, and I heard you. You were the first voice in—in—”

The sound fractures. Becomes a keening. A high, sustained, inhuman wail that has no words left in it, just the raw frequency of loss, a being older than language grieving in the only language it has left. Sound itself, vibration itself, the hum turned inside out and made to carry a weight it was never designed to hold.

You stop.

Your composure breaks. Silent tears pour down your face, and your mouth contorts, your chest heaving and you press the notebook against your sternum until it hurts. The keening behind you is the worst sound you’ve ever heard. Worse than the Smiler, worse than Entity X, worse than Bobby's voice saying baby? in a yellow corridor, because this sound has your name in it.

This sound is the noise a heart makes when it's too old and too vast and too full to survive what's happening to it.

You turn and look behind you.

The corridor is empty.

The shimmer on the wall pulses gently, waiting. And the space where BB stood—three metres back, in the corridor, where his voice was—is vacant. Just the flat, beige, infinite emptiness of a level that's been suddenly abandoned.

He's gone.

For all his power. For all the corridors he owns and the entities he's unmade and the levels he moves through like blood through a vein. For all the ancient, vast, immeasurable force that lives inside the Bobby-suit and behind the borrowed eyes and underneath the face he chose because he heard a woman crying and wanted to be the thing that made her stop.

The one thing BB couldn't do was watch you leave him.

You press your hands over your face, and you sob. Hard. A sound that comes from the bottom of your gut and fills the corridor and bounces off the walls and comes back to you changed, louder.

You scrub your face. The heels of your hands grinding against your eyes until white spots swim in your vision. You breathe wetly, straightening, and look toward the wall. The shimmering exit.

You step through.

an: in which everyone has a no good, very bad day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[fightingbymoonlight]

Seeing people I know and like using AI is making me understand the protagonists of those old time sci fi dystopia's.

"Oh I don't normally use AI, I just wanted it to plan my trip"

You lived on this planet for decades, you know what you like, there are hundreds of websites where you can type into any search engine " things to do in [area]" and have at least a hundred different options.

"Oh I only use it so I can figure out what to make during the week with what I have"

The most popular website as you type in "recipes" into google have sections where you click dinner- quick and easy and those usually rely on staples + 1 or 2 items. I found 30 recipes on chicken alone.

"I had a writing idea, so I typed a few sentences into Chat GPT and I was able to write 20 pages with it."

Youdidn'twriteit.Youdidn'twriteit.youdidn'twriteit.youdidn'twriteit.YOUDIDN'TWRITEIT.YOUDIDN'TWRITEIT.YOUDIDN'TWRITEIT.

[catmanbowser]

took a glimpse on what's going on in the kpop side of twt and just saw a post frm a few days ago of mark lee, apparently now ex member of nct, wearing a confederate flag..????

[purplespiritimagines]

the quiet you stole - jason todd

request anon - meta human reader that has like scp 999 powers to spread joy, emotionally comfort and even reformed villains to rehabilitate and their powers manifest back when they feel so alone of wishing someone was there to comfort them and for someone to believe in them that things can be better and so one day their powers got triggered when they wanted to comfort an animal and now they're able to do those things for anyone and anything but sadly can't do so for themselves

content jason todd x gn! reader, meta! reader, comfort powers, non-consensual use of emotional/comfort powers, consent violation, emotional manipulation concerns, bruce makes ethically questionable choices, lazarus pit trauma, lazarus episodes, rage spirals, dissociation, fear of losing control, trauma responses, hurt/comfort, power overuse, collapse/near-collapse, mplied childhood loneliness/neglect, references to resurrection trauma, references to death, non-graphic violence, gun use, injury/blood, underground lab/experimentation imagery

masterlist

word count 10.4k

Bruce Wayne found you in the aftermath of a mission neither of you liked to remember. It had been years ago, in the ruins beneath an old Gotham church where the Court of Owls had kept frightened people in cages and called it preservation, because Gotham’s monsters had always been fond of pretty words for ugly things. Batman had gone in expecting weapons, records, names, evidence. He had not expected a room full of victims so hollowed out by fear that even rescue looked like another kind of threat. They had screamed when he approached. They had clawed at medics. One man had tried to break his own hand to slip a restraint because the sight of armour meant pain to him now, and no amount of Batman’s careful, gravelled reassurance could convince him otherwise.

Then you had stepped out of the shadows with blood on your sleeve and a voice like warm rain.

“Can I help them?” you had asked.

Batman had turned on you like a weapon. He had not known you then. He had only known you were there, unaccounted for, unafraid, standing in the wreckage of a Talon cell with trembling hands and eyes too old for your face. You should have looked like a survivor. You should have looked like another person who needed carrying out.

Instead, you had looked at the people in the cages and cried for them without making your grief the loudest thing in the room.

“What can you do?” Batman had asked.

“Comfort,” you said.

It had sounded too small for what happened next.

You had knelt outside the first cage and asked the man inside if he wanted you to come closer. He had spat at you. You had nodded like that was answer enough and stayed where you were, hand open on the stone floor, palm up, no demand in it. The air around you had changed by degrees. Batman remembered that most of all: not light, exactly, not a visible glow, not magic in the theatrical way Gotham sometimes spat up from its cursed old foundations. Just warmth. Shelter. The impossible sensation of standing in a room where fear had been the only language spoken for weeks and hearing, suddenly, a second language answer it.

The man had stopped shaking. Then a woman in the next cage began to sob. Then a child crawled toward the bars and reached for your hand.

Batman had watched you give something away. He had watched the tremor start in your fingers and climb up your arms. He had watched the colour drain slowly from your mouth. He had watched every person in that room breathe easier while you became colder and quieter, while the hurt lifted from them and settled somewhere inside you where no one else could see.

Afterwards, you had refused medical transport with a politeness so brittle it nearly cut.

Batman had followed you into the alley behind the church. Rain had been falling in thin, mean sheets. Your breath had fogged in the cold. You had leaned one shoulder against the brick and pressed both hands to your sternum like you were trying to put yourself back inside your own body.

“You’re a metahuman,” he said.

You laughed once, exhausted and humourless. “Usually people say thank you first.”

“Thank you.”

That had surprised you enough to make you look at him.

Batman stood in the rain with his cape dripping black onto the pavement, unreadable and enormous and too still. You could feel the grief in him even then, though you had not known its shape. It was old. Armored. The kind of pain that had built a city inside itself and populated it with rules.

“You helped them,” he said.

“They let me.”

“You asked.”

“I always ask.”

His silence had shifted. You had not known him well enough then to translate it, but later you would understand. Batman trusted rules more than people, and you had just offered him one.

“I don’t control anyone,” you said. “I don’t erase pain. I don’t force forgiveness, or happiness, or obedience. I can make the fear loosen. I can make someone feel safe enough to choose what they do next. That’s all.”

“That’s not all.”

“No,” you admitted. “But it’s the part that matters.”

He had studied you through the rain. “What does it cost?”

You had smiled at him then, which was unfair, because the smile made you look gentler than the answer deserved. “More than people like to hear.”

Batman had not pressed.

That was why, years later, when Bruce Wayne called and asked for your help, you picked up.

Not because you trusted Batman completely. You had worked with him enough times to know trust with Bruce Wayne was less a door and more a series of reinforced checkpoints. But he had never tried to put you in a lab. He had never asked you to use your power on someone who refused. He had never called you an asset to your face, which, for a man with contingency plans for his contingency plans, probably counted as emotional growth.

So when he said there was a case involving Lazarus contamination, you came to Gotham.

You should have known better.

The cave had not changed. It was still cold stone and colder light, a cathedral built for secrecy, humming with machines that looked expensive enough to develop opinions. Bruce stood near the main computer in a black sweater instead of the suit, which should have made him seem less like Batman and somehow did not. His face was tired in a way money could not soften. Alfred gave you tea with the solemn expression of a man who knew the whole truth and had been quietly disappointed in everyone for years.

“There have been three incidents,” Bruce said, pulling up footage on the screen. “Low-level criminals exposed to a modified compound derived from Lazarus Pit residue. Heightened aggression, regenerative instability, temporary dissociation, violent emotional amplification.”

You watched a man in a convenience store rip a steel shelf from the wall with his bare hands while screaming for someone who was not there. The footage changed. A woman in restraints wept green-tinged tears and begged the doctors not to let her sleep because something was waiting under the dark. Another clip showed a warehouse fight, shaky security footage catching a flash of red helmet and gunmetal before the camera cut out.

Your eyes moved back to Bruce.

“There’s more,” you said.

Bruce did not answer quickly enough. Alfred’s expression, somehow, became even more disappointed.

You set your tea down untouched. “Bruce.”

His jaw tightened. “Jason has been affected by Lazarus exposure before.”

The name landed carefully, like something fragile placed on a table.

Jason. You knew of him, of course. Everyone in Gotham who knew Batman’s world knew of Jason Todd in pieces: the dead Robin, the resurrected son, the Red Hood, the boy who came back wrong because Gotham had never met a tragedy it could not make worse with time, magic, or parental failure. You had never met him properly. You had seen him once from a rooftop across a street, red helmet shining under rain, moving through Crime Alley like a warning with a heartbeat.

Bruce continued, “The recent incidents have aggravated his episodes.”

Your stomach sank. “Episodes.”

Bruce’s eyes flicked away. Only for a second. “Lazarus episodes. Rage spikes. Dissociation. Sensory distortion. He becomes more reactive after exposure to certain compounds, especially when the residue has been altered.”

“And you want me on the case because I can stabilise victims.”

“Yes.”

The answer was too clean.

You waited. Bruce closed his eyes for the length of one breath. When he opened them, Batman looked out through Bruce Wayne’s face. Not the cowl. Worse. The will. The fear pretending to be strategy.

“I also want you near Jason,” he said.

There it was. The real mission. The ugly little bone under the offered hand.

“Near him,” you repeated.

“Your presence alone has had measurable effects in past cases. Victims calm faster when you’re in proximity, even without direct contact.”

“I know how my power works.”

“I believe you could reduce the severity of his episodes.”

“Does Jason know you’re asking me this?”

Bruce said nothing.

You laughed softly, but there was no humour in it. “No, then.”

“He won’t accept help if he knows.”

“Then that’s his choice.”

“He’s suffering.”

“So are most people in Gotham. I don’t sneak into their nervous systems because someone with a cape thinks they’d be more convenient if they stopped hurting so loudly.”

Bruce flinched. Good. Some anger in you wanted him to. Another part of you hated that you knew exactly why he was doing this.

Because Bruce loved like a man trying to defuse a bomb with his bare hands. Because Jason was both his son and his failure, and Bruce could not look at one without feeling the other cut through him. Because he would rather turn the whole city upside down than ask Jason for permission to care and risk being told no.

“I’m not asking you to alter him,” Bruce said.

“You are.”

“I’m asking you to help him.”

“You’re asking me to make him easier to survive.”

The words went cold between you.

Alfred looked down. Bruce’s face tightened, and for a moment, he looked less like Batman and more like a father too exhausted by fear to dress it properly. “I can’t keep watching him destroy himself.”

“And you think I can fix him.”

“No.”

The denial came fast. Too fast. You stared at him until he looked away.

“I don’t agree with that word,” you said. “People aren’t broken appliances. His rage might be hurting him, but it also belongs to him. His pain belongs to him. You don’t get to decide he’d be better without it.”

Bruce’s voice dropped. “If he kills someone during an episode—”

“Then that still doesn’t make his consent optional.”

Silence spread through the cave, wide and echoing.

You should have walked out. You almost did.

But then the footage on the screen flickered back to Red Hood in the warehouse, his body jerking mid-fight as if something inside him had pulled hard on a chain. You watched him slam one hand against a wall, watched him shake his head like he was trying to dislodge a voice, watched him turn away from an unconscious man with visible effort. You saw the restraint. Not ease. Not goodness handed down like a verdict from someone safer. Choice. Brutal, shaking, deliberate choice.

And you hated Bruce a little for knowing you would see it.

“I won’t use my power on him without permission,” you said.

Bruce looked at you.

“I mean it. Not targeted. Not deliberately. Not because you ask, not because you worry, not because you think his emotions are inconvenient.”

“I understand.”

“No,” you said. “You don’t. But you’re going to pretend you do because that’s what men like you do when you want something badly enough to call it necessary.”

Alfred made a small sound that might, under different circumstances, have been approval. Bruce absorbed it without defending himself.

You hated that too.

“I’ll help with the case,” you said. “I’ll help contaminated victims. If Jason wants to know what I can do, I’ll tell him. If he asks for help, I’ll help. That’s all.”

Bruce nodded once.

You wanted to believe that was an agreement. Looking back, you would understand it was only a strategy changing shape.

You met Jason Todd in a safehouse kitchen at three in the morning with a knife in his hand and blood on his shirt. The blood was not all his. That seemed to be a theme with him.

You had been told the safehouse was empty. That was the first lie. The second was that Bruce had asked you to drop off containment samples there because the cave systems were compromised, which sounded plausible only because Batman had a lifelong commitment to making logistical nightmares seem professional. You let yourself in through the back with the access code Bruce had given you, carrying a sealed case of Lazarus residue samples and a paper bag from a twenty-four-hour diner because Alfred had muttered something about you forgetting to eat.

Jason was standing in the kitchen when you entered, shirt half-unbuttoned, helmet on the counter, dark curls wet from rain or sweat or both. He had a combat knife in one hand, and a look in his eyes that made the whole room feel suddenly smaller.

You froze. He froze.

Then he looked you up and down, slow and unimpressed. “You the delivery guy?”

You lifted the sealed case. “Do I look like the delivery guy?”

“You look like someone who should know better than to walk into my safehouse.”

“I was told it was empty.”

Jason’s mouth twisted. “Yeah, well. People lie.”

You thought of Bruce and nearly laughed. Instead, you set the case down carefully on the table. “I’m working the Lazarus contamination case.”

His expression changed by half a degree. With Jason, you would learn, half a degree was basically a monologue. “With B?”

“With Batman,” you said, because you had not earned the right to make that wound casual.

Jason saw the distinction. Of course he did. His eyes sharpened. “And you are?”

You gave him your name.

He waited.

“That’s usually where people say theirs,” you added.

“You broke into my kitchen.”

“Technically, I used a code.”

“That makes it worse.”

“Fair.”

He stared at you for another long second, knife still loose in his hand. Then his gaze dropped to the diner bag. “That food?”

“Yes.”

“For me?”

“Alfred said someone here would be unpleasant if unfed.”

Jason blinked. Then, to your surprise, he laughed. It was a rough little thing, dragged out of him against his will. “That old man’s a menace.”

“I’m getting that.”

He set the knife down.

Not far. Not out of reach.

But down.

It should not have felt like something.

It did.

The first thing you noticed about Jason was that his pain did not ask politely to be seen.

Jason’s pain was a house fire. It filled the room even when he smiled. It lived in the set of his shoulders, in the way his eyes tracked exits, in the fury that rose too quickly when fear touched it, in the green-black pulse beneath his skin that was not emotion exactly but something older and uglier wearing emotion as armour. The Lazarus Pit in him felt like standing near a storm drain during a flood: a pull under the surface, a pressure that wanted to drag everything down.

Your power reacted before you gave it permission.

That frightened you. Not because Jason seemed monstrous. He did not. That was the problem. He felt violently, painfully human beneath the contamination, and the part of you that had first manifested your gift for an injured alley cat wanted to reach for him with both hands.

You did not. You sat across from him at the kitchen table while he ate fries with the intensity of someone pretending not to be starving. He watched you watching him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You got a face.”

“Most people do.”

“Yours is doing a thing.”

You looked down at your untouched coffee. “I was trying to decide whether asking about the blood would get me stabbed.”

Jason glanced at his shirt. “Not mine.”

“Congratulations.”

“Some mine.”

“Less congratulations.”

His mouth twitched.

You should not have liked him so quickly. Jason Todd was all sharp edges and guarded spaces, sarcasm like barbed wire, eyes that dared people to come close just so he could prove they would regret it. But he was also the kind of man who ate diner fries from a paper bag in a safehouse kitchen at three in the morning and quietly slid the second burger toward you when he noticed you were not drinking your coffee.

“Eat,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“Didn’t ask.”

“That’s rude.”

“That’s dinner.”

You stared at the burger, then at him. He looked away first, pretending to study the rain streaking down the dark window.

You ate.

He did not smile, but he looked less irritated by existence afterwards.

That was how it began: not with comfort, not exactly, but with a burger offered like a challenge and a knife left close enough to matter but not close enough to threaten.

Bruce kept assigning you to the same routes after that. Not openly. He was subtler than that, which somehow made it worse. A contaminated weapons cache in Crime Alley. A possible victim near Jason’s territory. A safehouse debrief Red Hood “might attend.” You were not stupid. Neither was Jason, though his suspicion aimed itself mostly at Bruce and therefore missed, for a while, the exact nature of the trap.

“You and B joined at the hip now?” Jason asked one night from the roof of a closed pawn shop, where the two of you were watching a suspected Lazarus courier enter a bar across the street.

You were crouched beside an air-conditioning unit, cold wind cutting through your jacket. “No.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“I work cases involving emotional destabilisation and meta-chemical contamination. This case has both.”

“Fancy way of saying you’re here because people are losing their minds.”

You looked at him. “People don’t lose their minds. They get overwhelmed. There’s a difference.”

Jason’s helmet turned toward you. You could not see his face, but you felt his attention settle heavier than before. “That your professional opinion?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your unprofessional opinion?”

“That Gotham has a bad habit of calling people crazy when it means inconvenient.”

The silence that followed had teeth.

Then Jason said, “Careful. Talk like that and the Bats might start liking you.”

“Too late. Alfred gave me biscuits.”

“Shit. You’re family now.”

You laughed before you could stop yourself.

Jason looked away quickly, but not before you caught the slight tilt of his helmet, the surprise of it. Like he had not meant to make you laugh. Like he had not expected to want to do it again.

You did not use your power on him. You did not reach into him, did not quiet the Pit, did not smooth the rage when it rose. When his breath hitched after exposure to residue, you kept your hands to yourself. When his fingers tightened around his gun until the leather of his gloves creaked, you stood near but did not touch. When he paced a safehouse like a caged thing after a bad fight, you sat on the counter and talked about books until he either told you to shut up or threw one at you.

But your power had always been more than touch. It lived in your voice when you softened it. In your proximity when you let yourself care too loudly. In the air around you when someone’s pain called to yours and your body answered before your ethics could catch up. You did not direct it at Jason, but sometimes the room got warmer. Sometimes his shoulders loosened after twenty minutes beside you. Sometimes the green edge in his presence receded by a fraction, and he would blink like he had just remembered the world did not have to be fought every second.

You told yourself that was not the same thing.

You were lying. Maybe not the way Bruce had lied. Not with plans and omissions and a chessboard where his son’s pain had become a problem to solve. Your lie was softer. Worse, maybe, because it came wrapped in tenderness. You wanted Jason to sleep. You wanted the tremor to leave his hands. You wanted his laugh to come easier. You wanted the Pit to stop using his body like an old crime scene.

You wanted to help. Gotham was built on horrible things done by people who wanted to help.

Jason got close to you like a stray animal deciding the porch light was not a trap. Slowly. Suspiciously. With a lot of biting.

He started appearing when Bruce had not assigned either of you anywhere, leaning in the doorway of your temporary apartment with takeout and a scowl.

“You eat today?”

You looked up from the case files spread across your floor. “Hello to you too.”

“That a no?”

“That is none of your business.”

“So no.”

He stepped inside without waiting for permission because he was rude, then paused halfway through the motion and glanced back at you, jaw tight. Waiting.

It took you a second to understand.

The big, terrifying Red Hood, crime lord of Crime Alley, had remembered to ask with his body even when his mouth forgot.

You softened. “You can come in, Jason.”

He grunted, like permission was annoying because it mattered, and entered.

He learned your tells, too. That was the danger of him. People underestimated Jason’s perception because he wore anger like a warning sign large enough to distract from everything else. But he noticed. He noticed when your fingers went numb after helping contaminated victims. Noticed when you smiled too quickly after a debrief. Noticed when Bruce’s voice got careful and your shoulders rose half an inch. Noticed when you did not eat unless someone put food directly in front of you.

So he put food in front of you. Aggressively.

One night, after you spent two hours calming a girl who had been dosed with Lazarus residue and kept screaming that her dead brother was calling from the walls, Jason drove you back to your apartment in silence. You were cold all the way through, coat wrapped tight around your body, hands tucked under your arms. You had used your power with permission. The girl had begged for help. You had given it.

Jason had watched from the doorway.

He had not said anything until you were inside. Then he took one look at you trying to unlock your door with shaking fingers, gently pushed your hand aside, and unlocked it himself.

“I had it,” you muttered.

“You were about to fight the keyhole and lose.”

“Rude.”

“Accurate.”

Inside, he made tea with the grim competence of a man who had survived on worse things than caffeine and spite. He placed the mug in front of you, then draped his leather jacket over your shoulders without asking. You should have objected. You did not. It smelled like smoke, rain, gun oil, and something faintly warm underneath that was only Jason.

He leaned against the counter, arms folded. “That what happens every time?”

“What?”

“You go all corpse-cold after doing your Care Bear routine?”

You huffed a laugh into the mug. “Care Bear routine?”

“Don’t dodge.”

You looked down at the tea. Your reflection trembled faintly on the surface. “Not every time.”

“Lie.”

“Sometimes.”

“Better.”

You were too tired to be careful. “It depends how much pain there is.”

Jason’s face shifted.

You realised the mistake too late.

“How much pain,” he repeated.

“It’s not— I don’t take it exactly.”

“But you feel it.”

You stared into the tea. Jason swore quietly.

“It’s not as bad as you’re thinking,” you said.

“Considering you don’t know what I’m thinking, that’s a dumbass thing to say.”

“You think loudly.”

“Yeah? What am I thinking now?”

That Bruce was right and wrong at the same time, you thought. That Jason was angry because anger was easier than fear. That he wanted to ask whether you had ever used it on him but did not yet know there was a question to ask. That some part of him, the part that had been treated like a weapon by enemies and family alike, knew something in this whole arrangement was rotten even if he could not see where.

You said none of that.

“You’re thinking I should eat something,” you said.

Jason narrowed his eyes.

Then he opened your fridge. It was, tragically, mostly condiments and one heroic apple.

He stared inside for a long moment. “This is a hate crime.”

“It’s minimalism.”

“It’s a cry for help.”

“You’re very dramatic.”

He closed the fridge. “I’m ordering food.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Didn’t ask.”

The warmth in your chest then was not your power.

That was the problem. Somewhere between stakeouts and diner bags, between his sarcasm and your tired smiles, between the way he never called you soft like it was an insult and the way you never looked at him like rage made him less worthy of tenderness, Jason became more than Bruce’s son, more than Red Hood, more than the case’s unspoken centre of gravity.

He became Jason. He became the man who read battered paperbacks while sitting on your fire escape because he claimed your apartment was too quiet. He became the person who fixed your loose window lock without mentioning it. He became the voice saying “You good?” in your comm after every mission, rough and casual and not casual at all. He became the one who called you Sunshine like an insult until one night it slipped out soft and both of you pretended not to notice.

He became dangerous to want. Because wanting made you selfish. Because sometimes, when the Pit scraped under his skin and his eyes went distant, you let the room warm by a degree.

Just a degree. Just enough.

The field mission that ruined everything took place beneath the old Monarch Theatre. The building had been abandoned since No Man’s Land, left to rot in a neighbourhood that had learned not to look too closely at places with locked doors and fresh tyre tracks. The Lazarus compound had been moving through the city in coded shipments, and every trail led back to the theatre’s flooded basement, where some offshoot of the League had apparently decided Gotham needed one more basement full of bad decisions.

Bruce wanted Batman and Robin on the perimeter. Jason told him to go to hell.

Bruce told him he was compromised. Jason told him to go to hell twice, with better punctuation.

You ended up in the passenger seat of Jason’s car, watching rain streak across the windshield while he drove with one hand and checked his gun with the other like a man actively trying to shorten Bruce’s lifespan through stress.

“You know,” you said, “when Batman says someone is compromised, usually there’s at least a little data behind it.”

Jason snorted. “B says compromised when he means disobedient and emotionally inconvenient.”

“Those are different things.”

“Tell him that.”

You looked at him. The greenish glow of passing traffic lights moved over his face, catching the white streak in his hair, the hard line of his jaw, the bruise half-hidden near his temple. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Compromised.”

His hand tightened on the wheel. For a second, you felt it. The Pit, restless under his skin, reacting to the name without being named. A dark tide under a locked door.

“No,” he said.

The lie sat between you, breathing.

You did not challenge it. That was your mistake.

The theatre basement smelled like mould, rust, old velvet, and chemical rot. Water pooled ankle-deep across the cracked floor, reflecting the sickly green glow of containment tanks set up beneath the stage. League symbols marked the walls in black paint. Men in tactical gear moved between crates, their veins lit faintly green beneath their skin. Not League proper, you realised quickly. Deserters, maybe. Fanatics. People scavenging from sacred horrors and pretending that made them priests.

Jason was quiet in the way he got before violence. Not calm. Never calm. Focused. The difference mattered.

You moved through the shadows behind him, one hand near your belt, the other gloved and flexing at your side. Your job was to stabilise victims if any were present. That was what Bruce had said. That was what you told yourself.

Then Jason saw the tank. It was smaller than the others, built upright like a coffin, full of green liquid and suspended wires. Inside floated a body. Not alive. Not fully dead either, maybe. A failed resurrection. A test subject. A boy, no older than fifteen, with dark hair drifting around his pale face.

Jason stopped moving.

The whole basement changed. You felt the Pit in him wake. It turned inside him like something with teeth, recognising itself in the glow, in the rot, in the impossible wrongness of a body kept between states. Jason’s breath hitched once. His gun lowered by an inch. Then his shoulders went rigid, and the air around him seemed to snap tight.

“Jay,” you whispered.

He did not answer.

One of the deserters spotted you. Shouted.

The basement erupted. Gunfire cracked against concrete. Jason moved like a storm given bones, violent and efficient and too fast, dropping the first three men before you had fully taken cover. You pulled two exposed civilians—lab techs, unwilling or not, you could not tell—behind a stack of crates and pressed warmth into the air with your voice, keeping them from panicking as bullets tore through the dark.

“It’s okay,” you said, though nothing was. “Stay low. Breathe. Hands over your head. Don’t move unless I tell you.”

Across the room, Jason slammed a man into the side of a tank hard enough to spiderweb the glass.

The man laughed.

“You’re proof it works,” he choked. “The dead can come back angry enough to be useful.”

Jason froze.

Then he hit him again. Harder.

“Jason!” you shouted.

He did not hear you. Or he did, and the Pit heard first.

The man’s head cracked against the glass. Once. Twice. The tank alarm began to shriek. Green light strobed across Jason’s face, and when he turned, his eyes were not glowing, not exactly, but the rage in them had gone bright and terrible, edged in something that was not fully his.

A deserter lunged at you from the side. You ducked too late. Pain burst across your shoulder as you hit the floor. Water soaked through your clothes. Your power flared instinctively, warming the terror of the civilians behind you, calming the attacker for half a second—long enough for you to kick his knee out and scramble back.

Jason saw you fall.

The Pit surged.

It was like being near a furnace door thrown open. He crossed the basement in three strides and put the attacker through a rotted wooden partition. The man went down hard, groaning, weapon skittering away. Jason grabbed him by the collar and lifted him again.

“Don’t,” you said.

Jason’s helmet had been knocked away in the fight. His face was bare. Wet hair clung to his forehead. Blood marked his mouth. His expression was not blank. That would have been easier. It was full of too much. Rage, fear, memory, death, the boy in the tank, you on the ground, Bruce’s voice in his comm telling him to stand down, all of it collapsing inward until there was only the hand around the man’s throat and the terrible need to make something stop.

“Jason,” you said again.

His fingers tightened. The man clawed at his wrist.

You knew, with absolute clarity, that Jason would hate you for what happened next. You also knew he would hate himself more if you let him kill that man while the Pit had its hands inside him. So you reached.

Not gently. There was no time for gentle.

Your power slammed into him across the flooded basement like a door blown open by light. Jason staggered as if struck. The man dropped from his grip, gasping, and crawled away. You pushed warmth into the green-black storm inside Jason, not to erase it, not to fix it, not to make him docile, but to quiet the thing that had wrapped itself around his choice and was squeezing.

Jason turned toward you.

The look on his face gutted you. He knew. The rage was still there. You could feel it trying to rise, huge and wounded and rightful. He wanted to be furious. He wanted to snarl, to curse, to demand what you had done, to shove your power back out of his skin with both hands.

But your comfort was already moving through him.

His breath steadied against his will. His shoulders lowered. The green edge in his eyes dulled. His anger hit the warmth you had poured into him and softened before it could become sound.

Horror entered his face. Not fear of the Pit.

Fear of you.

“What,” he said, voice too calm, too even, trembling underneath because the emotion had nowhere to go, “the fuck did you do?”

Your hand was still extended. You could feel him inside the reach of your power, feel the rage trying to form and being soothed, soothed, soothed before he could choose whether he wanted it eased. The wrongness of it hit you so hard you almost pulled back.

Then Jason’s gaze flicked to the fallen man. To the boy in the tank. To his own bloody hands.

His jaw clenched.

“Stop,” he said.

You tried. The second you loosened your grip on the power, the Pit roared back through him. Jason doubled over with a strangled sound, one hand going to his head, the other reaching blindly for the gun at his hip. Not aimed at anyone. Not yet. But the violence in the room answered him like an echo.

You pushed the warmth back in, sobbing once from the effort.

Jason went still again. Too still.

His eyes lifted to yours.

“You’re keeping me calm,” he said.

It was not a question.

You could barely breathe. “I’m keeping you here.”

“Don’t dress it up.”

“I’m sorry.”

His mouth twisted. You felt the apology hit him and fail to land. How could it? You were apologising while still doing the thing.

Somewhere behind you, Batman’s voice cracked through the comm. “Status.”

Jason’s eyes did not leave yours.

You said nothing.

Jason answered, voice level in a way that made the skin on your arms prickle. “Ask your specialist.”

Bruce went silent.

Jason laughed once. It sounded almost gentle, because your power would not let it sharpen properly.

That was worse. That was so much worse.

The rest of the fight ended around you in fragments. Batman and Robin breached from above. The deserters surrendered or fell. The tank systems were shut down. The boy inside was gone in the way bodies were gone when people had tried too hard to drag them back. You held the warmth around Jason until the Lazarus residue was contained, until the active compound stopped pulsing through the room, until the Pit inside him retreated from a roar to a low, hateful growl.

Only then did you let go.

Jason stumbled back like a cut string. For one suspended second, he simply stood there, breathing hard, staring at you with his own anger finally returning to him.

Then his face changed. The rage arrived.

Fully. His.

He looked almost relieved to feel it.

“You,” he said.

You took one step toward him. “Jason—”

“Don’t.”

The word cracked across the basement.

You stopped.

He looked past you at Batman, who had gone utterly still near the edge of the flooded stage. Damian stood behind him, sword lowered, eyes flicking between all three of you with the sharp, uncomfortable awareness of someone realising the adults had made a mess with consequences.

Jason’s laugh came out raw this time. No magic softening it. No warmth sanding down the edge. “You knew.”

Batman said nothing.

Jason’s eyes burned. “Course you did.”

“Jason,” Bruce said.

“No.” Jason pointed at him, hand shaking. “No, you don’t get to do the voice. You don’t get to stand there like this is a mission that got complicated.”

You felt cold spreading through you now, the aftershock of overuse. Your knees trembled. You barely noticed. Jason’s hurt filled the basement louder than any alarm.

He looked back at you. The anger in his face almost broke you because underneath it was betrayal so young it might as well have had dirt from a grave still under its nails.

“How long?” he asked. Your throat closed. “How long have you been doing that to me?”

“I haven’t—”

His eyes flashed.

You stopped. Started again, worse and more honest. “Not like tonight.”

Jason went very still.

Batman’s head turned toward you. You ignored him.

“I didn’t target you,” you said, voice shaking. “Not deliberately. Not before tonight. But my power responds to pain, and yours—” You swallowed. “Yours is loud. Sometimes being near me probably helped. Sometimes I let it.”

Jason stared.

The silence after that was worse than shouting.

“So all those nights,” he said softly. “All those times I thought I could breathe around you.”

Your eyes burned. “That was still you.”

“Don’t.”

“It was.”

“Don’t you dare.”

You flinched.

Jason stepped closer, not enough to threaten, but enough that every line of him felt like a wound held upright by fury. “I thought I was getting better.”

“You are.”

His laugh was vicious. “Was I?”

“Yes.”

“Or were you just putting a blanket over the monster so nobody had to look at it?”

“You’re not a monster.”

“You don’t get to decide that either.”

The words struck like a slap. You had no answer.

Jason looked at Bruce again. “This your plan?”

“Jason—”

“This why they’re here?” His voice rose. “You bring in your little miracle worker to fix the bad Robin? Make me quieter? Easier? Less embarrassing at family dinners?”

“That’s not what this is,” Bruce said, but there was guilt in his voice, and Jason heard it like a gunshot.

“Bullshit.”

Damian said, “Todd—”

“Stay out of it.”

For once, Damian did.

Jason backed away from all of you, shaking his head. His anger was wild now, but it belonged to him, and you understood with terrible clarity why he clung to it. After what you had just done, anger was proof he still had something no one else could touch.

“I didn’t agree to this,” he said.

You felt tears slip down your face. “I know.”

“I didn’t ask you to save me.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to crawl inside my chest and turn the volume down because you’re scared of what I’ll do.”

“I know.”

“Then why did you?”

The question broke open in the basement, raw and enormous.

Because Bruce asked, at first, some ugly part of you thought. Because you were afraid. Because the Pit was eating his choice alive. Because you loved him. Because you had wanted to help for so long that you had stopped asking whether help without consent was just another kind of harm.

You said the only answer that did not try to make you look better.

“Because I thought I knew better than you.”

Jason’s face changed.

It hurt him that you told the truth. Good, maybe. Terrible, definitely.

“And because I care about you,” you said, quieter. “But that doesn’t make it right.”

“No,” he said. “It really fucking doesn’t.”

Your legs nearly gave then. You grabbed the edge of a crate, fingers slipping on wet metal.

Jason saw. He looked like he hated that he saw.

His body moved half an inch toward you before he stopped himself with visible effort. Even furious, even betrayed, even gutted by what you had done, some part of him still wanted to catch you.

That was what finally made you cry.

Jason’s expression shuttered. He reached down, picked up his helmet from the flooded floor, and put it on. The red faceplate came between you like a door slamming shut.

“Tell B to find a new specialist,” he said.

Then he left.

The cave was silent after Jason’s departure in a way you imagined battlefields were silent after everyone had stopped pretending victory was clean.

You sat on the medbay cot with a blanket around your shoulders, IV fluids running into your arm because Alfred had taken one look at you and said, very calmly, “Sit down before I make Master Bruce regret several of his life choices in chronological order.” You had sat. Bruce had not argued. Damian had disappeared somewhere, likely to report to the others or sharpen something in disapproval.

Bruce stood across from you, hands braced against the counter, head bowed.

You stared at him.

“No,” you said.

He looked up. Whatever he saw in your face made him go still.

“No,” you repeated, because the word was the only thing keeping you from falling apart. “You don’t get to be quiet right now.”

Bruce’s jaw tightened. “You need to recover.”

“You used me.”

His expression fractured, but not enough. Not yet.

“You knew he wouldn’t agree,” you said. “You knew if you told him what I could do and why you wanted me near him, he would tell you to go to hell. So you put me in his path and let the case do the rest.”

“I didn’t ask you to use your powers without consent.”

“You built a situation where you hoped I would.”

Bruce flinched.

There. There it was.

The truth beneath the strategy.

You laughed weakly, coldly. “God, you’re good. You didn’t even have to order it. You just put everyone in the right places and trusted fear to make the choice for you.”

“I was trying to protect him.”

“You were trying to control him.”

Bruce’s face hardened.

You had seen Batman’s anger before. It was a terrible thing, disciplined and glacial, sharpened by righteousness. But you were too tired to fear it.

“He almost killed someone,” Bruce said.

“And now he gets to wonder whether the only reason he didn’t is because someone violated him.”

The anger left Bruce like air from a punctured lung.

You pulled the blanket tighter around your shoulders. “He was fighting it before I touched him. Did you see that? Did you actually see him, or were you too busy waiting for proof that he needed intervention?”

Bruce said nothing.

“He was fighting it,” you whispered. “The Pit was loud, but he was still there. I should have trusted him longer. You should have trusted him period.”

That one landed.

Bruce turned away.

For a long while, the only sounds were the hum of the cave and the slow drip of water somewhere in the dark.

“What did it feel like?” Bruce asked eventually. You looked at him. “When you used your power on him,” he said. His voice was rough. “What did it feel like?”

You closed your eyes. Jason’s rage. Jason’s horror. Jason trying to get angry and finding your warmth wrapped around the anger before he could choose it.

“Like holding a door shut while someone was trapped on the other side,” you said. Bruce’s face went pale. “Does that sound like help to you?”

He did not answer.

You slid the IV from your arm before he could stop you.

“Where are you going?”

“To apologise.”

“He won’t want to see you.”

“I know.”

“You should rest.”

You looked at him then, and maybe for once he saw why Jason had been so angry. How awful it was to have someone decide your needs for you and call it love.

“Don’t,” you said.

Bruce stepped back.

You left the cave with Alfred’s coat around your shoulders and Jason’s hurt still burning in your hands.

Jason did not answer the first time you knocked. Or the second. The third time, something heavy hit the inside of the door hard enough to rattle the frame.

“Go away.”

His voice was rough. Not helmet-filtered. Bare.

You stood in the hallway of his safehouse building with Alfred’s coat wrapped around you and a paper bag of food slowly cooling in your hand. It was nearly dawn. Crime Alley had that bruised, grey look it got before the city remembered to be cruel again. Somewhere down the hall, a radiator clanked like an old ghost with unfinished business.

“I brought food,” you said.

Silence.

Then, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No.”

“You think soup fixes this?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

Because I love you, you thought, but that felt like the kind of truth that asked for something, and you had no right to ask.

“Because you were right,” you said.

The hallway went quiet.

You rested the paper bag against your hip because your hands were shaking again. Not from power use now. From fear.

“I’m not here to make you forgive me,” you continued. “I’m not here to explain it until it sounds better. It doesn’t sound better. I used my power on you without consent. Before tonight, I let it help you in ways you didn’t know about. Maybe not like that, maybe not directly, but enough that you’re allowed to feel violated by it. You asked if your progress was real, and I know I don’t get to be the person who answers that for you right now.”

Nothing.

“I’m sorry,” you said, voice breaking. “Not because you found out. Because I did it.”

Behind the door, you heard movement.

Then Jason said, “Did Bruce send you?”

“No.”

“Did he know you came?”

“Yes.”

“Did he try to stop you?”

“Yes.”

A pause.

“Good.”

Despite everything, a miserable little laugh left you. “Yeah.”

The door opened. Jason stood there in sweatpants and a black T-shirt, barefoot, hair a mess, eyes bloodshot. He looked exhausted. Human. Furious. Beautiful in the worst possible way, because your heart clearly had no self-preservation instincts and deserved to be studied by professionals.

His gaze dropped to the food. “What is it?”

“Soup.”

His mouth twisted.

“And bread,” you added.

He stared at you. You stared back.

Finally, he stepped aside. Not much. Just enough.

You entered carefully, because every inch of his space felt like a privilege you had lost and been loaned temporarily under strict supervision. His apartment was dim, curtains drawn, books stacked in unstable towers near the couch, weapons cleaned and arranged on the kitchen table with the tenderness some people reserved for family photos. There was a cracked mug in the sink. A blanket on the couch. A helmet on the floor by the window, faceplate turned away.

Jason closed the door.

You set the food on the counter. Neither of you moved toward it.

For a moment, the apartment was full of everything you had ruined.

Jason leaned back against the door, arms folded. “You gonna do it now?”

Your stomach dropped. “Do what?”

“Make this easier.”

“No.”

“You sure? I’m real fucking upset. Must be uncomfortable for you.”

You deserved that. 

You nodded. “It is.” His eyes narrowed. “But I’m not going to touch it,” you said. “Not your anger. Not your pain. Not anything. I don’t care if I’m uncomfortable. It’s yours.”

Jason looked away first. The muscle in his jaw jumped.

You swallowed. “I know that’s late.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

He dragged both hands over his face, then pushed away from the door and paced toward the window. His whole body looked like it wanted a fight and could not find one that would not make the hurt worse.

“I thought it was me,” he said. The words were quiet enough to bruise. “I thought I was doing better. Around you. Sleeping more. Not snapping so fast. Not feeling like my skin was trying to crawl off every time the Pit got loud. I thought—” He laughed, low and ugly. “I thought maybe I was healing. Stupid, right?”

“No.”

He turned on you. “Don’t.”

“It wasn’t stupid.”

“You don’t get to comfort me.”

“I’m not using my power.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

You shut your mouth.

Jason breathed hard through his nose, eyes bright with anger he was finally allowed to feel. “I thought I was safe with you.”

Your eyes filled. You did not let yourself look away.

“You were,” you said, then immediately shook your head. “No. That’s not fair. You weren’t safe from me. I wanted you to be, but wanting didn’t make it true.”

Jason stared at you like that answer had gone somewhere neither of you expected.

You kept going before fear could stop you. “You were right in the basement. I don’t get to decide you’re not a monster. I don’t get to decide what parts of your pain matter or what parts should go quiet. I don’t get to make you easier because I care about you.”

His face tightened.

“You’re not an episode,” you said. “You’re not something to manage. You’re not Bruce’s failure with a pulse. You’re Jason. And I should have treated your anger like it belonged to you even when it scared me.”

Jason’s eyes went wet. He looked furious about it.

“You and Bruce talk about me like I’m a bomb,” he said. “Like sooner or later I’m gonna go off and prove everyone right.”

He looked away, breathing unevenly.

For a while, neither of you spoke.

Then he said, “Was any of it real?”

You had expected the question. It still hurt worse than expected.

“My feelings were real,” you said. “My choices were the problem.”

Jason’s laugh broke halfway through. “That sounds like something a therapist would say right before charging two hundred bucks.”

“I can try saying it worse.”

“Please don’t.”

A tiny, awful smile tugged at your mouth and vanished. Jason saw it. His expression cracked for half a second, not into forgiveness, not into softness, but into grief. Like he missed you already and hated you for being in the same room.

“Did B call me broken?” he asked.

“No.”

Jason’s eyes sharpened.

“He thought it,” you admitted. “Or close enough. He wanted you safer. Quieter. Less hurt. He didn’t say fix, not exactly, but he meant it somewhere underneath.”

Jason nodded once, sharp and unsurprised. “And you?”

You looked at him. He held your gaze like he needed the answer and dreaded it in equal measure.

You could have said no. You could have said you never thought of him as broken. It would have been almost true.

Almost.

“At first,” you said, hating yourself with every word, “I thought of the Pit as something I could help quiet.”

Jason’s face closed.

“But I didn’t understand what that meant,” you continued quickly. “I thought if I could take away the worst of it, I was helping you. I didn’t think enough about the fact that I was deciding what counted as worst.”

“Yeah,” he said coldly. “You didn’t.”

“No.”

He looked down at his hands.

You wanted to touch him so badly your fingers ached.

You did not move. That was all you could offer now: the absence of taking.

Jason noticed. He always noticed. It made him angrier, maybe. Or sadder. Sometimes those were cousins in his body.

“Why does it not work on you?” he asked abruptly.

You blinked.

His gaze lifted. “Your power. You give everybody else the warm fuzzy bullshit. Why do you look like death every time?”

The question knocked the breath out of you. “That’s not—”

“Don’t lie.”

You closed your mouth.

Jason’s voice roughened. “I’m pissed at you. Doesn’t mean I stopped noticing.”

That was unfair. That was Jason.

You looked down at your hands. “It manifested because I was alone. When I was younger. I wanted someone to comfort me so badly that it felt like my chest was going to crack open. No one came. An injured cat did. I wanted it to feel safe, and then it did.” You swallowed. “After that, I could give comfort to other people. Animals. Anyone, if they let me. But it only goes outward.”

Jason was very still.

“I can make someone feel like the next minute is survivable,” you whispered. “I can’t make myself believe it.”

The apartment changed. Not magically. You kept your power locked down so tightly it hurt. But Jason’s anger shifted around the new information, not gone, not softened, just forced to make room for another wound.

“That’s fucked,” he said.

A laugh escaped you, startled and wet. “Yeah.”

“Real eloquent, I know.”

“No, it’s accurate.”

Jason looked at the floor, jaw tight. “So Bruce found the one person in Gotham who can comfort everybody except themselves and decided, yeah, let’s use that.”

“He was scared for you.”

“I don’t care.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean I don’t care why he did it. Fear doesn’t make it less shitty.”

You breathed in slowly. “You’re right.”

“And you.” His voice cracked on the words, anger struggling under hurt again. “You don’t get a pass because you were lonely.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to be sad enough that my consent stops mattering.”

“I know.”

Jason stared at you. You let him.

Eventually, he dragged a hand through his hair and looked toward the counter. “Soup’s getting cold.”

You blinked.

He glared. “Don’t make that face.”

“What face?”

“That kicked-puppy, hopeful face.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. It’s annoying.”

You looked down quickly.

Jason swore under his breath. Then he walked to the counter, unpacked the soup and bread with jerky, irritated movements, and pushed one container toward you. “Eat.”

Your throat tightened. “Jason—”

“I’m still mad.”

“I know.”

“I don’t forgive you.”

“I know.”

“I might not.”

Your fingers curled around the warm container. “I know.”

He looked at you, eyes dark and tired and unbearably alive. “But you look like you’re gonna fall over, and I don’t want that on my floor.”

A tear slipped down your cheek.

He pointed at you with a spoon. “Don’t make it weird.”

You laughed, brokenly. He looked away, but not before you saw his mouth tremble.

You ate soup in silence on opposite sides of his kitchen.

It was not forgiveness. It was not absolution. It was not even peace. But it was food. Warmth you had not created. Care you had not earned by emptying yourself first. Jason sat across from you, furious and hurt and still there, and maybe that was the cruellest mercy of all.

He did not come back all at once. Jason Todd was not a door that opened because someone apologised properly. He was a city after a siege, checking every road for traps. He stopped answering your calls for a week, then answered one with “What?” so aggressively you nearly cried from relief. He refused to work cases with you, then appeared on a rooftop two buildings away during one of your field assignments and pretended that it did not count. He returned the jacket you had forgotten at his apartment washed, folded, and smelling like his detergent. There was a protein bar in the pocket with a sticky note that read: Eat before you faint, dumbass.

Bruce, to his credit or perhaps merely his survival instinct, tried to apologise to Jason. Jason broke his nose.

Alfred, you heard, allowed it.

You did not use your power on Jason again. Not once. Not when he was angry. Not when the Pit surged. Not when his hands shook after a contaminated weapons bust. Not when he looked at you like he hated you for being the person he wanted comfort from most. You learned the shape of restraint properly, not the soft, self-serving version you had practised before. You learned to sit on your hands. To ask with words instead of warmth. To let silence hurt. To let Jason be ugly with pain without trying to make it beautiful enough for you to hold.

It was the hardest thing you had ever done. It was also the only apology that mattered.

Months later, he asked.

It happened in his apartment during a storm, because apparently Jason’s emotional breakthroughs required rain for dramatic integrity. The Lazarus compound case had ended three weeks before. The deserters were in custody. The modified residue had been neutralised. The boy from the tank had been buried under a name no one knew was his, with Jason standing far back beneath a tree while Bruce stood even farther away and looked like grief had invented new architecture inside him.

You and Jason were not fixed. But you were something.

You were sitting on his couch with a book in your lap, not reading, while Jason paced near the window with the restless energy of a man trying to outrun his own nervous system. His eyes had that green-edged brightness they got when the Pit was not loud enough to take him but loud enough to make staying in his body feel like a fight.

“You want me to go?” you asked softly.

“No.”

The answer came fast.

You nodded and stayed seated. He paced another line into the floor. Rain hit the windows hard enough to blur the city lights.

“Can you ask?” he said suddenly.

You looked up. Jason had stopped moving. He stood with his back to you, shoulders tense, hands flexing at his sides.

Your heart began to pound. “Ask what?”

His voice was rough. “You know what.”

You set the book aside carefully. “Jason.”

“Don’t make me say it if you already know.”

“I need you to say it.”

He turned then, anger flaring, but this time it was not at you. Not really. It was at the humiliation of need. At the vulnerability of wanting the very thing that had hurt him. At the terrible work of choosing something instead of having it chosen for him.

His jaw worked. Then, through clenched teeth, he said, “Ask me if I want help.”

Your eyes burned. You kept your voice steady. “Do you want me to use my power to help quiet the Pit?”

Jason closed his eyes. A tremor moved through him.

“Yes.”

“How much?”

His breath shook. “Not gone. Don’t make it gone.”

“I won’t.”

“Just enough that I can breathe.”

“Okay.”

“And if I say stop—”

“I stop.”

“Immediately.”

“Immediately.”

He opened his eyes. The trust there was not whole. It was not easy. It had scars and conditions and a knife hidden in its boot. But it was trust because he was choosing it, and because you understood now that choice was the whole sacred thing.

You held out your hand.

Jason stared at it for a long moment. Then he crossed the room and took it.

You let the power move slowly this time. Carefully. Not like the basement. Not like a door forced shut. More like opening a window in a room full of smoke. Warmth passed from your palm into his hand, then no farther than he allowed. You could feel the Pit recoil, restless and ugly, but you did not chase it. You did not smother it. You did not decide what Jason needed removed.

You gave him exactly what he asked for.

Jason’s breath caught. His fingers tightened around yours.

“Okay,” he whispered after a few seconds. “Stop.”

You stopped. The warmth withdrew immediately.

Jason swayed.

You did not grab him. He noticed that too.

After a moment, he sat beside you on the couch, not close enough to touch except for your still-linked hands. His breathing was uneven, but his eyes were clear.

“Was that me?” he asked.

The question was so quiet it nearly broke you.

You turned toward him. “Yes.”

His mouth twisted. “You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Because it feels easier to believe when I’m pissed at you.”

“I know.”

That earned you a tiny, reluctant huff.

Then he looked down at your joined hands. “I still hate what you did.”

“I know.”

“I still hate what Bruce did.”

“You should.”

“I still don’t like people messing with my head.”

“I wasn’t in your head,” you said softly, then corrected yourself before he could. “But I was too close.”

Jason looked at you. You held his gaze.

He nodded once.

“Yeah,” he said. “You were.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

It was not forgiveness. Not exactly. But it was the first time the words did not bounce off a wall.

Jason leaned back against the couch, still holding your hand like he had forgotten to let go or decided not to. “You look tired.”

“I’m fine.”

“Lie.”

You smiled faintly. “Sometimes using it makes me cold.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” His jaw tightened. “Does it hurt?”

“Not like pain.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It feels like giving away the last blanket in winter.”

Jason went still. Then, with his free hand, he reached for the throw blanket folded over the back of the couch and dropped it over your lap with aggressive precision.

You looked at it. Then at him.

His ears had gone faintly pink. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face did.”

“My face is touched.”

“Your face is annoying.”

You smiled. He rolled his eyes, but his hand stayed in yours.

After a while, you said, “You don’t have to let me help like that again.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to forgive me to ask.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to be less angry because I’m sad about it.”

Jason looked over at you, something quiet and fierce in his face. “Good. Because I’m gonna be angry for a while.”

“Okay.”

“But I missed you,” he said, like the words personally offended him. “And I’m pissed about that too.”

Your laugh came out soft and shaking.

He looked away, scowling at the window. “Don’t get smug.”

“I’m not.”

“You are spiritually smug.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“It is when you do it.”

The rain kept falling outside, turning Gotham’s lights into rivers against the glass. Jason’s apartment was dim and cluttered and warm in the way places became warm when someone let another person stay. The Pit had not disappeared. The hurt had not vanished. Bruce’s fear had not become harmless because he meant well. Your love had not become innocent because it was love.

But Jason’s hand was around yours. No force. No hidden warmth. No secret easing. Just his thumb, rough and hesitant, brushing over your knuckles because he chose to do it.

And you, who had spent your life giving comfort you could not keep, let yourself sit beside him beneath the blanket he had thrown at you like a threat.

For once, the warmth in the room belonged to both of you.

Not fixed. Not quieted. Not saved.

Chosen.

[dizzyghoast]

honestly fandom has ruined me because now any time i'm in the desert and i see two vast and trunkless legs of stone or a half-sunk shattered visage i'm like "omg just like in Ozymandias" and its like come on girl not every half-sunk shattered visage is Ozymandias

[noxidae]

Enough fanfiction where a guy emotionally neglects his wife because he’s gay. We need more of guy emotionally neglects his wife and then emotionally neglects his boyfriend because he sucks

[mythallia]

A little audio update for all you non-patreon folks

[the-darklings]

𓈒 ˳ ˳ 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐁𝐎𝐁𝐁𝐘 𓈒 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓 5.

pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby(bb) wc: 18.9k 🚬🚬🚬 contents/warnings: emotional manipulation, emotional neglect in a past relationship, internalised self-blame, discussions of infidelity, grief and loss, emotional dependency, body horror, strong violence, psychological horror, existential/cosmic horror, angstttttt. notes: This took the pisssssssss. But here it is at long last. So much plot happens in this part it's actually dizzying. Originally wanted to cut it earlier but once you read the ending you'll understand why I pushed to get to it. So enjoy this behemoth and again massive, fat, joosy thank you to everyone for reading, messaging, liking, reblogging and apparently shouting out this series on tiktok??? hello? crazy. you guys are awesome. thank you 💕

📹 better bobby series masterlist.

“That goes on the left.”

“It's on the left.”

“My left. Not your left.”

BB holds the stack of notebooks. Your old ones, filled and dog-eared, the spines cracked from use. He looks at you with an expression of exaggerated patience. Bobby's face doing BB's particular brand of tolerant amusement, the one that says I have existed since before your species discovered fire, and I’m being told where to put stationery.

“Your left and my left are the same left,” he says. “We're facing the same direction.”

“We weren't a second ago,” you argue. “You turned.”

He looks down at his feet, then at the shelf. Then at you. His mouth twitches.

“Fine,” he says, and moves the notebooks to the other side of the shelf with the slow, deliberate care, making a point about how cooperative he's being. “Your left.”

“Thank you.”

“You're a tyrant,” he huffs, even though his eyes crinkle as he says it.

“I'm an organised tyrant.”

The apartment hums around you.

That's the thing you still can't quite get used to. The hum is different here. Not the flat, fluorescent drone of Level 0's hallways, that ambient pressure that sits on your skin like a low-grade headache. This is warmer. Rounder. A sustained note that lives in the walls the way heat lives in a radiator, and it fills the rooms, plural, with doors and corners and a kitchen with a window that faces a corridor that BB has done something to. 

Strange and inhuman, so that the light that comes through the glass looks like late afternoon in the Santa Clara Valley, even though there is no afternoon here and no valley and no sun.

BB built this for you.

A hallway that hadn't existed. A doorway where a wall once stood. He carved a sublevel out of Level 0, the way you'd carve a space inside a block of wood, and what emerged was this: an apartment. Your apartment. Not a copy, not the uncanny almost-right, but a reconstruction built from the details he absorbed through the wall over months of listening and your own memories. The layout of the kitchen. The position of the bookshelves. The height of the counter where you used to lean while Bobby stood at the sink.

It's not identical. It can't be. Some details Backrooms can’t render right, some he interpreted rather than reproduced, and there are places where his understanding of home and yours diverge in ways that are quietly alien. The windows don't open. The bathroom has no mirror. The bookshelves are organised by colour, the way you described to him once, and seeing your preference rendered in physical space by something that remembered a passing comment had made your throat tight in a way you couldn't name.

He started building it after the agents.

You don't like thinking about the attack. Your body remembers it better than your mind does. 

You remember the impact. The floor. A pressure on your chest that felt unbearable, like the air itself had solidified, and a pain in your shoulder that burned white and erased thought. You remember voices—clipped, tactical, coordinated, the language of people who had trained for this—and then BB's arrival.

You don't remember what happened to the agents. BB recounted what happened later, in clipped sentences, his jaw tight, his eyes carrying a darkness that took hours to fully recede, that there had been six. Human. Armed. Organised in a way that suggested training and resources, and a purpose that went beyond casual exploration. The encounter had been resolved.

He didn't elaborate on resolved. You didn't ask.

After that, BB locked Level 0 down. You felt it happen even as you clung to him after the attack, a shift in the hum, a tightening, like a fist closing around the entire level. 

The corridors that used to carry the occasional lost wanderer, the stray explorer who stumbled in from Level 1 and stumbled out again, are now sealed. Thresholds that had been porous became walls. Doors that had been doors became surfaces. BB walked the perimeter for three days straight, and when he came back, his eyes were fully black, and the warmth took a long time to return, and the message was absolute: nothing gets in. 

Nothing human, nothing inhuman, nothing with a weapon and a tactical vocabulary and the coordinates to find the corridor where you bled on the floor. Level 0 was his. Level 0 was yours. And the only things moving through it now were the two of you and the hum and whatever BB decided to allow, which was nothing, which was no one, which was the total and permanent closure of a territory around the person inside it.

You healed. Your lip closed over, your bruises receded. BB fussed over you, his face tight with concentration that you gradually recognised as fear. Not fear of the wound. Fear of what the wound meant. That you could be reached. That the corridors he'd taught you to walk and the levels he'd shown you and the notebook full of careful shorthand hadn't been enough to keep a human with a weapon from putting you on the ground in a place he'd told you was safe.

He'd been different since. Not colder, exactly, the warmth was still there, the hand on yours, the chin on your shoulder while you sketched. But warier. His attention, already vast, had developed a new layer, a peripheral vigilance that never fully shut off, a constant low-level scanning that you could feel the way you felt the hum. 

He checked the corridors before you entered them now. He checked rooms you'd been in a hundred times. And he'd built this place—the sublevel, the apartment, the nest within the nest—and the message was clear even if he never said it aloud. Deeper. More hidden. Harder to reach. A space carved into the architecture of Level 0 itself, tucked beneath his territory the way a vital organ sits beneath the ribs.

You've been here a while. 

Long enough that the first notebook is full and the second is two-thirds gone and the third is waiting on the shelf BB just stacked, its mottled cover still crisp. 

Long enough that you've mapped Level 0 in its entirety, or as close to entirety as a place like this gets, and made partial notes on multiple other levels. Some detailed, some no more than a page of warnings and a rough sketch. It’s been long enough that your handwriting has changed. Gotten smaller, tighter, more efficient, conserving space the way you conserve everything here. 

And long enough that the thing on the perimeter has become a permanent entry in the notebook. Updated weekly, the symbol you invented for it—a circle with a line bisecting it, unknown entity, behaviour unclassified—appearing on more pages than any other annotation.

It's still circling. Still testing. Running its vast, patient intelligence along the boundary of BB's territory and pulling back before contact. You've taken to calling it Entity X in your notes permanently, a placeholder designation, because giving it a real name would make it more solid, and it's already solid enough. 

You can feel it sometimes. Not the way you feel the hum or BB's presence, but as an absence, a hot spot at the edge of perception, like turning your head toward a sound that stopped just before you heard it.

BB doesn't talk about it.

That's how you know it's bad. BB talks about Smilers with contempt and Howlers with mild annoyance, and the locked-down perimeter with the grim satisfaction of a thing that sealed its borders and dares anything to test them. He talks about the agents with a clipped exactness that betrays how much it shook him. 

But Entity X gets silence. Gets the jaw-tightening. Gets the moments you've started cataloguing in a private section of the notebook that you don't label. The mornings when he's already awake when you surface, sitting at the edge of the nest with his posture too rigid and his eyes too dark, focused on a distance you can't perceive. The nights he disappears and comes back with the face not quite set, the edges sharp, the wet-paint quality that means he dropped Bobby to deal with whatever he found and hasn't fully climbed back in yet. He smooths over it. Deflects. Does the half-grin and the shrug and the it's handled that you've learned to read as I don't want you to carry this.

You let him think it works. You watch him reassemble his composure over breakfast, and you don't push. You don't pry. You simply add another entry to the private section, which is getting longer. The circle-with-a-line symbol fills the margins like a recurring dream.

Long enough that the thought of leaving has shifted from a wound to a question.

You think about it. Still. Not every day—not the way you did in the beginning, when it was a constant screaming pressure behind your ribs—but in the quiet moments, the ones between mapping and walking and BB's hand on yours. In the pauses. You'll be sketching a corridor junction, and your pen will stop, and you'll look at the lines on the page and think: I could navigate this now. 

Not all of it. Not the deep levels, not the places BB won't take you. But the paths between 0 and 1, between 1 and the threshold levels, the routes that thread through the safer territories. You know them. You've walked them, mapped them in your own shorthand and committed the landmarks to memory. You’re no longer the woman who fell through a wall and couldn't find her way back. You could find your way back. Probably. If you wanted to.

If you wanted to.

The if is the problem.

The if sits in your chest like a stone, and you can feel its weight when you breathe, and you don't examine it too closely because examining it means confronting what's underneath. That the woman who fell through the wall wanted to go home with a desperation that burned, and the woman standing in a reconstructed kitchen organising shelves with an ancient entity is not sure she does anymore. Not because home stopped mattering. Because here started mattering too.

You feel loved here.

The admission lives in the back of your skull like a low-grade fever, always present, never quite articulated. 

You feel loved. BB needed you before he loved you, or whatever the equivalent is for a being that predates human emotional language. But loved, in the clear, daily, accumulative way that love manifests when it's not grand gestures and declarations but shared laughter and proximity and a hand that finds yours in the dark without being asked. BB loves you pervasively, from every direction at once. And you’ve started to love him back, and the loving feels like betrayal, and the betrayal feels like breathing, and you can't tell anymore which one you're supposed to stop.

It's selfish. You know it's selfish. Somewhere on the other side of the wall there's a world you belonged to, a life with your name on it, and you're standing in a facsimile kitchen letting an inhuman thing shelve your notebooks and you're happy, or close enough to happy that the difference doesn't register, and the selfishness of that—choosing comfort over confrontation, choosing the being who stayed over the man you'd have to face—sits in your stomach like acid.

You don't say any of this. You lean against the kitchen counter, and you watch him arrange the shelf and try not to notice the tension he thinks he's hiding.

It's in his hands. The notebooks are stacked neatly, but his fingers linger on each spine a fraction too long before releasing, and there's a quality to BB’s movements—too measured, too controlled—that you've learned to recognise as the aftermath of a bad patrol. 

He'd been out this morning. Before you woke. You'd surfaced to find the nest empty, and you'd lain there tracing the impression of his body in the fabric and counting the minutes until the hallway produced him again. And when it did, his face was smooth, and his smile was easy. He'd said morning, baby with the half-grin. You'd said morning, and neither of you mentioned that his eyes were still a shade too dark, that the blue was slow in rising, that whatever he'd encountered at the perimeter was still sitting behind his expression like sediment that hadn't fully settled.

He's protecting you from it. The way he shields you from the worst of the corridor checks, the way he smooths Entity X into a vague it's fine, it's the same, nothing's changed whenever you ask directly. He carries it alone because carrying it is what he does, because shielding you is coded into whatever he is at a level deeper than the face, and the tenderness of that instinct and the frustration of being managed by it exist in equal measure inside your chest.

You watch his hands on the shelf. You watch the tension he thinks is invisible. 

The hum holds you both in its warm, low frequency, and somewhere from the apartment, the music starts.

A crackle of static first, the particular pop and hiss of a record that's been played too many times, and then the melody. Slow. Sweet. Old in a way that feels intentional, like the Backrooms reached into the past and pulled out the exact song designed to make your chest ache.

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when—

Vera Lynn. The voice is warm and rounded and impossibly clear for a moment, every note landing clean, and then the Backrooms stutter—a glitch, a skip, the audio hiccupping like a record needle jumping a groove—and the word when stretches, distorts, hangs in the air a fraction too long before the melody catches up to itself and continues.

—but I know we'll meet again some sunny day—

Another glitch. The word sunny fractures, splits into overlapping copies of itself that pile up for half a second (sunny sunny sun-n-ny) and then resolves, the song smoothing back out like water closing over a dropped stone. The crackle persists underneath. A warmth to the distortion, like listening to a broadcast from very far away, like the song is travelling through miles of wall and wire and yellow to reach you.

You go still.

Your hand rests on the counter. The song fills the apartment, and you feel yourself drift. Not physically. Internally. The song pulls at the room in the back of your chest, the one where the Thursday morning lives, the one where Bobby said stay and the sheets were gold, and the phone rang, and he ignored it because his mouth was on yours.

Keep smiling through, just like you always do—

A skip. Always repeats, layers, becomes a brief chorus of itself before the record unsticks and Vera Lynn carries on, serene, unruffled, singing about reunion to a woman standing in a place where reunion might be impossible.

You stare at the window. The fake Santa Clara light falls across your hands on the counter, and it's warm, it's exactly the right warmth, and the song is playing, and you are thinking about the front door of your real apartment, the one with the sticky lock that Bobby always meant to fix. The sound your keys made when you set them on the table by the door. Whether anyone has fixed the lock since you've been gone, or whether it's still sticky, waiting for your hand on the knob, waiting for you to come home and jiggle it the way only you knew how—

“Hey.”

BB's voice. Close. You blink. He's in front of you—when did he move?—and his head is tilted, his eyes searching your face. That total-attention read, line by line. He sees where you went. He always sees it. He can track the exact moment your gaze goes internal, the instant when the woman in front of him leaves the room, and the woman who misses Bobby takes her place.

He doesn't ask. He doesn't say are you thinking about him or do you want to talk about it or are you okay. He does something else instead.

He holds out his hand.

Palm up. Fingers open. The same gesture he made at the old nest, except the context has shifted, the weight of it is different now, heavier, more layered. 

His eyes are warm, and his mouth is soft. Vera Lynn sings through the walls and glitching on the word again (a-a-again), and BB stands in a kitchen he built for you with his hand extended, and the look on his face says come here, come back, I know where you just went, and you don't have to stay there.

You seize his hand in yours.

He pulls you in. Gently. Your chest against his. His hand settles at the small of your back. Low, warm, the heel of his palm resting against the base of your spine, and his other hand keeps yours, lifting it, positioning your joined hands at shoulder height, the way you showed him.

You've been teaching BB to dance.

It started as a joke, a throwaway comment about how Bobby had two left feet and you'd tried to teach him once. He'd stepped on your toes, called dancing vertical suffering, and refused to try again. 

BB had tilted his head. Asked questions. And the next evening, he'd stood in the middle of the living room with his arms stiff and his weight wrong and said show me, and you'd laughed but taken his hands and spent an hour teaching him a basic box step while he moved with the mechanical precision of something that had studied human motion extensively and participated in it never.

He's better now. Not fluid, not quite natural, still carrying that faint quality in his movements, the angles a half-degree too clean, but better. He can hold the frame. He can follow the tempo. Can move you through the small kitchen space without stepping on your feet.

'Til the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away —

The song glitches. Dark clouds becomes d-dark cl-clouds, a stutter that sounds like the record is caught in a groove, cycling, and then it releases, and the melody continues, and BB turns you slowly in the kitchen light.

You look up at him.

He's looking down at you. Bobby's face, close, the chain at his throat catching the warm not-sunlight, the earring a small bright point at the edge of your vision. His expression is—

You've run out of words for BB's expressions. The early ones had names: Bobby's grin, Bobby's smirk, Bobby's mock-wounded outrage. But BB has been building his own vocabulary of expressions on top of Bobby's, small deviations from the blueprint, micro-adjustments that belong to him and only him, and the one on his face right now is entirely his.

He smiles at you.

Small. Crooked. Genuine.

Bobby's grin was a performance, a weapon, a thing deployed with intent. This is quieter. Lopsided. One corner of his mouth lifting slightly higher than the other, the asymmetry creating warmth. It's the smile of a thing that learned to smile by watching a man smile and then, slowly, over months, forgot to copy and started to mean it.

You gaze at each other.

BB's hand is warm at your back, and your hand is in his, and you're standing close enough that you can see the individual lashes framing his eyes, dark against the blue, and the small scar on his jaw, and the way the not-sunlight catches the fine grain of his skin. Which is perfect. Which is too perfect, and has no imperfections except the ones he chose to replicate, and even those are too intentional, the blemishes of a face that was designed rather than grown.

You should look away. The tension is building in the space between your bodies the way static builds before a storm, and you should look away because looking at BB like this, in this light, with this song, is a door you're not sure you can close once you walk through it.

You don't look away.

BB's gaze drops.

To your mouth.

It's not subtle because BB doesn't do subtle. His eyes fix on your lips and stay there, and you can feel the weight of it, the physical pressure of being looked at that intently by something that ancient. Like a beam of light concentrated through a lens until it burns.

His breathing changes.

He doesn't need to breathe. You know this. You've known it for a while. The breathing is performance, a courtesy, a piece of the human costume he maintains because the alternative would unsettle you. But right now, in the kitchen, with his eyes on your mouth and the song glitching softly around you (we'll meet a-a-again), his chest expands and contracts, the air leaving him in a slow, uneven exhale, pushed out rather than released. Like whatever is happening inside him right now is too large for the shape to hold without venting pressure.

“Can I—” he starts.

Stops.

BB’s jaw twitches, that muscle at the hinge. His eyes are still on your mouth, and his hand tightens at your back. A fraction, barely perceptible, his fingers pressing into the fabric of your shirt, and his throat moves. A swallow. Another borrowed gesture, another piece of human machinery he doesn't need, except right now it looks involuntary. It looks real.

“Can I,” he rasps again, even quieter. 

His voice has dropped into that low register, the one that carries the hum's harmonic underneath it. Not the ancient-thing voice. Or the vast, reverberating frequency he uses when something threatens his territory. This is… smaller. Almost shy. A resonance that sounds like it's coming from a place BB didn't know he had.

He trails off.

The kitchen is quiet. Vera Lynn has gone silent. The song caught in a glitch, a held note, the record spinning in a groove that won't release. Only sounds are the hum, BB's unnecessary breathing, and your own heartbeat, too loud in your ears.

"What do you want?" you ask, barely above a whisper. 

You can feel the tension in him through your palm on his shoulder. Not the coiled readiness he carries in dangerous corridors. A different kind. A vibration, running through the muscle and bone of a body that is not muscle and bone. That is something else entirely, wearing the shape of a man who is shaking because he wants something and doesn't know how to take it without being taught.

BB makes a sound.

Low. At the back of his throat. A sound that lives in the space between a groan and a hum, that carries a wanting so raw it barely fits through his vocal cords. Throaty. Needy. And underneath it—beneath the borrowed voice, beneath Bobby's timbre and the human costume—a vibration that is entirely and unmistakably other. Primal. 

His hand lifts from between your bodies. Unsure. His fingers drift upward, and his thumb finds your mouth. Presses against the swell of your bottom lip. Gentle. Barely there. The pad of his thumb traces the curve of it the way he traces the edge of a doorway when he's reading a room, with that same focused attention, that same reverent precision.

“A kiss,” he whispers.

His eyes lift from your mouth to your eyes. His thumb stays on your lip. The wanting on his face is so naked, so unperformed, so completely stripped of Bobby's armour and BB's composure that it makes your breath catch. 

“You taught me to dance,” he goes on, the words coming out unevenly. Hushed. His thumb moves against your lip, the faintest drag, back and forth, and his eyes are dark and wide. The ancient thing behind them is nowhere to be seen. What's looking at you is just BB, just the being you named in a meadow, wanting something human with a desperation that borders on heartbreaking. “Teach me this. Teach me how to—” His breath shudders. Not a performance, a malfunction. A system overwhelmed. “How to do it right. I want to do it right. For you.”

Your breath hitches.

The conflict is a living thing in your chest,  a creature with teeth and a heartbeat, pulling in two directions at once. 

Bobby's mouth on yours on a sunny morning. BB's thumb on your lip in a kitchen that shouldn't exist. The man who kissed you like he invented it, and the being who is asking permission to learn how to. The love you carried through the wall and the love that grew on this side of it, stubborn and impossible and real, and the guilt, the guilt, the guilt that says this is betrayal and the counter-voice that hisses betrayal of what? Of a man who grunted at your goodbye? Of a love that was already starving when you left?

You want this.

The wanting is its own answer. It sits in your stomach, hot and undeniable, and it doesn't care about the guilt, and it doesn't care about the conflict. It doesn't care that the mouth hovering near yours belongs to a thing that heard you through concrete and chose to wear the face of the man who broke your heart. 

You want this. You want him. BB. Not the face, or the copy, not the better version of someone else, but the thing underneath. The one who learned your name, kept your promise, built you a kitchen, and is standing in it now with his thumb on your lip, his body shaking, the word please forming on his tongue.

“Please,” he breathes, his thumb dragging across your bottom lip one more time. Feather-light. And his face is so soft, so open, so wrecked with the rawness of wanting something he's never had that the word comes out like a prayer. "Please."

You don't stop him when he leans in.

His lips brush yours.

The lightest possible contact. The surface tension of a kiss, the moment before it becomes one, and the touch is tentative. So fragile, and so different from every kiss you've ever experienced that your body doesn't know how to categorise it. 

Bobby kissed like he was claiming, savouring. BB kisses like he's asking, begging. His mouth hovers against yours, barely touching, a question held in the millimetre of space between his skin and yours, and you can feel the tremor in his lips. He's shaking. Fine, continuous, a vibration that you feel more than see, and his breath—the breath he doesn't need—washes over your mouth in a warm, unsteady exhale.

Then the contact lands. Full. His lips press to yours, and the sensation is—

Heat.

Beyond warmth, beyond the gentle building of a slow kiss. A current that slams through your entire system, starting at the point of contact and radiating outward through your jaw, your throat, your chest, and the base of your spine. It's not natural, it can't be natural, because the body against yours is not a body and the mouth on yours is not a mouth, not really. It's the surface expression of something vast and old and powerful, and that power is in the kiss, threaded through it like voltage through copper, and your nervous system lights up like a circuit completing.

BB is worse.

You feel it happen. His skin, always cool, always that slightly-below-human temperature that you've gotten used to, goes hot. A flush of warmth that starts at his mouth and spreads, radiant, through his jaw and his neck and the hands on your body. His cool skin warms beneath your lips like metal left in the sun. Like the contact between your mouth and his is generating a heat that his body was never designed to process.

He makes a sound against your mouth. Soft. Greedy. A small, desperate noise that vibrates between your lips, and he can't stop it. You can tell. Because you can feel the way his jaw tightens and his breath catches. Like he's trying to contain it and failing, the sound escaping anyway, involuntary, the noise of someone encountering sensation for the first time and being unmade by it.

You tilt your head. Change the angle. Show him.

He follows. Quick, eager, that same devouring attentiveness he brings to every lesson. Your angle becomes his angle, your pressure becomes his pressure, and the speed at which BB adapts is inhuman. Seconds instead of minutes, the learning curve of a thing that absorbs information through contact. 

Your lips part, just barely, and his mirrors the movement, and the kiss deepens, and BB's hand slides up your back and grips, bunching the fabric of your shirt between his fingers. The sound he makes this time is louder. A sigh that cracks open midway through and becomes a groan, low and shaking, shot through with that sub-harmonic frequency that you feel in your teeth.

His other hand finds the side of your face, cups your jaw. His thumb traces your cheekbone, and his mouth moves against yours. He's learning. You can feel him learning, cataloguing each shift in pressure, each tilt, each breath, mapping this the way you mapped his corridors, with hunger and the desperate focus.

You run your fingers through his hair. BB shudders. A full-body tremor, head to feet, and the sound he makes is a wrecked, bitten-off thing that lives somewhere between a gasp and a whimper, and his forehead drops against yours, and his mouth chases yours, his fingers tightening in your shirt.

When you finally part, his mouth follows yours. An inch. Reluctant. Not wanting the distance.

His forehead rests against yours. His breathing is ragged. Unnecessary, performative, and completely out of his control, great shuddering exhales that fog the negligible space between your faces. His eyes are closed. The lashes dark against his flushed skin, which is still warm, still radiating that unnatural heat, and his lips are parted, and his expression is—

Ruined. That's the word. He looks ruined. Taken apart at the joints and not yet reassembled. Every layer of composure stripped away. Bobby's armour, BB's own careful vaneer, the ancient thing's vast indifference. All of it gone, peeled back, and what's underneath is just this: a being, shaking, in a kitchen, with the taste of you on a mouth he built to say your name.

“Am I doing it right?” he whispers shakily, slightly dazed. “Was that good?”

His eyes open. Find yours. And the expression in them is so earnest. So genuinely concerned that the answer might be no, that he might have gotten it wrong. That the thing he wants more than anything he's ever wanted might be the thing he's worst at, that your chest cracks along an old fault line, warmth flooding in.

You smile. Your nose bumps his.

“You're a very eager student,” you murmur, your voice thick. Roughened. 

The heat still sits in your veins, humming through the places where his mouth was, and the words come out low and warm but certain.

BB's face transforms.

The worry dissolves. What replaces it is satisfaction. Feline. Deep. The slow, spreading pleasure of a thing that’s been told it succeeded at the one task it cared about. And the expression settles onto Bobby's features in a way that is entirely BB's. Not the cocky grin, but quieter, more private, enormously pleased, a contentment so total it rearranges his face into a shape Bobby never wore.

He leans in. Presses his lips to your forehead.

Gentle. Unhurried, lingering. His mouth is warm against your skin, and you feel the hum transfer through the contact. That low, steady vibration, his frequency, the sound that lives in his chest and translates through his mouth into a pulse that settles behind your sternum like a second heartbeat. 

He holds the kiss there. Two seconds. Three. His hand cradling the back of your head, his fingers in your hair, and the gesture is so tender and so completely his that the breath leaves your body in a long, slow exhale.

You close your eyes. Lean into it.

Bobby never used to kiss your forehead.

Bobby kissed your mouth, your neck, the spot below your ear that made you gasp. Bobby kissed with intent, heat, and skill. Bobby kissed like a man who knew exactly what he was doing and wanted you to know he knew. 

But the forehead—that quiet, unhurried, undemanding press of lips to the place above your eyes—that was never in Bobby's vocabulary. 

It was too tender. Too unperformative. Too much like a devotion and not enough like a statement. Bobby declared. And the soft devotional gesture of forehead to forehead, mouth to brow, the kiss that says I cherish you instead of I want you—that was always one of the doors Bobby bricked up, one of the tender things he couldn't do because doing it would've meant admitting the size of what he felt, and Bobby's whole life was an exercise in pretending the feeling was smaller than the room.

Vera Lynn unsticks from her glitch, and the last notes of the song drift through the apartment like smoke (some sunny d-day), and you are here. In a kitchen that was built for you by something that heard you cry through a wall. 

You lean into lips gentle against your skin and close your eyes. 

BB pauses at the threshold of the apartment.

He does this now, the pause, the backward glance, the half-second where his body is already oriented toward the corridor but his attention is still tethered to you. 

It started after the first kiss. A new subroutine in him, a step added to the departure sequence that wasn't there before, and you've watched it develop over the past few days.

“Perimeter check,” he calls out casually. The half-grin flashes. “Back soon.”

You cross the kitchen, pressing your lips to his cheek. A quick, light contact, the kind of kiss that says be safe without saying it.

BB's hand catches your chin.

His fingers close around it,, his thumb and forefinger framing your jaw the way he'd frame a shot if he were Bobby, if he had a camera, if the instinct that lives in those borrowed hands were pointed at a lens instead of at your face. He tilts your head. Tips it up. Holds you exactly where he wants you.

And he kisses you.

Full, wet, unhurried, his lips parting against yours with a confidence he didn't have two days ago in the kitchen. He's been learning, replaying, refining, the way he refines everything, and the kiss he gives you now is deeper than the first, more certain, carrying the heat that slammed through both of you the first time and has been simmering since, banked but not extinguished. His tongue brushes your lower lip. His fingers tighten on your chin. 

He makes that sound again. The low, needy one, the one that lives at the back of his throat with the purr, and he tries to swallow it, almost, but not quite.

BB pulls back. A centimetre, his mouth hovering.

“Was that okay?” he breathes out, his breath on your lips. His eyes search yours with that earnest, slightly worried focus. Still checking, treating every escalation like a threshold he needs your permission to cross.

You nod. You don't trust your voice. You stay close, your forehead almost touching his, breathing the same air, and the hum in the walls dips low and warm around you.

BB presses his lips to your forehead. Holds them there. 

"Stay," he murmurs against your skin.

Then he's gone. The hum adjusts, tightens, and you're alone in the apartment with the ghost of his mouth on your brow and the taste of him on your lips.

You decide to sort the nest to kill time.

It doesn't need sorting, really.

BB arranges it with a precision that borders on pedantic, the blankets layered in an exact order, the pillows positioned at angles he's adjusted over weeks of watching how you sleep. But your hands need occupation, and your brain needs distraction, because the kiss is still on your mouth, the taste is still there, and the wanting is a warm, heavy thing in the pit of your stomach. 

And if you don't move, don't work, don't put your hands on fabric and fold, you're going to lie down on this bed and think about his fingers on your chin and his tongue on your lip and the sound he made, and you can't afford to be that soft right now. Not while he's out there. Not while Entity X is out there.

You refold the top blanket. Smooth the creases. Adjust the pillow on the left side—your side, the one that holds the impression of your head—and reach for the second pillow, the one on BB's side that he doesn't need but uses because you told him beds have two pillows and he'd looked at you with that tilted curiosity and said why? and you'd said because that's how it works and he'd said that's not a reason and you'd said because it means someone else sleeps here too and he'd gone quiet for a long time and the next morning there were two pillows.

You're smoothing the second pillowcase when you hear it.

Your hand stills.

“—not about that, can you just—”

Your voice. Your own voice, coming from somewhere beyond the apartment walls, floating through the hum the way Vera Lynn had floated. Sourceless, directionless. Except this isn't music. This is you. A version of you from before, the you that existed on the other side of the wall, and the sound of your own voice reaching you from the yellow makes your blood slow in your veins.

“—I'm just asking if we're okay, Bobby, that's all I'm asking—”

And then his. Bobby's. The real Bobby, the original, the voice you haven't heard in— 

You don't know how long. Months. Maybe onger. And the sound of it hits you in the sternum like a fist because it's exactly the same, the same timbre and cadence, the same tired dismissive flatness that used to make the back of your throat burn.

“We're fine.”

Two words. Tossed over his shoulder. The verbal equivalent of a shrug, of a turned back, of a man already looking at the television while his girlfriend stands in the kitchen with her hands gripping the counter and her chest full of words she's running out of courage to say.

“You keep saying that, but you don't—Bobby, can you look at me? Can you just—”

“I am looking at you.”

“You're not. You're looking at the screen. I'm asking you to turn around and actually—”

“What do you want me to say?" And there it is—the edge. The blade that lives under the casual, the sharp thing that comes out when he feels cornered, when the conversation is moving toward a territory he doesn't want to enter. Not anger. Worse than anger. Impatience. A man who’s decided this conversation is unnecessary before it started. “We're fine, babe. I'm here. What else do you want?”

“I want you to talk to me—”

“I'm talking to you right now. Stop trying to turn this into a fight.”

“That's not—Bobby, that's not what I mean, and you know it.”

Silence of a man who’s already disengaged follows, who’s pulled the drawbridge up mid-conversation and is now sitting behind his own walls waiting for you to exhaust yourself against them. You know that silence. You lived inside that silence for months. You drowned in it.

You set the pillow down. Your hands are trembling.

You know you shouldn't. Your instincts are screaming loudly. The animal brain hisses warnings. The brain that’s spent months learning the rules of this place and the first rule, the foundational rule, the one BB drilled into you before he taught you anything else, is stay in the nest. Stay in the apartment. Stay inside the protection he carved for you out of Level 0's guts.

But your voice is out there. Bobby's voice is out there. And the sound of that exact conversation—that devastating, ordinary conversation, the kind you had a hundred times, the kind that ended with you staring at the ceiling at two AM—is pulling at you the way gravity pulls. 

Not curiosity. Recognition. The lure of an old wound being reopened.

You step out of the apartment.

The corridor beyond the front door is yellow. Long. The sublevel hallway that connects the apartment to the main body of Level 0, the passage BB carved like a throat between his territory and yours. 

The fluorescent lights buzz overhead in that flat shadowless drone, and the hum is steady, even, unchanged. Nothing looks wrong. Nothing feels wrong, except that your voice is coming from the far end of the corridor, from beyond the doorway where the sublevel opens into Level 0 proper, and the conversation is continuing, rolling forward, playing itself out like a recording that doesn't know it's being listened to.

“—I feel like you don't even notice if I'm here or not. Bobby, do you notice? Do you notice when I'm standing right in front of you?”

Your eyes burn. The lump in your throat is solid, immovable, sharp-edged. You walk toward the sound. One hand trails the wall, and your bare feet are silent on the carpet, and the conversation beyond pulls you forward step by step.

“You're being dramatic.”

The words hit you like a slap. Not because they're new. Because they're not. 

Bobby said that. Bobby said those exact words, in that same exact tone, with that exact tired, dismissive, I-don't-have-the-energy-for-this tone, and the accuracy of the reproduction makes your skin prickle because the Backrooms shouldn't have this. 

The Backrooms shouldn't have the argument you had on a random Tuesday in October in a kitchen in Santa Clara. The Backrooms shouldn't know what Bobby sounded like when he was making you feel invisible.

“I'm not being dramatic, I'm being honest, I'm trying to tell you that I'm hurting and you won't even—”

“Hurting from what? Babe, I don’t want to fight. Stop turning everything into an argument.” Bobby's voice, louder now. The edge hardens into a wall. “You want me to sit here and—what? Have a feelings conversation? I'm tired. I worked all day. Can we just—can we not?”

You stop at the doorway.

The sublevel opens into the corridor beyond. Level 0 proper, BB's territory, the locked-down hallways that nothing enters and nothing leaves. The lights stretch into the yellow distance. The carpet extends, flat and damp, into the dark. 

The conversation is louder here, bouncing off the walls, your voice and Bobby's voice layered on top of each other in a terrible intimacy, and your eyes are full, and the anger is back. The buried anger, the one BB identified months ago, the one you folded into self-doubt and swallowed. It's risen now, pulled to the surface by the sound of Bobby refusing, again, to try. To talk. To turn around and listen. 

To look at you, see you standing there with your heart in your hands, asking for the bare minimum, and be told you're being dramatic.

The doorway is empty.

Your voices continue, playing in the walls. But there's nothing there, just the corridor. More of the yellow, and the dark at the far end, where the lights don't reach. Where the fluorescents give way to a blackness that is too thick, too solid to be ordinary shadow.

You stare at the dark.

The dark stares back.

Your sweat goes cold. A full-body temperature drop, your skin prickling from scalp to ankles, every hair on your arms standing in unison, and the moisture on your palms turns to ice water, and your heartbeat detonates. Slams against the cage of your ribs so hard you feel it in your teeth. Once. Twice. A third time that shakes your vision.

The conversation stops.

Your voice. Bobby's voice. Gone. Cut off mid-sentence like a throat being closed, and the silence that replaces it is not Level 0's silence, not the hum-filled quiet of a place holding itself still. This is the absence of sound. The void where sound should be. A silence so complete it has its own pressure, pushing against your eardrums, filling your skull with a static that isn't static but attention. 

Vast, focused, oriented entirely on you.

The dark moves.

A motion that starts at the far end of the corridor and travels toward you with unhurried, deliberate patience, like whatever it is has all the time in the world and knows it. The fluorescent lights flicker (one, two, three in sequence), and when they reignite, they’re not yellow anymore.

They’re red.

A deep, arterial crimson that transforms the corridor into a visceral maw that looks less like a hallway and more like standing in the inside of a throat. The carpet darkens. The walls darken. Familiar geometry of Level 0 warps under the red light into a place you don't recognise, a version of BB's territory that has been flooded with something foreign, something that changes the colour of the air itself.

The lights flicker again. Red, black, red, black. A strobe, pulsing, each flash revealing the dark a little closer, a little more solid, a shape forming inside it the way a body forms inside smoke, and in the stuttering crimson you see it.

Your head tips up.

And up.

And up.

It comes into the red light the way a whale breaches water. Slowly, the sheer scale of it requiring a recalibration of your visual field that your brain refuses to perform.

Your legs won't move. Your body has locked up, every muscle seized in the ancient, primate, pre-verbal grip of a fear so total it bypasses the nervous system and goes straight to the marrow. 

This isn’t the Smiler or the Howler. This isn’t six agents with weapons and tactical vocabulary. This is the thing in the notebook. The symbol you drew on page after page, updating weekly, tracking its movements at the perimeter with clinical detachment because clinical detachment was the only way to hold it at arm's length.

It's not at the perimeter anymore.

It's tall. Obscenely, horrifically tall. Its body fills the corridor from floor to ceiling, which suddenly seems too low, its shape pressing against the walls as if the hallway were built around it, or as if it had grown to fill the hallway.

It's shaped wrong, proportioned wrong, only vaguely humanoid silhouette stretched to the breaking point and then stretched further, limbs too long, muscular, joints articulating at angles that make your eyes slide off them like water off glass.

Its skin is more like a hide. Leathery. Matte. A deep, dark red that absorbs the crimson light instead of reflecting it, like something that was red once and has since become a surface that eats light and gives nothing back. No texture. No sheen. The flat, dead finish of something organic that has forgotten how to be alive.

And it has no face.

The surface where a face should be is smooth. Featureless. A blank expanse of that matte leathery skin, curved slightly, like the inside of a mask, and the blankness is worse than any feature could be because your brain keeps trying to find the face, keeps scanning the surface for eyes, mouth, nose, any anchor of recognition, any sign that what you're looking at is a being and not a wall of skin that has learned to walk.

Then the eyes appear.

They don't open, they emerge. 

Bulging outward from the surface of the face, pressing through the skin like something hatching, the leathery hide stretching and thinning and splitting apart in wet, peeling seams, and what emerges is yellow. Burning, furnace-bright yellow, the colour of the fluorescent lights distilled and concentrated and superheated until it became something that hurts to look at. Two points of searing amber in the featureless red, and they fix on you.

They fix on you, and they don't move.

Tears spill down your cheeks. 

The animal body's response to being seen by something that should not be able to see. A reflex, a pressure release, your system venting whatever it can in a desperate attempt to process the input flooding through it. 

Your heart hammers inside your chest, your mouth bone dry. Your hands are numb at your sides, the fingers bloodless and tingling, and you can feel your pulse in your throat and your temples.

Entity X.

It's bigger than you thought. Bigger than BB's clipped descriptions and careful evasions. 

It fills the corridor the way a flood would. Totally, leaving no space unoccupied. And those eyes, those burning yellow eyes, are locked on you with a focus that’s not predatory. Not hungry. Patient. 

It’s been waiting for this, you realise with a lurch. To lure you out with the sound of your own voice and Bobby's voice and the argument calibrated to the exact frequency of your buried fury, and now that you're here, now that you're standing in the doorway with your tears on your face and your anger in your throat, it’s in no rush. 

It has what it wanted. Your attention. Your recognition. 

It reaches for you.

The arm extends. Long, impossibly long, the limb unfolding like a telescope, the joints articulating in that wrong way, and the hand comes through the doorway. Into the sublevel. Into BB's territory, into the space he carved and sealed and locked down, the space where nothing enters—

The hand comes apart.

Ribbons. The skin peels away from the fingers in long, wet strips, the flesh beneath splitting and curling back, and the arm disintegrates from fingertip to wrist to forearm in a cascade of shredding tissue that falls to the carpet in dark. Heavy coils dissolve on contact, eaten by the floor, absorbed into BB's territory like an immune response rejecting foreign matter. 

The barrier—invisible, structural, woven into the very air at a level you can't perceive—is doing what BB built it to do. Unmaking anything that tries to cross inside and harm you.

You scramble backwards.

Your heel catches the carpet. You stumble, catch yourself on the wall, push off, and your body is finally moving, finally responding. The paralysis encasing you cracks, and the survival brain kicks online with a screaming urgency.

You back away from the doorway, and Entity X is standing in the corridor beyond it, and you watch in mute terror as its arm begins to regrow. The ribbons reverse, the skin re-knitting, the flesh sealing back over the bones with a wet, thick sound like clay being pressed into shape.

It tracks your retreat with those yellow eyes, and it’s not even slightly bothered.

It’s not bothered at all.

It reaches again. The same arm, healed, whole, the matte red skin glistening faintly with the residue of its own reconstruction. It pushes through the barrier, and the skin starts to peel again. It pushes harder, the arm advancing centimetre by centimetre through the invisible wall, and the peeling is slower this time. 

The barrier is straining. You can feel it in the hum. A high, tight frequency that sounds like metal under stress, and Entity X is shredding its own flesh to reach you, and it doesn't flinch. Doesn't falter, those burning eyes fixed on you with an intensity that is not rage, not hunger, is something far worse than either.

It's insistence.

You turn and run.

The corridor stretches. Or you're running slower than you think, or the sublevel is responding to the breach by elongating, by putting distance between you and the doorway, and you sprint for the apartment at full speed. Your bare feet slap against the carpet, your breath coming in ragged, tearing gasps, and behind you, you can hear it. 

Not footsteps. A sound like tearing fabric, like the barrier giving way fibre by fibre, like something enormous and patient methodically peeling through a protection that was supposed to be absolute.

You slam through the apartment doors, gasping for breath. 

You scramble for the lock. It’s decorative, you know that, it's a human gesture in a human-shaped apartment, and it will stop nothing that just shredded itself through BB's barrier, but you still try, grabbing the bookshelf next. The one BB just arranged. Your notebooks cascade to the floor as you drag it across the carpet and shove it against the door. The wood scrapes, the weight of it pathetic against what's coming. 

You grab the kitchen table. A chair. The standing lamp from the corner. Anything. Everything. Piling it against the door in a barricade of furniture that looks exactly like what it is: a pathetic attempt to buy time.

“BB!”

Your voice breaks on his name. Cracks open, raw, a scream that comes from the bottom of your lungs and fills the apartment and bounces off the walls he built for you.

“BB, COME BACK! BB!”

The door splinters.

Not from the hinges. From the surface. The wood bulges inward, warping, then splits along a line running from top to bottom, and through the crack, you see it. The red. The matte, light-eating red. And then an arm. 

It comes through the gap the way the first one came through the barrier, fingers curling around the edge of the broken door, and the wood peels away from the frame in long strips. The apartment dismantles itself around the intrusion, BB's careful construction coming apart under the weight of something that will not stop.

The clawed hand reaches into the room.

You grab the lamp. The standing lamp, with a heavy brass base, the most solid thing within reach, and you swing it. It connects with the arm, bounces off the matte skin, and the impact travels up your wrists and into your shoulders, but the thing doesn't react. The arm keeps coming. You throw the lamp. Throw books. Throw a kitchen chair that shatters against the forearm and falls into pieces.

“Stay away from me!" You're screaming, your voice stripped raw, your body backing toward the far wall with nothing left to throw. “Get away—”

Entity X's eyes find you through the wreckage of the door.

Yellow. Burning. Fixed. It hasn't blinked. Through the barrier, through the peeling, the furniture and the lamp and the screaming. Those eyes locked onto you in the corridor, and they have not left you. 

They’ll not leave you, and the constancy of the gaze is the most terrifying thing you've ever experienced because it means you. You’re the target. You’ve always been the target. Whatever this thing is, whatever it wants, whatever fuel it runs on—it wants you, specifically, personally, with a focus that transcends predation and enters the territory of purpose.

The arm reaches for you. Healed. Whole. The stripped flesh re-formed, the fingers extended, and it's close enough now that you can see the texture of the skin. Up close, it's not smooth; it's covered in fine, hairline fractures. Like dried earth, something that cracked and sealed and cracked again, a surface that has been broken and rebuilt so many times, the damage has become a pattern.

The arm detaches.

Ripped, torn from the shoulder socket with a violence so total the sound it makes isn't a tear but a detonation. A concussive, wet blast that shakes the walls and sends a spray of dark viscera across the ceiling and the wrecked furniture and your face, warm and thick, smelling of copper and something older, something mineral.

Entity X's arm hits the floor. The fingers are still curling. Still reaching. Oriented toward you, even severed from the body.

The thing that threw it is standing in the doorway.

It’s not BB and not Bobby.

Not anything that has ever worn a human face, and you understand this immediately, viscerally, in the part of your brain that predates language and operates on pure animal recognition: the shape in the doorway is wrong. 

It's Bobby's height, but the proportions have shifted. The shoulders sit too wide, the stance too low, the geometry of the body rearranged into something optimised for destruction rather than disguise. The face is Bobby's face, but it's barely holding, the features sliding, the jaw too sharp, the eyes fully black. Two pits of absolute dark in a face that is coming apart at the seams. 

The skin is cracking. Not like Entity X's fractures—like porcelain, like a mask that's been struck, fissures radiating from the jaw and the cheekbones, and through the cracks you can see—not flesh, not bone, but nothing. An absence. A dark so total it makes Entity X's darkness look like shadow.

He's covered in black. Head to chest, arms to elbows, the viscous substance coating his skin and matting his hair to his forehead, dripping from his hands in long, slow ropes. Whatever distraction Entity X deployed to pull him from the perimeter, BB didn't just fight through it. 

He annihilated it. And he didn't stop to put the face back on before he came for you.

The hum collapses. 

The ambient frequency of Level 0—the constant, ever-present vibration that’s been the background radiation of your existence since you fell through the wall—drops to a subsonic register that you don't hear so much as feel. 

A pressure wave that presses against your eardrums, your chest, and settles at the backs of your eyes. The red lights in the corridor blow out. Every single one. The apartment goes dark except for Entity X's burning yellow eyes and the fissures in BB's cracking face, which glow. Faintly, coldly, with a light that has no colour name.

BB opens his mouth, and the sound that comes out is not a voice.

It’s the hum.

The hum itself, weaponised, concentrated, forced through a throat that has stopped pretending to be human. The sound fills the apartment, the corridor, the sublevel, more vibration than language, dragged through the collapsing shape of Bobby's vocal cords with a fury so enormous it makes the floor ripple:

“Clever distraction.”

Entity X turns.

The motion is glacial. Unhurried. The massive red body rotating in the wrecked doorway of the apartment to face the thing that just removed its arm, and even now—even turning to face BB, even orienting its body toward the threat—its eyes stay on you.

Its eyes stay on you.

The head doesn't move with the body. The neck articulates. Wrong, all wrong. Rotating independently of the torso at a degree that no anatomy should permit. The burning yellow gaze remains fixed on your position against the far wall while the body faces BB, the removed arm regrowing in wet, rapid pulses at the severed shoulder, rising to meet what's coming.

The fight starts.

You can't follow it. Not really. Not the way you'd follow a human fight, with fists and momentum and the readable physics of two bodies colliding. 

This is different. These are two beings that don't obey the laws of physics, tearing at each other in a space that's coming apart around them. 

BB moves the way he moved against the agents. Too fast, fluid, the human shape abandoned for something more efficient, more angular, more suited to what he actually is, and Entity X absorbs. Takes. Endures. 

BB tears through its torso, and the flesh re-knits immediately. BB shatters its jaw with a crack, the featureless face splintering like ceramic, the yellow eyes bulging through the fissures, and the jaw reforms. BB puts his fist through its chest, and the chest closes around his arm, and for a terrible second, they're locked, joined. BB rips free with a sound like tearing metal, and Entity X is already whole again, already standing, already watching you through the chaos with those eyes that have never left, never wavered, never once looked at anything else.

You're behind BB. Pressed against the wall, moving when he moves, keeping his body between you and the thing, and you're trying to be small, trying to be invisible, but Entity X doesn't need to see you to know where you are. It knows. The way it knew your voice. The way it knew Bobby's voice. The way it knew the exact argument to play through the walls to bring you to the threshold.

BB is winning. At first. His speed is devastating, his fury enormous, and Entity X staggers under the assault, the massive body driven backwards through the wrecked apartment and into the corridor, and for a few brutal seconds you think he's got this, he's got it, he's going to unmake it the way he unmade the Smiler—

Entity X catches his arm.

The movement is casual. Almost lazy. One massive red hand closing around BB's forearm mid-strike, and the force of the stop shudders through the corridor, through the floor under your feet. BB wrenches. Twists. The hand doesn't open. Entity X holds him there—one-armed, the other still regrowing—and for the first time in the fight, it isn't retreating.

It's pushing forward.

The shift is tectonic. 

Entity X drives BB backwards, and the corridor shakes around you. BB's feet leave the ground for a fraction of a second, and when he lands, his posture has changed. Less offensive, more braced, the shape of someone absorbing impact instead of delivering it. Entity X hits him. Open-handed, a strike that catches BB across the chest and sends him into the wall hard enough to crater the surface, and the sound BB makes is not a snarl. It's a gasp. A short, involuntary, winded exhalation, the noise of a body—even a body that isn't a body—taking damage it didn't expect.

And through it all. Through the fighting and the shattering and the black blood and the reknitting flesh.

Entity X's eyes never leave you.

The gaze stays locked on you with the serene, unwavering patience that knows this fight is temporary. That knows BB is between it and you, and that BB is the obstacle, but you’re the objective and obstacles, eventually, move.

BB goes down.

A blow you don't see—too fast, too angled, connecting with something vital in BB's body—and he hits the floor and doesn't get up immediately. 

He gets to his hands and knees. The black blood drips from his mouth now, from his nose, from a gash across his chest that isn't closing the way Entity X's wounds close. His arms are shaking. The human face is flickering. BB, then the thing beneath, then BB again, the mask destabilising under the damage, slipping.

“BB!”

You're moving before you think. Scrambling across the wreckage, over the broken furniture and the shattered doorframe, toward him, toward the crumpled shape of him on the floor, and your hands reach for his shoulders—

“Stop.”

His voice. A snarled command, delivered with every frequency he has. Human, inhuman, the hum itself weaponised into a single syllable that hits you in the chest like a physical force and roots your feet to the floor. 

He lifts his head. His eyes are black, and his mouth is black with blood. The expression on his face is wild, furious, terrified. An emotion he’s never shown you before, an emotion you didn't know he was capable of, and the terror is not for himself.

“Level 974.” He spits blood. Black. Thick. “Mr Kitty. You know the route. Go, now.”

“I'm not leaving you—”

“You’re a target.” Each word costs him. You can see it. The effort of speech, of maintaining the face, of holding the human shape together while the damage tries to unmake it. “As long as you’re here, it will not stop. It doesn't want me. It wants you. And I can't—” His jaw clenches, a tremor running through his arms. “I can't fight it and protect you. I need you gone. I need you out of range.”

Entity X rises behind him. The massive body straightening. The burning eyes on you. Always on you.

“BB—”

“I am older than this place.” Low. Fierce. Black blood on his teeth, and his eyes fully dark, the ancient thing speaking through the ruined face with a conviction that shakes the walls. “I’m older than the walls and the hum and the doors and it. I have survived every horror this place has made. But I cannot do it while I'm holding back.”

Holding back.

You understand, then. Instantly and fully. 

He's been fighting at half capacity. Less. Fighting with one hand while the other shields you, positioning his body between you and the thing, dividing his attention between destruction and protection and losing ground on both. But it's more than that. 

You look at his face—the cracking face, the flickering face, Bobby's features sliding and reforming and sliding again—and you understand the other constraint. 

The one he'd never say. The Bobby suit. The face, the body, the human shape he's maintained for you since the day you came through the wall. It takes power to hold it. Focus. Resources currently being spent on keeping twenty-two-year-old Bobby Franklin's jaw attached to his skull, instead of being channelled into whatever he actually is underneath. 

He's not just protecting you with his body. He's protecting you with his form. Keeping the familiar shape, the face you trust, the lips you kissed, but keeping all of it intact costs him, bleeds him, divides the vast and ancient thing into a fraction of its true capacity. 

As long as you're here, he will keep wearing Bobby. As long as he's wearing Bobby, Entity X will keep gaining ground.

You’re not his weakness. You’re his ceiling. And as long as you're in this corridor, he will keep hitting that ceiling, and Entity X will keep pushing through it, and the math only ends one way.

“Trust me,” BB says, blood in his mouth, the face slipping. The thing underneath looks at you with an intensity that has nothing to do with age or power but with promise he made you, his hand on your cheek. “Run.”

You grab the notebook.

It's on the floor, knocked from the shelf in the barricade, pages bent, the cover dented. 

You snatch it up. Press it to your chest. The routes are in there. Level 0 to Level 1, Level 1 to the stairwell threshold, the stairwell to the passage threading through Level 2 and opening into the long, dark corridor descending to Level 974. You mapped it. You walked it with BB at your side and his hand at your back, and you marked every turn, every landmark, every shift in the hum that signals a boundary.

You look at BB one more time. On the floor. Bleeding black. The face barely holding. Entity X rising behind him, vast and red and patient, those yellow eyes burning through the dark as it turns to follow you. 

BB snarls, and Entity X’s legs crack beneath it. 

You run.

Through the wrecked sublevel. Into the corridor, into Level 0, your notebook against your chest and your bare feet on the carpet and the sound of the fight erupting behind you. Massive, structural, the sound of two ancient things finally meeting without a ceiling, and you run toward the route you mapped, the path you memorised, and you don't look back.

You run until you can't hear it anymore.

The fight stopped being audible three corridors back; the sounds of two entities tearing each other apart swallowed by the hum. 

What you're running from now is the silence. Weighted silence of a level that’s been breached, holding itself still the way an animal holds still when the predator is too close to outrun. The red light hasn't faded. It pulses occasionally, as if Level 0 itself is wounded and you're running through it.

Your bare feet slap on the carpet, the notebook clutched to your chest. The cover bent, the pages pressed against your sternum. 

You're navigating from memory now, the left fork at the junction where the carpet gets warmer, the right turn at the corridor where the hum drops a semitone, the long stretch past the section with the water-stained ceiling tiles that marks the boundary of BB's inner territory. 

You know this route, walked it with BB multiple times. Traced it in the notebook with blue ink and annotated the landmarks and tested yourself on it in the nest while BB watched with that quiet pride, and the memory of his face—the last time you saw it, cracking, bleeding black, the ancient thing surfacing through the fissures—makes your vision blur and you blink hard and keep running.

The corridor opens up.

You skid to a stop. The junction ahead is the one that leads to the stairwell threshold, the one that drops you into the transitional space between Level 0 and Level 1. 

But that’s not why you stop. You stop because the corridor is full of furniture.

And you know this furniture. The recognition is immediate, physical. The flat-packed shelving units with the Scandinavian labels. The plastic-wrapped headboards stacked against the wall. A dining table, oak veneer, the floor model with the scratch on the left leg where Bobby kicked it once, carrying inventory, and the scratch is there, exactly where it should be. The recognition hits you like a blow because this is Clark's. 

Clark's inventory: the same flatpacks and display pieces you organised on night shifts, labelled in your handwriting, and sorted by vendor into bins.

The Backrooms do this. You know they do. They absorb, they replicate, they pull pieces of the real world through the membrane and deposit them in corridors like driftwood. BB explained it once: the levels aren't separate from reality, they're underneath it, and sometimes the underneath leaks up and the above leaks down and things end up where they don't belong. 

But knowing the mechanics doesn't prepare you for the lurch of seeing Clark's dining table in a yellow corridor, and you press your hand to the wall and breathe. The wall is warm under your palm, and you think of BB, and the thought is a blade, so you keep moving—

Voices.

Entity X's lure would be sourceless, directionless. These voices have a direction. They're coming from ahead and to the left, from the section of the corridor that bends around the stacked flatpacks, and they're real. Human. Layered on top of each other with the particular rhythm of people talking in a confined space, voices bouncing off hard surfaces, and you can hear—

“—I don't care, I'm going down there, let go of—”

“Bobby, stop, you can't just—we don't know what's down there, we don't know if—”

“—came through here, right? Through this wall, through this—whatever the hell this is. If she came through here, maybe she's lost, maybe she's—”

“Bobby. Baby. Listen to me—”

Your feet stop. Your lungs cease functioning. 

Bobby.

Bobby's voice. Real, live, present. Happening right now on the other side of a bend in a corridor that shouldn't exist. 

You'd know Entity X's trick by now, the sourceless quality, the way it comes from everywhere and nowhere. This has a direction. This has Bobby's actual vocal cords behind it. And it sounds different. The tired, dismissive Bobby who said you're being dramatic is gone. This voice is raw. Stripped. A man speaking through gravel, through grief so thorough it's changed the texture of his vocal cords. Desperate in a way Bobby never used to sound because Bobby never used to let himself sound like anything except perfectly at ease.

And the other voice. The woman. Calling him baby.

You step past the wall.

The corridor opens into a wider space. One of the junction rooms, the kind where several hallways converge, and the ceiling is higher, the fluorescents brighter, and the hum is louder because more of Level 0 is accessible from a single point. The flatpack furniture from Clark's store is stacked along the walls. A rope trails across the carpet from the far wall, where the concrete appears to dip into a dark space below.

Clark stands near the rope. Older than you remember. Heavier in the face, the circles under his eyes darker, his work shirt untucked and stained, his hands clenched. He looks terrified and dazed in equal measure. 

And a woman. Young. Dark hair, cut short, slip flops. She's got one hand on Bobby's arm and the other pressed to her own chest, and her face is tight with a fear that hasn't fully landed yet, still hovering in the space between this can't be real and this is real, and I might die.

And Bobby.

Your Bobby.

He's standing in the middle of the junction room with the rope half-tied from his belt and a camera in his hand—of course, even here, even in the impossible, Bobby brought the camera—and he's thinner. 

The crop top hangs differently on him now, looser, the chain at his throat sitting lower against collarbones that are more prominent than they used to be. His face is harder. The softness that used to live at the edges, the boyish quality, the roundness that you used to trace with your fingers in the morning light, is gone. Carved away. What's left is angular, drawn, the face of a man who hasn't been sleeping right for a long time. Who hasn't been eating right, either. 

He’s been doing something to himself, or having something done to him, that has stripped the youth from his bones and left behind this sharpened, hollowed version of the person you loved.

You don't know how long it's been. You don't know what happened to him after you fell through the wall. You just know that the Bobby standing in front of you is not the Bobby you left, and the distance between those two versions is written in the new, foreign angles of his still handsome face.

The woman spots you first.

Her gasp is sharp, bitten off, the sound of a person encountering something that doesn't fit the parameters of what she was prepared for. Her hand tightens on Bobby's arm. Her eyes go wide, and her body shifts. Backwards, behind him, an instinct that tells you everything about their dynamic in a single gesture.

Bobby turns.

For a moment, there's only shocked silence. Bobby stares at you. You stare at Bobby. 

The light buzzes, and the rope trails across the carpet. The woman's hand is on his arm, and Clark's flashlight beam trembles on the floor, and you’re standing ten feet apart in an impossible place, looking at each other for the first time since the doorway, the grunt, and the don't wait up and neither of you breathes.

Bobby's mouth moves. No sound, a rasp of breath. Then, cracking at the edges:

"Baby?"

His voice splinters on the second syllable. Splits open. The word comes out ragged, disbelieving, torn from somewhere deep, and the information—you, standing in a yellow corridor, alive, alive—is too big for his face, and the room.

You don't respond. You can't. Your throat has closed around a sound that won't form. 

You're looking at him. Bobby. Real Bobby. The original. The man whose face you've been kissing on another body for who knows how long, whose voice you've been hearing through borrowed vocal cords, whose edges and angles and scars you've memorised on a copy so perfect you'd almost forgotten there was an original. 

And here he is. Diminished and sharpened, desperate and real, standing in front of you in a crop top and a chain with a camera in his shaking hand, and the distance between you is ten feet, and however long it's been and all the things neither of you said.

Bobby drops the camera.

It hits the carpet with a muted thud. 

Bobby, who’s never let go of a camera voluntarily in his life, who held onto the viewfinder the way other men hold onto control, lets it fall from his fingers like it weighs nothing. Like it was never important, like every hour of footage he ever shot was just a rehearsal for the moment he'd need his hands free to reach for you.

He yanks at the rope around his waist. His fingers are clumsy, frantic, tearing at the knot rather than untying it, his jaw clenched and his breathing coming in short, hard bursts through his nose. The woman takes a step toward him.

“Bobby, wait, you don't know if—”

He doesn't hear her. The rope falls. He steps out of it like stepping out of a skin he doesn't need anymore, and he starts walking toward you. Fast, accelerating, his stride lengthening with each step, his breathing growing more laboured, and the expression on his face is furious. 

At the ten feet of carpet between his body and yours, at whatever he's been through since you vanished, at whatever it cost him, and he’s crossing it with the barely-contained ferocity.

He stops. Three feet from you. Two.

“Fuck,” he whispers, his eyes glassy, red-rimmed. His lashes are wet. Bobby, who doesn't cry in front of people, who presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and grinds the tears back, who’s never once let you see him break, is standing in front of you with tears in his eyes and making no effort to hide them. 

“Fuck,” he says again, softer, cracking, his whole face contorting around the word like it's the only syllable left in his vocabulary. 

He's looking at your face. Scanning every feature the way he used to scan you through the viewfinder, except there's no viewfinder now, no glass, nothing between his eyes and your face, and you can see the exact moment his brain confirms what his body already knows.

It's you. It's really you.

His hand lifts. Shaking. Visibly, violently shaking, the tremor running from his shoulder through his elbow through his wrist through his fingers, and his hand reaches across the two feet of air between you and lands on your shoulder.

You flinch.

Bobby makes a sound. A wrecked, gutted thing. Less than a gasp, more than a breath. His fingers tighten on your shoulder, involuntary, desperate, like he's afraid you'll dissolve if he loosens his grip. His other hand comes up and grabs your other shoulder, and he's holding you at arm's length with both hands, his face falling apart, the composure crumbling, and his voice when it comes out is barely there:

“You're real. God, please, tell me you're real, baby. Tell me this isn't—tell me I'm not—”

You're both breathing hard. Standing in a yellow corridor, his hand on your shoulder. Your body is rigid, his eyes wet as they drink you in, and the woman behind him is watching you both. Clark mumbles his disbelief faintly, and the world reduces to the two feet of air between your body and Bobby’s and all the wreckage on either side.

Bobby whispers your name.

Not baby. Your name. The real one, the full one, spoken so quietly you almost don't hear it, spoken the way you'd speak a word you're afraid will break if you say it too loud. Your name in Bobby's real mouth, the one that kissed you on a Thursday morning and said stay and meant it, and the sound of it cracks you open. 

He throws his arms around you.

Without gentleness, without hesitation. Bobby grabs you with both arms and pulls you into his chest so hard you stumble, your bare feet sliding on the carpet. His arms lock around your back, and his face buries in your neck. He's holding you desperately, with the full-body grip, a man who’s just recovered the thing he was drowning without.

He's warm.

The realisation hits you with a horrible, dizzying vertigo. He's warm. His hands on your shoulders were hot. Searingly, really, shockingly hot after months of BB's cool skin, BB's below-human temperature, the constant slight chill of a body that generates heat only when kissed into producing it. 

Now his whole body is pressed against yours, and he’s a furnace. Metabolic, organic, almost unbearable. The heat of blood moving through capillaries, of a heart pumping in a chest that rises and falls because it has to, because it will stop if it doesn't. He smells like soap. Faintly. Under that, sweat. Actual sweat, the salt-and-skin smell of a human body under stress. 

And underneath that, barely there, weed. Like he smoked before coming down here. Like Bobby needed his hands to stop shaking long enough to hold the camera, and the specificity of it, the humanness of it, the biochemical reality of a man who self-medicates his anxiety with marijuana and has done it since he was nineteen, is so overwhelmingly, violently real that your knees buckle.

You cling to him. 

Your arms come up—late, delayed, your body catching up to the fact that this is happening—and your fingers grab fistfuls of his shirt, and you hold on. He holds on too, and you're both shaking. Both gasping, making sounds that aren't words at the sheer impossibility of it all. 

Just grief and relief and terror and love, suddenly all the same thing. 

Bobby's hand is on the back of your head, pressing your face into his neck, and his chest is heaving, his pulse hammering against your cheek, and he's alive, he's alive, he came for you, he found the wall, and he came through, and he's here and—

“Bobby?”

The woman's voice. Small. Wary. She's standing behind Bobby with her arms wrapped around herself and her face pinched with confusion, frightened, and underneath both of those, a hurt she's trying very hard not to let surface. She's staring at you. At your head, pressed into Bobby's neck. At Bobby's arms around you, locked, total. 

The way he's holding you like the building could come down, and he wouldn't let go.

Bobby pulls back. Only his head, only enough to see your face. His hands come up and cup your jaw, framing your face the way he used to frame shots, and his thumbs trace your cheekbones and his eyes drag over your features with the starving hunger.

“You're alive,” Bobby says hoarsely, his thumbs on your cheekbones and his eyes bright. “You're alive. I thought—the tapes, they went blank, they all went—I thought you were—fuck, you're alive. I missed so fucking much—"

The lights go red.

A sudden, total shift. Every fluorescent in the junction room snaps from yellow to deep crimson in the space of a single heartbeat, and the hum screams. A high, keening frequency that's less sound and more pressure, a vibration that pushes against your eardrums again and fills your skull. An alarm. Organic, not mechanical. 

The level itself shrieks, Level 0 responding to a breach so severe that its entire frequency is destabilising.

You know this sound, know what it means. Your body knows before your brain catches up. The red means Entity X. The alarm means the fight has moved, or ended, or escalated beyond what the level can contain. The walls are wrong, and the carpet under your feet is vibrating with a frequency you've never felt before, and every nerve in your body is firing the same message: move.

You grab Bobby's hand. Hard. Your fingers lacing through his.

“Come with me. Right now.”

“What—what is that, what's happen—”

“Right now, Bobby.”

The woman closes the distance. She's been standing behind him, arms wrapped around herself, but the alarm has shaken her forward, adrenaline overriding the hurt on her face, and she grabs Bobby's other arm with both hands.

“Bobby is not going anywhere," she insists, her voice steady. Tighter than her face. “We came here together, and we're leaving together—back through the wall, not deeper into—”

You look at her. Really look at her for the first time. Dark hair. Round jaw. Pretty in a girl-next-door way. You focus on the way she holds Bobby’s arm, the way she positions herself behind him, and remember the baby she called earlier. You see it, and something cold slides between your ribs and sits there.

“Who are you?” you ask flatly.

Bobby's hand tightens in yours. “She's—this is Kat, she works at—”

A scream splits the corridor.

Not human. Long, oscillating, rising in pitch until it hits a frequency that makes the flatpack shelving units rattle against the walls. Howler. Close. Moving fast, drawn by the alarm the way predators are drawn by distress signals, and the sound of it snaps through the junction room like a whip.

“If you want to live,” you begin, your voice dropping into a register you didn't know you owned, calm, flat, cold, the voice of a woman who’s mapped multiple levels and catalogued fifty-three entity types and survived— “you'll follow me. Now.”

You pull Bobby. Bobby grabs Kat, and you move.

You lead them the only way you know how. By the notebook, by the months of repetition and documentation. 

You check each junction against the layout in your head, cross-referencing the hum's pitch and the angle of the corridor walls. Left at the warm patch. Right at the stain. Down the corridor, where the ceiling drops by three inches and the air smells damp. Through the threshold that shifts from carpet to tile and tile to the stairwell that descends between levels.

Bobby is behind you. His hand in yours. He won't let go. His grip is crushing, his callused fingers locked around your palm with a force that will leave bruises, and every few steps, his thumb moves against your wrist. Some involuntary check, a pulse-read, confirming you're still there, still solid, still real.

“How long have you been here?” he asks. Moving fast, breathing hard, his voice pitched low. The camera is gone. Left on the carpet in the junction room, the first time Bobby has abandoned a camera since he was a boy. “How did you—are you hurt? Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“You're not fine, you're barefoot in a—what is this place? Where are we?”

You work your jaw, scanning ahead to escape the storm of warring emotions in your chest. “Keep moving.”

“Baby—”

“Don't call me that.”

The words leave your mouth before you can catch them. Sharp. Reflexive. A flinch turned verbal. 

Bobby's hand tightens on yours, and you feel the impact of the words travel through his grip like a current. A brief, rigid shock, a stiffening of the fingers.

You keep walking. The stairwell descends. Kat is behind Bobby, her hand on the back of his shirt, her breathing ragged, her head on a swivel. She's terrified. You can hear it in the quality of her breath. Short, high, the particular arrhythmia of a nervous system running on pure cortisol. But she's moving. She's keeping up. She hasn't frozen up. 

Some distant, clinical part of you notes this with grudging respect.

Through Level 2. The dripping pipes and the dark. Bobby pulls Kat closer as the dripping grows louder and the shadows lengthen. Something in the walls makes a sound like breathing, and you watch him do it from the corner of your eye—watch his hand find her shoulder, watch his body angle between her and the dark—and the cold thing between your ribs turns over.

Through the transitional corridor. Down. The air changes again. Warmer, sweeter, carrying the faint smell of grass and dust, the signature of the levels that sit closer to the organic stratum. You check the notebook. Page thirty-seven. The route to 974.

Bobby is watching you. You can feel his eyes on the back of your head, on your bare feet, on the notebook clutched in your hand. On the way you navigate this impossible place with confidence. You feel him putting pieces together. That you’ve been here long enough to stop being lost. Long enough to have a system. To have bare feet, which means long enough to have stopped expecting to leave.

“You know this place,” he says. Not a question. His voice is careful, testing, wariness of someone who’s assembling a picture he doesn't want to see. “You've been—you've been here this whole time?”

“Yes.”

“Eighteen months?”

You pause. “Is that how long it's been?”

The silence behind you is devastating. Bobby's thumb stops its circuit on your wrist. Kat makes a small, wounded sound of realisation. If she wasn’t sure who you were before, she is now. 

“You didn't know,” Bobby says quietly. “You didn't know how long.”

You keep walking. The corridor opens up, the air changing again. A final threshold, a shift in the hum, and the space ahead brightens. Not with fluorescent light but something softer, golden. 

Scent of freshly cut grass, old wood and sugar fills your nose, followed by the particular mustiness of a house that’s been lived in by a being both patient and old for a very long time.

Level 974.

Mr Kitty appears at once.

One moment, the entrance to 974 is empty. The amber light, the corridor opening onto a landscape of gently rolling hills and scattered structures, some of them painted in colours too cheerful for the Backrooms, pinks and pastels that shouldn't survive down here. 

The next moment, he's there. Tall. Black. A humanoid shape standing in the centre of the path, its skin the deep, light-absorbing matte of a body that exists as a silhouette even in full illumination. It has no face. The surface where features should be is smooth, blank, and featureless, but the blankness differs from that of Entity X. 

Where Entity X's facelessness was a threat, a void, a surface that peeled open to reveal burning eyes, Mr Kitty's is gentle. Calm. The blankness of a thing that doesn't need a face because its presence communicates everything a face would. It stands with its long arms at its sides, and its smooth head tilted toward your group, its posture radiating patience the way the hum radiates sound.

Kat screams.

A sharp, bitten-off shriek at the wrongness of it, the too-tall body, the faceless head, the quality of ancient, unhurried presence that radiates from it. The scream bounces off the corridor behind you and fades into the amber light.

Bobby jerks to action. Reflex, instinct, the hardwired response to protect the person behind him. He steps in front of Kat, his arm sweeping back to push her behind his body, his jaw set and his eyes wide. His other hand still grips yours so tightly the bones grind together. 

His body is a wall between her and the threat, and the positioning is automatic, total, the posture of a man who does this without thinking.

Your stomach hollows out.

A different emptiness than fear. A cavity that opens beneath your ribs and fills with something cold and acidic. You watch Bobby shield Kat with his body the way he should have shielded you, the way you wished he would have shielded you, the way you spent months standing in doorways wishing he'd turn around and step toward you and put himself between you and anything at all. 

And he's doing it now. For her. The reflexive, unthinking protectiveness he could never perform for you when it was you who needed it. The muscle he let atrophy while you were his has somehow been rebuilt for someone else.

“It's okay,” you say, and your voice comes out even. Controlled. The cold thing behind your ribs makes your words clear. “He won't hurt you. He's safe.”

“He?” Bobby stares at the figure. The figure's blank face turns toward him. Bobby's hand tightens on yours.

“Mr Kitty.” You step forward. The tall, dark shape inclines its head toward you. A brief, acknowledging tilt, the gesture of a being that knows you and has been expecting you. “I need your help. Entity X breached the sublevel. BB is fighting it. I need—”

I'm aware.

The voice arrives inside your skull. A warm, dense pressure that fills the space behind your eyes and settles into your thoughts like sediment into still water. Mr Kitty's blank face is angled toward yours. The stillness radiating from him is calm. Steady. 

The disturbance registered across many levels. The barrier on Level 0 has been partially compromised. Your boy is still engaged.

Your stomach knots. “Is he winning?”

That depends on your definition.

“Is he alive?”

A pause. Mr Kitty's blank head inclines slightly, a gesture you've come to read as contemplation. He does not die the way you understand dying. But he is diminished. The sustained engagement is costly. The red one first used other entities to weaken him.

“Can we use your house? I need to get them somewhere safe.” Your voice catches. “Please. Just…”

Follow the path, little one. You’ll see it in the distance. I need to check the perimeter first. It’s chaos out there. Something else might slip through. 

You nod, gratitude plain on your face. Bobby and Kat are staring at you with matching expressions of blank, dissociated horror when you turn to them. 

“You were talking to it,” Bobby blurts out, flat with disbelief when Mr Kitty flickers out of sight. "You were having a conversation with a faceless thing. What the fuck.”

“It's complicated,” you mutter. “Follow me. Quickly.”

You lead them up the path. The amber light is steady here, warm and sourceless, and the hills roll gently toward a cluster of structures. 

Houses, loosely, buildings with doors and windows and roofs that approximate the concept of dwelling in the way the Backrooms approximate everything. Close enough to function but underlaid with a wrongness that only registers if you look too long. The second structure on the right is small. Wooden. A porch with a rocking chair. 

The door opens when you touch it, and the inside smells like dust and old paper and tea and the particular warmth of a house that is, impossibly, safe.

Mr Kitty is already inside. Standing in the corner of the kitchen, his dark shape nearly touching the ceiling, his long arms folded in front of him with a stillness that radiates patience. The plate of scones sits on the counter beside him.

You usher Bobby and Kat inside. Kat's hands are shaking. Bobby's jaw is tight, and his eyes are moving—scanning the room, the windows, Mr Kitty's dark shape in the corner, you—with the frantic, comprehensive attention of a man who is trying very hard to apply logic to a situation that has left logic behind long ago.

“Sit,” you say. “Eat. Don't touch anything you don't recognise, especially the toys.”

You look behind them. The doorway is empty. The amber path stretches back toward the corridor, quiet.

“Where's Clark?”

Bobby's jaw tightens. He doesn't look at the door. “We got separated. The dark section, with the pipes. Something moved in the walls, and he panicked and ran the wrong direction and I—” He stops. Swallows. The guilt on his face is immediate, reflexive. “I couldn't go after him. I had to keep—I had to keep moving forward."

Kat puts her hand on his arm. “He had the rope. He can follow it back.”

“The rope was tied to me.”

The silence fills the room. You look at the door. Clark is somewhere in the Backrooms, alone, without a map, without a guide, without the months of hard-won knowledge sitting in the notebook pressed to your chest. Clark is somewhere in the dark, and he’s still a man who hired you, who complimented your attention to detail, told you once in an offhand way that seemed to surprise even him that you would’ve made a fine architect, like him. 

“Mr Kitty,” you say, turning toward the entity. “Clark. He's on Level 2. Can you—”

I'm aware. I'll send guidance. The older male is frightened but unharmed. For now.

You cross to the window. The amber light outside is steady. The green hills are quiet. No red in sight. You press your palm flat against the glass and close your eyes, reaching the way BB taught you. Not with your hands but with the part of you that connects to the hum, the part that learned to feel Level 0's frequency like a second heartbeat—

Nothing.

“BB,” you call out. Into the glass and beyond it. “BB, please, answer me. BB?”

Nothing. The window is cold under your hand. He always answers you. Always. From any level, from any distance.

“Who's BB?”

Bobby. Behind you. Standing by the kitchen table, a scone untouched in his hand, watching you with an expression that has shifted from shock to something more complicated. Suspicious, calculating.

You turn back to face the window. “Not now.”

“You just called someone's name into a window. In a house inside a nightmare. I think now is pretty much exactly when.”

“Bobby—”

“Is it a person? Another… another one of those things, like the tall one? Are you with someone down here?” He sets the scone on the table. His frown deepens when you don’t correct him. “What—is he your new boyfriend or something? Does he have a face, at least?”

The laugh that comes out of you is ugly. Short, throaty, carrying a bitterness you didn't know you had room for on top of everything else. You turn from the window, glaring, ignoring the pang of relief, love, and warmth you feel at the sight of him despite it all.

“You don't get to ask me that.”

“I don't get to—I just found you. I've been looking for you for eighteen months. I sat in a basement and talked to a goddamn wall for seven months because I thought—because I hoped— nd you're down here with a name for someone and—”

“And what, Bobby? What were you doing while you were sitting in that basement? Because it looks like you were doing pretty well.” Your eyes cut to Kat, who’s standing by the counter with a scone in her hand and her face pinched still. “Looks like you bounced back just fine.”

The room goes quiet. 

Bobby stares at you. The hurt on his face is immediate, unguarded, a direct hit. The flinch he didn't have time to armour against, the naked impact of being told by the woman he's been grieving that his grief wasn't enough. His jaw tightens, eyes hardening.

“You think I bounced back?” Low. Dangerous. Bobby's edge, the blade under the casual, the sharp thing that used to make you go quiet, except right now it's not going to make you go quiet because you’ve spent months in the impossible learning how to not go quiet. “You think—do you have any idea what it was like? You disappeared. You just vanished. No note, no call, no body, nothing. The cops thought I killed you. They hauled me in, sat me down and looked at me like I was something he scraped off his shoe. I sat there, and I took it because what was I gonna say? She up and vanished? The neighbours heard us fighting. Terrence would barely talk to me unless it's about searching for you. People won’t look at me around town. My own mother—”

“Bobby, maybe this isn't the—” Kat starts.

“And the tapes.” Bobby's voice cracks, just slightly. A tiny fracture in the anger and grief. “The tapes went blank. All of them. Every single one. Years of footage and it just—you just—disappeared. From the tapes, from people's memories, from everything. Terrence couldn't remember what you looked like. My mom called you 'Bobby's friend.' Nobody remembered you. Nobody, except me. And I thought I was losing my fucking mind because I could remember and no one else could, and the tapes were blank and you were gone and I had nothing, nothing—”

“I'm sure your new girlfriend was very comforting,” you cut in coolly. “In your grief.”

The words come out serrated. Cruel. You hear them leave your mouth, and you can feel the wrongness of them, the unfairness. This woman is standing three feet away, and you don't know her. You’re aiming your pain at her like a weapon because she's standing next to Bobby and keeping his name in her mouth, and the alternative is aiming the anger at yourself.

Kat's face goes white. Then red. Her hand tightens around the scone, and she sets it down on the counter, carefully, the controlled gesture of a woman who’s choosing her next words carefully.

“I kept him alive,” Kat says. Quiet. Level. A statement of fact delivered with a steady gaze. “When everyone else gave up or thought he was a killer, I was there. Every night. I didn't leave.”

Your mouth compresses into a bloodless line. “How noble.”

“You left.”

“I didn't leave, I—”

“I know, I’m sorry that came out wrong.” Kat's voice doesn't rise. It drops, gets quieter. Gets closer to the bone. “I know something happened to you. Clearly. Since you’re here. I know you didn't choose this. But he didn't know that. He sat in a basement for seven months talking to an empty wall, and then Clark kicked him out, and he sat in a parking lot, screaming at me because he couldn't scream at you, and I stayed. I stayed when everyone else left. So don't stand there and act like I stole something from you. I picked up what you couldn't carry anymore because you weren’t there."

The room vibrates. Not with sound. With the tension of three people, holding pain that doesn't fit. Pain that belongs to eighteen months of separation and misunderstanding and choices made in the dark by people who were all, in their own ways, trying to survive.

Bobby is looking at you. His eyes are red, jaw set, his hands fisted at his sides.

“It took months,” he chokes out. “It took months after Clark kicked me out. Months before—before anything. I was a wreck, and she was kind to me. I pushed her away, and I pushed her away, and I pushed her away, and eventually I—” He swallows thickly. “I had nothing. You were gone. The tapes were gone. And I had to—I had to keep living, baby. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I kept living.”

“I'm sure it was very hard," you bite out coldly. “Having to move on after seven whole months.”

“Seven months of sitting on a concrete floor talking to you.” Bobby takes a step toward you. His voice rising now, the anger competing with the grief, both of them pushing through the cracks in his face. “Seven months of bringing you coffee, your order, every night, and pouring it down the drain at two in the morning because you weren't there to drink it. Seven months of sleeping on your side of the bed because it still smelled like you for the first three weeks, and then it didn't, and that was worse. Seven months of saying I love you to a wall, night after night after night, and the wall never answered. So yeah. Yeah, it was hard. Sorry, it wasn't long enough for you.”

“Then maybe you should have told me you loved me before I disappeared.”

The words come out cold. A scalpel drawn across the exact right vein, delivered with a fury so controlled it's almost calm, practically a snarl. Your jaw sits tight, and your eyes burn, voice carrying the compressed weight of every night you lay three feet from Bobby in the dark and wondered if you were still visible.

“Maybe if you'd said it once—” Your voice cracks. Splits. Your anger rises like bile, flooding your throat, and you can feel it. The rage, the one BB heard through the wall, the one you buried under self-doubt and swallowed until it poisoned you. It's here. Right here. Pressing against your teeth, trying to get out. “Maybe if you'd just—maybe—”

You stop.

Your jaw clamps shut, your hands fisted at your sides. You can feel the anger writhing in your chest, trying to claw its way up your throat, and you swallow it. Again. The way you've always swallowed it. Push it down. Fold it in. Turn it inward because the alternative is letting it out, and if you let it out, you don't know what might happen, you don't know what it might burn down, you don't know—

In the corner of the room, Mr Kitty tips his head.

A slow, measured tilt. His blank face angling toward you with a quality of attention that's different from his usual patient stillness. Then the moment passes, and Mr Kitty's head straightens again. 

Bobby is staring at you. The anger on his face has fractured. What's underneath it is worse. Hurt, raw and exposed. Kat stands at the counter behind him with her arms crossed and her face closed. The hurt she's refusing to show bleeds through anyway, visible in the set of her mouth and the brightness of her dark eyes.

You're about to speak. The words are loaded, chambered, aimed—the doorway, the grunt, the don't wait up, the months of feeling like furniture in your shared apartment and now learning it took him seven whole months of dramatic wall-performances before he found a fucking replacement—

And then you hear what he said.

You hear it. Underneath the anger, underneath the accusations. The specific, factual content buried in the grief.

Seven months of sitting on a concrete floor talking to you.

The basement. Clark's basement. The storage level, the concrete floor, and the wall that breathes. 

Bobby sat in the basement and talked to the wall you fell through. For seven months. Talked to you, through the wall, the same wall that separates the real world from the Backrooms, the same wall that BB sat on the other side of and listened through. BB heard you through the wall. That's what he told you himself. I heard you. From the other side.

If BB heard you through the wall, then BB heard Bobby, too. Bobby's voice, Bobby's grief, Bobby's confessions and apologies poured into concrete for seven months. BB heard a man sitting on the other side of the wall begging you to come back, searching for you, refusing to give up.

BB heard all of it.

BB knew Bobby was looking for you. Knew Bobby loved you. Bobby was sitting three inches of concrete away from the woman BB was holding in the dark, and BB said nothing. BB held you while you cried about Bobby's indifference, and he said it was never you, it was his malfunction, and he knew (he knew) that Bobby was on the other side of that wall. 

He chose, deliberately, consciously, with the full weight of whatever passes for his moral compass, to keep that from you.

BB let you believe Bobby didn't care.

BB let you grieve a living man.

And the worst part—the part that makes your vision narrow and your hands shake and something hot and corrosive flood the back of your throat—is that it worked. It worked. 

You grieved Bobby. You swallowed the anger, folded the hurt inward, and accepted BB's version of the story. He got scared and retreated; that's his malfunction, not yours. 

You let it hollow you out, let it carve the space that BB then filled, and the filling felt like love. The forehead kisses. The promise. The apartment he built for you, the bookshelves by colour, the way he learned to dance and to kiss and to hold you through nightmares. All of it—every tenderness, every moment you thought this is what it feels like to be seen, to be loved—was planted in soil he'd poisoned. 

He didn't just withhold information. He cultivated your grief. He let the hurt grow until it choked out everything else, until Bobby was a wound instead of a person, until you stopped hoping for the door back because what was the point of a door that opened onto a man who didn't love you?

Except Bobby loved you. Bobby loved you the whole time. He loved you so much he sat on a concrete floor for seven months saying it to a wall that wouldn't answer and BB was on the other side of that wall listening and he heard every word and he held your face and said how odd and kissed your forehead and never once, not once, said he's looking for you, he's right there, he hasn't stopped.

The realisation doesn't land like a blow. It lands like a floor giving way. Every tender moment. Every I heard you and nobody else did. Every forehead kiss, every promise, every night in the nest with his cool hand on your back and his hum in your bones. 

All of it built on an omission so vast it restructures everything it touches.

You want to scream. Want to put your fist through the window of this safe house and scream BB's name into the amber light and demand—demand—that he explain himself, that he look at you with those borrowed eyes and tell you why. 

Why did he let you believe you were forgotten? Why did he let you ache for a man who was aching back, three inches of concrete and a universe apart, both of you reaching for each other in the dark while the thing between you held you close and said I've got you, baby, nothing touches you.

Nothing touches you. Because BB made sure nothing reached you. Not even the truth.

Part of you—small, stubborn, lodged behind your ribs like a splinter—whispers that he did it because he loves you. 

That the omission wasn't deliberate cruelty but desperation. That BB heard Bobby through the wall and understood, with the clarity of a thing that’s never been loved or chosen, that the truth would take you away from him. That the choice was between honesty and losing the only person who ever said his name kindly. And the whisper sounds like BB’s voice, and it sounds like the hum. It makes your eyes burn because you understand desperation and loneliness, you understand choosing wrong because the right choice is unbearable—isn't that exactly what Bobby did? What you did by choosing to stay? 

Isn't that the whole stupid, devastating circle? Bobby loved you and showed it by looking away. BB loved you and showed it by keeping you blind.

The whisper doesn't survive the inferno in your chest.

He knew. He knew. And he kept you anyway.

Your mouth opens. The questions forming on your tongue, taking shape, gaining mass—

A crack splits the room. Structural, not sonic. The walls of the house shudder. The windows fracture, the glass spiderwebbing from the centre to the frame in a pattern that resembles stress lines. Kat screams, a sharp, yelping sound. Mr Kitty straightens to his full height, his dark shape pressing against the ceiling, his blank face oriented toward the source of the disturbance with a sudden, absolute alertness.

Bobby is wrenched forward.

One second, he's standing by the kitchen table. The next he's airborne, yanked off his feet by a force that crosses the room faster than sight, faster than the sound that follows it. A percussive boom that blows the scones off the counter and knocks Kat sideways. 

Bobby slams into the far wall, and the wall cracks behind him. He's pinned there, three feet off the ground, his feet dangling, his hands clawing at the thing around his throat.

BB's hand.

BB is in the room. Not entered, arrived, the air displacing around his sudden presence with a pressure change you feel in your sinuses. 

He's holding Bobby against the wall by the throat, one-handed, arm extended, and the face he's wearing is Bobby's face, but it's not—it's wrong, more animal than human, the features sharpened past recognition, the jaw too wide, the teeth visible behind lips that have pulled back in a snarl that doesn't belong on any human mouth. His eyes are black. Fully black. The fissures from the fight are still visible, tiny cracks radiating from his jaw and cheekbones, leaking that colourless light, the mask of Bobby held together by fury and will and nothing else.

One arm hangs at an angle that isn't right. Dark, viscous blood streaks his chest, his neck, his hair. The crop top is torn. The chain is broken, hanging from one side of his throat. He looks like he walked through a war to get here, and the war isn't over; it's just been put on pause long enough for him to cross the Backrooms and find the one thing in his territory that doesn't belong.

Bobby chokes. His feet kick. His hands grab BB's wrist, but BB doesn't move, doesn't register the resistance, a marble statue with a throat in its hand.

BB leans in. Close. His face inches from Bobby's, the original and the copy, face to face at last, the man and the thing that chose his face. Bobby's eyes are wide, bulging, filled with a terror that’s different from any terror he’s ever felt because he’s looking into his own features and finding nothing human behind them.

BB bares his bloodied teeth, snarling low in his chest. 

“How dare you be here?”

an: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[chortlebot]

before someone screenshots this and posts it elsewhere this is me

[clawcakes]

PREV TRUTH NUKE

[moonstruckme]

𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚎𝚟𝚊𝚛𝚍 𝚒𝚜 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚋𝚊𝚍

a/n: Please do not misconstrue my participation in the marauders fandom as support of JKR. If you’re new here and want to participate in the fandom, I encourage you to do so without participating in anything that would provide financial gain to her or her transphobic agendas

part 15 | masterlist

rockstar!marauders x journalist!reader ♡ 1.8k words

Remus spends the day with you. He's tired (and, you suspect, in at least some pain, though he doesn't say) after staying out so late the night before, and there's too much walking to be done at Cadbury World. James talks about abandoning the whole idea, but Remus and Sirius won't hear of it. After breakfast, Sirius shepherds Remus into your room with strict instructions for Remus to look after your ankle and you to look after him.

You pass hours lying about and coming up with idle things to amuse yourselves. Remus teaches you a few chords on his bass. You point out noteworthy characters passing by on the sidewalk below your window. You nap. Around lunchtime, Lily comes by with sandwiches and joins you for an intense round of seeing who can complete a sudoku puzzle the fastest.

You don't talk about what you said to each other the night before, though it lingers with you. The idea that, for all your suspicion of being sweet-talked by the band, every attempt you make to get friendlier with them ultimately advances your purpose of getting them to open up so you can write an entertaining story, regardless of your intent in the moment. How when you told Sirius that your job was at stake and he told you that his friend was, you hesitated a moment at which was more sacred.

Remus asked so simply. Are you only being nice to us so that we'll give you quotes for your feature?

Like he already knew your answer. Like he had faith in you, and was only asking you to have it in him. You wish you could feel as sure as he seems.

The sun is still out, and so you're surprised when James and Sirius come into your room, James in a branded jumper and bearing chocolate bars for each of you.

"How was it?" you ask.

"Brilliant!" says James, at the same time as Sirius groans, "Awful."

"It was like being in Willy Wonka." James props his chin on a fist as both boys flop down on the bed by yours and Remus' feet.

Sirius shudders. "Creepy film. Why does chocolate require so many mascots? Between the show last night and walking around all of today, my legs are pulverized."

"Is that why you're back early?" asks Remus.

"Partly." James smiles, reaching up to ruffle Remus' hair. "We also missed you. Massage?" he offers Sirius.

Sirius looks momentarily like he could cry for gratitude, but he neatens his expression into one of cool imperiousness soon enough. "Seems like the least you could do."

James scoots closer gamely. He pushes his thumbs into Sirius' calves, and Sirius sighs, dropping his head to his folded arms.

You try not to stare, but even just the awareness of it, James' strong hands kneading confidently at the flesh, is enough to make heat rush from your face down to your chest. It only gets worse as James makes his way up the backs of Sirius' legs.

You search for something to distract yourself. You've been trying to find a hook that could function as a through-line for your feature; maybe this could be it. The Marauders as not only one of the most popular bands in Britain, but the most closely-knit group of boys you've ever witnessed. Supportive, as devoted to each other as they are to their music, and unafraid of showing it.

"So." Sirius turns his head to peer at you, cheek resting on his forearm. You tuck the idea away for later. "Do you think you'll ever walk again?"

You smile, praying it's not obvious how they've flustered you. "That's the hope. You?"

"Likely not." He heaves a great sigh. "My career is finished. Struck down in my prime."

"We'll be alright without you," James says lightly. Sirius kicks one of his feet, and James retaliates by pressing knuckles into his thigh. Sirius stills with a hiss.

"What about you?" he asks, poking Remus' foot. "How are you feeling? Think you'll ever be able to get up onstage again?"

Remus, already a few bites into his chocolate bar, gives Sirius a dry look. "Oh, because that's all I matter to you, is that it?"

"Obviously. If I'm out of the band, James will need you. Otherwise, the whole show will just be him throwing drumsticks off into the crowd. No one will come to see it."

"They'd still come," James defends himself.

A thought strikes you. You take your tape recorder from the nightstand, setting it to record and putting it where the boys can see it. Remus eyes it, but no one objects.

"Uh oh," James jokes. "She's gearing up."

"I was just wondering," you say, "what do you think you'd be doing if you weren't in the band?"

As always when your tape recorder comes out, Sirius takes the lead. He sits up on his elbows, his grin sharpening as if by instrinct or habit.

"Well, if my family had their way I'd have ended up in banking," he says, "but I think I could've been an actor. This face was just made for the public eye, don't you think?"

"So you think you'd have still ended up in entertainment?"

"Don't I entertain you, gorgeous?" Sirius winks.

"If there weren't films or microphones," teases James, "he'd have found a circus to ringlead."

It's funny, because even sitting here with Sirius now—in normal clothes, bare of the dark slashes of eyeliner he wears onstage, with the sun shining on him and warming the impenetrable black of his hair to dark brown—you can't picture him doing anything else. He's right; whether by nature or by practice, Sirius has mastered stardom. He doesn't have to wait for a spotlight to find him. He emits his own.

"Remus," James goes on, "wanted to be a teacher, though."

You turn to the bassist, feeling your brows lift. "Did you really?"

Remus appears almost shy. "I did, yeah."

"He was always very swotty." Sirius grins, fond around the eyes. "He used to finish his homework and then stick around to help us with ours. Lily, too."

Remus rolls his eyes. "You never needed much help."

"No," James agrees. "It was really more the three of them helping me. I'm useless at maths."

"What did you want to do?" you ask him.

James shrugs. "I don't know. When I was little I wanted to be a firefighter. I thought about being a veterinarian for a while, but then I heard there's some maths involved in that sometimes too…" Sirius reaches back to pat him consolingly. "Maybe a footballer? I guess it's a good thing I'm already doing this, or else I might not be able to decide."

You hum, nodding. "I could see that for you."

"That I would never have decided?"

"Yeah."

James pauses Sirius' massage, his eyes squinting behind his glasses. "That feels like it might be an insult."

You copy Sirius and reach over to give him a consoling pat. "You'll live."

"She means you could've done anything you wanted to," Remus translates helpfully. "You're good at lots of things, Jamie."

"You could've been a masseuse, too," adds Sirius, who appears to have nearly liquefied into the mattress.

"Oh." James puffs up. "Well, thanks. What would you have done?" he asks you.

You blink. "Other than journalism?"

"Yeah."

The answer, honestly, is nothing. You're not like James. You didn't have a myriad of other ideas and viable options. This is the whole plan for you. The only plan.

You're saved from answering when the room's phone rings.

You all startle. You hesitate a moment before remembering that this is your room, and you reach over to the nightstand to answer it.

"Hello?"

"L/n?" Your posture straightens unconsciously at the sound of your editor's voice.

"Yes, hi," you say quickly, then cringe at your lack of professionalism. Sometimes it feels like you get greener by the day. "How can I help you?"

He begins speaking in his usual brusque, clipped way. It still intimidates you, even if you're slowly getting used to it. The boys must catch onto the nature of the call; Sirius sits up, looking unsure, and James whispers to you that they can leave. You wave them off, frowning as you listen to the voice on the other line.

"Yes," you say. "Yeah, I can do that."

You hold the phone to your ear with your shoulder and reach for your pen and notepad.

"Where is it? Okay, thanks….and pre or post-show? Got it. No, that's perfect. I, um…" You hesitate, a bit embarassed to be having this conversation in front of others. "Thank you for the opportunity. I'll—"

You cut yourself off when your editor begins speaking again.

"I understand. It will be, thank you. Alright, goodb—"

You're cut off again by the click of the receiver.

Sirius' brow wrinkles. "That guy wasn't letting you get much out, was he?"

"What's going on?" James asks.

You take a breath. "They want me to interview another band."

His eyes widen. "You're done with us?"

"No. It's…Reckoning is having a show here tonight. They've scheduled me for a pre-show interview because I'm nearby."

"They're asking you to cheat on us?" Sirius gasps in mock outrage.

"You all cheated on me first," you remind him, "when you got interviewed by another reporter."

You don't recall what else came out of that day until the levity has already sapped from Sirius' expression, leaving a dark pinch in its place.

"We should go with you," he says.

"Don't be stupid." You shake your head, looking away. "I do this stuff all the time."

Sirius seems as if he might argue with you, but Remus speaks before he can. "It's good that they're asking you to do more work for them, isn't it?"

"Yeah," you hedge. "Just…my editor sort of implied it's because the feature is taking me too long. I think they're starting to get antsy."

Remus eyes you worriedly.

You try to sound assured. "But it'll be fine. Since I'm here, I can write this other article in the meantime to keep them happy."

Sirius sighs, rolling over and casting his head back dramatically. "So long as we're still your favorites."

"I don't think I'm supposed to pick favorites," you tell him, a smile creeping onto your face.

"What we're supposed to do and what we do are two different things, doll. Anyway, I think you already said we're your favorite band." He casts a look at Remus. "Didn't she?"

"I remember that," Remus agrees.

"Think you called us amazing once too," muses James. He bumps your good ankle with his elbow playfully. "Don't forget that when you're writing your feature, alright?"

"You're the feature," you remind them. "This is just an article."

Remus hums, and you bark out a laugh when he says in an impression of Sirius' imperiousness, "Too right."

[chimckenns]

After a long day, when Honey doesn’t want to talk to anyone else, they go and find Guy.

It might seem counterproductive since he’s the most talkative guy they know. But his mere presence is enough to soothe the exhaustion set in on their body and soul.

Guy’s also more observant than many let on. He saw them walk in through the door and immediately let out a “oh…Honey.”, running with quiet footsteps to hold them. Honey sank into his arms and he held them up enough to move them both to the couch where they crawled onto his lap.

He rubbed their back and kissed their cheek, giving them time to settle and fully relax.

“Long day?”

Honey nodded against his shoulder.

“You did good, Honey. Let me take care of you now.”

He shifted them both so they laid on the couch, their head on his chest and his arms around them.

“Can you talk?” Honey liked the sound of his voice and the feeling of it rumbling in his chest.

Guy smiled. There’s nothing more he’d love to do than to talk to his Honey.

“Okay. I’ll keep it quiet.”

[hikari-ni-naritai]

In Japanese, they don’t say “moon,” they say “tsuki,” which literally translates to “moon,” and I think that’s how language works.

[rainbowgod666]

Hey its been at least 9 years anything changed?

[hikari-ni-naritai]

nope! all quiet on the linguistic front. i am a girl now though

[kirikomamura]

staff killed her for this

[angmallen]

WHAT she got nuked??

[resetium]

Trans people existing violates community guidelines

[resetium]

I wasn’t kidding

[heyitslucky]