What if there is a Better Reader in the Backrooms and once Real Reader sees her, she gets jealous and protective over Better Bobby??
ok, ok, ok, but imagine.
you've been in the backrooms with Better Bobby for... who knows how long.
time is... a carpet, buzzing light and his almost-right smile. and you shouldn't be here. you know you shouldn't be here. but bobby (real bobby, your bobby, the bobby who asked you to be his girlfriend junior year and made you feel like the only person in the room before he started making you feel like the only person in a room he'd rather not be in) real bobby stopped trying.
real bobby got comfortable. real bobby started looking through you like you were furniture, answering "yeah that's cool" without looking up, forgetting plans you made, treating your presence like background noise he'd already tuned out. and you were so lonely. you were so lonely in a relationship that technically still existed, wearing your boyfriend's letterman jacket like a costume for a role he'd stopped rehearsing, and then you heard a voice in a wall.
or maybe it was always there. that door. maybe Better Bobby just finally opened it for you.
because that's how it happened, wasn't it? no one forced you. there was just a door that shouldn't have been there and a voice on the other side that sounded like bobby (like bobby on a GOOD day, like bobby when he still looked at you like you mattered) saying "hey, come here, i want to show you something" and you followed it because you were starving.
you were emotionally starving and something that sounded like the boy you loved was offering you a meal and you walked right in.
and Better Bobby has he's been everything. he's been real bobby with the volume turned up on all the parts that made you fall in love and all the parts that faded turned back on.
he remembers things you say. he asks follow-up questions. he angles himself between you and every dark hallway and when you talk he LOOKS at you with bobby's blue eyes and actually, fully, completely pays attention. he finds you blankets. he stays awake while you sleep. he hums bobby's little tuneless songs and when you wake up from nightmares about the smiling thing in the dark and flickering lights he says "i'm here, i'm right here" and means it in a way that real bobby hasn't meant anything in months.
and you've been indulging. you know you have. you've been leaning into it the way you lean into a hot bath: knowing it's temporary, knowing the water's going to cool, but right now it's warm and you're so cold and nobody has made you feel warm in so, so long.
you let him walk close. you let him hum. let yourself pretend, in the amber wash of light, that the eyes are the right shade of blue and the hands are the right temperature and the thing sitting next to you in the hallway that smells like mildew is just a boy who loves you and not a question you can't answer.
but you maintain it in the beginning. the mild suspicion. the distance. the tension when his head tilts at that angle that necks don't do. the way you catch yourself leaning in and pull back and watch something flicker across his face (hurt? performance of hurt? does it matter when it looks the same?) you keep one hand on the wall at all times. metaphorically. ready to run. because you know what he is even if you don't know WHAT he is. because what if the warmth is borrowed and the attention is replicated?
and somewhere above this fluorescent nightmare your actual boyfriend is probably not even wondering where you went.
and then, one day, you turn a corner on level 0 and there she is.
and she looks like you.
but better. the way Better Bobby is bobby but more.
she's you with the contrast turned up. you, but rested. you, but without the dark circles and the bitten nails and the desperate grateful look you get when Better Bobby does something thoughtful. that pathetic oh-god-someone-noticed-me expression that you hate on your own face.
she's you the way you look in the mirror when the lighting is perfect and you're having the best day of your life, which, for the record, you're NOT having. because you're standing on wet carpet under buzzing lights looking at a thing that crawled out of the walls wearing your face like a sunday dress.
and she looks at Better Bobby.
and she SMILES.
not your smile. yours is still a little tight, still cautious and always halfway to flinching because the last person you loved taught you that attention is temporary and warmth gets revoked without warning.
hers is wide and warm and full and it reaches her eyes (your eyes, YOUR eyes but without the hurt behind them) and she tilts her head and says "hi, bobby" in your voice but lighter. your voice without the weight of being someone's afterthought for the better part of a year.
and here's where your brain should be going: that's an entity. that's a threat. we need to leave.
here's where your brain ACTUALLY goes: why is she looking at him like that?
because she IS. she's looking at Better Bobby with an openness you have never once allowed yourself. she's looking at him without the flinch. without the constant background calculation of is this real or is he going to get bored of me too. she's looking at him like she's never been neglected. like she's never sat on a bed waiting for someone to look up from a screen and notice she'd been waiting. like she doesn't carry the specific, learned knowledge that love has a half-life and attention decays and eventually everyone stops seeing you.
Better You doesn't doubt him.
Better You isn't waiting for him to lose interest.
Better You is what you would be if real bobby hadn't taught you that being loved is a temporary condition.
and the thing that absolutely dismantles you, the thing that sends you into a jealousy spiral so irrational it should be clinically studied, is watching Better Bobby's reaction.
because he looks at her. he looks at this perfected version of you, this you-without-the-damage, this you who would never flinch when he reaches for her, who would never pull back at the last second, would never look at his kindness with suspicion because the last boy with that face stopped being kind. she doesn't know that, she's never been un-loved, she's BETTER—
and his head tilts. the not-quite-human angle. the one that means he's processing something new.
and you can see him considering it.
and what hits you isn't just jealousy. it's recognition. it's the pattern completing. because you've been here before, haven't you?
not in the backrooms. in your own bedroom. watching real bobby's attention slide away from you toward his camera, his friends, anything, everything. the whole world more interesting than the girl sitting right there.
you've been the person someone grows bored of. been the version that isn't enough. and now here, in the one place where something was finally paying attention to you, finally choosing you, finally making you feel like you were worth staying awake for... here comes the upgrade. here comes the 2.0. a you without the flinch or the doubt or the desperate, needy wounded thing living behind your ribs and of COURSE he's going to choose her. of course. because that's how this works. that's how this ALWAYS works.
you're hard to love and here is the proof, smiling with your mouth.
and what comes out of your mouth is not "bobby, that's an entity, we need to go." what comes out of your mouth, before your brain can catch it, in a voice that is embarrassingly, revealingly sharp, is:
"bobby."
one word. aimed at him. not at her. because you're not afraid of what Better You will do. you're afraid that the one thing in the universe that chose to love you is about to unchoose. just like the original did. you're afraid you're about to watch it happen again, in real time, wearing the same face both times.
Better Bobby looks at you.
glances at her.
looks at you.
and something shifts.
it's small. you'd miss it if you weren't watching him with the intensity of someone whose entire emotional survival depends on what happens in the next ten seconds. his expression (bobby's expression, that open curious, considering look) doesn't change. but something behind it does. like a building settling. a decision being made in a room you can't quite see.
he takes your hand.
his fingers are the wrong temperature. they're always the wrong temperature. too cool in a place that's always too warm, like touching something that exists at a slight remove from the physics of the room. you know this hand. you've memorised this hand without meaning to. the shape of bobby's fingers rebuilt in whatever Better Bobby is made of, and when they close around yours you feel the strength in them held in check. gentle. chosen.
he turns around.
Better You is still standing there. still smiling. still wearing your face without any of the cracks in it. and Better Bobby looks at her (at it) and something happens to his eyes.
the blue goes out.
not like a light switching off. a light being swallowed. bobby's blue, that specific clear blue you fell in love with in a hallway between second and third period, drains out of his irises and what's behind it is black. not dark brown. not deep blue. pure black.
the kind of black that doesn't reflect light because it's older than light. the kind of black that was here before the backrooms were here, a black that's been watching from inside bobby's blue eyes this entire time, patient and ancient. so fundamentally other that your hand tightens in his involuntarily because your body understands something your brain is still processing: you are holding hands with something that existed before the concept of hands.
and he says, in bobby's voice but emptied of everything warm:
"don't follow. or i'll rip you apart."
flat. cold. the way you'd state a law of physics. a description. a factual account of what will happen, delivered with the same casual certainty as "water is wet" or "sky is blue." his voice doesn't do the bobby crack. there is nothing human in it at all. this is the thing under the bobby. the thing that BUILT the bobby, speaking from behind the mask without bothering to move the mouth right. it's older and colder and more vast than anything that's ever said your name softly in the dark while you were trying to sleep.
Better You stops smiling.
the black blinks out. the blue comes back. bobby's blue. warm, familiar, slightly wrong in the way you've gotten used to. the wrongness you've started to find almost-comforting because at least it's consistent. at least it's YOUR wrongness, the wrongness you know. chose.
he looks at you. bobby's face. bobby's almost-smile. the one that crinkles the corners of his eyes and makes you forget, for a moment, about the black.
"coming, baby?" he says, like nothing happened. like he didn't just flash the void behind his face. like his hand in yours isn't a claim, a territory marker, a line drawn in wet carpet.
and you realise three things simultaneously:
one. he chose you. not better you. not the version without the damage. you. the flinching, doubting, suspicious, wounded, difficult, real you. whatever his reasons are (love, obsession, malfunction, possession, something without a human name) he chose the hard one.
two. he will kill for it. the thing in the hallway wearing your face is an entity that could probably survive most of what the backrooms throw at it. he looked at it with ancient black nothing-eyes and said i will unmake you and meant it.
three. you don't know if being chosen by something like that is salvation or the most beautiful trap ever built.
and you hold his hand (wrong temperature, wrong pressure, wrong wrong wrong) and you keep walking.
lowkey need to see how real!bobby handles his girl's disappearance 🚬..delicious
pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby
contents/warnings: bobby's pov, emotional neglect in a relationship, heavy grief and loss, angsty in general, emotional volatility/verbal cruelty, alcohol abuse (clark), existential/cosmic horror (erasure from reality), self-loathing and guilt (told you he'll be going through it!)
notes: we're giving this twink a character as promised! got carried away but surprisingly?? really like how it came out?? hope y'all enjoy, and excited to see if the tide changes on the Real Bobby hate lol.
📹better bobby series masterlist.
Real Bobby notices on a Tuesday.
Not right away. That’s the single most damning thing. The part that’ll eat at him later, that’ll sit in his chest like a hot coal for months, perhaps the rest of his goddamn life if he’s being honest.
He doesn't notice right away.
The first night, he figures you're pulling a double at the store. It's happened before. He eats cereal standing over the sink, leaves his bowl on the counter, sleeps diagonally. Doesn't think about it.
The second night, he's annoyed. You could've called. He almost picks up the apartment phone but gets distracted by something on TV, and the receiver stays in the cradle, your number undialed, and he falls asleep with the light on.
The third morning, he reaches for you.
It's not conscious, really. It's that old reflex in him. The one from the early days. Something he thought he trained out of himself because tenderness was starting to feel like a liability, so he resorted to laziness instead. His hand slid across the mattress toward the warm dip where you normally sleep. But his fingers find only cold sheets. Flat, undisturbed. No impression of a body. And something in Bobby’s chest pinches, just slightly, like a hand closing around a tender nerve.
He sits up. Looks at your side of the bed. The pillow still has the shape of your head from three nights ago. Nothing's been moved.
He checks the answering machine. The red light is steady. No messages. The last thing you said to him—actually said, out loud, in person—was I'm closing tonight, don't wait up. He'd grunted. Hadn't looked up from the TV. He remembers that now.
You stood in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your jacket half-on, and you looked at him. He realises now that you looked at him, really looked, like you were waiting for something, and he grunted.
He calls the store. Clark picks up, says you didn't show for your shift last night. Or the night before. Didn't call in either. Clark sounds worried, but not in a panicked way. Just the clipped, pragmatic worry of a man already calculating how to cover the hours.
Bobby tries to sound like he already knew, like he's been handling it. He's the kind of boyfriend who would obviously know that his girlfriend's been missing for three days.
He hangs up, stands in the kitchen and looks at the apartment.
Your coffee mug is still on the drying rack. Your jacket's on the hook by the door. Your shoes—the white ones, the ones you wear everywhere, the ones he's made fun of a hundred times—are sitting by the mat. You didn't leave, didn't pack anything. You didn't take your shoes or anything at all.
Bobby files a missing persons report that afternoon.
The cops tell him to come in the following morning.
The detective's name is Moreno. He's got a desk in the back of the precinct, a cup of coffee that's been sitting there long enough to develop a skin, and an expression that Bobby doesn't like. There’s no hostility. It’s the other thing, the worse one. Interest.
“So,” Moreno begins, flipping open a notebook. “Three days.”
“Yeah.”
“And you noticed this morning?”
Bobby's jaw tightens. “I thought she was working doubles.”
Moreno lifts his eyes briefly. “For three days.”
“It's happened before,” Bobby says a little defensively.
“Has it?” Moreno writes something down. Slow, purposeful, the pen moving like he wants Bobby to watch it, to feel the weight of each letter being recorded. “Walk me through the timeline, Bobby. When's the last time you actually saw her?”
Bobby tells him. The doorway. The jacket. The don't wait up. The grunt.
Moreno nods. Writes. “And after that? What'd you do that night?”
“Watched TV. Went to bed.”
“Alone?”
Bobby stares at him. Jesus Christ. “Yeah. Alone.”
“Okay.” Moreno takes a sip of his dead coffee. Sets it down. “We talked to your neighbours, Bobby. Just routine. The couple in 4B, the Nguyens, mentioned hearing arguments. Through the walls. More than once, over the past few months.” He looks up from the notebook. “You want to tell me about that?”
Bobby's chest goes tight. “Couples argue.”
“Sure they do. What were you arguing about?”
“I don't—stuff. Normal stuff. Dishes. Schedules.”
“They said it sounded pretty heated sometimes,” Moreno remarks. “Mrs Nguyen used the word volatile.”
Bobby feels something cold move through his stomach. “I never touched her. If that's what you're—”
“Nobody said that,” Moreno's voice is easy, perfectly calm. The practised calm of a man who's done this before. “But I've got a missing woman who was last seen by her boyfriend, who didn't notice she was gone for three days, whose neighbours describe an argumentative relationship. You can see why I need to be thorough.”
Bobby can see alright. Bobby can see exactly what this looks like from the outside, and the cold thing in his stomach turns to ice because it looks bad. It looks like exactly what it isn't, and there's no way to explain the difference between I was a shitty, negligent boyfriend who took her for granted and I hurt her without sounding like he's making excuses for both or covering his ass.
“We'd like to take a look at your camera equipment,” Moreno says. “Your footage. You're a camera guy, right? Clark at the store mentioned you're always filming.”
Bobby nods. Numbly.
They take the camera. They take the tapes, too.
Bobby sits on the couch in the apartment and stares at the empty shelf where the equipment used to be, and feels naked in a way that has nothing to do with clothes. The camera was the last layer between himself and the world. They've taken it, and now there's just Bobby, sitting in an apartment full of evidence of his own failures, waiting for strangers to watch his footage and decide what kind of man he is.
They call him back in four days later. Moreno's got a different look on his face now. Still interested, but muddied, thoughtful. Like he's found something he wasn't expecting.
“We reviewed the tapes, Bobby,” Moreno says.
Bobby waits.
“There's a lot of footage of her,” Moreno says carefully. Neutral. Watching Bobby's face the way you'd watch a surface for ripples. “A lot. Some of it she doesn't seem to know about. You filming her while she's sleeping. While she's cooking. While she's reading.”
“The light was good,” Bobby says automatically, the old excuse, and it sounds hollow even to him.
Moreno lets the silence sit. Then, “Bobby. I've got a missing woman. Her boyfriend has hours of footage of her, some of it taken without her apparent knowledge. Her neighbours describe fights. The boyfriend didn't notice she was gone for seventy-two hours.” He leans forward, knotting his fingers on the table. “You see the picture I'm looking at, right? It doesn’t look good. If you want to tell me anything, I can help you—”
“That's not—I never hurt her. I was—”
“What were you?”
And Bobby opens his mouth to snap back with something defensive, sharp. Bobby, who uses his tongue like a blade when he feels cornered, rears up to go, and what comes out instead is:
“I love her.”
Not loved. There’s no past tense here. This isn’t careful distancing of a man constructing an alibi. Present tense, raw, graceless, blurted out like a cough. Like something expelled from deep in his lungs against his will. His voice breaks on her, and Bobby’s eyes burn.
Moreno is staring at him, and Bobby is sitting in a police precinct with his chain tangled and his crop top wrinkled, his earring catching the overhead fluorescent light. And he looks, in that moment, exactly like what he is: a twenty-something-year-old asshole who didn't know what he had until the world seemingly swallowed it whole.
“I love her,” he repeats, quieter now. Like now that the word is out, he can't stop saying it, like the dam has cracked and the only thing behind it was this. “I love her, and I was—I wasn't good to her, I know that, okay? I know what it looks like, but I didn't—I would never—”
Moreno watches him for a long time. The precinct hums in the background. Phones, footsteps, murmur of voices.
They let him go. No evidence. No body. They're able to confirm his alibi, and ten again.
There’s no proof of anything except the fact that Robert Franklin is a man who films the woman he loves while she sleeps because he can't bring himself to tell her she's beautiful while she's awake.
He goes to the store that night.
Not because he thinks he'll find anything. The cops already searched it. Half-heartedly, briefly, the way you search a place when you've already decided the boyfriend did it, and the crime scene is somewhere else.
They walked through the showroom and poked around the loading dock. Went down to the storage level, shone flashlights between the flatpack bookshelves and the plastic-wrapped headboards, and found nothing. Because there's nothing to find.
Bobby just knows that this is the last place you were.
That your hands touched the furniture down here. The inventory sheets, the shelving units, the boxes of cabinet hardware and drawer pulls you organised on the night shifts he couldn't be bothered to stay for. Your fingerprints are on everything. The ghost of your routine is embedded in the layout of this room. The way the boxes are stacked, the system you developed for sorting shipments by vendor, and the little handwritten labels in your writing on the bins.
Bobby stands in the middle of it, and he can feel you. He can feel you the way you feel someone in a room they just left—the displaced air, the warmth fading from a surface, the sense that if he turned around fast enough, he'd catch the edge of you disappearing around a corner.
He sits down on the concrete floor. Puts his back against the wall. The far one, behind the shelving unit full of cabinet hardware, the one that feels different from the others in a way he can't articulate. Cooler. Thinner somehow.
He doesn't plan to talk. But at one point, the silence gets too much, and it just… comes out.
“Hey, baby. It's Bobby.”
His voice sounds strange in the empty room. Too loud, too small. Bouncing off the concrete and the flatpacks and coming back to him slightly changed, echoed.
“I don't know if you can hear me. I don't—this is stupid. This is really fucking stupid. Obviously, you can’t hear me because you’re not here. But I just—” He stops. Presses the back of his head against the wall. Stares at the ceiling. “The cops think I did something to you. They looked at me like—” He swallows. “I don't care about that. I don't care what they think. I just need you to know I'm looking. Okay? I'm looking, baby. I'm not gonna stop.”
The draft brushes against his palm. Cool. Steady. Like a pulse.
He comes back the next night. And the next. And the next.
It becomes the only thing that makes sense. The apartment is a museum of his failures. Every unwashed dish, every unanswered question, every space where your things are slowly being buried under his carelessness.
But the store is different. The store is where you were. The last place your body occupied space. Sitting in it feels like sitting in the shallow end of your absence rather than drowning in the deep. He can think down here. He can talk. He can say the things he should've said when you were standing in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your heart in your eyes, and he was looking at the TV.
Hey baby. It's me. Found one of your socks behind the dryer today. The fuzzy ones. I put it on the dresser. Just in case.
I keep thinking about Thanksgiving. When you burned the rolls, and I said, "guess we're going to my mom's next year", and you laughed, but you weren't really laughing. You were hurt. I knew, and I didn't fix it.
I'm sorry about the rolls. They were good. They were a little burnt, but they were good. You made them, and I should've eaten every single one.
Bobby pauses. Picks at the concrete with his thumbnail. The storage level smells like particleboard and cardboard. Somewhere deep in the room, he can feel that draft again. That impossible nowhere-breeze he still hasn’t found a source of.
I was thinking about that morning. In the kitchen. You were making breakfast, and you turned around with a spatula and asked if I wanted toast, and the light was behind you, and I—I felt this thing. This huge thing. Like my chest was going to crack open. And I said, "sure." I said SURE. You were standing there in my kitchen looking like that, and I felt the biggest thing I've ever felt, and I said sure and loaded film into my camera like it was nothing.
It wasn't nothing. It was everything. I just didn't know how to—I couldn't—
Bobby stops. Presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.
I was so scared you'd see how much I needed you and you'd leave. So I made you leave by not letting you see. That's the dumbest shits anyone's ever done. Baby. I'm so stupid.
He comes back every night. Even when there are no words. Even when he just sits with his hand on the wall and his eyes closed, breathing in the sawdust and the nothing-draft, feeling the concrete thrum against his palm like a second heartbeat.
No leads. No calls. No breaks in the case because there's no sightings, no signs of a break in, nothing. Eyes follow him around town, full of questions and suspicion. There's those who genuinely believe he did something to you. It's stupid, so fucking stupid. He's many thins, but he would never—
Except he did. He did hurt you. Just not in the way these people think.
So Bobby keeps coming because this room is the last place you were. And as long as he keeps sitting in it, as long as he keeps talking to the walls, you're not gone.
You're just somewhere he hasn’t found you yet.
Month two.
The news spreads the way news does in a place like Santa Clara.
A slow seep through the neighbourhood, through the strip mall. The regulars who used to come to Clark's store for dining sets and bed frames and the occasional impulse-buy end table. A girl went missing. She worked there. The police questioned her boyfriend. No arrests, but you know.
People stop coming.
Not all at once. But the thin trickle becomes a drought.
The regulars find reasons not to visit. Other stores, other errands, a sudden preference for the furniture place on Stevens Creek that doesn't have a missing-person case attached to it.
The showroom gets quieter. The displays gather a fine layer of dust that Clark used to wipe down every morning, and now he only gets to it every other day, then every third day, then whenever he remembers. Which is less and less because Clark is a man watching his business die and his marriage fracture.
He can feel both things slipping through his fingers at the same speed, and the bourbon is the only thing that makes the slippage feel like someone else's problem.
So Clark hires Kat.
Not because he needs a full-time replacement. Frankly, customer traffic no longer justifies it, but the showroom needs a body in it. A presence. Someone to make the store look like a place where things are still happening. Kat is bright and cheap, and she doesn't ask about the missing girl, at least not at first, and Clark is grateful for that.
Bobby notices her the first time he comes in for his nightly visit to the basement.
She's behind the register, leaning against the counter with a pen behind her ear, doing something with a stack of delivery receipts. Radio plays something tuneful from a boombox she's brought from home. Dark hair. Quick smile. She looks up when the door chimes and gives him that particular once-over that Bobby used to live for. The slow sweep, the lingering, the way women's eyes always catch on the chain, the earring, the slice of toned stomach under the crop top.
She says, “We're closed.”
“I know. I'm not shopping.”
She watches him walk past the display couches and the dining sets, then down the stairs, all with undisguised curiosity. Bobby doesn't turn around.
The second time, she asks.
“You're the boyfriend, right? Of the girl who—” She catches herself. Has the decency to look uncomfortable. “Sorry. Clark mentioned it.”
“Yeah.”
“I'm Kat,” she says. “I'm covering her shifts.”
“I know.”
Bobby keeps walking. Past the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lamps, down the stairs, into the storage level where the real furniture waits in boxes. He sits on the floor. Presses his palm to the wall.
Hey baby. It's me again.
That night, back in the apartment, Bobby can't sleep. He lies on his side of the bed with his hand on your side and stares at the ceiling. The silence is so complete it has a texture, thick and too heavy. He gets up. Goes to the living room. Stands in front of the shelf where the cops put the tapes back, lined up in a neat row they were never in before.
He picks one up. Turns it over in his hands. The label is in his handwriting. A date, nothing else.
He tells himself he's looking for clues. That's the reason he gives himself as he threads the tape into the camera, plugs it into the TV, and sits on the floor with the remote in his hand.
The apartment is dark except for the blue wash of the screen. He's going to watch the footage with detective's eyes, with Moreno's eyes, looking for something everyone missed: a person in the background, a car that didn't belong, a moment where your face changed because you knew something was coming. He's going to be useful. He's going to be the kind of boyfriend who solves this.
And there you are. In the kitchen. In the morning light. Turning around with a spatula in your hand, your hair messy from sleep, one of his t-shirts hanging off your shoulder. You're saying something—he can't hear it over the lump in his throat, but he can read your lips, do you want toast—and the light is behind you, exactly the way he remembered.
You're so beautiful, so real and so present on this tape that for a second Bobby forgets. For one perfect, idiot second, his body forgets you're gone and his hand almost lifts to touch the screen.
Then the moment passes and you're still in the TV and he's still on the floor and the distance between those two things is the rest of his life.
He watches everything. All of it. Hours. The sleeping footage that made Moreno look at him like that. Bobby sees it now, sees what it looks like from the outside, and he also sees what it actually was: a man so stunned by the existence of this person in his bed that he needed the camera between them to survive it.
You in the kitchen. You reading on the couch with your feet tucked under you, turning pages with one hand, the other hand resting on Bobby's thigh without thinking about it. He filmed that too, the hand, just the hand. Five minutes of your fingers against his jeans because he couldn't say you touching me is the best thing in my life, so Bobby recorded it instead. You at the store, sorting inventory, your lips moving along to the radio, and you catch the camera, and your face does that thing—the mock-exasperated smile, the Bobby, stop that you never really meant—and your eyes are warm.
Your eyes are so fucking warm. Alive.
He watches until the tapes run out, and then Bobby rewinds them and watches again. He can't help it. The apartment fills with the sound of you. Your voice, your laugh, the particular way you said his name, Bobby, half-scolding and half-tender. For a few hours, the silence has a crack in it and something warm leaks through.
He starts watching them every night. Before the store, after the store, sometimes both. It becomes a ritual. Some sick twin devotions, the basement and the tapes, the wall and the screen, one hand pressed to concrete and the other pressing play.
Month three.
Kat starts leaving coffee on the counter for him.
It's hot, and it's there every night when he walks in, balanced on the edge of the register next to a ceramic lamp that's been on display since before you vanished.
She doesn't make a thing of it. Doesn't say I made this for you, or I thought you might want. It's just there. An object in his path. Bobby takes it because refusing would require a conversation he doesn't have the energy for.
She starts sitting on the stairs when he's in the basement. Not coming all the way down, just perching on the third step, legs crossed, chin in her hand, talking to him through the open stairwell.
She tells him about her day. About the customers, mainly. The couple who spent three hours testing every sofa in the showroom and then bought a lamp, the woman who wanted to return a bed frame she'd clearly had for two years, and some guy who asked if they sold waterbeds. Clark apparently almost threw him out. She's funny, in a way that's different from you. Louder, broader, more direct.
You were a scalpel. Kat's a blunt instrument, and right now Bobby is so hollowed out that even blunt force registers as contact.
He doesn't laugh. He doesn't encourage her. But he stops telling her to go away, and Kat reads that correctly as the only invitation Bobby knows how to extend right now.
It's the tapes that start to bother him first.
Not anything he can really name at first. It's more like a feeling. Particular unease of looking at something familiar and sensing, at the periphery, that it's shifted. He's watching the kitchen footage—the toast morning, his favourite, the one he's rewound so many times the tracking wobbles at the edges—and something feels off. Bobby stops the tape. Rewinds. Watches again.
You turn around with the spatula. The light is behind you. You say do you want toast. Everything is exactly the same.
Except your face.
Bobby leans closer to the screen. Squints. Your face is… fine. It's your face. Your eyes, your mouth, the way your hair falls. It's you. But there's… something. Some flicker of wrongness so faint it's less than a shadow. Like the difference between a photograph and a photocopy of a photograph. The information is all there. It's just one generation removed from real.
He tells himself it's the tape. Old footage, cheap equipment, the kind of VHS degradation that happens when you rewind the same section a hundred times. He tells himself it's his eyes, his exhaustion, the fact that he's watching the same clips at two in the morning in a dark apartment obsessively.
His brain is doing what brains do when they're tired and desperate: finding patterns in the static.
He believes it. For a while. He presses play.
One night, Kat is quiet for longer than usual. Bobby can feel her watching him from the stairs, her chin on her knees, the stairwell light behind her making her silhouette sharp.
“You loved her a lot, huh,” she says. Soft. Not a question.
Bobby goes rigid. His hand is flat on the wall. The draft tickles against his palm.
He turns his head. Looks at her. And whatever's on his face, he knows it’s not warm. It's the Bobby that bites, the one who gets mean, and Kat sees it happen, feels the temperature drop. The wall goes up behind his expression like a bulkhead slamming shut.
“I still love her,” he says, cold and flat. Corrective. Present tense.
He turns back to the wall. Kat is quiet for a long time. Then she gets up and goes back upstairs, and Bobby hears her footsteps cross the showroom floor above him. He closes his eyes, pressing his forehead to the concrete. He hates himself for being cruel to one more person who didn't deserve it or ask him but did you do it?
But he can't—
He can't let her use the past tense. He can't let anyone use the past tense. Because that means it's over, and it's not over. It's not. You're somewhere, he can feel it.
Bobby is a man sitting on a concrete floor talking to nobody, and the only woman who ever mattered to him is gone, and the last thing he gave her was a fucking grunt.
He can't live in that version. He won't.
Month four.
Bobby starts going through the inventory records.
Your handwriting is everywhere. The logs, the labels on the bins, the sticky notes on the shelving units, reminding Clark which shipments need to go out first. He sits in the storage level with the binder in his lap and traces your letters with his fingertip. He can hear your voice in the loops and slants. The way you wrote like you talked, quick and slightly messy, always abbreviating things so he had to ask you to translate.
The tapes are getting worse.
He can't deny it anymore. The wrongness he felt at month three has deepened into something visible, a decay he doesn't need to squint to see.
Your face has lost something in the kitchen footage. Nothing he could point to, nothing a stranger who'd never met you would notice. But Bobby has watched this clip a thousand times, and he knows the terrain of your face the way a sailor knows coastline.
Something has shifted.
Your eyes are the right colour, but the light behind them is dimmer, muted, like watching a candle through frosted glass. Your mouth moves and the words come out (do you want toast), but there's a fraction-of-a-second delay. The audio arriving just a breath after the lips, and it gives your voice a quality that makes the hair on Bobby's arms stand up. A dubbing. A sense that someone else is speaking through you, almost perfectly synchronised but not quite.
He goes through the other tapes. One by one. Methodical. The sleeping footage first. And you're there, you're sleeping, but the quality of your stillness is wrong. Too still. A person breathing doesn't look like that, doesn't have that uncanny smoothness, that mannequin-serenity.
The footage of you at the store next. Sorting inventory, lips moving to the radio is the worst affected so far. Your hands look right, but they move in a way that's almost, almost correct. The way a marionette's hands move when the puppeteer is very good. Bobby watches your fingers sort through drawer pulls and cabinet hardware, and he knows that those are not the hands that touched him.
He doesn't tell anyone. Who the hell would he even tell? Moreno? Hey, detective, the girl on my tapes is turning into something else? Yeah, same one that went missing and everyone thinks I secretly killed! His mom? Terrence? They already think he's losing it. Or, worse, they would think he’s high again.
They already use that voice with him now. The careful tone people use when they're managing a dangerous animal. This would be the thing that tips it, the thing that sends Bobby from grieving boyfriend to guy who cracked.
He starts making a list of his failures instead.
An erosion in reverse. Every day, some new memory surfaces, a moment he discarded when it happened and now can't stop replaying. Each one is worse than the last because each one is a place where he had a choice and chose wrong and didn't even realise it. Or maybe he did. And that’s worse.
The night you came home excited about something—a movie, a book, something a friend said, he can't even remember what it was, and that fact alone makes him want to put his fist through drywall—and you'd been lit up, talking fast, gesturing, and he'd been reviewing footage on the couch.
He'd said uh-huh without looking up. Not even once. Not once during your entire story did he lift his eyes from the viewfinder. You trailed off mid-sentence and went quiet, and Bobby hadn't looked up then either.
He tries to find that moment on tape. He knows he was filming that night. The camera was always running, always capturing, the viewfinder his permanent excuse for not being present. He scrubs through the footage looking for it. Looking for your face lit up. Looking for the moment you dimmed.
He finds the timestamp. And what Bobby sees makes his stomach drop.
You're sitting on the couch. He can tell it's you by the posture, the clothes, the way you're tucked into the corner cushion with your legs folded. But your face. Your face is… smeared. Like a thumbprint pressed across wet paint. The features are there, technically. But only technically. Eyes, mouth, nose. But they've lost their arrangement, their specificity.
The uniqueness that makes a face your face instead of just a face.
Bobby is looking at you, and he can’t tell what you look like. He’s lived with you, slept beside you, fucked you in every spot in your shared apartment, filmed you obsessively for months, and yet he’s looking at a tape from four months ago, and he can’t reconstruct you.
The audio is worse. Your voice—the one he knows better than his own, the one that said his name like a bell, half-scolding and half-tender—is distorted.
Vowels flattened, consonants dissolved. That familiar melody of your speech now reduced to a low warbling tone that doesn't sound like language anymore. It sounds like a recording of a recording of a recording. Each new generation losing fidelity, losing you, until what's left is just the shape of where a voice used to be.
Bobby ejects the tape. His hands are shaking so hard he almost drops it. He puts it back on the shelf and sits on the couch in the dark and doesn't move for an hour.
He sits with the inventory binder the next night and reads your handwriting and says to the wall:
Something's happening to you, baby. I can't—I don't know how to explain it. But something's happening to the tapes, and I think it means something's happening to you. I need you to hold on. Okay? I need you to hold on because I'm still here, and I'm not leaving. I need you to still be you when I find you.
I think I got scared of how much I needed you. So I stopped letting myself need you. And that's not an excuse. I know that's not an excuse.
The truth is, I wanted to be there so much that it was destroying me. I wanted you so much it made me fucking mean. I loved you in a way I couldn't control, and I've always been an idiot who quits everything. Who gives up when things get too big and scary. You were the one thing that made my hands shake, and I hated it, and I needed it. I needed you because you saw me. I didn't know how to need something without resenting it.
So I resented you. For making me believe in myself. For making me need something other than the weed. And I showed it by turning away and turning away and turning away until you thought I didn't feel anything at all, when the reality is I felt everything. I felt too much. I've always felt too much, and I've never once known what to do about it except hide behind the camera and make a dumb joke and let the moment pass.
He pauses. Slams the binder shut. Runs his hand over the cover where your coffee ring stains the cardboard.
I should've told you about the toast morning. The spatula. The light behind you. I should've put the camera down and told you right then.
I should've told you every morning.
Baby. I can still see your handwriting. I need to—I need that to mean you're still somewhere. That this is just the tapes. That the tapes are old and I'm tired and you're fine, wherever you are, you're fine and you look like you and you sound like you and when I find you I'll know your face.
Month five.
Kat touches his arm.
It happens on a Wednesday. She's handing him the coffee, and her fingers brush his wrist and stay there. A half-second too long. Warm. Intentional.
Bobby stares at her hand. Looks at her. She doesn't look away.
“You know,” she says cautiously, “you don't have to sit down there alone every night. You could stay up here. Sit on one of the display couches. They're actually pretty comfortable for fake living rooms.” She smiles. Not the interested once-over from the first night. Softer now, more careful.
Bobby takes the coffee. Goes downstairs.
His pager buzzes against his hip later that night. He unclips it, tilts it toward the light. Kat's number. She must've pulled it from the staff contact sheet Clark keeps.
He looks at the little green screen for a long time. Clips the pager back to his belt. Presses his forehead to the wall.
That night, at home, he puts in the toast tape. It's become a test now, a compulsion. He checks the way you'd check a wound, needing to see if it's gotten worse, even though looking makes it worse too. He sits on the floor in front of the TV and watches the kitchen footage load.
The spatula is there. The counter. The window with the morning light. The t-shirt hanging off one shoulder. Everything in the frame is crisp, real, and correctly rendered.
Except there's no one holding the spatula.
Bobby's breath hitches. He leans forward, hands shaking. Rewinds. Plays it again.
The spatula lifts. Turns. The t-shirt shifts on a shoulder that isn't there. Or is there, maybe, but wrong. A smudge of colour where a body should be, a heat-shimmer distortion where your outline used to sit. The light comes through the window and falls on the kitchen counter and on the empty space where you stood, and there is something in that space.
Not nothing, or blank tape, but a presence that has no edges, no features, no face. A blur. A smear. The visual equivalent of a word on the tip of your tongue that won't come.
The audio says — — toast — and then dissolves into a sound that Bobby can only describe as the noise a voice makes when it's being pulled apart from the inside. Each syllable stretches thinner and thinner until it snaps, and what's left is a low, sustained hum that sounds like buzzing lights in an empty hallway.
Bobby presses stop. Ejects the tape.
He goes to the shelf. Pulls another. The one where you're reading on the couch, your hand on his thigh. He puts it in.
Your hand is gone. His thigh is there. Bobby can see his own jeans, the denim folded at the knee. That specific wear pattern on the left leg. But the hand that used to rest on it has dissolved into a faded wash, a blurry disturbance on the surface of the image, like someone pressed their palm to a fogged window and then the fog closed over the print.
He puts in another. The store footage. You sorting inventory.
The bins are being sorted by no one. Cabinet hardware moves through the air. Drawer pulls lift and settle into containers by themselves, organised by a system invented by a person the tape can no longer render. The radio plays in the recording. Bobby can hear the music. Unchanged. But the voice that used to sing along to it is gone. Replaced by a low, pulsing tone that rises and falls in a pattern that almost, almost resembles the melody you used to hum, if he listens hard enough, if Bobby presses his ear to the speaker and closes his eyes and believes—
He can't. He can't believe it hard enough. The tape runs, and the inventory sorts itself. The radio plays somewhere underneath it all in a frequency that used to be your voice.
Bobby puts every tape in, one by one. Every single one. And on every single one, you’re fading. The early tapes—the oldest ones, the ones from before the store, from the first months—are the worst.
On those, you’re gone entirely. The frame exists, as does the light. But the space you occupied is smooth and empty, the image healing the wound of your absence like skin closing over a wound.
Reality itself seems to be deciding you were never there and quietly, methodically, is editing you out.
On the very last tape he checks, the most recent, he can still see you. Barely. A silhouette that won't resolve. A shape in the doorway that could be a person or could be a trick of the light. He pauses the tape and stares at the shape, and it looks like you the way a cloud looks like a face. If you want it to, if you squint hard enough and ignore the parts that don't match.
Bobby sits on the floor, holding the remote, staring at the paused frame. He understands, with a certainty that bypasses logic and settles directly into his bones, that you’re being erased. Not just from his life. Not just from the apartment, the store, or the neighbourhood that forgot you. From reality. From any evidence that you existed at all.
The tapes were his proof. Not for Moreno, or the cops, but for himself. Proof that you were real. That the toast morning happened. That your hand rested on his thigh. Love, in all its messy, imperfect shape between you, was real. That you sang along to the radio and burned rolls at Thanksgiving. That you stood in doorways waiting for him to look up. For once in his life, to just look up and see you.
He filmed you because he couldn't tell you he loved you, and thought the films would be enough. They were going to be the evidence he'd have forever, the record of what he felt even when he couldn't say it aloud.
And now even that’s being taken.
He doesn't go to the store that night. He goes straight to the basement and puts his whole body against the wall. Not just his hand. His whole body, chest, cheek and palms flat against the concrete. Maybe he’s going insane, finally, properly insane, but he talks until his voice gives out.
Don't go. Whatever's happening, whatever this is—please. Don't go. I know I didn't earn you. I know I don't get to ask you to stay when I didn't give you a reason to stay. But I’m asking. I'm begging. Please.
I can barely remember your face, baby.
I looked at the tapes, and you're not—you're going away. You're going away, and I can't stop it. The last version of your face I have in my head is from the doorway, the night you left, and I didn't even LOOK at it. I fucking grunted. You were looking at me, and I was looking at the TV. Now your face is disappearing from my own tapes, and the last real look I had at you I wasted on a GRUNT.
Baby. Please don't make me forget what you look like.
The wall breathes against him. The draft. The nowhere-breeze, cooler than the room, steady, almost rhythmic. Like breathing. Like something on the other side pressing back, watching him.
Bobby lifts his head but he's alone down here.
He stays until morning anyway.
Month six.
The apartment is starting to forget you.
Your shampoo ran out first. Bobby couldn't bring himself to buy more, so the shower shelf has a gap now.
Your magazines are buried under his mail, his camera equipment that's migrated back to every flat surface because there's nobody to complain about it. The coffee mug—your mug, the one on the drying rack—he put it in the cabinet. High shelf. Behind his. He can't see it when he opens the door, but he knows it's there.
The tapes are blank.
Completely blank. Clean, smooth, unrecorded type of blank. As if the camera was never pointed at anything, as if the record button was never pressed. Hours and hours of footage simply un-happened.
Bobby put in the toast tape last week, and what played was thirty minutes of soft grey nothing. The gentle hiss of virgin magnetic tape, the sound of a medium that has never held information. He put it in the camera, connected it to the TV, and watched nothing. Rewound it. Watched nothing again, ejected it, held it in his hands, turned it over and read his own handwriting on the label.
The date, just the date. The label is the only proof left that something was once on this tape, because the tape itself has forgotten.
All of them. Every single one. He checked them all, one after another, on a Saturday afternoon with the curtains drawn. By the time Bobby reached the last one, he wasn't even surprised. Just hollow. The shelves are full of labelled cassettes that now contain nothing.
A library of blanks. An archive of absence.
He has no pictures of you.
He realises this with a physical lurch, sitting on the floor surrounded by dead tapes. He has no pictures of you.
Bobby the camera guy, Bobby who filmed everything, Bobby who pointed the lens at you while you slept because he couldn't survive the sight of you without a barrier, and somehow, he has no proof you exist. The tapes are blank. He never took photographs because the camera was always rolling. And the only image of your face he has left is the one in his head, and that one is fading too.
Just the ordinary human erosion. The way memory smooths out detail over time. Six months of absence turns a face into an impression, an atmosphere, a feeling-where-a-face-used-to-be.
He remembers your eyes. He thinks. He remembers warmth, colour, the way they changed in kitchen light, and the blue wash of the TV at midnight. But he doesn't remember their exact shape. Doesn't remember if the left one was slightly different from the right.
The details are blurry; the tapes can't tell him anymore, and no one else can, either. You’re being unmade—from the record, from the world, from his own goddamn memory—and Bobby is the man who was supposed to preserve you, who pointed a camera at you for years, and he couldn't even do that right.
He still goes to the store. Every night. Without fail.
Even when it rains, or when he's sick, or when his hands shake on the steering wheel, driving down at eleven PM. He sits on the floor, and he talks. Sometimes he brings the coffee, your order, and a paper cup from the place on El Camino that makes it the way you like best.
Bobby sets it on the concrete beside him like a place setting at a table for two, and it goes cold while he talks. Eventually, he pours it out in the utility sink by the loading dock, rinses the cup and drives home.
It's getting harder to believe.
He can feel it.
Faith eroding the way your shampoo scent eroded from the pillow, the way you eroded from the tapes, gradually, then suddenly. Six months. People don't come back after six months. The cops have functionally closed the case.
Bobby's mom called and talked around the subject for forty minutes before finally saying honey, maybe it's time to— and Bobby hung up on her. His buddy Terrence sat him down at a bar and said, awkwardly, carefully, the way everyone talks to Bobby now, man, I know you don't want to hear this, but— and Bobby walked out before he could finish the sentence.
He knows what they're going to say. He knows because he's been saying it to himself at three in the morning, lying on his side of the bed with his hand on the cold spot you should be, a thought looping in his brain: she's not coming back. She's not coming back.
But Bobby goes to the store. And he sits on the floor. He puts his hand on the wall. The draft is still there—that impossible nowhere-breeze, cool against his palm—and it feels like breathing. Bobby presses his whole body against the concrete.
This space is the last thing that still holds you. The tapes gave you up. The apartment gave you up. The neighbourhood, the cops, his friends, his mother, everyone has let go. Bobby presses himself against the wall every night because this is the one place in the world that still has you in it. The last surface that carries your imprint, and he’ll not leave it.
He will not let the last proof of you go.
Bobby thinks about who he was seven months ago, and the contempt is so total it's almost cleansing.
A twenty-something-year-old asshole in a crop top who thought he was too cool to say I love you, who hid behind a camera lens because looking at things through glass was easier than looking at them with his bare, stupid, cowardly eyes.
He had a girl who made him breakfast and stayed up waiting for him. Who asked do you even want to be here anymore and answered her with don't be dramatic because the truth was too enormous and too terrifying to fit through his teeth.
The camera was supposed to be the thing that kept you. The proof, the record, the insurance policy against loss. He filmed you because he couldn't hold you, and now the film is empty. His arms are empty too, and the only thing left is a dusty basement with a strange wall and a man who doesn't deserve the comfort of it.
Robert Franklin, who quit everything, who let every good thing in his life rot through neglect and cowardice—Robert Franklin refuses to quit this.
This is the one thing he will hold onto with both hands. Because if he lets go, he has to look at who he is without it, and that person has nothing. That someone is an idiot with a camera and a crop top sitting in an empty apartment full of blank tapes, where he ground something beautiful down to dust because he was too chickenshit to be soft.
So he goes. Every night. He goes.
Month seven.
Clark is drunk.
Bobby can tell before he's through the door.
The showroom lights are on, but the sign is flipped to CLOSED, and the radio's playing louder than usual from somewhere in the back. When Bobby makes his way past the dining displays, he finds Clark sitting in the leather recliner. The expensive floor model, the one that's been here since the store opened, with a bottle of Jim Beam wedged between his thigh and that look on his face.
The one Bobby sees in the mirror. The look of a man whose life is falling apart.
“Bobby.” Flat. Not unfriendly. Voice of a man who's been drinking past sloppy and into something cold and brittle on the other side. “Right on time.”
“Clark.” Bobby eyes the bottle. “Where's Kat?”
“Sent her home early.” Clark takes a long, gulping drink. He's still wearing his work shirt, that same button-down he always wears, but it's untucked and the collar's stained. He looks like he's been in that recliner for a while. “Sit down.”
“I'm going downstairs.”
“No.” Another wet gulp. His eyes are red but steady. “You're not. That's what I need to talk to you about.”
Bobby stops.
“Linda kicked me out,” Clark says conversationally. The way he'd talk about lumber prices or a late shipment. He gestures around the showroom with the bottle. “So I'll be staying here. Back office. Maybe downstairs, if I can clear space between the Scandinavian imports.” The joke almost lands. Almost. “Which means I need the room, Bobby. All of it.”
“You're—what?”
“I'm saying you can't come here anymore.”
The words land like a slap. Bobby's hand tightens on the strap of his camera bag.
“Clark—”
“Seven months.”
And there it is. That thing that happens when Clark drinks, when the bourbon strips away the politeness and the it's not my place and the careful middle-aged-man diplomacy, and what's left is just the raw compressed anger of a man who's been swallowing his own resentment for months.
Clark is a man who holds everything down until the whiskey lifts the lid and whatever's underneath comes out scalding.
“Seven months of you in my basement. Seven months of—do you know what's happened to this place since your girlfriend disappeared? Do you? Because I do. I watch it every day. I watch the customers not come in. I watch the phone not ring. I watch the neighbourhood look at my store like it's a goddamn crime scene and take their money to Stevens Creek because nobody wants to buy a dining set from the place where a girl vanished.” Clark's voice is rising, a deep rumbling anger spilling outwards. “I built this store. And now I'm sleeping in it because my ungrateful wife thinks I'm a failure and my customers think I'm cursed and the only person who walks through my door every night is you, Bobby, sitting on my floor, talking to my wall—”
“That's not my fault —”
“She's not down there.” Clark slams the bottle on the end table. It cracks the mahogany finish, and he doesn't notice or doesn't care. “She's not in the walls, or the ceiling or the goddamn floor, son. She's not inside a goddamn flatpack bookshelf.”
Bobby sucks in a breath. “You don't know that. Nobody does.”
“Yeah, I do.”
Clark leans forward. Red-eyed. Steady. And the thing he's been holding between his teeth for months comes out. The ugly thing that isn't about Bobby at all, it's about Clark, about a store that was failing before you ever disappeared and a marriage that was cracking before the customers stopped coming.
A man who needs someone to blame because the alternative is looking in the mirror and seeing his own fingerprints on everything that's broken. And right now, tonight, drunk and newly homeless and sitting in a recliner in a showroom full of furniture nobody's buying, Clark has found his someone.
“She's either dead,” Clark says, and the word just hangs there, settling on Bobby's skin like hot oil spilling over— “or she left you. And either way, son. Either way. You need to stop. Because I can't have you down there anymore. I can't have this—this haunting—attached to my store. I'm trying to save what's left, and you sitting in my basement every night is—”
He stops himself. A crack appears in Clark’s anger, a fissure where the sober Clark underneath can see what the drunk Clark is doing. Using Bobby's grief to deflect from his own failure. Blaming a missing girl for a business that was haemorrhaging money long before she vanished, for a wife who kicked him out because Clark worked sixty-hour weeks and never once asked how her day was.
Clark knows. Underneath the bourbon, he knows. And the knowing makes his face twist with both sadness and fury.
“Bobby.” His voice changes. Drops. The anger drains out of it like water from a cracked glass, leaving only the exhaustion underneath. Clark rubs his eyes with one hand, and suddenly, he looks old. Older than he is, tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. “I didn't—that came out wrong. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said it like that.”
Bobby doesn't hear him.
Because Bobby is already moving. Past the display couches and the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lives. He shoulder clips the corner of a dining table hard enough to shift it on the showroom floor, and the door chimes behind him when he rips it open.
The night air hits him, and he's in the parking lot, his hands are on his knees, and he's breathing in short, ragged, tearing bursts that feel like they're coming from somewhere below his lungs.
Somewhere that's been sealed shut for seven months and has just been cracked open with the words she's either dead or she left you.
Dead or she left you.
Dead.
Or she left you.
He can't fucking breathe. He can't—the air is right there. Santa Clara night air, warm and full of eucalyptus and car exhaust, but he can't get it into his lungs. Because Clark said dead, and that word is a door Bobby has refused to open for seven months, and now it's open, it's wide fucking open.
And behind it is a version of reality where you’re in the ground somewhere and the last thing he ever said to you was a grunt and your last memory of him is the back of his head and the blue light of the television and the sound of a man who couldn't be bothered to look up.
And the tapes are blank. And your face is gone. And there is no record anywhere in the world that you existed except the label on a cassette in Bobby's handwriting and in a basement he's just been locked out of.
“Bobby. Bobby, wait—”
Kat. Coming around the side of the building, car keys in her hand. She didn't go home. She was sitting in her car, headlights off, engine off, just sitting there, and she's been doing that, he knows she's been doing that, waiting for him, watching the door. And he's never said anything because acknowledging it would mean acknowledging everything it implies.
“Bobby, hey, stop, are you okay? I heard him through the door, what did he—”
Bobby straightens up. Pivots toward her. And he knows—somewhere in the functioning part of his brain, in the part that isn't currently on fire—that she doesn't deserve what’s coming. She's been nothing but kind.
Coffee on counters, stairs and parking lots and pager numbers he never called back. She never once asked for anything in return. She’s a good person standing in a parking lot trying to help a man who’s bleeding out from a wound she didn't inflict.
But the thing inside Bobby right now is not rational. It's not kind. It's the wounded animal, the cornered dog, the part of Robert Franklin that has always turned his pain into teeth and aimed them at whoever's closest because the alternative is feeling it. And he…
He can't feel it; if he feels it right now, he’ll come apart on this asphalt, and he doesn't know if he'll come back together again.
“Don't do that. Don't chase me. Don't wait in the parking lot. Don't leave me coffee. Don't—” His voice cracks, and he hates it. Hates the sound of himself breaking in front of her. Another woman who's being kind to him, and he's going to ruin it with his inability to do anything with tenderness except flinch from it. “I'm not going to fuck you, Kat. Alright? Is that what you need to hear? My girl is missing. The girl I love is fucking missing, and I don't know where she is, and I can't—I can't do this. Whatever you think this is going to become. I can't.”
He presses the heel of his hand into his eye. Hard. Grinding the tears back because Bobby doesn't cry in front of people. Even though he's been doing it alone on concrete for seven months, even though the irony—Bobby Franklin pushing away the person trying to be there for him while grieving the person he pushed away by not being there—is so perfect and so cruel it feels engineered. Like the universe is holding up a mirror and saying see? You're doing it again. You learned nothing, idiot.
He knows. He knows he's doing it again. He can't stop doing it.
“I can't,” he rasps. Quiet, broken. “I'm sorry.”
Kat stands still. Her keys dangle from one finger, catching the orange glow of the streetlight. She doesn't step back. Doesn't cry or get angry or tell him to go fuck himself, though she definitely should. Bobby almost wishes she would because it would give him someone to push against.
The tapes are blank, and your face is a smear. Reality is closing over the hole you left like water closing over a stone, and soon there’ll be no evidence you were ever here at all except a man in a parking lot who can't stop saying your name in the present tense.
Kat shifts her keys to her other hand. Takes one step closer. Not touching. Just closer.
She looks at him, and she says, quietly, softly, “I don't need you to love me, Bobby.”
Quiet. Simple. Like she's telling him the time.
Bobby's mouth opens. Closes. His hand drops from his face. The parking lot is quiet. Only the buzzing streetlight fills the silence.
He looks at her, and he looks wrecked, he knows. Absolutely wrecked, hollowed out and scraped clean from last seven months, standing in a place where the only options are forward into something he's not ready for or backwards into a basement he's just been locked out of, and he doesn't say yes.
But he doesn't walk away, either.
an: ohoho, i'm so excited to hear what ya'll think after that lmao. we're picking up with BB and you next time. stay tunedddd~
I love the idea of everything with better bobby being so intense and almost dreamlike, trippy from the beginning. Like being high (lmao) and fading in and out of a meaningful conversation that youre struggling to focus on as you sink into the couch. Meaning to dust a kiss on what you think is your unusually clingy bf’s cheekbone and between one moment and the next, what started as an innocent cheek kiss has resulted in you sliding against the wall until youre sat on that yellow floor, lap full of him as he essentially tries to stick as much of his tongue as he can down your throat. Hands confusedly going to his shoulders and he’s curled around and over you like a python, nosing your pulse with quick, shivery breaths, hand on our nape, and waist, reeling you to him as he pins you to the wall. Him getting the hint of a kiss and taking that to mean he can finally just.. do what he wants. It’s permission, right? You love him too? You must, you initiated contact. And now he can touch and touch and mouth and smell and nose and be the needy, raw animal crawling under a false skin that wants you so so sosososososososososososoossobad so bad so bad
˳ ˳ BETTER BOBBY SERIES.
Reality itself has a different consistency down here.
Time is soft. The edges blur. The hum does something to your brain you can't explain. There's this ambient frequency in this place and it does to your cognition what warm water does to muscle tension. Loosens it. Softens the borders between one moment and the next. Until everything has this gauzy, slow-motion, underwater quality where you can't quite tell where a thought ends and a feeling begins.
You're lying on the blankets and Better Bobby is beside you and he's been clingy today. Clingier than usual anyway. Which is saying something, because his baseline is already I need to be touching you at all times or I will simply cease to exist.
His head is on your chest and his arm is across your waist, his fingers drawing patterns on your hip through your shirt. You're talking. Having a conversation. A real one. But you can't quite hold the thread.
You keep meaning to finish your sentence but the hum is so warm and his weight is so warm... and his fingers are doing that thing where the warmth-that-reads-you is bleeding through the contact.
Not deliberately, just passively. The way a radiator bleeds heat, and your thoughts keep drifting.
"—and I was trying to tell Clark that the shelving unit was—"
Better Bobby shifts. His nose pushes into the curve of your neck between one blink and next. A slow, animal press. Not a kiss. Just... contact. Scent. You feel him inhale.
"—was, um—the brackets were wrong, and he—"
His mouth opens against your throat. Not a kiss. Just his lips. Parted. Resting there. You can feel his breath on your pulse point. Damp. Quick.
"—he wouldn't listen, he never—"
What were you saying? The sentence is gone. It was right there and now it's dissolving the way everything dissolves down here, like sugar in warm water,.
Better Bobby's fingers have stopped drawing patterns and are just pressing now. Five points of heat on your hip. The hum is in your teeth and behind your eyes and you think—vaguely, dreamily, from too far away—that you should probably finish your thought about Clark's shelving unit.
You turn your head. He's right there. His face inches from yours, those pale eyes half-lidded, watching you with that patient, hungry, endlessly attentive focus.
And you think idly I'll just kiss his cheek. That's all. Just a small thing. A punctuation mark. The kind of casual intimacy you used to have with real Bobby, back when touch was easy, back when you could press your lips to his cheekbone in passing and it meant I'm here and nothing more.
You lean in. Your mouth brushes his cheekbone.
And the world tilts.
Between one heartbeat and the next, between the moment your lips touch his skin and the moment you mean to pull back, there's a shift.
The surroundings stay the same. The change is in him. You feel it through the contact point. Through your mouth on his cheek, a full-body shudder that runs through Better Bobby like a current. His hand moves from your hip to your waist and grips and his head turns, fast, faster than a human head should turn, finding your mouth.
It's not the careful learning kisses from before, when he asked you to teach him how to kiss you properly.
This is... this is the thing that lives underneath Better Bobby.
The thing he keeps leashed and gentle and civilised for you. The thing that unravelled the Smiler in the dark to keep you safe. Except there's no threat now. That intensity is pointed at you.
And it's not trying to hurt you. It's trying to consume you. To crawl inside the kiss and live there. His tongue is in your mouth, his hand settling on the back of your neck and he's pulling you into him with a strength that isn't human. He's not pretending to be right now, and you make a startled sound against his lips and he swallows it. Takes it. Wants more.
You're moving. You don't decide to move. Momentum moves you. He moves you.
Your back hits the wall and you slide down it, the yellow wallpaper rough against your shoulder blades, and then you're on the floor with your legs open and he's in your lap—no.
He's not in your lap. He's around you. Curled over and around you like something serpentine, a thing that doesn't have a skeleton the way humans have skeletons. Better Bobby's body conforms to yours at every point of contact, chest to chest, hip to hip, his thighs bracketing yours, his arms closing around you and it's not an embrace.
It's an enclosure. A perimeter. You're inside Better Bobby the way a heart is inside a chest.
Your hands go to his shoulders. Half pushing, half holding, your fingers digging into muscle that flexes and shifts under his skin in ways that aren't quite anatomically right.
He doesn't notice. Or he doesn't care. His mouth is on yours and then it's not. Then it's on your jaw, your throat, the dip of your neck. And he's not kissing so much as tasting, his lips parted and dragging and his breath coming in these quick, shivery little bursts against your skin.
Fast, animal. The breathing pattern of a creature that's been holding itself back for such a long time and has just now found what it wants.
Because that's what the cheek kiss was. You understand that now, distantly, through the gauze of the hum and the warmth and the overwhelming physicality of him everywhere. Everywhere. Around you and against you, his palm on your nape angling your head back so he can get at the full length of your throat.
The cheek kiss was permission. You touched him. You initiated. And in whatever language Better Bobby's instincts operate in, that translated to: yes. Yes, you can. Yes, I want you to. Go.
And he went.
His nose pushes into the soft space behind your ear. He inhales (deep, shaking, greedy) and makes a sound that comes from below his chest, below his lungs, from whatever furnace drives the entity underneath the skin.
The sound isn't pleasure exactly, it's relief.
The relief of a thing that's been starving and just got its mouth on something warm and tender. He noses down the tendon of your throat to your collarbone and mouths at it. Open and wet and artless.
No technique, no finesse, just contact. As much contact as he can get, and his hips press into yours and his hand on your waist hauls you closer, closer, like the laws of physics are personally inconveniencing him by not allowing you to occupy the same space.
"Bobby—Bobby, slow—"
He makes a sound against your clavicle. Not a word. A vibration. A negation. No. No slow. Had slow. Done with slow. Slow was when I was being careful and now you've kissed me and I don't have to be careful. I need—I need—I need—
God, his hands.
They're everywhere at once.
Your waist, your ribs, your hips, the back of your neck, sliding under the hem of your shirt and pressing flat against the bare skin of your lower back.
Warmth hits you like a drug, a wave, and your head drops back against the wall with a quiet moan and the yellow ceiling swims above you. Better Bobby is nosing up the front of your throat with those quick shallow breaths, scenting you, learning you, his lips catching on your skin with every exhale.
He's not performing.
That's the thing that breaks through the haze. The one clear thought that surfaces through the gauze of strange pleasure: he's not performing.
The gentle Better Bobby, the careful one, the one who plays with your hair and says I've got you, baby. That Bobby is a construction. A deliberate presentation.
The thing that's pressed against you right now, shaking, sucking at your pulse, making that raw sub-vocal sound that vibrates in your ribs—this is what's underneath.
This is the animal under the false skin he's stolen. This is what heard your voice through a wall and wanted and has been wanting every second since. Through every gentle hair-stroke, every patient conversation and every careful, calibrated touch.
He wanted like this. The whole time. This raw, this desperate, this artless, graceless, trembling need that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a creature that has been alone in the yellow for longer than human loneliness has a name for and has finally, finally found something warm and alive willing to stay.
The wanting is so big it doesn't fit inside the Bobby-shape. It's leaking out. Through his hands and his mouth. Through the harmonic that's gone ragged and unsteady, the hum destabilised by something it wasn't designed to contain.
He pulls back. Just enough to look at you. His eyes are fully black. No pretence now. No Bobby-blueveneer. Just the entity, vast and ancient and desperate. Looking out of a stolen face at the only person it has ever wanted.
"You kissed me," he says. His voice is wrecked. That deep register, broken open, cracking through the cockiness like light through a fracture. "You—you kissed me."
"I kissed your cheek—"
"You kissed me."
Like the distinction doesn't exist. Like any contact, any voluntary touch, any moment where your mouth chose to be on his skin is the same thing. Total. Binary. You touched him or you didn't and you did and that means—
"You want me," he exhales.
He doesn't phrase it like a question. It's a revelation.
His hands are cradling your face now, both hands, his thumbs on your cheekbones, and he's looking at you with those black eyes and the expression on his face is... it's too much.
Too many things at once. Wonder, hunger, tenderness and that dark, possessive satisfaction and underneath all of it, at the very bottom, something so painfully vulnerable it doesn't belong on the face of something this powerful.
Hope.
The ancient thing in the walls is looking at you with hope.
"You want me," he says again. Quieter now. Testing the words. Feeling them in his mouth. "You—not him. Me. You reached for me."
And what are you supposed to say to that?
What are you supposed to say to a creature that has worn loneliness like a second skin for longer than your entire species has existed, that heard you through concrete and plaster and chose to build itself a body just to be close to you? That has been patient, gentle and careful for weeks because it was terrified of scaring you away and has just felt your lips on its cheek and interpreted that as the end of a famine?
You look at him. At the black eyes and the silver earring and the chain and the scar. At the trembling. The hunger.
You put your hand on the back of his neck and pull him in.
He tips towards you. Like gravity.
His mouth is on yours and the sound he makes is not a moan, it's not a growl, it's that entity-harmonic blown wide open. A resonant chord that fills the hallway and the walls. The hum itself. And he's kissing you, shaking, and his hands are everywhere and nowhere.
He's trying to be gentle and failing, trying and failing and giving up and just... taking. Mouth and hands. That impossible warmth flooding through every point of contact and the yellow walls humming around you.
His body curls around you like something that will never, never, never let you go.
*clears throat* gf starts stealing bobby's slutty crop tops and wears it around the house with only underwear on. he chases her cause those are his fav shirts (i see bobby as a lil diva) and then they fall into bed together laughing <3 (im joking they fuck hard)
truly building empires over here!!!
slightly suggestive but mostly just playful and short! no real movie spoilers aside from few characterisation details. enjoy!
Bobby doesn't even notice at first.
He's rolling a joint on the kitchen counter, shirtless because it's August in Santa Clara and the apartment's been holding heat all day like a brick oven. He's got his sunglasses pushed up into his hair and his chain's sticking to his chest with sweat. In truth, he's entirely focused on not spilling weed on the counter again because last time he spent twenty minutes picking it out of the grout lines and it was a whole thing.
Then you stroll past him.
In his favourite cropped Metallica tee. The one he cut himself with kitchen scissors, thank you very much, and the raw hem is intentional, it's art even. Yet right now, it's hanging off your frame, the hem barely grazing your navel. Underwear on. Nothing else. Bare feet on the tile, walking like you don't have a care in the goddamn world.
The joint falls apart in his hands.
"Hey. Hey. That's mine."
You don't even turn around. Just keep drifting toward the living room like you can't hear him, late afternoon sun coming through the blinds and catching the backs of your thighs.
Bobby abandons the weed. Full priority shift. He pushes off the counter and follows. "Babe. Baby. That is my favourite shirt. Do you understand what I went through to get that? I drove to San Jose for that. The guy at the shop tried to charge me double because it was vintage and I had to negotiate—"
"It looks better on me."
"It—okay, objectively untrue, I have the shoulders for it, we both know this, but that's not even the point—"
You speed up. Which means you know exactly what you're doing, which means this was premeditated, which means Bobby's being played and he knows it.
He goes after you anyway because he's never once in his life backed down from something stupid.
He catches you in the hallway, his arm hooking around your waist from behind. His chest lands flush against your back, and he's faster than you'd think for someone whose lungs are basically decorative at this point.
The momentum carries you both sideways into the bedroom doorframe—his shoulder takes the hit, he swears, you're laughing too hard to stand up straight—and then you're falling onto the mattress in a tangle of limbs, the bedsprings protesting beneath you.
Bobby's half on top of you, breathing hard and grinning, and he's got the hem of the Metallica shirt fisted in one hand like he's genuinely going to reclaim it. His rings are cold against your stomach.
"Give it back."
"Make me."
And the thing about Bobby—the thing people don't get when they write him off as just some mouthy stoner with a nice face—is that he's all talk right up until the exact moment he isn't.
The grin doesn't disappear. It just changes. Sharpens at the edges. His eyes go heavier, lazier, and the hand gripping the shirt stops pulling and starts pushing it up instead, his knuckles dragging slow up the curve of your ribs.
"Yeah?" His voice drops into that low rough register that sits right behind your sternum. Late light's coming through the window and catching his earring, the thin silver hoop throwing a pin of light onto the pillow beside your head. "You sure about that, baby?"
You hook your leg over his hip. Pull him in tight. Bobby exhales hard through his nose. Sharp, punched-out, like you knocked something loose in his chest. His jaw clenches and you can feel his hips twitch forward before he catches himself.
He kisses you hard. Not cruel, but not careful either. Bobby doesn't do careful unless you're hurt or frightened, and right now you're neither. Right now you're smiling against his mouth and he bites your lower lip for it, just enough sting to make your breath catch in your throat.
"You're trouble," he drawls into the dip of your jaw. His weight settles between your legs and you can feel exactly how not-annoyed he actually is, the thin cotton of his cutoffs doing absolutely nothing to hide it. "You are a genuine fucking menace and I want my shirt back."
"So take it off me."
He does. Fast enough that the collar catches on your chin and you yelp, and he laughs—this low, stupid, delighted sound—and then you're laughing too, breathless and tangled and ridiculous. Until his mouth finds the side of your neck and his teeth scrape your pulse and the laughing dissolves into something a lot less innocent.
Bobby's hands are rough. Camera calluses, sun-dark knuckles, silver rings he never bothers taking off. He knows what he's doing with them, which is infuriating, because it means he also knows exactly when to slow down. When to drag his thumb across the jut of your hip bone and just wait, patient as anything, until you shift underneath him and try to pull him closer.
He likes that part. Likes watching you get impatient. It's the same energy as when he's behind the camera, all steady focus and perfect timing, except right now the thing he's paying attention to is the sound you make when he finally slides his hand between your thighs.
"Bobby—"
"What's the magic word, baby?"
"Bobby."
"That's not it." He presses his mouth to the soft skin below your ear. You can feel him smiling. "But I'll accept it."
He drags your underwear down with one hand, easy, tossing them somewhere behind him without looking. Presses his mouth to the inside of your thigh, slow and warm, and then he looks up at you. Those ridiculous pale eyes, the hoop earring, the permanent half-smirk he can't seem to turn off even now, and says, low and rough, "You look better in nothing, for the record."
You tug him up by his chain. He comes willingly, grinning. Somewhere between his mouth on yours and his hand fumbling with his own zipper the cutoffs end up on the floor.
The Metallica shirt ends up hanging off the bedside lamp and neither of you cares about any of it for a good long while.
bobby franklin x reader [mdni] — your boyfriend splashes out on a new camcorder and insists on testing it out on you.
“State your name for the record.”
“You know my name, Bobby.”
“The camera doesn’t.”
Said camera has barely left Bobby’s hands since he’d brought it home two days ago, much to your chagrin. It had taken the entirety of those two days—when you weren’t at work, anyway—for him to convince you to be his muse on your day off. You weren’t even sure what you were signing up for.
Now you sit cross-legged on the bed with one of Bobby’s shirts hanging from your frame, sweating in the summer heat. The fan in the corner rattles noisily, doing little to combat the warmth, and the heat of your annoyance at a camcorder being shoved in your face isn’t exactly helping.
You roll your eyes at him, unimpressed. “The camera isn’t a person. I'm not introducing myself.”
“Well—“ He kisses his teeth, ready to argue his case.
“If you’re just using this as an excuse to roleplay, I want no part of it,” you interject, arms folding stubbornly over your chest.
Bobby zooms the camera in on your deadpan face. “Subject displays signs of hostility—“
“Turn that thing off.”
The warning in your voice only seems to amuse him. The viewfinder hides his expression, but you imagine him grinning, which only exasperates you further.
“Hostility increases—“
“Bobby.”
“Fine. Fine,” he relents—not by turning the camera off, obviously, because that would have required him to possess even a shred of self-restraint, and he’s thoroughly enjoying pestering you right now. Instead, he zooms back out and lowers the camera enough for you to see his face. “This image quality is insane.”
Despite yourself, you feel a little endeared by his enthusiasm. “Well, it better be. That thing is worth, like, a month’s rent.”
The number still makes you feel vaguely ill. The conversation where you’d discovered exactly how much his new equipment cost had almost given you a heart attack. Bobby, however, appears completely unbothered. In fact, judging by the distant look in his eyes, he probably hasn’t heard a single word you’ve just said.
He’s more focused on staring at the tiny flip-out screen again, adjusting the focus ring, watching you reluctantly unfold your arms again.
“Though to be fair,” he says, “you make it easy.”
Your frown deepens. “That’s a terrible line.”
“Line?” He replies absently.
“That.” You gesture vaguely towards him. “Whatever that was. You make it easy.”
A smile curls at the corner of his mouth. “It wasn’t a line.”
“It absolutely was.”
“It wasn’t.”
“You called me pretty.”
“I did not,” he denies.
You sit upright. “So now we’re lying?”
Bobby laughs. “I said the image quality was good.”
“Because of me. Therefore you implied I was pretty.”
“I did no such thing.”
“Liar!”
The grin spreading across his face makes your stomach flip unhelpfully. You considered yourself immune to his charms by now, but his boyish grin and the way he’s admiring you through his camcorder makes you want to swoon. Which is exactly why you immediately scowl at him.
“Stop looking so pleased with yourself.”
“I can’t help it,” Bobby says.
You huff an amused breath despite yourself. The sound seems to encourage him, and he adjusts something on the side of the camcorder and squints through the viewfinder.
“Hmm,” he hums thoughtfully to himself.
Naturally, such a sound is immediately enough to warrant suspicion. “What?”
“I need the subject to move around. Test how it picks up motion.”
“So now I’m just ‘the subject?’” You raise a challenging brow at him, and he immediately backtracks.
“I need my hot supermodel girlfriend to move around,” he corrects.
You roll your eyes, but it does make something stir in your chest despite its sheer ridiculousness. Bobby lowers the camera again and you catch the mischievous look on his face.
“Maybe you should model.”
“No,” you deny instantly.
“You’re not even going to think about it?” He says, a whine catching in his voice.
“I don’t need to. I don’t want a video of me stripping, or whatever the hell you want, sitting around our apartment. I babysit my niece here twice a week.”
“Okay, and? It’s not like she knows how to work one of these. She barely knows how to brush her own teeth.”
“It’s— it’s the principle,” you insist, cheeks burning. You wouldn’t consider yourself a shy woman, far from it, but the idea of there being a physical record of you attempting to seduce your boyfriend is offputting. “I’m not a slut.”
He groans and throws his head back. “No, you’re not,” he agrees as patiently as he can. He’s using the same voice he uses to console your aforementioned niece, which isn’t exactly helping his case. “You’re very loyal, in fact. Dedicated, too. It’d be really nice if you could show me that dedication—“
“Gross.” You stick your tongue out. “Don’t make it weirder than it has to be.”
“Fine. Fine.” He raises his free hand in surrender. “I’m not making it weird.”
A silence falls over the both of you, and you worry at your bottom lip in consideration. It just goes to show how much you adore him, because you should be sticking with your gut answer and telling him to fuck off. Alas…
“You promise you won’t show anyone?”
Bobby perks up instantly. “Promise. Scout’s honour.” The boyish salute that follows makes your shoulders ease up a little, and you briefly question why you’d even consider stripping for such a childish individual.
“Fine. But just a little. To… test your motion, or whatever.”
“What?” He blinks stupidly, before realising that’s the excuse he’d used just a moment ago. A sheepish grin tugs at his mouth. “Oh, right. Exactly. Just a little is fine.”
You swallow, shifting slightly on the bed. The frame creaks, and you can’t help but think the moment feels incredibly unsexy. You’re sweating in the sweltering heat, and it’s probably picking up the whirring sound of the fan, and—
Now you’re just psyching yourself out. It’s fine. It’s just Bobby.
“Okay, so… what do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t think I’d get this far.”
“Bobby.”
“Just do what feels right.” He waves a vague hand. “Take your shirt off, or something.”
Such a request should make you sputter with indignance, but it’s no surprise coming from the man who seemingly spent upwards of eight hundred dollars on a camcorder just to record his girlfriend in their shitty apartment. You force some more confidence into your posture, shoulders squaring as you look down at your shirt. Slowly, your fingers drift down to the hem, curling around it.
You glance up at him for reassurance, met with an eager nod. Stifling a sigh, you drag it up slowly, revealing inch by inch of warm skin. “Like this?”
“Just like that,” Bobby breathes, voice lower now.
Encouraged by that, you pull it up further, dragging it up past your bra. Bobby wets his lips at the sight—your breasts spilling over the cups, soft and enticing. Up up up it goes until you’re pulling it over your head, letting it fall to the floor in front of you.
You want to shift uncomfortably, clamp your thighs together, cover yourself with your arms. It’s not like he’s never seen it before. It’s just unnerving with the camcorder directed at you. But you force yourself to stare directly at it, spreading your thighs slightly to give him a proper view of your panties.
“Fuck, yeah,” he murmurs. “Touch yourself.”
“What?” You say, alarmed.
“Not—“ He laughs a little, shaking his head. “Not there. Sorry. Just… your tits, or something.”
Your shoulders sag with relief. That’s a little too much for now, but you’re content enough to give him at least some form of show. Your fingers skate back up your stomach, goosebumps prickling beneath them. Then you cup your breasts over your bra, watching his reaction through half-lidded eyes.
“You’re so pretty, babe,” he says, and the approval goes straight between your legs. “Doing so well.”
You reward him by hooking your fingers under one of your bra straps, inching it down. His breath catches audibly—selfishly, you hope the camera caught that reaction—and he shifts a little on his feet. The thought of him getting visibly aroused by your display emboldens you further.
The other strap follows, and you palm at yourself over the cups a little more. “I would have worn a better set if I knew we were doing this.”
“I like this bra,” he says, only half hearing you, zeroed in on the sight of you squeezing at yourself.
You release them and he almost groans in disappointment. Before the sound can escape, you reach behind you, unclasping the bra and letting it fall away. His eyes widen cartoonishly, and you bite your lip to mask a smile, trying to remain as sultry as possible.
“Shit, can I touch you?” Bobby takes a step forward. Your eyes flick down to his jeans. They’re tight, but you think you can make out the forming bulge beneath the denim.
“Can’t touch ‘the subject,’” you quip.
Hands skim along your chest again, and he seems enraptured as you grope yourself. You’re surprised he hasn’t caved already, but his restraint is admirable as he nods sagely in agreement. Still, you hear him groan under his breath when you focus on a nipple. It stiffens under the touch, already sensitive enough to make you bite the inside of your cheek.
“Is this enough movement?” You ask, rolling your nipple between your fingers while your other hand palms at the flesh of your other breast. You’re hardly moving, so the answer is definitely no, but he indulges you with another one of those enthusiastic nods. You're certain you could sit entirely still with your bra off and he'd tell you it was enough for his little 'motion test.'
“Yeah. Looks, um—“ His gaze moves to the viewfinder, which he realises he hasn’t actually looked through since you took your shirt off. He can only hope the camera was pointed at you properly. “Looks great.”
“The movement, or me?”
“The movement,” he says, laughing at the indignance that crosses your face. “You look more than great. You look perfect.” Heat crawls up your cheeks, but he’s not done. “Which is exactly why I really can’t keep my hands to myself right now, and I don’t think you should waste your day off sitting in bed alone when we could be having sex.”
You bark out a laugh as he switches it off, setting it on the dresser and advancing towards you. “Well, that’s an improvement from your last line.”
He stands between your parted legs, ducking his head to give you a quick kiss. “For the record, it wasn’t a line,” he insists as you reach for his belt.
“Liar,” you mutter against his mouth.
The smile he gives you when he pulls back is so hopelessly smitten that your own laughter softens with something warmer. He ruins it by breaking the silence with:
“Maybe we should invest in a tripod. Then we could really record something sexy—“
YOUR 'BETTER BOBBY' FIC WAS SO GOOD! if you ever felt inspired would LOVE to read more about them. maybe another entity attacks them and they get separated? and alone and lost, reader can't help but miss the real Bobby ahhh. anyway, love you, thank you for writing!
I'm so glad you're all loving this idea, because inspiration hit me so hard I wrote this in one sitting. Continuation to this. Def let me know if you wanna see more 👀
warnings: horror (finally got to write my true love), and some gore (nothing explicit/implied)
You've been here long enough that you've stopped counting the hallways.
That, in hindsight, should probably scare you the most. The fact that it doesn't scare you anymore.
The yellow used to make your skin crawl, that specific shade of institutional sick. Now it's just... the colour of home. Better Bobby's taught you that. Through sheer repetition of safety.
Every time he pulls you into a new room and checks the corners before letting you sit down. Every time he angles his body between you and a doorway without thinking about it. Or when he hands you something to eat. You've stopped asking where the food comes from. That's another question that goes in circles every time you try it. He watches you until you take a bite, satisfied, like feeding you is the only task on a list he takes very seriously.
You have a room now. Your room. He found it for you three (days? rotations? sleeps?) ago, deeper in Level 0 than you'd been before, tucked behind a series of turns that he walked so confidently you wondered if he'd planned the route in advance.
It's quieter than the others. The carpet is thicker, the hum lower, and there's a warm patch on the floor near the far wall where some buried pipe must be running. Better Bobby dragged every blanket he'd scavenged into a pile on that warm spot and when you'd looked at him he'd shrugged, one shoulder, earring catching the fluorescent light.
"What? You get cold."
Real Bobby used to steal the covers.
You try not to make the comparison. You try so hard. But Better Bobby makes it impossible because he's everything real Bobby was on your best days. Distilled and concentrated, with all the carelessness burned off.
He touches you constantly. Not sexually, just contact. His hand on the back of your neck when you walk. His chin on your shoulder when you're sitting together. His fingers finding yours in the dark when the lights flicker, which they do sometimes. And in those brief, stuttering seconds of blackness you can hear things moving in the walls and Better Bobby's grip tightens. He says I'm here like it's a fact of physics. Like his presence beside you is as fundamental and non-negotiable as gravity.
It's a Thursday, you think, or what you've decided is Thursday—you've started naming the days by feeling, which probably means you're losing it—when everything goes wrong.
You're walking. Better Bobby's slightly ahead of you, one hand trailing the wall, talking about something. He talks to you the way real Bobby used to, a constant low-level narration.
Except Better Bobby's commentary is about the architecture of this place, which hallways are safe, which ones echo differently than they should. The way the carpet changes texture near certain thresholds you should know about. You're half-listening, comfortable in the drone of his familiar voice, when he stops abruptly.
You almost walk into his back.
"Bobby?"
He doesn't answer. His head tilts slightly, the way a dog would listen toa distant sound. His whole body goes rigid in a way you've never seen before. Better Bobby doesn't tense up. Better Bobby is languid and easy and always, always calm.
"Bobby, what—"
"Don't move."
His voice is different. Stripped of the warmth, the lazy drawl, all the honeyed softness he pours over you. What's left is flat and hard. Something in your hindbrain fires that hasn't fired since you got here because Better Bobby has kept you so safe that you forgot what fear tasted like.
You taste it now. Bright and metallic at the back of your throat.
The lights flicker abovehead. Not the usual gentle stutter or dimming it does at random intervals. This is violent, a seizure of light, and in the strobe of it you spot something at the end of the hallway.
You can't process it. Your brain tries and slides off the shape the way water slides off wax. It's too tall, and wrong. So wrong. It takes up too much space for its size, like it's pressing against the dimensions of the hallway from the inside, and it's looking at you with something that isn't a face.
Better Bobby shoves you behind him. Both hands this time. Hard.
"Go."
"I'm not leaving you—"
"Go. Left, left, straight, third door. I'll find you." He looks over his shoulder at you and his eyes are dark and flat. Ancient in a way that makes your stomach drop because for just a second—just a flicker, shorter than the lights—the thing looking out from behind Bobby's face isn't Bobby, either. "Baby. Run."
You run.
Left, left, straight, except there's no third door. There's no door at all.
The hallway stretches and bends and the carpet under your feet changes from rough to damp to something that feels horribly organic so abruptly you almost skid. You're running and the fluorescent yellow is shifting with you, deepening in increments, and the walls are getting narrower.
The ceiling goes lower suddenly and you realise, with a lurch of animal terror, that you're not on Level 0 anymore.
You don't know when it changed. There was no door, no threshold, no moment. The hallways just... became somewhere else. Like you walked through an edit. A jump cut in reality.
You stagger to a stop. Your breathing is so loud it fills the quiet corridor.
It's dark here. Not quite pitch black, mercifully. There's light, but it's coming from somewhere wrong. Faintly blue, sourceless, the colour of television static.
The walls aren't yellow anymore. They're concrete instead. Industrial. Stained with something you refuse to look at closely. The ceiling is a mess of exposed pipes and dead wiring, and water (you hope desperately it's water) drips in a strange pattern that sets your teeth on edge
It's cold here. You're shaking, you realise a moment too late.
You press your back against the concrete wall and slide down to the floor, pulling your knees to your chest and try to make yourself small. Try to make yourself invisible. Because Better Bobby isn't here and without him you're nothing in this place.
Just soft, warm, alive thing in a place that is none of those things.
That's when you see it. From the corner of your eye.
It assembles itself in pieces in the dark, the way a photograph develops, the way something reveals itself to you only once it's already too close.
Teeth first.
A grin. Too wide and white, wrong, hanging in the blue-black dark about thirty feet down the corridor. Human teeth in a human smile except there are too many of them and the smile is too wide. It's not attached to anything you can see, either. Just the grin, suspended, luminous. The way a Cheshire cat would look if the Cheshire cat wanted to kill you.
It doesn't move. You don't breathe.
Then it's twenty feet away.
You didn't see it move. You didn't blink. Not once. It was thirty feet and now it's twenty and the grin hasn't changed, not even slightly. The same frozen rictus of delight, and you understand with a sick, cold certainty that it's not walking toward you. It's just... closer. Like the distance between you is a thing it can edit. A number it can change at will.
Fifteen feet. The grin widens. You didn't think it could widen.
You can see more of it now, or rather you can see the shape of more of it. The suggestion of a body behind the smile, darker than the dark around it, a silhouette that doesn't quite hold its edges. And the sound. There's a sound now, low and wet, like someone trying to laugh through a mouthful of something thick. A gurgling, hitching, delighted sound.
It's happy to see you. Whatever this thing is, it's so, so happy that you're here.
Ten feet. You can feel the cold coming off it. Not temperature, exactly, something else. An absence. A pulling. Like it's drawing the warmth out of the air between you one degree at a time and feeding the grin with it.
You open your mouth to scream and nothing comes out.
"Close your eyes."
The voice comes from directly behind you.
You didn't hear him arrive. You didn't hear footsteps or breathing or the rustle of fabric. He's just there, the way he's always just there. His hand closes over your eyes from behind, firm, warm, his palm flush against your face, fingers curving over your brow.
"Close them. Keep them closed. Don't open them until I tell you to."
Better Bobby's voice is calm. Completely, impossibly calm. The same tone he uses when he's telling you to go back to sleep after the lights flicker. But underneath it—deep underneath, in a register you feel more than hear—there's something else now. An edge that doesn't sound like Bobby at all.
His hand lifts off your eyes. You keep them shut. You squeeze them so tight you see colours behind your lids. Bright, bursting phosphenes, and you press your face into your knees and you hear him move away from you. Toward it.
Then the sounds start.
You can't categorise them. You won't.
There's a tearing sound. Not fabric, or paper; something denser, wetter, something with resistance. A sound like a dog shaking water from its fur except heavier and it ends in a crack that reverberates through the concrete floor and up through your spine.
The gurgling laughter changes pitch. Goes higher. Then higher still. Then it's not laughter anymore, it's something between a shriek and a frequency. A sound that vibrates in the roots of your teeth, and underneath all of it is a low rumbling that you realise is coming from Better Bobby. A sound no human throat should make, a sound like tectonic plates grinding in the dark.
There's a splash. Something hisses, like water on a hot pan. The shrieking cuts out—not fades, cuts, abruptly, like someone hit a switch—and then there's a long, wet, dragging sound that moves away from you down the corridor and fades into the pipes and the dark.
Silence.
There's a ringing in your ears. Your fingers feel numb, heavy. You're biting the inside of your cheek so hard you can taste blood in your mouth.
Footsteps. Normal ones. The soft pad of sneakers on concrete.
"Okay, baby. You can open your eyes now."
You do. Better Bobby is standing in front of you, looking down at you with that soft, tilted expression. Same white tee. Same denim shorts. Trusty camera over his shoulder. Not a drop of anything on him. Not a wrinkle. His hair isn't even mussed any more than usual. His earring catches the faint blue light and throws a tiny star onto the concrete wall and he's smiling at you, gently, like you just had a bad dream and he's here to tell you it's morning.
There's nothing in the hallway behind him. Nothing on the floor. No sign that anything was ever there at all, except a faint smell. Ozone, copper and deeper beneath that, an almost rotten stench. You try to examine it but it's already fading.
You don't ask. You can't ask.
Your body moves before your brain does. You launch yourself off the floor and into him so hard he actually rocks back a step. Better Bobby, who's never been moved by anything in your presence, who stands in front of horrors like a wall moves this time. Your arms lock around his neck and you bury your face in his chest.
You're shaking. So violently that it's almost convulsive, these full-body tremors that you can't control, and the sound coming out of you isn't crying exactly. It's more animal than that, a high keening thing that you'd be embarrassed about if you had any room left for embarrassment but you don't, you used it all up being terrified.
Better Bobby catches you. He doesn't stumble again. His arms come around you and they're solid and warm. He holds you so tight that the shaking has nowhere to go, like he's absorbing it into himself, and one hand cradles the back of your head, pressing your ear against his chest. His heartbeat is steady, steady, so steady, and how is he so steady, how is he always so steady—
"Shhh. I got you. I'm here. It's gone."
You can't stop. You're gripping his shirt in both fists, knuckles blanching, and you're gasping against his collarbone and he just...
He holds you. Doesn't rush it. Or tell you you're okay or that it wasn't that bad or any of the things real Bobby would say in later months to make you feel silly for being scared. He just holds on and rocks you, the smallest movement, his cheek resting on top of your head.
Your voice comes out cracked and ruined. "What—what was that, what did you— how did you—"
He hums gently. "Don't worry about it."
"Bobby, that thing, it was—its face, it was smiling, it was—"
"I know." He pulls back just enough to look at you. Tips your chin up with his knuckle. That lazy smile, easy and warm and so perfectly Bobby it makes your chest splinter. "I know what it was. It's gone now. Don't worry about it."
"How did you get rid of it?" you rasp.
His thumb strokes your jawline. "Does it matter?"
"Yes."
He looks at you. For a moment something flickers behind his eyes. Something vast and patient and very, very old. Then it's gone, and he's just Bobby again, warm-eyed and soft-mouthed, tucking your hair behind your ear.
"I told you, baby. Nothing gets past me." He kisses your forehead. Slow. Gentle. His lips are warm and the concrete corridor is freezing around you. You lean into him like he's the last source of heat in the world. "Come on. Let's go home."
He takes your hand.
You let him lead you.
He leads you back through the concrete and the pipes and the blue-dark, his thumb rubbing circles on your knuckles, and you don't look behind you.
Not even once. Because whatever he did in that corridor is something you have decided you don't need to see the aftermath of, and also because some part of you—the part that still thinks clearly, the part that Better Bobby hasn't quite reached yet—understands that there is no aftermath.
That whatever Better Bobby does to the things in the dark, he does it completely. He doesn't leave evidence. He doesn't leave remains. He unmakes them, and he does it wearing Bobby's crooked smile, Bobby's silver earring and Bobby's cut-off shorts like a costume. Like a skin, like a love letter written in someone else's handwriting.
The concrete gives way to carpet. Just as abruptly. The blue darkens to yellow again. The cold lifts. The hum returns, and for the first time ever you're grateful for it. The way you'd be grateful for the sound of traffic outside your apartment window because it means you're back in the world, or at least, back in the only world you have left.
Your room. The warm patch. The blankets.
Better Bobby guides you down, wrapping the blankets snug around you. He tucks himself behind you and you press back into his chest, his arm winding around your waist. You're still shaking faintly, these little aftershock tremors, and he absorbs every single one.
"Sleep, baby. I'm right here."
And you close your eyes and you think about real Bobby.
You think about the apartment in Santa Clara. The kitchen counter where he used to roll joints with the window open because you didn't like the smell building up inside. The way his camera equipment colonised every flat surface, cables and lenses and that one light diffuser he was so particular about. You used to complain it and he used to say babe, genius needs room to breathe and you'd throw a dish towel at his head while smothering a grin.
You think about the night you fell in love with him. Not the day you realised it (you'd known for a while by then) but the night it actually happened.
You sitting on the hood of his car in a parking lot off El Camino Real, sharing a joint, and he'd turned to you with the camera for once not in his hands and said, so disarmingly, you're the most wonderful girl I've ever met, and his face looked stripped of its usual cockiness. Bare. Scared. Young.
He was so young. You both were.
You wonder if he's sitting in that apartment right now with the TV on and the lights off, not really watching, just existing in the space you used to fill.
You wonder if he's looked at your toothbrush in the holder next to his. If he's opened the fridge and seen the leftovers you made two nights before you vanished (was it two nights? you're losing track of the real timeline, it's blurring at the edges, and that scares you more than the grin in the dark) and whether he ate them or whether they're still sitting there. Slowly going bad, a small decomposition that mirrors something larger in your life.
You wonder if he's picked up his pager. Scrolled to your name. Stared at it.
You wonder if his thumb hovered over the button the way it used to hover over the shutter release—that perfect hesitation, that half-second of do I or don't I—and whether he pressed it or whether he set the pager down and rolled over. Told himself he'd deal with it tomorrow the way he's been telling himself he'd deal with you tomorrow for months now.
You wonder if somewhere under the indifference and the exhaustion and the slow-growing cruelty there is still a version of Bobby who filmed you sleeping because the light was good. Who cut a Metallica shirt into a crop top with kitchen scissors and held it up like a trophy. Who said hold still, the light's doing something crazy on you and meant I love you, you're beautiful and couldn't say it any other way.
You wonder if that Bobby still misses you.
You wonder if he'd ever come looking.
Better Bobby pulls you closer. His mouth finds the spot behind your ear. The one real Bobby discovered during your second date together. The one that makes everything go quiet inside your skull.
"You're thinking again," he murmurs.
"I know."
"About him."
You don't answer. You don't have to.
Better Bobby is quiet for a long time. His breathing is slow and even against your back. The lights hum their tuneless hymn in your ears. Somewhere deep in the walls, something moves again, and you tense at the scraping sound.
Better Bobby's arm tightens around you. A reflex, instant, protective, the one thing about him that never feels performed.
"He's not coming, baby," he says softly. He doesn't say it meanly this time, either. Not triumphant. More so sad. Almost like he wishes it weren't true, for your sake. Because even this thing that wears Bobby's face and unmakes grinning horrors in the dark doesn't want to watch you grieve. "You know that."
OKAY WAIT YOURE THE RIGHT PERSON I HAVE TO TELL THIS TO: Coraline AU x Backrooms AU for Bobby Franklin x reader
Okay so Bobby and reader are together but he’s grown brasher, ruder and arrogant these past few months. Long story short, he’s grown tired of you and he treats you like shit. But he hasn’t really broken it off yet. He can’t bring himself to. He’s grown used to you and he doesn’t wanna go through the whole process of breaking up and moving out and whatever whatever. And you love him too much to do anything, so you just deal with it. Hoping that one day he’ll be how he used to when you first got together.
So one night at the store when you’re pulling a night shift alone, (Bobby had left early, he wasn’t gonna stay and do night shift with you asshole) you hear thumps coming from the lower level. You’re scared but you grab a hardware knife and keep it close as you quietly go down to explore the noise.
Once you reach the extra storage level, you hear it: Bobby’s voice calling from inside the wall. At first you’re convinced that you’ve gone crazy. But no, it’s him. And he’s gently luring you in, “babe, I can see you. gosh you look so cute with that scared look on your face. come here.” You look around in confusion, but a tiny thump from behind the wall grabs your attention. “Yes. Here. C’mere babe.”
You stop in front of the wall. And when you lean in close to press your ear against the wall, poof you stumble into the room and fall on your ass. Your head spins as you blink awake, and immediately you’re hit with ugly neon yellow wallpaper. You look around the room before your gaze locks on … Bobby?
You freeze in surprise. There he is, same white shirt and denim shorts, same camera dangled over his shoulder, and a sickeningly charming smile on his face that you haven’t seen since the beginning of your relationship. Something isn’t right. He doesn’t smile at you like that anymore.
But before you can say anything, he’s walking closer to you until he’s gently cupping your face in his hands. “Hello babe, missed you. You are NOT going to believe this place!” Slowly, with an arm draped over your shoulders, he’s guiding you further and further away from that spot on the wall that you came in here from. You look around. Something makes your stomach churn with unease. It’s yellow everywhere, hallways everywhere. Yet ‘Bobby’ seems to know this place like the back of his hand.
When you finally snap and ask him who he is, he simply smiles that sickening smile again before cupping your cheeks and pressing a tender kiss on your lips. “It’s me, Bobby. Better Bobby.”
Now he just has to convince you to never leave him again. To never go back the ‘other Bobby’. To a dull life where ‘other Bobby’ can’t love you as best as he can. That he’ll never neglect you like ‘other Bobby’ that he can be better. That the only condition is that you stay in here with him forever.
[part 2]
The thing that makes Better Bobby so dangerous is that he's not a bad time at all.
He's not some obvious monster wearing Bobby's face wrong. He doesn't glitch. He doesn't flicker. He's warm. He's present in a way real Bobby hasn't been in months. Maybe longer, if you're honest with yourself, and Better Bobby makes you honest because he makes you feel safe enough to be.
The first few days—hours? time is slippery here, the fluorescent lights don't change and there are no windows and Better Bobby just shrugs when you ask how long you've been here, says does it matter, baby? and the worst part is you can't think of a good reason why it does.
The first stretch of time is almost easy. Dangerously, seductively easy.
He finds rooms for you. Not just any rooms, the good ones. Quiet ones, with carpet instead of that damp yellow tile, where the humming of the lights isn't quite so loud.
He sets up a little nest of blankets he found god-knows-where and pulls you into his chest and plays with your hair and talks to you in that low, lazy voice. The one real Bobby used to use on Sunday mornings when neither of you had anywhere to be. He asks you questions about your day. Your day. When's the last time real Bobby did that? When's the last time real Bobby looked at you while you were talking instead of at his pager or through the viewfinder or at literally anything else?
Better Bobby looks at you like you're the only thing in the room. Which, technically, you are. But still.
And he keeps you safe. That's the part that really gets its hooks in.
Because the Backrooms aren't empty. You learn that fast. There are sounds in the deeper hallways, wet dragging things, clicking, something that might be breathing if breathing sounded like it was coming from a throat that was never designed for air.
The first time you hear it (really hear it, close, too close) you freeze, and Better Bobby is already moving. He steps in front of you. Puts his body between you and the sound without hesitation, without even breaking his sentence, one arm reaching back to keep you behind him. His hand finds your wrist and holds it. Firm. Certain.
"Stay behind me, baby. I got you."
And he does. He always does.
He knows which hallways to avoid, which doors not to open, what corners to take wide. He navigates this place like it's his, and maybe it is, and you try not to think about what that means.
When something skitters in the walls at night (at what passes for night, when he dims the lights in whatever room he's chosen and curls around you like a barricade) he doesn't flinch. Just pulls you closer, mouth against your temple, murmuring you're okay, I'm here, nothing's getting past me. And nothing does.
Real Bobby wouldn't even stay for a night shift.
That thought makes your chest hurt every time. You try to push it away but Better Bobby's already noticed the expression on your face. He notices everything, because he's always watching you with that soft, focused attention that reminds you of how real Bobby used to be behind the camera. Seeing things before they happen. Anticipating you.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"Liar." But he says it gently. Kisses your forehead. Doesn't push.
And you start asking questions. Carefully at first, then less so.
How did you get here?
"Same way you did, baby. Found a way in."
But when? How long have you been here?
"Long enough to know how to keep you safe. Isn't that what matters?"
That's not an answer.
"Sure it is." That smile. The one that used to make your chest ache when real Bobby aimed it at you across a room. "You're just not hearing what you want to hear. Ask me something else."
What are you?
"Bobby."
You're not Bobby.
"I'm Better Bobby." He says it like it's obvious, like you're being a little slow, and there's even a flash of that real-Bobby sharpness in it, that dry teasing edge, and it's so perfectly him that it makes your throat close. "I'm the one who stays, baby. That's all you need to know."
But where did you come from?
"Where did you come from? Where does anyone come from?" He tilts his head at you the way real Bobby does (did) when you said something he found cute. "You're going in circles, you know that?"
And you are. That's the thing. Every question leads back to the same place: I'm here, I love you, stay. It's a closed loop. A hallway that turns and turns yet looks different at every corner but deposits you right back where you started, standing in front of Better Bobby while he smiles at you like you're the whole world.
The architecture of this place and the architecture of his answers are the same. Endless. Repeating. Warm enough that you stop noticing you're already lost.
Because he does love you. Or whatever he does, it's close enough that it feels the same in the dark when he's holding you and the things in the walls are quiet, his heartbeat steady under your ear. It feels like love. It fits in all the spaces where love used to be. And he never gets tired of you. Never rolls over with his back to you. Never sighs when you walk into the room like your presence is a weight he didn't ask to carry.
He carries you willingly. Happily. Endlessly.
And somewhere above you, somewhere beyond the yellow and the hum, real Bobby is probably just now noticing your side of the bed is cold. Probably just now checking his pager. Probably frowning, not out of worry but out of inconvenience. Because your absence is a disruption to his routine and not a hole in his chest. Or is it?
Better Bobby presses his lips to your hair. "You're thinking about him again."
You don't answer.
"He's not coming for you." It's not cruel, the way he says it. It's gentle. It's the gentlest thing anyone's said to you in months. "You know that, right? Baby, look at him. You know he's not coming."
And the worst part (the part that keeps you here, that makes you curl into Better Bobby's chest and close your eyes and let the yellow blur behind your eyelids) is that he might be right.
A.N: Hi my loves! 🩷 Thank you so so much for your wonderful support, you've made me so happy! 🩷I hope you'll like this one as well, and please let me know what you think🩷 ILYSM, kisses! 🩷
Pairing: Robb Stark x F!Reader
Summary: Rumors can cause jealousy.
Word Count: 4,7k
Warnings: Explicit language, adult themes, suggestive themes. MDNI- Do not read if you're under 18.
Series Masterlist
Back in the Reach, when Lady Olenna hired that lady of the night to tutor you and Margaery on marital acts and what husbands liked, she had assured both of you that unlike what everyone around you kept telling you, your name, your family’s wealth, any heirs you’d have with your future husband; none of that was a guarantee that he would fall in love with you.
According to her, it was all about how mesmerizing you would be, and your marital bed was the key. That night, while you and Margaery laid in the bed trying to silence your giggles so as not to wake Loras again and get a scolding, you had both agreed that it was exaggeration; surely it couldn’t have been the case for everyone.
But judging by Robb’s reaction after what you had done last night, you were beginning to believe that lady.
“My maid will be here any moment!” you said as you pushed him gently, making him walk backward to the door. “I must get ready for breakfast—we already overslept!”
He grabbed your wrist and in a blink, you had your back against the wall, a giggle escaping you.
“Robb!”
“Dismiss her when she comes.”
“And what of my ladies-in-waiting?”
He grinned at you. “Dismiss them too.”
“That would be rude!”
“Fine, I’ll dismiss all of them—”
“You’ll do no such thing!” you exclaimed, the look of shock on your face coaxing a chuckle out of him as he cupped your face in his palm, your heart skipping a happy beat.
Gods, he looked irresistible.
He had put on his breeches, but his white linen shirt was half open, letting you peek at his chiseled chest. His curly hair was tousled thanks to last night’s—and this morning’s—activities, and there was a mischievous light gleaming in his eyes as he looked at you, tracing the line of your bottom lip.
You frowned, willing yourself to focus.
“I don’t suppose anyone has told you this,” you said, sticking your nose in the air, “but a lady needs her own time to get ready to be seen in public.”
“A lady or my lady?”
A smile curled your lips before you could stop it, and you pointed in the direction of the door, making him whine.
“I’ve been away from you for a week!”
You shrugged your shoulders, feigning nonchalance as if you weren’t currently battling yourself not to drag him back to bed. “That was of your own making.”
“That, my sweet wife, is a cruel lie,” he murmured, leaning to brush his lips against yours. A pleasant sigh left you, the familiar warmth blooming in your lower stomach, your mind going blank once again as it always did whenever Robb kissed you. Your body moved at its own accord; you threw your arms over his broad shoulders so that you could pull him closer, ready to lose yourself in his arms but a knock on the door snapped you out of it and made you pull back. Robb blindly chased your lips as you pressed a hand on his chest to push him back again, turning your head.
“Just a moment!”
You went under Robb’s arm to get away from him, whirling on your heels before you stepped back, clasping your hands behind you with a grin. He raised his brows like he was warning you.
“Do not—” he started, but before he could finish his sentence, you had already swung the door open to beam at your maid. She was a sweet girl, only a couple years younger than you. Just like the other northerners you had met, she wasn’t very fond of sharing too much, nor did she jump at the opportunity to gossip unlike what you were used to back in the Reach, but you were certain you were going to be friends soon enough.
“Good morrow Kyra!” you chirped. “My lord husband was just leaving, you may come in.”
Kyra stepped in and curtsied.
“M’lord. M’lady.”
Your grin widened at the look of utter betrayal on Robb’s face. “I shall see you at breakfast, my husband.”
“And I shall see you, my wife,” he said, kissing your temple as he walked past you and left the room. You turned to Kyra, looking down to pretend to fix the silky skirt of your nightgown.
“Kyra, would you mind telling the maids to draw me a bath?” you asked. “And I’d really appreciate it if you could help me take off my necklace, thank you.”
With the King and his court arriving next week, Lady Stark was busy beyond words. She had to foresee anything and everything about their visit, and while you had been following her like her shadow to learn and help out if needed, you also had your own duties.
While the preparations were being made for the feasts upon the King’s arrival, Wintertown could not be expected to put everything on hold, especially with the arrival of autumn. Thus, you and your ladies were tasked with preparing certain supplies for the smallfolk. The baskets mostly consisted of blankets and food, and while back in the south your father had certain people responsible for overseeing such help, in the north, it fell upon Lady Stark—and per her request, you.
You would’ve been lying if you said it didn’t surprise you, but you figured it was just one of the many differences between the south and the north.
Everyone did something here, regardless of who they were.
Your ladies-in-waiting were already in the granary, and you had every intention to go join them when you stepped out into the yard after having a short conversation with Lady Stark, but you stopped dead in your tracks when you caught the sight of Theon sparring with Jon while Bran watched them and Robb sat beside him, no doubt having just finished sparring with either of them. You could feel your heart skip a happy beat as you stole a look in the direction of the granary, but the urge to be with Robb—fleeting as it would be, for mere minutes—overcame your hesitation. You made your way to him, a smile twitching his lips the moment you entered his sight and sat beside him.
“Hello,” you said. “I figured I could take some fresh air before I went inside, I hope you don’t mind?”
“Of course not,” he said quickly while Bran waved at you, still quite shy. You gave him a warm smile, both your and his attention turning to Jon when he blocked Theon’s strike with his sword, pushing him hard enough to make him stumble back.
“But will it happen?” Bran insisted while you rested your head on Robb’s shoulder and he pressed his lips on top of your head, sneaking an arm around your waist to subtly pull you closer. Jon rolled his eyes.
“Of course not, Bran.”
“You never know,” Theon sang and Bran huffed.
“Even if father says so?”
“Father won’t say so.”
“He said so to Robb.”
“He asked me,” Robb corrected him, “it’s not the same thing.”
“What are we talking about?” you asked and Bran turned to you with a scowl on his face.
“Jon getting wed.”
“I’m not getting wed.”
“Silas said he was the one who approved Robb,” Bran said. “And if Robb had to approve your future lady…”
Robb let out a scoff. “I don’t think that falls on me.”
“There’s usually more things to consider than your older brother approving someone,” you pointed out. “Silas saying that isn’t the whole truth.”
“But Jon, would you have to wed Ser Tallhart’s daughter if father said so?”
You bit back a laugh at the exasperation on Jon’s face. While you didn’t know the details of how he and Silas separated, it was quite obvious that Jon’s attention wouldn’t belong to anyone else for a long time, judging by how sulky he had been since your brother left. As much as you wanted him to share his feelings with you, you figured he didn’t want you or anyone else to know, so you had to keep your silence despite seeing his sadness.
Perhaps you could imply you would keep his secret, but you would have to earn his trust for that.
“Ser Tallhart’s daughter?” you asked, making Theon let out a laugh.
“I doubt that’ll happen, Bran.”
“But!” Bran insisted. “But listen. Silas approved Robb, right? And you already said, about Ser Tallhart’s daughter, that Robb approved.”
Robb made a face. “I didn’t say I approved.”
“But Theon said that you called her pleasant and said southern girls and northern girls are different,” Bran said, making your head shoot up from Robb’s shoulder. “You approved, and Jon doesn’t have a southern betrothed, and...”
The look of panic that settled on all three men would’ve been funny if it weren’t for the fury crashing down on you. Theon and Jon stopped sparring as if someone had just barked an order at them, and Robb’s eyes widened as he stared at Bran at a loss for words. Bran seemed oblivious to their reactions, ranting about how Jon couldn’t wed because that’d mean he’d see him less like Robb, while you tried your hardest to keep your expression calm, considering you were in public.
Ser Tallhart’s daughter, was it?
“…Ah,” you said and arched a brow at Robb, an overly sweet smile curling your lips. “Is that what Robb said?”
One simple observer would’ve thought Robb was being accused of treason with the way he shook his head vigorously.
“That’s not what I—Bran, you make it sound very different than what actually took place.”
“But Theon and Jon were saying—”
“I said nothing.”
“I’m not involved in this conversation.” Theon and Jon spoke at the same time, desperate to absolve themselves of any crime but Robb wasn’t so lucky and by the looks of it, he knew it.
“I just said for—for Jon, she looked pleasant.” He waved a hand in Jon’s direction without even sparing him a glance while you tilted your head, still smiling. “For Jon only. I wasn’t even—”
“My lady?” Alys’ voice reached you, making you look over your shoulder. “Maester Luwin says we may start if you’re ready.”
“Of course,” you said as if your stomach wasn’t churning, the familiar ache whenever you were nervous back in its full strength. You got up from the bench to follow Alys, leaving Robb dumbfounded but he snapped out of it before you could reach the granary and caught up with you.
“Wait—”
“I cannot,” you said airily without a glance at him, “I have things to do.”
“That sounded wrong, back there.” He stepped in front of you to block your path, making you narrow your eyes. “I didn’t call her—I did call her pleasant, but only because I was trying to encourage Jon. He’s been sulkier than usual, and Theon thinks it’s because he didn’t like any southern girls at our wedding.”
“And one look at Theon makes you think of wisdom?”
“No,” he admitted after a beat. “Not really. But what else could be the reason?”
Your brother was the reason, but it wasn’t like you could tell Robb that. Besides, that wasn’t the point, you were not going to stand here and get into an argument where the whole yard could see, you were way too trained for that. Jealousy was not mesmerizing, most of the time it held the opposite effect. Lady Olenna used to say that the more a lady looked bothered, the more her influence slipped away. Grasping too tightly would signal to the court that you were insecure, and insecurity was unbecoming of a lady.
Which meant that even though it took every ounce of control in you, you couldn’t appear angry.
“I don’t find anyone more pleasant than you,” Robb added, almost breathless. “My lady, surely you must know that.”
You could swear the words you were not supposed to say were clawing at your throat, but you took a deep breath and forced yourself to smile.
“Alright.”
Robb pulled back slightly, his eyes darting over your face.
“…Alright?”
“Yes,” you said, your voice holding no trace of grudge unlike your heart. “And if you’ll excuse me, I must be going now.”
“But—” He stopped you, holding your arm before you could turn around. “But we’re alright?”
As much as you wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, that also would appear very unladylike, so you nodded your head instead.
“Of course,” you chirped. “How selfless of you to assess and compare ladies for Jon, I’m certain he’s grateful.”
“See, that comment right there doesn’t assure me that we’re alright—”
“And though I’d love to hear about the differences between southern and northern ladies, I really must be going now,” you cut him off, pulling your arm out of his grip. “Have a good day, my lord.”
With that, you walked away from him, anger still pulsing in your temples.
Who even was Ser Tallhart’s daughter? No one had told you anything about her.
There was no wonder your ladies-in-waiting would know about her, seeing that they had likely crossed paths at a wedding or a feast. If you were back home, you could’ve asked your friends, but here in Winterfell you had to be more careful than that.
Any wrong question could lead to many speculations.
Not to mention, you still didn’t trust them. Alys, Wylla and Lyra seemed rather sweet, but when it came to Jorelle and Barbrey, you were still very cautious. Barbrey was going to have to work hard to prove her loyalty to you, and Jorelle…
Well.
You weren’t certain that you could ever lower your guard with her.
It wasn’t even about her at this point, it was more about her family. You knew very well that at any given moment, her family would push her forward if they knew they could undermine you, Lady Cerwyn’s condescending manners were a proof of it. Not only that, the whole North would support them, as they were already fond of Jorelle and her family.
Your family, however, were outsiders to the north, and no matter how much help they would send when the winter came, northerners didn’t trust or like outsiders.
You were pulled away from your thoughts when Wylla spoke.
“That’s a very beautiful necklace.”
Your head snapped up, and you willed a lovesick smile on your face despite the storm in your head.
“Aw thank you,” you said, dipping the spoon into the salt bag to pour some of it into the small container before you walked to place it in a basket. “Robb kindly brought me a gift from Torrhen’s Square.”
Alys and Barbrey exchanged smirks while Lyra and Jorelle folded the blankets to put into the rest of the empty baskets.
“Do you know…” you trailed off, nibbling on your lip. “Have any of you been to Torrhen’s Square before?”
Jorelle lifted her head for only a moment before she returned her attention to the blankets, clearly deciding against whatever she was going to say. Alys nodded her head.
“I have, once.”
“I don’t think I’ve met House Tallhart,” you mused. “I’ve heard high praises though.”
“Did Gilliane come to the wedding?” Lyra asked and you turned your head.
“Gilliane?”
“Their oldest daughter, my lady,” Wylla said. “And no, she didn’t.”
“I think only Erena came,” Alys said. “I’m certain I caught a glimpse of her—her younger sister.”
“I’ve met too many people to count at the wedding, I’m afraid,” you said. “Perhaps I met them and don’t remember it.”
“Erena is very sweet, Gilliane however…”
“Lyra,” Alys warned her and she held up her hands.
“I said nothing.”
You tilted your head. “Oh, now I must know.”
Barbrey grinned. “Gilliane is very emotional.”
“It’s no crime against the king to be emotional!” Alys insisted while Lyra made a face.
“It should be.”
Jorelle bit back her smile.
“Gilliane gets affected by anything and everything,” she told you. “A bit of a crier.”
“And she falls in love with someone different at every Harvest Feast,” Wylla added and fixed her hair in an exaggerated manner. “And if anyone would like to ask me why she didn’t come to the wedding, I have the answer.”
“How?”
“One of her brothers holds affections for me, and he’s a gossip.”
Alys’ jaw dropped. “Which brother?”
“Benton.” Wylla reached out to grab an apple to take a bite, coaxing a laugh out of you while Lyra narrowed her eyes.
“Have you started living in Wintertown and we don’t know about it?”
“It’s just one apple!”
“Don’t let Maester Luwin see you,” Jorelle said and Wylla shrugged her shoulders.
“I am famished, would he rather if I fainted?”
“That is a very sound logic I admit,” you teased them and Wylla gestured at you.
“See?”
“But in return, we hear why she didn’t come to the wedding,” you added, plopping down on the nearest chair and cracking your neck with a grimace. “Sounds interesting.”
“Alright, so…” Wylla jumped to sit on the table. “Benton says she was heartbroken.”
“That’s no news, she gets heartbroken whenever someone looks at her wrong.”
“Jo!”
“Am I lying?”
“No wonder she and I can’t get along well, she has too many feelings for my taste,” Lyra mused and Alys pressed her fist on her lips in an attempt to hide her smile. Barbrey leaned in.
“Who was she heartbroken over?”
“And that’s what is so interesting about it,” Wylla said and turned to you. “Don’t misunderstand this, because I would know if there was anything between them, but…”
You pulled back, your mouth half agape. “Robb?”
The whole room erupted into chaos.
“Wylla!”
“Have they even spoken to each other before?”
“I have never ever seen them exchange words in any wedding or feast.”
“Yeah, Benton says the same. She was admiring him from afar, pushed her father to make an offer of betrothal, but…”
Well, if that was the pleasant girl, at least now you knew she was no real threat to your position or your heart.
“A lot of fathers made—” Barbrey started but Alys elbowed her, stealing a look at Jorelle whose calm face was impossible to read as usual. Lyra shrugged her shoulders.
“I’ll say it if you won’t. Everyone’s fathers made proposals.”
“Lyra, don’t say that!”
“What, like she doesn’t know?”
“I do know,” you assured them. “And I don’t mind at all. If Robb held a grudge over everyone who made a proposal to wed me, our marriage would be cold until we’re old and gray. That’s simply how such arrangements work, it makes sense that families made proposals, I could never hold grudges over that.”
At least that was what Lady Olenna would want you to say.
Untroubled and amused.
That’s what you had to appear when it came to possible former betrothals; untroubled and amused.
Even though what you felt was the complete opposite of that.
“And I don’t want any of you to guard your tongues around me,” you added in a haste, as if you yourself hadn’t been trained to guard your tongue around people since you could speak. “Not when it’s just us, at least.”
No one back in the south would believe or entertain such thought. In fact, if you and Margaery were ever told what you had just said, you both would’ve taken it as an insult to be seen so naïve, but this was the north.
And you could not seem resentful or insecure.
“Now,” you said and grabbed an apple to bite it as well. “Tell me more about this person. I have been suffering from lack of gossip ever since I came here, and I’d like to catch up.”
By dinner time, you had learned everything there was to learn about House Tallhart and their daughters, and thankfully, nothing seemed alarming.
But that didn’t mean you weren’t angry at Robb.
And although Lady Olenna would’ve advised you otherwise, you were going to make sure he knew exactly how you felt.
Lord Stark had made it much easier, albeit not on purpose. He had kept Robb with him the whole day for meetings and petitions, and you had managed to excuse yourself to your own bedchambers right after dinner before he could come back. A week away from home must have meant Lord Stark had much to catch up on, because it was nearly midnight by the time you heard Robb’s heavy gait pass your door. You raised your brows, keeping your attention on your book in your lap when the door to his bedchambers opened, then closed after a couple of complete silence. His footsteps approached your door before he opened it and peeked his head in.
“What are you doing here?”
You flipped the page without pulling your gaze off the book. “Reading.”
“Here?”
“Seems that way.”
“But…” He stepped inside. “But I’m back.”
“Hasn’t escaped me.”
“Then why are you here?”
“It’s my bedchambers,” you replied. “Why are you here?”
“I couldn’t find you in—are you still angry at me?”
“No,” you lied through your teeth. “I simply decided to sleep here tonight.”
Judging by the look on his face, you might as well have announced you meant to annul your marriage: “You’re not sleeping here tonight.”
“I am,” you said, pretending to be engrossed in your book though you barely had any idea what you were reading. “And you can sleep in your own bedchambers and think about Ser Tallhart’s daughter all you want.”
“What?” His eyes widened. “I told you, I only said that for—”
“I care not.” You pointed at the door, your gaze fixed on the page. “Leave me be.”
He lingered there for a moment as if he was trying to find the best approach, then took a step towards the bed.
“My sweet wife—” he started, but stopped dead in his tracks when you lifted your head to glare daggers at him. He swallowed thickly and cleared his throat.
“I was trying to encourage Jon.”
“I heard you the first time,” you said and closed to book to give him a snake like smile. “Now that you’re here though, how are northern girls different than southern girls? Since you are an expert, you should have no issues enlightening me?”
“That’s—” He pointed back at the door like Jon was standing outside, stumbling over his words. “I simply said, if Jon didn’t find any southern girls to his liking, northern girls might be uh—different?” The last word came out like an uncertain question. “In terms of his uh, his…affections.”
You raised your brows, still glaring at him.
“I swear it was for Jon only.”
“Wonderful,” you deadpanned. “You may leave now. Have pleasant dreams.”
A ghost of a smile twitched the corner of his mouth. “I can’t believe you’re jealou—”
“Robb if you finish that sentence, I will make you suffer in a very southern way, and then you’ll know the actual difference between northern and southern girls,” you growled, and he held up his hands, biting back his smile.
“Be angry at me if you wish,” he said, stepping closer to the bed, “but we’re not sleeping in different beds.”
“I’m not coming there, and you’re not welcomed here.”
“Oh you are coming there,” he said and before you could so much as blink, he had thrown you over his shoulder, a surprised shriek spilling from your lips.
“Put me down this instant!” you exclaimed, your voice going high-pitched while he made his way to the door. You pressed your palms on his shoulder to throw him off his balance and wiggle out of his grip, but much to your frustration, it didn’t work. “How dare you? This is actual disrespect, you—”
“You left me no other choice,” he stated, stepping out of your bedchambers into the hallway. “Whose fault is it? Not mine.”
“Put me down!”
He turned, but stopped in an instant, and though you hoped it was because he decided to listen to you, the real reason turned out to be very different. He shifted his weight and let out a curt cough like he was trying to regain his composure.
“Father.”
Oh Gods.
Oh Gods no.
Lord Stark could not see you like this, absolutely not.
“…Robb.”
Alright then, Lord Stark was indeed seeing you like this.
You shut your eyes tight, half hoping it would make both of you disappear from Lord Stark’s vision, scrunching up your face.
“Good evening, Lord Stark,” you squealed out, the angle Robb was holding you in preventing you from seeing your father-in-law, perhaps by mercy.
“My wife and I were just…” Robb started, but even you could tell he had no idea where the sentence would go. “We were uh, going to sleep.”
Well, Robb was a terrible liar, so at least you could find some solace in that for the future of your marriage, especially now that you were going to have to spend the rest of the said marriage not being able to look at his father in the eye. A silence fell upon the hallway before Lord Stark heaved a sigh as if he had the realm’s weight on his shoulders, and even though you couldn’t see his face, you could picture the exasperation on his face.
“I saw nothing,” he ended up saying. “I saw nothing, and I am walking away before I see anything.”
You heard Lord Stark go past him and you watched him walk to the other end of the hallway without sparing a glance back. A whine climbed your throat and you slumped over his shoulder, hiding your face in your hands until Robb entered his—your—bedchambers and dropped you on the bed. You grabbed the nearest pillow to throw at him, your cheeks burning.
“I won’t be able to look at your father anymore, Robb!”
“He doesn’t mind.”
“He—that—” you stammered, gesturing at the door. “He saw!”
“Aye, and he doesn’t mind,” Robb said, catching the other pillow in the air. “To repeat, you gave me no other choice!”
You gritted your teeth and turned to Grey Wind who was watching you both from beside the fireplace.
“Grey Wind, up,” you commanded and he leaped on the bed, making Robb frown.
“What are you doing?”
“He will sleep between us.”
“No he won’t.”
“Yes he will,” you said and pulled the fur covers on top of you, the direwolf curling up next to you. “You can sleep on your side, or you can sleep somewhere else dreaming of Ser Tallhart’s pleasant daughter, your choice.”
“That’s a vile accusation and a terrible insult—Grey Wind, down.”
“Grey Wind, stay,” you shot back and Grey Wind let out a huff, looked between you and Robb, then yawned and nudged your arm with his snout. “See? He’s staying.”
Robb threw his head back with a groan while you pulled your pillow to yourself.
“Lamb…”
“I’m too sleepy to argue.”
“Then just listen?”
“I shall not,” you said, closing your eyes. “Goodnight.”
“But…”
“Goodnight, I said.”
Robb exhaled through his nose impatiently and moved about in the room, his heavy steps enough of a clue to what he was doing. Despite trying to control yourself, you still ended up opening an eye to watch him take off his shirt, but you shut your eyes again before he could see you gawking at him. He got under the furs, and after a couple of seconds you dared steal a peek again to find him half naked, his arm thrown over his eyes to block the candlelight, oblivious to the way your gaze followed down his chiseled body while you bit at your lip.
Oh well.
Just because you were angry at him didn’t mean you couldn’t enjoy the sight.
him walking into the kitchen one morning in only his underwear, cock hard and heavy enough it bounces against his thigh when he walks. he doesnt acknowledge it; he pours himself a cup of coffee and gives you a nod.
"you're staring at me," he says.
neither one of you have acknowledged the tension between you. the way he watches your lips and the way you undo your bikini tops when you sunbathe by the pool.
"I'm just really hungry all of a sudden," you say. "Your son fed me before he left, but he just... didnt fill me up."
the next day, you get your coffee in just your panties and your favorite bra. he's back again, just as hard as he scooches behind you to grab the pot from the percolator. his cock is press against your ass and you can feel how thick he really is.
"did you get your fill this morning?" he asks from over your shoulder.
"no," you press back slightly. "I'm ravenous."
"You think he'd be more like his father. I always make sure my woman are stuffed."
You two get into a habit of hugging when you say good morning. He wraps his arms around you and keeps you tight so you can feel him against your stomach. Sometimes he lifts you on to the counter to "hug you better". like that his cock is pressed right up against your cunt, angled perfectly as if he's about to enter you.
"Best hug we've ever had," he whispers with a roll of the hips.
The air tastes of concrete and ash, the dust from the chaos still settling. Bakugo's mouth is filled with grit and no matter how much he tries to spit he can feel it rub against his gums and coat his tongue. It's knocked a contact out of his left eye and its somehow gotten down the back of his pants and rubbed his ass raw. As he emerges from the rubble, it takes effort not to hack up his lungs; his head is swimming and the lack of oxygen might actually make him pass out. Instead, he rubs the snot off of his face with his sleeve-
"Ew."
Of course, you look picture perfect. Your new costume is pristine, your hair is somehow still styled, and your skin looks better than ever: somehow you've managed to leave a building collapse looking better than ever.
"You look terrible."
"Where the fuck were you?" Bakugo spits again.
"Three feet behind you." The way you smile pisses him the fuck off. Everything you've done since you hit the scene pisses him off. "I put up a shield."
Your quirk also enrages him. Perfect little bubble shields that his blasts don't break. It actually makes the two of you great mission partners because he can go apeshit without worrying about singeing your eyebrows off, but he'd rather die than admit that.
"And you couldn't get me too?"
"Hm, I guess not." You adjust yourself with a shrug, turning on your heel towards the street. "Oopsie."
The dryness in his mouth is getting painful. "Oopsie? Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Sorry, I thought the ranked 16th hero could take care of himself," you fake a pout. "But I guess you need help from number 14."
"Fuck off." He stands and tries to wipe off his face with his dirty gloves. "You couldn't have done shit without me doing the hard work."
"Sorry, I can't hear you from all the way down the popularity polls."
"Oh-" Bakugo nearly snaps, but instead geits hos teeth so tight that he thinks he might have chipped a molar
"I'll be sure to thank you in my interview. They tend to give pretty people the front page."
The major publications do give you the front page. You give the tightest, cutest little speech about the power of teamwork and loving this community and blah blah blah, all of which makes him roll his fucking eyes. You take a couple pictures with Bakugo, but the picture of you that ends up on social media is of just you, sparkly and perfect.
The picture that the tabloid accounts post are very, very different.
"Holy shit."
Bakugo near drops the phone when the post comes across his Twitter feed. It's you from behind, bent over to grab something, and your costume is having a... malfuction. It's halfway up your ass, so tight that he's sure he could make out the shape of your pussy if the picture wasn't blurred.
Bakugo is googling for the uncensored picture before he can feel any shame about it. They're out there and his suspicions were right-- he can tell how soft your pussy is just from looking at it. It's probably feel nice to close his teeth around you softly, just enough to feel the shape of it in his mouth, just enough to get you to gasp. The real bite would be out of your ass, right where it's the meatiest so he could get the biggest mouthful of you.
Bakugo's cock twitches.
He puts down his phone.
Then, he picks it back up. And put in back down. Then, he picks it up again and closes the tab before making a call.
"Hey." Bakugo says the moment you pick up the phone. "Nice ass."
There's a bit too much sincerity to that, but you don't seem it notice.
"You're the worst," you seethe before the line goes dead. It feels like a hollow victory as he leans back into his couch, trying to shake the weird feeling his chest has accumulated. He doesn't like you in the slightest, your costume is just cut extremely high on your hips, that's it. He's just a man, he can't help the primal instinct of wanting--
That thought makes him sneer at himself. Gross. Before he can admonish himself more, his phone is vibrating.
"Hel-"
"At least I have an ass; you're built like a board." Your voice snaps through the receiver.
"Fuck you. I have a bubble butt-"
"Are you a teenaged girl? Get off of tiktok."
"Fuck you." Bakugo wants to bite you in a different way now.
A.N: Hi my loves! 🩷 Thank you so so much for your wonderful support, you've made me so happy! 🩷I hope you'll like this one as well, and please let me know what you think🩷 ILYSM, kisses! 🩷
Pairing: Robb Stark x F!Reader
Summary: Honeymoon is made better with gifts.
Word Count: 4k
Warnings: Explicit language, adult themes, suggestive themes. MDNI- Do not read if you're under 18.
Series Masterlist
Life in the North was full of responsibilities.
Robb knew that. As the heir to House Stark and the future Lord of Winterfell, he had always known he would have responsibilities to his house, his family, and the north.
However, as a new husband, he also had responsibilities to his wife, and those outweighed anything and everything else, in spite of the rest of the realm thinking otherwise.
It had been his father’s request of course. After postponing everything for over a moon because of the wedding, he now had to go back to his regular visits to his bannermen and lords to ensure loyalty, and as usual, Robb was expected to go with him. Before his wedding, Robb never had any problems with it, instead he found it useful for the future but now…
It was different now.
He pulled on his breeches and went over to the hearth to feed the fire so that the room would still be hot when he left. After giving Grey Wind a quick scratch behind the ears, he got into a white linen shirt and put on his boots, trying to be as quiet as possible so as not to around his lady from her slumber. He sat at the foot of the bed fixing his sleeves, but he was so lost in his own thoughts that he didn’t notice the bed shift before his lady draped herself across his back like a cloak, her arms thrown over his shoulders. The warmth of her naked skin seeped through his shirt while she tucked her face into the crook of his neck with a sleepy sigh and Robb smiled, his chest tightening with the rush of happiness flooding it.
“Did I wake you?” he asked, his voice low in the quiet of the room save for the crackling of wood in the fireplace. She shook her head, letting out a noise of displeasure.
“No,” she said, her breath caressing his neck. “But you should have.”
He entwined his fingers with hers to press a kiss on the back of her hand. “It’s early in the morning still.”
“Mayhaps, but you’re leaving for a week.”
He didn’t even have to look at her to know she had a sulky expression on her face, it was clear as day from her voice. With another curt kiss on her wrist, he slipped out of her arms to turn to see her better, but that turned out to be the wrong move, especially considering he was expected outside.
Gods, he was never going to get used to this.
The sight of her sitting there all prim and proper as if she wasn’t bare before him was enough to make his breath hitch in his throat, desire shooting through him faster than a lightning strike. It took every ounce of willpower in him not to pounce on her, the familiar fire burning low in his veins while she blinked slowly, sleep still clinging to her eyes. He couldn’t help but reach out to graze his fingertips up her waist, awakening goosebumps on her soft skin.
“And how,” he murmured, his voice hoarse with want, “am I supposed to leave you when you look like this?”
A teasing smile curled her lips.
“You’re not,” she answered. “And yet…”
Robb found himself mirroring her smile before he leaned in to steal a kiss from her, his hand cupping the side of her neck as he gently pushed her on her back so that he could settle between her legs, a giggle escaping her.
“Robb!”
It was simply cruel; to expect him to be anywhere but here in her arms while she looked up at him with such a pretty pout.
“Yes, my lady?”
She fiddled with the laces of his shirt as if she wanted to focus on something else, her brows pulled into a worried frown.
“Is it very far?” she asked. “Torrhen’s Square?”
“Not very far but we’ll stay for a night or two,” he muttered, dipping his head to kiss her neck but she stopped him.
“But you’ll be back in seven days for certain?” she insisted. “No longer?”
“Seven days is long enough.”
“No I know, I just…” she trailed off while he played with her hair absentmindedly. “I don’t want you to be away any longer than necessary, that’s all.”
“Trust me,” Robb grumbled, “I wouldn’t be leaving if it were up to me.”
That irresistible pout pulled at her lips again.
“Or so you claim.”
He shot her a half-hearted glare. “Do you honestly think I’d rather spend a night in Ser Tallhart’s castle—”
“I thought he was a lord.”
“House Tallhart is a masterly house.”
“Masterly house?”
“It’s…” Robb trailed off. “Think of landed knights but northern.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, you honestly think I’d rather spend a night in Ser Tallhart’s castle than be here with you?”
“Well, where will you be for a week? Here with me or Ser Tallhart’s castle?”
“I’ll be on horseback for most of it,” he corrected her and she pushed at his shoulder, making him chuckle. She nibbled on her lip, then took a deep breath.
“While you’re away,” she said. “May I ask something of you?”
“Anything.”
She raised her brows. “Anything?”
“I’d give you the realm if you wanted,” he muttered, nudging her nose with his, drawing a giggle out of her.
“I suppose it’s lucky that I don’t wish for the realm,” she said softly. “I only wish for your attention and affection.”
His heart melted in his ribcage.
“But since I’m to be deprived of both for a week,” she added before he could assure her she’d have them forever. “I want you to bring me a gift from there, wherever Torrhen’s Square is.”
His grin widened. “A gift?”
“Yes,” she said, wrapping the laces of his shirt around her index finger. “So that I’ll know you thought of me.”
He frowned down at her.
“And my wife, who has conquered my heart and my soul,” he said, caressing her cheekbone, “believes it possible that I will not think of her?”
She shrugged despite the smile playing on her lips, but before she could say anything, a servant knocked on the door.
“My lord, the horses are ready, your father is waiting for you.”
Robb repressed a groan and dipped his head to give her a goodbye kiss, unable to make himself pull back until she did, her eyes darting over his face.
“Promise me you’ll miss me,” she said, nearly breathless as he captured her lips with his again.
“I will,” he murmured. “I swear it. Promise me you’ll miss me back?”
“Every second,” she said and he stole another kiss from her, then forced himself to get off of her, already longing for her warmth. He grabbed his doublet to put it on while she pulled the furs up to her chest, then leaned over the edge of the bed so that she could give Grey Wind head scratches.
“What kind of gift?” Robb couldn’t help but ask as she cooed at Grey Wind, then turned her head.
“Hm?”
He clasped his cloak. “What kind of gift?”
“That’s for you to choose.” She kissed Grey Wind’s head who gave her a happy rumble. “You be careful out there, my sweet.”
Robb went over to her to peck her on the lips. “And you be careful here.”
“I will.” She beamed at him and let herself fall back on the bed while he walked to the door. “Miss me!”
“I will,” Robb chuckled and let himself gaze at her once more, then opened the door and stepped out with Grey Wind following him suit. The direwolf let out a whine, turning his head to look back at the door and Robb heaved a sigh.
“I know,” he said as he made his way down the hallway. “Trust me, I know.”
At least the road hadn’t been troublesome.
Ser Tallhart and his family were good friends of House Stark, as they had been for centuries. They were very welcoming too, so after the meetings were over and the petitions were listened, the dinner was turned into a small feast. Though northern houses had less resources than houses of the Reach, they made up for it in hospitality, and this was yet another occasion for the two houses to get together along with some of the other vassals. He and his father had been talking to Ser Tallhart for the last ten minutes, and it was only when he excused himself to go to talk to another lord that his father turned to Robb.
“You look tormented.”
“I left my lady wife in Winterfell.”
“So did I, Robb,” his father reminded him and Robb made a face.
“It’s not the same, father.”
Or at least he wanted to think it was not.
His father raised his brows, biting back a smile.
“It’ll be good for you,” he said after a beat while Robb took a sip of his ale. “To be away for a week. Your mother tells me the whole North is talking about how you barely let your wife out of your bedchambers, they should see that’s not the case.”
“It’s not the case,” Robb insisted. “What, because we skipped breakfast a couple of times?”
“And keep excusing yourselves right after dinner,” his father pointed out. “And just the other day you all but snatched her when she was merely walking down the hallway—”
“We had things to talk of,” he defended himself, his ears burning. “And it may have escaped people, but we’re on our honeymoon.”
His father hummed. “It hasn’t escaped people, but you don’t want them to think you’re ruled by…excitement.”
Robb was fully aware of the fire spreading over his face, but he looked down at his cup and took a sip again while his father glanced around the hall, then heaved a sigh.
“Do you know what’s happening with Jon?”
Robb turned his head to find his brother in the crowded hall. The last he checked, he and Theon were talking to Ser Tallhart’s sons, but it was clear that Jon had left the conversation to go drink at the table by himself, lost in his own thoughts. It wasn’t a new occasion to see him sulk, but at least in the feasts and such he used to hold a conversation, especially if Theon or Robb were around.
And strangely enough, this wasn’t the first time Robb noticed it. Jon had been in low spirits for a couple of days, since the day before the Greensteds left Winterfell.
“He’s tired, perhaps.”
“For days?” his father asked and Robb shrugged his shoulders.
“I’ll talk to him,” he said and made his way to Jon to sit across from him, making his head snap up.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Robb said. “You look sulkier than I am, and I’m away from my lady. What’s going on with you?”
“Uh….” Jon blinked a couple of times. “I’m tired.”
“See, I just gave the very same excuse to father, and he didn’t believe it either,” Robb pointed out while he filled his cup, and Jon’s brows pinched together.
“Father asked?”
“Aye, you’ve been upset for the last couple of days.” Robb took a sip of his ale again. “Jon, be honest with me. Is this because of the southerners?”
Jon’s eyes widened. “…What?”
“They left and you’re upset?” Robb asked as Jon pulled back a little, swallowing thickly. “Who was that lady you danced with at the wedding, Lady Florys? Is it because she left?”
Jon stared at him for a couple of seconds and let out a breath, a look of relief crossing his features.
“No,” he said. “No, she was nice, but I don’t…”
“Was there another guest who caught your attention then?”
Jon pursed his lips, then shook his head.
“No.”
“Because my lady says—”
“What are we talking about?” Theon plopped down next to Robb, and Jon took a huge sip of his drink.
“Robb thinks just because he’s in love, I must be in love as well.”
“That’s not what I said.” Robb pointed at him. “I’m just trying to find a reason for your sulking being worse than usual, that is all.”
“Oh I think I know what this is about,” Theon told them, his eyes a little glassy no doubt thanks to ale. “But it’s good that you didn’t fall in love with a southern girl, Snow. Everyone knows the southern girls are—”
“Careful there,” Robb cut him off, glaring at him and Theon held up his hands, gesturing surrender.
“Your lady excluded, obviously,” he corrected himself. “But come on, Jon is not gonna wed a southerner.” He clasped a hand over his shoulder to shake him. “He’ll wed a northerner, that’s more his type!”
“I don’t even know what you mean to say, Greyjoy.”
“I mean to say, look around,” Theon pointed out. “Just because the whole Reach came to Winterfell and a lot of northerners and southerners found each other to their liking, does not mean you have to be among them. No need to feel excluded, maybe you simply like northern girls better than southern girls.”
Oh, Robb hadn’t thought about that possibility.
Perhaps Theon was right, it wasn’t because Jon liked any of the southern ladies, it was because he couldn’t find someone to his liking even with so many of them in Winterfell, and felt excluded.
Even his lady had said many of her friends would be exchanging letters with the northern men they’d met at the wedding.
“Am I wrong?” Theon asked Robb who shook his head.
“Not at all,” he said quickly. “Southern girls are different than northern girls, and not every northern girl came to the wedding.”
“Aye.”
“There are a bunch of people you have not talked with,” Robb said, stealing a glance around the hall. “A bunch of houses who are loyal to House Stark, like—oh, like Ser Tallhart’s daughter over there, see? She seems pleasant.”
“Very pleasant,” Theon said. “But mayhaps not that one.”
“Why not? Is she betrothed?”
“Her brothers said she held a lot of admiration for you,” Theon said with a grin. “Asked her father to make an offer of betrothal before you were betrothed to your lady.”
Fuck, that was not going to help Jon here.
Robb gave Theon a warning glare who sat up straighter.
“But he has another daughter,” Theon added in a haste. “Prettier if you ask me. Over there, talking to Lord Glover’s daughter—”
“I think I’m gonna go outside and find Ghost,” Jon mumbled and pushed back his chair, then made his way out of the hall while Robb and Theon exchanged glances.
“Did I make it worse?” Theon asked and Robb shrugged.
“Nah,” he said. “I doubt it.”
“And what of you?” Theon asked, leaning back. “Eager to be back in Winterfell already?”
Robb brushed a hand over his face. “That obvious?”
“Very obvious,” Theon said, then gave him a grin. “But hey, at least your lady is free to roam in the castle now that you’re not there to keep her captive in your bedchambers.”
Robb scoffed a laugh, then flipped him and took another sip of his ale.
They arrived in Winterfell at the hour of the wolf, a week after they left.
The last couple of hours had been a test on Robb’s willpower; ever since they had entered the Wolfswood he had been trying to keep himself from galloping his horse to the castle and leave the others behind. He knew that his lady was asleep—the whole castle was asleep, but he still couldn’t wait to have her in his arms and take in her sweet scent and see her, after torturous days of being away from her.
No matter how tired he was from the road, the mere promise of her presence was enough to make him feel refreshed as if he’d had a full night’s sleep rather than having spent hours on horseback.
He made his way into the keep with Grey Wind following him, leaving his horse to his squire to handle without a glance back. After climbing the stairs, he walked down the hallway and pushed his door open, but what greeted him was the sight of the dark and empty bedchambers, making him frown.
Where was his lady?
The bed was made and the hearth was empty, so it was clear that she hadn’t gone out for a stroll. He glanced around as if she could jump out of the shadows, then looked down at Grey Wind who wagged his tail at him.
“Do you know where she is?”
Grey Wind sniffed the air, then turned around to leave the room, this time with Robb following him. Even though Robb half expected him to lead him out of the keep, he was proven otherwise when the direwolf padded down the hallway, then went to sit in front of the closed door to his lady’s bedchambers and looked up at him.
“Good work,” Robb whispered and scratched Grey Wind’s head, then pushed open the door and stepped inside, the warmth of the room hitting his face, no doubt thanks to the fully lit hearth.
Considering she spent every night with him, he hadn’t been inside his lady’s bedchambers since they were wed, nor had he understood why she couldn’t just use their bedchambers, but now that he was seeing it for the first time, it made sense.
The room completely belonged to her.
As she had mentioned earlier, she was given the room with the best light, the huge windows letting the moonlight inside at night and sunlight in the morning. Her vanity was at the corner, and on the other corner, there were three panels of full length mirrors together, reminding him of a room divider. The frames were carved with flowers and goats, but on the top there were two snarling wolves, making him smile. The other side of the room was spared to her wardrobe and chests of accessories, he could already tell, seeing that one of them was left open.
And at the center of the room, there was the bed she laid, too lost in her dreams to notice his presence.
Even in her sleep she managed to take his breath away. For a moment, Robb wondered whether she knew just how enchanting she was, but all the thoughts in his head washed away as his gaze devoured her sleeping form, the furs drawn to her chest while she lay on her side, the strap of her nightgown slipped off one shoulder. He took a step towards the bed, and as if on cue, Frost’s head popped up behind her as she blearily blinked at him, then rested her head on her waist.
By the Gods, of course she had taken Frost from the stables so that she could sleep in the bed.
Robb heaved a sigh and made his way to bed to pick up the lamb, earning a soft bleat in return.
“You can stay with Grey Wind,” he muttered to her and opened the door to put her next to Grey Wind who had curled up by the door, as if he was on watch duty. If he didn’t know any better, he would’ve thought the tiny lamb was glaring up at him before she heaved a sigh, then plopped on top of Grey Wind in a dramatic manner, making the direwolf huff. Robb bit back a smile, then closed the door again to approach the bed.
Her scent filled his lungs as he carefully dipped his head to nuzzle into the crook of her neck, running his fingertips down her arm. She shifted a little, muttering something into her pillow, and it was only when Robb pressed a kiss on her neck that the haze of sleep slipped off of her, making her jolt with a sharp breath.
“It’s me,” Robb said with a chuckle and an exhale left her before she grabbed the nearest pillow to hit him with it.
“You scared me!” she exclaimed, drawing a laugh out of him as she dropped the pillow to press a hand on her chest. “Seven hells, Robb!”
“I missed you too.” He grinned before stealing a kiss from her. “Though I must admit, being struck with a pillow was not the welcome I had in mind.”
She let out a giggle and pushed at his arm, still breathless.
“I feared you were some sort of a thief in the night.”
“No thief can enter the keep, my love.”
“Well, still!” she insisted and pulled herself up in the bed to lean her back to the headboard, fixing her hair. “How fared your visit?”
“Torturous.”
She sat up straighter, her eyes gleaming even in the dim room. “What did you bring me?”
Robb hissed in a breath.
“Ah,” he said. “I forgot about that.”
Teasing her was nothing new to him, and it always made him laugh when she got all flustered, but this time was different. His stomach churned at once when her grin faltered, that shine in her eyes getting dim as she blinked a couple of times in hesitation.
“Oh,” she said softly after a beat and tried to smile. “That’s alright, I have um—I have enough things anyway!”
Yeah no, he couldn’t take her sadness even if it was for a second.
“Right,” he said and reached into his doublet to pull out a small pouch. “I suppose you don’t need this then?”
Her jaw dropped and she gasped, then hit him with the pillow again.
“Robb!”
“I mean I could always throw it away—” He let out a laugh when she snatched it from his hand. “Or not.”
“You didn’t forget!”
“Of course I didn’t forget,” he told her. “If my lady wife requests something, she shall have it.”
She untied the pouch and turned it over, the necklace falling into her palm, making her breath hitch. It wasn’t overly intricate; tiny drop shaped blue-white gems dangling from two gold wires twisted around each other, but when Robb found it in the market of Torrhen’s Square at a merchant’s stall, all he could think about was how beautiful it would look around his lady’s neck.
“The merchant said it was—”
“Moonstone,” she finished his sentence for him, lifting her head from the necklace to beam at him. “It’s gorgeous, thank you! I love it!”
Before he could kiss her, she had already leaped out of the bed to rush to the full length mirrors on the other side of the room, holding the necklace over her neck, trying to see it from all angles. He pushed himself off the bed to make his way to her, and she fixed her hair so that he could clasp the necklace before he wrapped his arms around her torso, her sweet scent engulfing him. She looked down at the necklace, her hand shooting up to adjust the gemstones while he watched her in the mirror, desire making him nearly lightheaded.
“Whoever said husbands didn’t know how to choose gifts doesn’t know of you,” she said airily before turning in his arms to look up at him with a big smile, and Robb found himself mirroring it. “Thank you so much, it’s so beautiful!”
“Of course,” he muttered, pressing a kiss under her jaw. “And you look very beautiful, my lady. You and your gown.”
“And my necklace!”
“And your necklace.” He huffed a chuckle while his hands tugged at the laces of her nightgown, but she pulled back a little.
“Wait—” She reached back to feel the clasp of the delicate chain. “Help me take it off first?”
A wolfish grin curled his lips before he leaned in to kiss her, walking her back to the bed until her legs hit the edge of the bed and she fell on the furs with a small squeal that turned into the sweetest giggle when he all but pounced on her.
“But my necklace—”
“Keep it on,” Robb murmured, dipping his head to trail his lips down her neck. “I want to see you come undone wearing nothing but that.”
btw I think your father met your knight right after he's appointed to his position in the military. its a gathering of some sorts, one where the knight is forced to be there and he's miserable-
until he catches a glimpse of you across the way. you're laughing with friends and he thinks it's the prettiest sound in the whole world. Your dress is like the waves of the Sapphire Sea: a brilliant blue he did not know fabric could be, capped white hems, and glittering gems scattering throughout the design.
"Do you know who that is?" a man says to the knight, gesturing with his glass of wine.
"No. It's wrong of me to stare," the knight says without thinking. "But think she may be the most beautiful girl in the world."
The man laughs.
They talk for a while, about life, about how the knight's family is from Theesa and the man sails there often, how the knight is now a commander, how the men under him are being taught how to behave. The mention their time in the Golden City and how the knight pays for his mother to live there, near her friends and the sea.
"Are you married?" the man asks suddenly and the knight is taken aback.
"Life in the knighthood hasn't left me with many options for marriage."
"Do you wish to have a wife?"
The knight is even more surprised. It takes him a moment to answer, voice suddenly soft. "I would. A family as well."
"You are in luck. My daughter needs to be wed."
"I could never deserve her hand-"
"Nonsense. I do not care about title; I care if you will treat my beloved daughter the way she deserves," the man says. "If I could take care of her forever, I would, but I fear I will die one day. She will need a husband. If she likes you, her hand will be yours."
Before the knight can reply, the man calls for his daughter.
And the most beautiful girl in the world turns around.
im still turning over the idea but I dont think you have a very romantic first time with your knight husband. he's home for a fortnight and you gather the courage to do to his quarters one night. he's half dressed, body darkened from the sun and heavily scarred, muscles soft from good meals-
"We should consummate the marriage."
He turns away.
"That isn't necessary."
"It is."
The two of you watch each other for a long while, stuck there, in uncertainty. He always watches you with wide eyes and you nearly laugh when you realize he reminds you of a deer in the tree-line, debating whether the hide or flee.
"I have never done any of this," you admit. "I will not be as impressive as others you may have-"
"That is the second time you have implied I have other lovers." Your husband cuts in. "I have devoted myself to you. I will not stray."
i think its the first thing you two really have in common. You notice a chess set, clearly gifted, and perk up immediately, offering to teach him to play.
he. absolutely cleans the floor with you multiple times.
thats not to say you aren't a good chess player. You're very good.
He's just... better.
though, you find on nights where you wear your looser gowns, the ones that gap at the top, the chemise that's nearly see through, he seems to forget how to play
the first night you play is quiet. both of you focus on the game and awkward small talk.
the second night, as you're moving your first pawn, you gingerly ask a question.
"Why is your second staying here?" Your bat your eyelashes as you ask. "Does he not have family to return to?"
Your husband rolls his head back and forth, sucking air through his teeth.
"I don't know if I should divulge."
That makes you sit up.
"Is it dangerous? Related to espionage or battle-"
"No, no, it's... He has fallen out of favor with his wife." He moves his piece confidently, the painted stone clicking against the tile. Tonight, you play on his bed, on top of the covers, both of you lounging long. "He has been with her for seven years. Their eldest just turned five."
You wait for more, but he gestures to the board, waiting for your move. Once you move another pawn, he continues.
"Last time we went to his estate, he brought home his bastard, who was born five days before his eldest," he says. His eyes is focused on the board, but you know the knit in his brow isn't because of your chess prowess. "Now, he expects her to raise the boy, who is now the firstborn and will inherit the family estate."
The pieces of the game go flying when you reach over and shove the man by the shoulder. he nearly falls off the side of the mattress, stumbling to catch himself.
"Shut up!" Your voice echoes down the hall from the volume. Your husband looks shocked, eyes wide, mouth popped open.
"Why did you hit me?!" he says, aghast. " I didn't do it!"
"These are things you tell your wife!" you say. "Why are you friends with such a slut of a man?"
"We-- slut?"
"Slut! I'm allowed to curse, am I not?"
"My wife is allowed to do whatever she likes for the rest of her life!"
There's a very unfortunate side effect of staying up late with uour husband and its that you really, really, truly want to fuck him.
You were the type of little girl to imagine your future husband sweeping you off of your feet and kissing you. After puberty those thoughts drifted into getting the daylights fucked out of you by a strong, handsome man, one with big hands and large biceps-
And now you have that man.
And he wants to play chess instead of with your body.
you start losing harder because you're stuck thinking about him and what he's keeping from you.
"Are you well?" he asks suddenly. "You usually play so nicely."
Well, you're thinking about him climbing on top of you
"There's an opportunity for your knight to mount my queen."
janainaart
yousharknotpass
theartofmadeline
dededos
