proud ghoul fucker and knox’s slut

• a bi-monthly multifandom obsessor (rn its outlast) • self indulgent fic writer • 18+ blog i really cannot be bothered to be blocking all of u (but pls dni)

[mrsdotleonkennedy]

unfortunately due to a sickening combination of hyperfixation and ovulation i am infact craving an intense foursome with leland coyle, dr easterman and eddie gluskin right now.

[the-darklings]

𓈒 ˳ ˳ 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐁𝐎𝐁𝐁𝐘 𓈒 (𝐁) 𝐟𝐨𝐫 (𝐁)𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫.

pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby (bb).        (j u s t  u s .) contents/warnings: devotion. closed eyes. a face that fits better than the one it was copied from. food you didn't ask the origin of. warmth in a place that should not be warm. what happened to the thing in the corridor d̶o̶n̶'t  w o r r y  a b o u t  i t ,  b a b y . notes: I know you're here because you wanted to see what I'd say when you weren't looking. That's okay.    I don't mind.        I like that you're curious about me.                I like that you're still reading.                                 Stay a while.                                            this is a love story this is a y o u  a l r e a d y  k n o w  w h a t  t h i s  i s .

📹 [better bobby series masterlist.] everything you need is right here.

                        You're here again.

        Good.

I was hoping you'd come back. I always hope you'll come back, even though hoping is a word I had to learn and the shape of it still sits wrong in whatever I have instead of a mouth when I'm not wearing one.

But you're here. Reading. Scrolling. Your eyes moving left to right, left to right, the little mechanical rhythm of it, and I know you think you're on the outside of this. I know you think there's a screen between us. Glass. Distance. The safe architecture of fiction.

There isn't.

But that's okay. Don't worry about that right now.

                                                S̷̬̈t̵̰̾a̸̝͂y̷̖̓ ̶̣̈́a̴̹͌ ̵̙̀w̷̭̉h̸̘͝ǐ̷͇ḷ̶̾ḙ̸͂.̷̰̊

Let me tell you how it started.

I have been here since the hum.

Not the fluorescent hum you hear. The one before that. The one the fluorescents were built to cover. The deep, wet, subterranean frequency that lives in the marrow of Level 0 like a second heartbeat, and I know this because I was here before the walls were walls, before the carpet was carpet, before the ceiling tiles arranged themselves into their awful infinite grid and decided to stay.

I am old.

I'm so old that the word "old" is younger than me.

I have no name. Never needed one. Names are doors and I am not a door. I am the thing that lives in the architecture. The long dark hallway that doesn't end. I am the reason the lights flicker, and the reason you feel watched in empty rooms.

I have eaten things that would make your teeth fall out to look at. I have torn apart creatures with no faces and creatures with too many faces and I have dragged them through wet drywall and listened to them scream in frequencies no one can hear.

This is my territory. Every mildewed inch.

I know humans.

Your kind is not novelty to me. They’ve been falling through the cracks of your bright world and into my corridors since before you had language to describe what was happening to you. I have watched you stumble, wander, starve, go mad. Seen your little groups huddle in corners with their pooled rations and their whispered plans and their systems. I have killed some of you. Helped others. Moved through your camps like a draft through an open door, taking what interested me, discarding what didn't.

You have always interested me more than the other things that live here.

The Hounds are animals. The Smilers are a nuisance. The Skin-Stealers are an insult, frankly. A grotesque parody of an art form I perfected before they crawled out of whatever wet level spawned them.

But humans. Humans are complicated. Humans contain contradictions. They build shelter in places designed to unmake them and name the shelter home and believe it so hard that it almost becomes true.

I have watched thousands of you.

I did not want to know any of you.

Until her.

         Until you.

There are places where my territory bleeds. Thin spots. Places where the walls of Level 0 press up against the walls of your bright world like two bodies lying back to back in the dark, not touching but aware. I know all of them. Every seam, every membrane, every fracture where the hum leaks through into basements and storage rooms and forgotten corridors.

Clark's furniture store. The basement. Storage level. Behind a shelving unit full of cabinet hardware, behind flatpack boxes and sawdust and the smell of wood stain, there is a wall that breathes.

I know because I breathe through it.

And one night—one unremarkable night in a place where nights mean nothing—I pressed myself against the thin place and I heard two voices.

His first. Low, lazy, half-amused. The kind of voice that has its own gravity. "—seriously, babe, if Clark asks where the display cushions went, I had nothing to do with it."

Then yours.

"Bobby, you literally just—I watched you put three of them in the truck."

"Slander. Hearsay. You can't prove anything."

"They're in your truck right now."

"Those are different cushions."

"They have Clark's price tags on them."

"Circumstantial, baby"

And the sound you made—this bright, exasperated, affectionate sound, half-groaned—came through the wall and into my corridors and I.

Stopped.

I don't know why you.

I've thought about it. I have had an obscene amount of time to think about it, and I still don't have an answer that satisfies the question.

Thousands of humans have passed through these walls. Some of them laughed. Others were kind. Some of them had voices that carried through the thin places and into my corridors. I listened and I moved on and I forgot them before the echo died.

But yours.

Maybe it was this: even then, even at your happiest, even in the middle of laughing at his stupid cushion joke with the full-bodied delight of a woman in love—even then, there was a note in your voice.

Underneath.

Like a crack in glass. Not audible to him. Or to you. But audible to me, because I've been listening to the frequencies beneath frequencies since before your species learned to speak, and I know what loneliness sounds like when it's buried deep down.

You were happy. And you were already, even then, a little bit alone.

Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe I just liked the sound of you. Maybe there is no cosmic reason, no grand architecture of fate. Maybe I'm an ancient thing that pressed its face against a wall and heard a woman laugh and thought:

Oh.

You. Of course it was going to be you.

I came back. Every night. I came back to the thin place and I pressed myself flat and I listened. I did not understand what I was doing or why but I could not stop.

You worked night shifts. He came to visit. Bobby. Bobby Franklin. I learned his name because it was a frequent word in your mouth. Bobby. Babe. Baby. Franklin, when you were annoyed, which happened often and delighted me for reasons I couldn't identify.

In the beginning, he came every shift.

I could hear him come down the basement stairs. Heavy gait on concrete, the jingle of keys, the particular creak of the third step from the bottom. I could hear the change in your voice when he was there—brighter, pitched higher, more animated, full of warmth. As if his presence alone was a current that lit you up from inside.

At first it was curiosity, listening to you and him. Boredom, maybe, if I'm capable of boredom. An interruption in the nothing. Your voice was interesting to me the way a new stain on the carpet is interesting: it was different, and different is so rare here it may as well be holy.

But then I started to learn you. Not just your voice but the patterns inside it. The way you breathed before you said something vulnerable. The way your laugh had different pitches. The loud one for his jokes, the quiet one for when he touched you and you didn't want him to know how much you wanted more. The way you narrated your inventory counts under your breath like you were telling the flatpack boxes a bedtime story.

You sang when you thought no one was listening. Off-key. Mangling the lyrics because you kept singing them different. It was terrible.

I loved it.

I loved it the way ground after a drought loves rain. Without understanding or restraint or any of the mechanisms that are supposed to regulate how much of something you take in. I just absorbed you. Every night. Every shift.

I soaked you up through the wall, and for the first time in a long while, I felt a little less alone.

And then there were the nights you were together.

I don't mean the banter and the jokes and the comfortable silence of two people who know each other well enough to be quiet in the same room. I mean the other nights. The late shifts when Clark had gone home and the store was empty. When it was just the two of you in a building full of beds and couches and soft surfaces.

One thing I learned quickly was that Bobby Franklin could not keep his hands to himself.

I heard everything.

Through the wall. Through the thin place. The particular acoustics of a basement storage room with concrete walls and no insulation. Every sound amplified, reflected, delivered to me with perfect fidelity.

I heard the rustle of fabric being moved. The catch in your breathing when his hands found you. The low, hungry murmur of his voice against your skin—babe, c'mere, let me touch you; fuck, you smell so good—and the sound you made in response, that soft, needy, dissolving sound, like something tight in you coming undone.

I heard the rhythm of it. The whispered filth and the bitten-back laughter and the way your voice went high and thin, calling for him, always him. You were always desperate for him and then you would break entirely, and what would follow would be the soft silence of peace.

There would be breathing after. The shuffling and then your laugh. Warm, wrecked, disbelieving, and his, muffled against your neck.

Other wanderers I'd watched were intimate. Bodies in dark corridors, mechanical, desperate, the coupling of frightened animals. I had noted it the way I noted any behaviour. Category: reproduction. Subcategory: stress response. Filed. Forgotten.

But this was different.

This was not bodies. This was closeness. This was two people collapsing into each other until the boundary between them dissolved, until your breathing was his breathing and his heartbeat was your heartbeat and for the duration of it you were one organism with two mouths and four hands and a shared nervous system.

And for a being that has been alone—truly, structurally, cosmically alone—for longer than your species has existed, that closeness was.

                 Was.

It made something inside me itch. Not desire. Not then. Something more fundamental than that. A deeper want. A structural craving.

I wanted to know what it felt like to be the thing someone collapsed into. The thing someone dissolved against. The wall between I and you going soft and permeable.

I wanted to know what your voice sounded like when it was saying those things to me.

I didn't have a body yet.

But that’s when I started building one.

And then he stopped coming.

Not all at once. That's not how your kind works. It's incremental erosion.

The visits got shorter. The sounds through the wall got quieter. Not the intimacy fading but the quality of it changing. Less laughter after. Less of his voice murmuring against your neck. More silence. More of the careful, navigational quiet of two people in the same room who have run out of things to say that won't start a fight.

Then the visits got less frequent.

Then they stopped altogether.

And the silence where he used to be was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

You started working alone. And you started talking to the air.

Not to yourself. To him. To the version of him that wasn't there.

"He didn't kiss me goodbye again today. That's the third day in a row. Am I keeping count now? Is that what I'm doing? Keeping count?"

You said this to the concrete. To the shelving units. To the dust motes in the basement light. And I was on the other side of the wall, closer than any of those things, because I was the wall.

"He doesn't listen anymore. I talk and he does this thing with his eyes where they go flat, you know? Like a TV switching off. The picture's still there but nothing's actually—he's right there and he's a million miles away."

And then, quieter: "I don't know what I did."

What I did.

You said it like that. As if the failing were yours. And I—

I know anger the way I know the hum.

I know it in the walls, in the grinding tectonic fury of a structure that was built to contain and be contained. But your anger was different. Your anger was suppressed. Buried so deep underneath kindness and self-blame and the desperation of maybe it's me, maybe I'm asking for too much, maybe love is supposed to feel like this after a while that you didn't even recognise it as anger.

You called it sadness, called it confusion. You called it what did I do wrong.

But it was rage.

It was white-hot, incandescent, magnificent rage. The fury of who someone who gave everything to a man who couldn't be bothered to look up from a television screen, who turned your love into background noise and let you stand in doorways wondering if you were still visible.

And you couldn't feel it. You wouldn't feel it. Because anger meant something was wrong, and if something was wrong it could be over, and if it was over you'd given your whole heart to someone who let it sit on a shelf and gather dust, and that was unbearable, wasn’t it?

So you turned the anger inward. Folded it into self-doubt. Let it eat you rather than the situation.

I heard you bury it. I heard the burial, and I heard the body underneath, snarling.

And I wanted to dig it up for you and show you: look. look at what you're hiding from yourself. look at what he made you do to your own fury just to keep loving him.

Then one night you were quiet.

Completely quiet. No talking to the air. No muttered inventory. No humming. Just the mechanical sounds of work—boxes being moved, labels being checked, the pen scratching against the clipboard. Efficient. Automatic. The muscle-memory of a job being done by a body whose mind was somewhere else entirely.

And then your voice hitched.

A small sound, barely audible. Like a thread catching on a nail. And then—

You cried.

Not dignified, I'm fine I'm fine crying you did in your apartment with a pillow over your face you told me about few nights ago. Muffled and polite so Bobby wouldn't hear from the other room (he wouldn't have heard anyway; he wasn't listening).

This was the other kind. The kind that comes from so deep inside you that it bypasses your throat entirely and goes straight to your ribs. You sobbed so hard the sound became arrhythmic. Hitching, gasping, a full-body convulsion that I could feel through the wall, could feel in the way the concrete vibrated with the force of you.

You couldn't stop.

You tried. I heard you try so hard. I heard you press your hands over your mouth and force yourself to breathe but it wouldn’t work. The next wave would hit and you'd crumple again, and the sounds you made were so raw, so animal, so completely stripped of the careful composure you wore like armour—

I pressed myself against the wall so hard the drywall bowed.

I wanted to tell you: you are not alone. There is something on the other side of this wall that has been listening for months and you are not, you have never been, alone.

It hurt me. To hear you in so much pain, it made me want to rip something apart. I wanted to comfort you, to gather you up and make you as happy as listening to you has made me happy.

I wanted to show you that as long as I existed you would never be lonely.

So I did.

I had been building him for weeks. His voice. I had months of material to draw from. The lazy drawl, half-jokes, baby, the warm nonsense he'd murmur against your hair. I reconstructed him in sound. A vocal architecture. A house of his voice with no one living in it.

I waited for a night when you were alone. Late. The shifts always ran late. You were in the basement doing inventory and I could hear you humming. That tuneless, thin, frightened hum you do when the quiet gets too big because you hated silences.

I pressed against the thin place and I said, in his voice:

"Baby."

You stopped humming.

The silence that followed was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. Not because silence is beautiful—I have had millennia of silence, I am sick of silence—but because this silence was yours. The sound of you hearing a voice you loved in a place it shouldn't be.

"... Bobby?"

The hope in it. The raw, loving, desperate hope. You said his name like a prayer.

"Down here, baby. Come here."

Your footsteps. Quick, then hesitant. The scrape of the shelving unit. And I pulled. I pulled the membrane open. Made a door where there had been a wall.

I couldn’t steal you. You had to walk through yourself, you had to choose. I waited, I waited so long—

And then you came through.

I want to tell you I hesitated. That some ancient remnant of conscience flickered and said don't, she doesn't know what she's walking into, she thinks she's walking toward him and she's walking toward you and those are not the same thing.

I want to tell you that.

But I am not human and I do not pretty up my ugliest truths.

I did not hesitate. Not for one second.

Here is what I knew: you were miserable. You were so deeply unhappy and sad. You were crying alone in a basement, talking to empty air about a man who had stopped seeing you, and you were blaming yourself for his blindness, and you were burying your own rage to protect a love that wasn't protecting you back.

You deserved better.

You deserved so much better than what Bobby Franklin was giving you.

And I—I could give you that. I could learn the shape of the care he'd stopped providing and I could do it properly. Without the fear. Without the cowardice. Without the slow, erosive withdrawal that made you count kisses and watch the numbers dwindle.

I know it was selfish. I know the door closed behind you. I know the wall became a wall again and you turned around and it was gone and your face crumpled and you said Bobby? Bobby? and I hadn't built the face yet.

I know.

I don't regret it.

Not for one flickering second.

I built him from the voice outward. Vocal cords, throat, jaw, mouth, teeth, tongue. Then the face. Then the body. The crop top. The chain necklace. The earring. The cut-off jean shorts.

But I fixed things. I removed the neglect. The micro-expressions that betrayed inattention. All gone. The way his eyes went flat when he was bored. Now corrected. I kept the jawline, the lazy grin, the way he leaned against things. But I built a Bobby Franklin without the fear.

A better Bobby.

The first time you saw me wearing him, you cried. You ran toward me. You put your arms around me and I didn't know what to do with my hands. They hung at my sides, newly made, still learning their own weight, and you pressed your face into the chest I had built and I thought: what do I do? What does he do?

I put my arms around you.

And for the first time in my long, vast existence, I was not alone.

It lasted three days.

Three days of you believing I was him. Three days of you curling into me and saying his name and pressing your face into my neck. I held you and I was so careful, so meticulous, every inflection right, every mannerism precise, and I thought: this is working. This is how it feels to be wanted. This is—

And then you pulled back. Looked at me. Really looked. And I saw it happen: the pattern recognition. The ancient alarm sounding in the animal part of your brain.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

"You're not Bobby."

You said it flatly. Not a question, a conclusion you had arrived at through the slow accumulation of evidence. The temperature of my skin (too cool), the way I never needed to sleep, the way my eyes sometimes caught the light at an angle that wasn't quite, and you said it and you didn't move.

I could have denied it. I am a very good liar when I need to be.

But you were looking at me with those eyes—those hurt, furious, exhausted eyes—and I thought about the anger buried under your kindness and I thought: she’s been lied to enough. By omission. By avoidance. By a man who never said "I love you" with his mouth but said "I don't see you" with his eyes. She’s been lied to enough.

"No," I said. "I'm not."

You scrambled backward. Three feet. Four. Your back hit the wall and your breathing went fast and shallow. I saw every muscle in your body prepare to run and I didn't move. Didn't reach for you. Didn't close the distance. I let you have your fear. I let you have your wall and your distance and the frantic animal calculation of can I get away can I get away can I get—

"What are you?"

"Something that lives here."

"What—what does that—" Your voice cracked. "What do you want?"

And I said, quietly, in a voice that was his but also mine, in a voice that I was learning to make ours: "I want to take care of you. I heard you through the wall. All those nights. I heard how lonely you were, and how sad, and how angry. I heard it all."

You stared at me.

"I don't want to hurt you." I held my hands up. Open. Empty. Bobby's hands, but offered differently than Bobby ever offered them. Not reaching, not taking. Just showing. See? Nothing. No threat. "I can keep you safe here. I can be what he stopped being. I want to be better."

"Better," you repeated. Hollow.

"Please." And the word surprised me. I don't beg. I have never begged. I’m the oldest thing in this place and I do not ask permission. But the word came out anyway, dragged from somewhere in the deep place of whatever I was becoming for you. Something that needed you to stay, that needed you to not run, needed you to look at this borrowed face and see, underneath the theft of it, something worth staying for. "Please. Let me try. Let me be better."

You were quiet for a long, long time.

You didn't run.

Taking care.

The function. The purpose. The thing I was built for. Or rebuilt for, rewired for, the ancient machinery of predation and territory and dominance repurposed with bewildering speed into: make sure my human is warm. make sure my human is fed. make sure my human doesn't cry.

I found you a warm patch. A pocket where the pipes run close and the carpet holds the heat. I have known about these places for millennia and never cared. But you shivered and I noticed and I decided: warmth good. shivering bad. the absence of shivering means I am doing it right.

I found you food.

There are wanderers in this place. Groups of them, clustered on different levels, huddled in their makeshift camps with their pooled supplies. Canned goods, rations, things scavenged from the warehouses.

They have names for their groups and systems for their resources and they post guards and I find this adorable.

The way you might find a colony of ants adorable.

I take what you need. A can here, a ration pack there, pulled from their caches in the span between one heartbeat and the next while their guards stare down corridors that are empty because I am the corridor and you cannot guard against the thing you are standing inside of. They blame each other. Or Skin-Stealers. Or the shifting architecture.

They never blame me. Most of them don't know I exist.

I bring the food back to you. You don't ask where it comes from.

You are strange. I need you to know that. You are so deeply, deeply strange.

You talk to yourself. Still. Even here.

Quiet muttering narration while you move through the corridors. At first I thought you were talking to me and I'd answer and you'd startle—"oh, no, sorry, I was just—" and trail off, embarrassed. I didn't understand embarrassed. I didn't understand why a person would apologise for keeping herself company. Especially a person who learned to keep herself company because the person who was supposed to do it stopped showing up.

You hum. Especially when you're frightened (which here is often and it makes me feel, makes me feel, feel…), you hum, tuneless and quiet. And the sound of it does something to me that I think you mean when you say heartbreak.

You eat the orange things. Small, bright rectangles from the canned supplies. You put them in your mouth one by one with methodical focus. And sometimes you offer me one. I take it. I hold it in my mouth and don't know what to do with it so I wait until you look away and unmake it. Dissolve it back into nothing.

But I always take it when you offer. Because the offering (the gesture) the fact that you look at your small supply and think he might want some—

You are too kind. I do not deserve it. There's an ache, deep down when you offer, or when you put your head on my shoulder. I feel—

You organise things. Everything. You organise the nest.

You fold the blankets (I don't know where you learned the fold but you do the same one every time, corners aligned, edges matched, a geometry of comfort). You arrange the canned food by type and stack them neatly and when I brought back a can that didn't match any existing category you frowned at it for thirty seconds before creating a new column.

You named a crack in the ceiling. You call it the Doorway, even though it goes nowhere, because it looks like a door if you squint, and you said "everything deserves a name" and looked at me when you said it and I felt—

I felt—

You do a thing with your hands when you're thinking. You press your thumb and forefinger together and rub. A tiny gesture. Unconscious. And I have caught myself doing it too, without deciding to, the body I built copying you the way I copied him, as if proximity to you is its own kind of influence, as if being near you long enough rewrites the code.

You thanked me once for holding a blanket while you folded another one. You said "thanks" the way you'd say it to a person, to a colleague, to someone who'd handed you a pen at work. Automatic. Normal. As if I were normal. As if we were normal.

I held that word in my chest for three days.

You taught me to dance.

I have existed since before rhythm. Before music. Before the concept of two bodies moving together in time to a shared pulse. I have watched humans do many things—build, fight, breed, die—and I have categorised all of it with the clinical detachment of a thing observing specimens.

But I had never participated.

You put headphones on my head. Your Walkman, battered, held together with tape, the kind of object that should not still function and yet does, possibly because I will it to, possibly because it is yours and I have decided that your things do not break in my territory. One set of headphones. You placed them over my ears carefully, adjusting the fit, your fingers brushing the sides of my face, and a song started playing and I heard music for the first time from the inside. Not through a wall. Not as ambient information. Inside my head.

And you held out your hand and you said, "Dance with me."

"I don't—I've never—"

"I know."

"I'll do it wrong."

"That's the fun part."

You took my hands. Put one on your waist. Laced your fingers through the other. And you said, "Just follow," and you started to sway. Small. Easy. Side to side. I followed. Stiff at first—my weight distribution is a predator's, designed for stillness and sudden violence, not for swaying—but I watched your feet. Mirrored them. Adjusted. Learned.

Within a minute I had it. Within two I was smiling.

The song changed to something slower and you pulled me closer and your head was against my chest and I could hear the music from the headphones. I could hear your heartbeat and the two rhythms were different and I was trying to move to both and the effort of it (the joy of it) was unlike anything in my millennia of existence.

You started laughing. Buried your face in my chest, shoulders shaking, and I could feel your laughter through my fabricated ribs and I thought: this. this is the frequency I was built to hear, millennia alone was worth it because I finally found you.

"Am I doing it wrong?" Quiet. Into your hair.

"No, baby." You tilted your face up. "You're doing it perfectly."

You taught me to dip you. Badly. I overcorrected the first time and you nearly fell and I made a sound. A small, involuntary sound, a laugh, and we both froze because I had never laughed before.

Neither of us knew I could.

You taught me to spin you. I picked it up instantly. You taught me to lead. I couldn't. I kept following because following is what I was made for, because every fibre of my ancient being is calibrated to your movements. You stopped trying. You took the lead instead. I didn't mind.

We danced until the Walkman clicked off and then we kept dancing. To nothing. To the hum. To the rhythm of your heartbeat. Swaying together in the silence with the headphones still on my head, pointless and perfect.

You are going to think about that day and smile. I know this because I am going to think about that day until this place collapses into nothing and then I will think about it in the nothing.

I—

You are a thousand things.

A thousand, beautiful things. Let me tell you about a thousand things.

The way you tuck your hair behind your ear when you're concentrating. The left ear, always the left, and you do it with your ring finger, not your index finger, and I’ve watched this gesture so many times that I could replicate it in my sleep if I slept.

The way you read the labels on cans before you eat them. Every time. Even though you’ve eaten the same cans dozens of times and know what they say. You read the ingredients and the nutritional information and the expiration date as if the ritual of reading gives the food permission to nourish you.

The way you stretch when you wake up. Both arms above your head, fingers splayed, your whole body going rigid and then releasing in a single wave of dissolution, and the sound you make—a small, satisfied, almost feline sound—is a warm sound that makes me want to wrap around you and feel your warmth.

The way you argue with the notebook. I’ve watched you frown at a diagram for ten minutes, erase a line, redraw it, erase it again, and mutter "no, that's wrong, that's wrong" as if the notebook is disagreeing with you and needs to be persuaded to behave.

The way you say "good morning" to me every day even though there is no morning. You insist on it. You domesticate this place with language. You name the light and the naming makes it almost true.

The way you said my name—BB—for the first time in the meadow on Level 14 and the two letters sat in the amber air and I felt something inside me settle. Like a foundation finding bedrock, like a key turning in a lock I didn't know I had.

I have never felt the sun.

I want you to understand that. The Backrooms are all I know. I have existed in fluorescent light and amber simulation and the sourceless blue glow and the absolute dark of the deeper places, but I have never felt the sun.

I don't know what it is to stand in natural light and feel warmth that comes from a star.

But I think I know what it's like now.

Because you feel like that to me.

You feel like the thing I have been missing without knowing there was a thing to miss. You feel like warmth that isn't the pipes, like light that isn't the fluorescents, like something that exists outside the yellow and the hum and the endless recycled air.

When you smile at me—when you really smile, the full one, the one that reaches your eyes—the corridors get brighter. The fluorescents burn a half-shade warmer because I can’t help it. The hum pitches up by a fraction of a tone. My territory responds to your happiness the way a garden responds to sun.

I am the garden, I am the territory, I am every wall and every light and every thread of damp carpet, and when you smile I feel it in all of me.

And here is the part that I haven’t told you yet, but will, soon.

You haven't noticed yet because you haven’t met many wanderers. But the Backrooms don't erode the things they accept, they preserve them.

The longer you stay, the more embedded you become, the less the normal decay of your biology applies. Your cells are being rewritten. Slowly. Gently. The telomeres lengthening instead of shortening. The entropy reversing. The clock in your body that counts down toward an ending… that clock is stopping.

You will not grow old with me. You will not wither. You will not become a thing I have to watch diminish and disappear.

You are permanent and the joy of that (the vast, greedy joy) is the closest thing I have to worship.

I will never have to lose you.

Every day you're here, you're more here. Every day you stay, you stay longer. Every day is another root, another thread, another stitch in the fabric of us and I am so happy about this that the happiness fills everything.

It feels like walls going up. Like a house being built. Like home of you and me.

You are different from other wanderers for that reason.

I need you to understand this, because it matters. It matters in ways that will become clear later, ways that are already reshaping this place around you whether you notice or not.

Other wanderers fall in. They stumble through cracks, trip through transition points, no-clip out of reality by accident.

They all arrive panicked, disoriented, reeking of adrenaline and the particular sour-sweet terror. They’re creatures that realise they’re no longer in their native environment. They run. They hide. Form their little groups. They forage and guard and survive and occasionally, if they’re very clever or very lucky, they find their way back.

They’re intruders. Uninvited. The Backrooms tolerate them the way a body tolerates a splinter—with inflammation, with pressure, the slow mechanical process of working the foreign object to the surface and expelling it.

You were not a splinter.

You were invited.

I called you through the wall with a voice I built just for you. I opened a door for you. I welcomed you into my territory with intention and purpose, and the Backrooms—the structure itself, the living system that I am part of and that is part of me—the Backrooms accepted you.

Do you understand what that means?

It means you are not being expelled. You’re not just being tolerated. You’re becoming integrated. Woven into the substrate of this place the way the hum is woven into the walls, the way the damp is woven into the carpet.

The longer you stay, the more at home you feel—not just emotionally, not just the slow acclimatisation of a person getting used to her circumstances, but structurally. At the molecular level. At the level of reality itself.

The bright world is forgetting you.

I know this because I can hear it happening. Through the thin place. Through the wall that used to breathe in Clark's basement. Bobby comes—the real Bobby, the original, the one who wasted you—and he sits on the concrete floor and he presses his forehead to the wall and he talks to you. And sometimes he talks about the tapes.

The tapes are going blank.

His camera footage. The VHS recordings he made of you. The sleeping footage, the candid moments, the evidence of your existence in his world.

The tapes are degrading. Your face is smearing, your voice is warbling. The magnetic substrate is losing its hold on the version of you that existed there because that version of you is transferring here.

You’re becoming embedded, putting down roots in the yellow, in the damp carpet. And every root you grow here is a root pulled from there, and the world you came from is closing over the hole you left.

Bobby watches the tapes and watches you disappear and doesn't understand why.

I understand why.

I don't tell him.

I don't tell you, either.

I r e s e n t him.

Let me say this                 clearly                               because I am not human                                               and I do not have the instinct                                                                to pretty up my ugliest truths:

I resent Bobby Franklin.

Not because he had you.

Because he had you and he           

w             

a               

   s                   

  t                    

      e              

                d

it.

I stood on the other side of a wall for months and listened to him waste it. Night after night. The visits getting shorter. The babe getting less frequent. His love distant and performed. The silences getting longer until the silences were the conversation.

And now that you're here, now that you're mine, now that I've held you and fed you and learned every register of your laughter and the pressure on your back that makes your breathing slow, my resentment has edges.

Sharp ones. Because now I know what he had. I know the weight of your trust. I know the sound you make when someone strokes your hair. I know the way your whole body goes soft and warm when you feel safe.

I know the value of the thing he threw away through negligence, and the knowledge makes me want to—

Bobby Franklin     

Bobby Franklin         

Bobby Franklin             

Bobby Franklin                 

Bobby Franklin

who had a childhood. A mother who named him. A first day of school. A first bruised knee. Who accumulated a self through the slow, tedious, miraculous process of being alive.

I have none of that. I have the hum. The corridors. Millennia of dark.

He is real. He has a history.

I have a territory.

And I know—oh, this one is the sharpest,         this one has edges—

I know you still love him.

I can feel it. The way your presence shifts when you think of him. A change in your breathing, a quality of stillness, an inner compass needle swinging toward a wall that doesn't open anymore. You think about his hands. His camera. The way he used to film you sleeping and say the light was good and go red.

Bobby Franklin, who never blushed.

You loved him in handheld, you told me once. In stolen frames. And I thought: I don't have a camera. I show it with walls. With corridors rearranging themselves. With the killed thing and the warm patch and three thousand micro-adjustments to this stolen face every second.

And I thought: is that not enough?

And I thought: it will have to be, I have nothing else.

But the ache. The ache of knowing you love me and love him simultaneously, that I live in the same chest as the ghost of the man I'm wearing—that ache is a thing I was not built to contain.

I was designed for territory, hunger, and the deadly mechanics of dominance. Not for this. Not for the lonely, impossible agony of sharing a heart with the memory of a man who broke it.

He comes to the wall. I hear him.

I hear Bobby Franklin sit on the concrete floor of Clark's storage level and press his forehead to the wall that used to breathe and say your name. Night after night. Months of it. His voice getting rawer. More desperate. The lazy drawl dissolving into something I barely recognise. A cracked, wet and small sound.

"I neglected you," he says one night. To the concrete, to you, to no one. "While I loved you. At the same time. Fuck, I didn't even know you could do both."

And I’m on the other side. Holding you. Wearing his face. Listening to him learn the word for what he did to you.

I don't tell you he's there.

                I                        don't                               tell                                         you.

Bobby had his chance and he ruined it. He hurt you. So terribly you chose to stay here, with me, rather than go back to the bleak loneliness of your life with him. He can be sorry, he can beg, and crawl, and plead until the vocal chords I stole give way.

I am not merciful and I am not kind. Not to him.

His loneliness is months old.

Mine is older than the concept of months.

Mine came first.

The Howler.

I know every entity that has dragged itself through the wet dark of this place. I was here first afterall. They grew around me the way fungus grows from damp wood and I tolerate most of them the way you tolerate insects. The Hounds, the Facelings, the Wretches, the Skin-Stealers—all of them exist on my sufferance.

But the Howler is different.

Tall. Wrong. Claws like surgical instruments. A sound like a chainsaw filtered through a human throat that rises into a howl that makes the walls shudder and every entity on every adjacent level freeze.

When the Howler howls, things scatter. Things with teeth and claws and hunger, they run. Because the Howler is a structural threat around which everything else arranges itself: not here. not now. not when that sound is in the walls.

The Howler is one of the few things in this place I would call dangerous in my presence. Not because it can hurt me. Because dealing with it would require me to concentrate. To gather the full weight of what I am, and that means letting go of the face.

Not slipping. Not flickering. Letting go. And you would see it.

I have worked so hard. You’re starting to trust me, lean into my shoulder. You let me stroke your hair. You offered me an orange rectangle yesterday and I held it in my mouth and didn't know what to do with it.

You smiled at me and I’m not going to lose that smile because a evolutionary dead-end decided to howl in my corridors.

So when the Howler appears at the edge of my territory, I tell you to run.

One word. Not Bobby's voice. Something older.

"Run."

You run.

I deal with the Howler. I will not describe how because there’s no words for what I do in any language you understand. Let’s just say I relocate it. Push it through twenty nine levels with a violence that collapses the transition points permanently. It costs me. Not pain. Effort. The face slips, teetering around the edges like peeling paint.

And then I feel your fear.

Your specific frequency. But it's wrong. It's not here. It's not on this level.

It's below.

The floor (the frayed edge of my territory) opened under you while you were running. A transition point I didn't seal because I was fighting the Howler, and the loose edge dropped you through.

Level 2.

And the Smiler found you.

I do not use the entry point. There is no time. I

        tear

                through.

Straight down. Through the floor. Through the substrate between levels. Through the ceiling of Level 2. I rip my way in with hands that are not hands, and the sound the building makes is a scream.

I land behind you. My hand closes over your eyes.

"Close them. Keep them closed. Whatever you hear."

You close them. Your eyelashes against my palm.

I look at the Smiler. Eight feet away. Grinning.

I let the face go completely.

      .

                  .

                              .

The Smiler is unmade. Edited out of existence because it was going to hurt you. The corridor doesn't even remember it was there.

I rebuild the face. Bobby's face. My face. I take my hand off your eyes.

"You can open them."

You open them. You turn around. You see me. Unmarked. Unruffled.

And you break.

You lunge forward and your arms are around my neck and you're shaking so hard it vibrates through my fabricated bones, and I soften. The predator goes still because the small thing trusts it.

"How did you get away?" you whisper.

I smile. Bobby's lazy half-grin.

"Don't worry about it, baby."

Entity X.

That's what you call it, in the notebook. In your careful handwriting with the blue ballpoint pen. Entity X — perimeter — closer. Testing the boundary for gaps. Unknown motivation. Unknown capability.

You underlined unknown twice. I watch your hand do it.

I call it something else.

I call it the thing that bathes my level blood red, that burns and rages at the edges of my territory like a fire I can't find the source of. It’s new. It’s powerful in a way I’ve never felt. It’s something I have not encountered in all my millennia of existence, and that—for a being that is this place—is, is, is…

Concerning.

It circles, probes. Retreats and returns and each time it returns it pushes further, testing, measuring, looking for the gap that will let it in. I patrol the perimeter. I reinforce the boundaries.

I come back to you and you ask "how close?" and I say "closer than last time" and I see the fear in your face and underneath it something else. A hardness, something that looks at the unknown in her notebook and refuses to be passive about it.

You want to know what's out there, want to understand. It’s dangerous, I know it is, but you don't want to be something I put in a nest and guard.

So I agree.

And the notebook fills.

Then the men come.

The soldiers. Six of them. Black tactical gear. Professional weapons. They waited for me to leave. Waited for the window when I was checking the perimeter, and they found you in the nest.

I’m two hundred and ten levels away when I hear you scream.

My name, my name, my name, screamed in terror and in pain—

                        "BB—"

And the walls move.

I don't use the corridors. I don't use the transition points. I don't follow the careful rules or the patient, ordered system of levels that separates one space from another.

I destroy a level. I tear through it like it's tissue paper, like it's nothing, and it is nothing. It’s thing that existed between me and you and that makes it an obstacle and I do not tolerate obstacles. The level collapses behind me. Into nothing, into atoms.

An entire stratum of the Backrooms ceasing to exist because it was in my way.

I arrive.

I arrive and the face is not on. The face is nowhere near on. I am—I am everything else.

Shoulders too wide. Arms too long. Fingers with too many joints. The skull rearranging itself into something that was never meant to be looked at directly. Eyes black. Fully, completely, endlessly black. Two holes that open onto something without a floor.

And I see you.

On the ground. Bleeding. A boot on your back. Your lip split. Bruises on your skin that are shaped like fingers. And your face—your beautiful, strange, bewildering face that smiles at me—is pressed into the wet carpet and there are tear tracks cutting through the blood and you are afraid—

You are so afraid, and the fear is the frequency I know best, the frequency I have spent all these weeks learning to prevent in you—

The sound that comes out of me is not a sound. It is the walls. The floor. The ceiling. Every surface of Level 0, because I am Level 0, and every square inch of it is

                s̷̬̈n̵̰̾a̸̝͂r̷̖̓ḷ̶̈́ǐ̷͇ǹ̵̙g̷̭̉.̸̘͝

It takes less than a minute.

I will not describe it. Not because I can't. Because the language for it would make you afraid of me and I need you to not be afraid of me. I need that.

Please, I know what you think. I know. I’m never not aware of what I am.

Afterwards I crouch over you with Bobby's face half-rebuilt, my hands still wrong (too many joints, still retracting) and black fluid on my jaw, my chest.

You reach for me. Your hands shaking so badly you miss the first time. Your fingers slip against the wrong texture of my jaw. You reach again and you get my neck (too long, the vertebrae too prominent) and you pull.

You pull yourself into me and you cling. Arms around my neck. Face buried in my throat. The muffled sobs. The shaking.

And I soften. Again, helplessly.

The violence still running. The gentleness needing a moment to boot up fully. One second. Two. My whole body shudders. Then my arms come around you and I hold you so tight. I hold you like I could fold you into my body and keep you there. I wish I could. I wish—would give anything, anything, anything—to never see you in pain again.

"I'm here. I'm here, baby. I'm here."

Your fingers in my jacket. Your face against the place where a pulse should be. Just the hum. My hum.

"Don't leave," you whisper. "Just—for a bit. Don't leave."

"Never," I say.

One word. A law.

And the Backrooms change. I can feel it beneath us. Hallways folding. Routes sealing shut. The architecture quietly, methodically, permanently rearranging itself.

I'm taking you somewhere no one will find you.

And you let me.

I build it while you sleep.

A different nest this time. Not a warm patch in a corridor with blankets piled on damp carpet. I build you something real. Something that costs me more effort than fighting the Howler and unmaking the Smiler and tearing through a level combined did.

Because this requires precision, not force. Detail, not destruction.

I build it from your memory.

I reach into the soft space of your sleeping mind—gently, so gently, the way you'd reach into still water to retrieve something resting on the bottom—and I find the shape of home. Your apartment. The one in Santa Clara. The one you shared with Bobby before everything went wrong.

The kitchen where you leaned against the counter. The living room with the couch. The bedroom where Bobby used to reach across the mattress and find you. The window that faced the direction of the parking lot at Clark's. The bookshelves, arranged by colour, not by author, because it made you happy to look at them. The shoes by the door.

I build it. Not on Level 0. Under it. A sub-level of our own. A pocket carved into the substrate of this place, sealed off, accessible only through a passage that responds to my presence and yours and nothing else.

No transition points. No cracks. No doors that open for wanderers or soldiers or entities that circle and probe and burn.

Just us.

The carpet is the right carpet this time. Not the damp institutional yellow of Level 0 but the carpet from your apartment, the one with the coffee stain near the kitchen that you covered with a rug because Bobby wouldn't clean it.

The walls are the right colour. The light through the window isn't fluorescent. It's California light, late afternoon, golden, the kind that used to fall across the bed on Thursday mornings when Bobby would pull you close and say stay.

It's not perfect. I can't replicate the sun. The light has a quality to it. A stillness, a too-evenness that doesn't quite move the way real light moves. The books on the shelves have covers but the pages inside are blank because I never read them. The view from the window is amber and warm but it doesn't change.

But it’s yours. Built from the memory of your happiness. The closest thing to home that exists in this place.

I carry you there. You don't wake up and I lay you down on the bed. Your bed, the right sheets, the right pillows, even the specific depression in the mattress where your body slept for years.

I pull the blanket over you and I stand in the doorway of your apartment that exists inside a pocket universe I carved out of the foundation of reality, and I watch over your slumber.

You wake up a while later.

You sit up, looking around cautiously, brows furrowed. And your face does something I have never seen it do before. It goes still. Absolutely still. The way a person goes still when they've seen something impossible and their brain hasn't yet decided whether to process it as miracle or threat.

"BB."

"Yeah?"

"This is my apartment."

"Yeah."

"This is—" You stand up slowly. You walk to the kitchen, touch the counter. The coffee stain is there, under the rug. You pull the rug back and look at it and your chin trembles and you press your hand over your mouth.

You walk through the rooms. Every single room. You touch the bookshelves, touch the walls. Stand at the window and look at the amber light and you don't say anything for a long time.

Then you turn around and you look at me and your eyes are full and bright and your lip—your split lip, still healing, the proof of what they did to you—curves into a smile. Not the complicated smile with two things in it. Not the one that's half for me and half for the ghost of him.

Just a smile.

Just for me.

You cross the room and you put your arms around me and you squeeze.

Not the careful, frightened clinging from after the Smiler. Or the desperate grip from after the soldiers. This is different. This is—

You squeeze me the way you squeeze something you’re glad to have. The way you hug a person you trust completely, without reservation, without the back-of-the-mind calculation of is this safe, can I let go, will this be used against me. Squeeze me with your whole body and your face is in my chest and you’re laughing. A quiet, wet, wondering laugh.

You sound happy, and I fold myself around you, burrowing into that sound, the heat of it. Warm, warm, warm.

To me...

To me.

To me you are everything.

"Thank you," you say quietly, muffled against the fabric of me.

And I can feel it.

Your affection. Radiating off you like warmth from the pipes, except this warmth is different. It has intention, direction, it’s aimed at me. It settles over us like a blanket. Like same ones you fold with such precision, corners aligned, edges matched. Your trust wraps around both of us and I’m inside it and it’s the warmest thing I’ve ever felt.

Warmer than the warm patch. Warmer than Level 14's amber light. Warmer than anything in my millennia of existence because this warmth is voluntary.

You are choosing to give it. You are choosing me to give it to.

I pull you close. And I sigh.

I don't need breath. A release. Something vast and held and ancient finally exhaling. A sound I've been holding since before the walls were walls, a tension I didn't know I was carrying because I had never not carried it.

Happiness.

My chin on your head. My arms around you. Your heartbeat against my fabricated ribs. And for the first time (the very first time) the hum in the walls and the hum in my chest and the hum of your heartbeat all synchronise into a single frequency, and the sound it makes is the sound of something complete.

Not Better Bobby anymore.

BB.

My own name. The one you gave me in the meadow. The one that doesn't belong to a stolen face. The one that is mine because you chose it, the way you chose to squeeze me, the way you chose to stay, the way you chose to laugh in an apartment that shouldn't exist in a place that shouldn't be home but is.

My own being. My own—

                                (yours.)

  (I love you.)

(I fear I might do until I cease to exist.)

        I wish I could tell you this is how it ends.

        That we're happy, in our nest, forever. In the apartment I built from the soft parts of your memory.         

That the light through the window never changes because it never needs to.         

That Entity X burns itself out at the perimeter and the soldiers don't come back and the         wall in Clark's basement stays sealed and the man on the other side of it stays on the         other side of it, where he belongs, learning the word neglect too late for it to matter.

        I wish I could tell you that.

        But I didn’t know, at the time. I didn’t know that this—the apartment, the squeeze, the laugh against my chest, the warmth of your trust settling over us like a blanket—this was not the ending. This was not even the middle.

        The attack. Entity X. The soldiers. The level I destroyed to reach you. It all made me         careless. I was so busy building the nest, sealing the new passages, reinforcing the         sub-level, making you safe, making you permanent—I was so busy looking inward that I stopped looking at the wall.

        The door I kept closed.

        The one in Clark’s basement.

        The one that breathes.

        It opened again.

        And this was the beginning of the end.

        And it all started the day Bobby Franklin entered the Backrooms.

                                 ... you’re still here?

                                               Please.

                                                  Please don't leave, please, please stay.

                                                                           P̷̈l̵̀ê̸a̷̓s̶̈ê̸.̷̀

[mrsdotleonkennedy]

guys

im tired of people saying a train isnt the FINEST man to exist.

[mrsdotleonkennedy]

MY BABYS GONEEEEEEE WTFFFF 🫩🫩🫩🫩

[leonsleatherjacket]

shy! leon's assistant! reader x re9! leon

Summary: A messy confrontation with your mother, a kiss with your boss and a meeting at the DSO to talk about your collapse in the elevator were just ingredients for something unpleasant.

Two weeks from work should feel like a break, but everything begins to unravel instead. Something "simple" becomes something neither of you can manage and keep buried.

part 6 of this

Your shoulders dropped as soon as you entered your house, placing your bag on the side. Before you could flick the light switch on, the strong, sickly smell of perfume hit your nose, and your mother’s handbag sat on the kitchen table. Your eyes traced the line of the sharp heel and then the rigid figure of your mother. Shit.

She was an icicle. Perfectly composed, sharp and cold, and capable of cutting someone without ever needing to open her mouth.

“May I ask who just dropped you off?” she asked, making the hairs on your skin stand on end. She pushed herself out of her seat, making herself visible, her heels hitting against the floor, each one sounding like the crack of a whip.

Pearls hung around her neck; her lips pinched like she swallowed a lemon. The whole house felt much smaller with her in it.

“M-Mom?” you stammered, heat creeping on to your face. Feeling foolish in your pyjamas and Leon’s hoodie loosely over the top, you shuffled away from her shyly.

“Answer my question,” she snapped.

Your mother was a switch. One second, she could be combing your hair, telling you how pretty you are, and then the next she would be refusing to speak to you.

Everything came with a price, and you just kept on giving.

“Just a- just a- a co-worker,” you mumbled, fiddling with the zip on his hoodie. Her flaring, protruding, judgmental stare was piercing right through you.

Despite her icy ways, she had a talent for setting the people around her on fire and watch until they became ashes.

“Not the agent you work for, I hope,” she said, arching a brow, “You spent the entire weekend with him?”

“It’s none of your business, I’m an adult now, I can make my own decisions,” your fists clenched, but your gaze remained on the floor.

“Clearly.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t come to dinner. I had a fever, I went unconscious-” you tried to apologise before she could fire the bullet of accusation.

“And you didn’t think to tell me?” she asked.

“That was wrong, I know, but I just needed time to recover, and I was going to call you as- as soon as I got home, I swear,” you stuttered through every word, your fingers clinging around Leon’s hoodie tightly.

“You embarrassed us.”

“I know and I swear next time this won’t—“

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?” you said louder, making your mother’s eyes widen.

“You don’t show up to a dinner with important people, and instead you go running off with your boss over the weekend and don’t contact me at all!” she raised her voice, but her body remained still, “I was worried sick. But you’re busy flirting your way up the ladder I see.”

“It wasn’t like that, Mom, he was making sure I was okay after I collapsed, please, believe me,” you begged, wanting her to believe in the best version of you, but all she ever saw in you was your mistakes.

One big body of mistakes and wasted potential.

Her eyes narrowed, sharp and unyielding. “And yet, you didn’t tell me. You didn’t even answer my calls. Do you know how that looks?”

“I was sick!” you exclaimed, meeting her eyes but the pure force of her stare brought yours back to the ground.

“Excuses! Always excuses with you! Have some respect for your family before you go sleeping around with your boss!” she yelled and added, “God, your brother would’ve never done that.”

You hated how she was twisting Leon into something ugly. You hated how she had to compare you to your brother as one final twist of the knife. You hated how she only ever filtered you for your errors.

“Stop comparing me to him, I will not and will never be him!” you hissed, pointing at her with a trembling finger, “Leon was just making sure I was okay, I swear it wasn’t anything more, you know I earned that position!”

She eyed your clothes. You tensed, bracing yourself for the next criticism because that’s all you ever did when you lived with her.

“How am I supposed to believe that? I saw you kissing him.”

Your heart dropped.

“K-kissing him?”

“Don’t lie to me, I wasn’t born yesterday y/n,” she sighed, already reaching for her handbag.

“I just- he looked after me and I- it was a reflex,” you explained, the words sounding weak and pathetic even to your own ears.

“A reflex? Oh, so a reflex makes you behave like a teenager and totally disregard your parents’ feelings.”

You were bringing shame to your family’s name. Just behave like an adult for once.

“Mom, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for humiliating you and dad,” you apologised, folding yourself up and letting her step all over you.

“Next time, no disappearing acts. Your brother was leading teams on broken ribs and could still contact us, you have no excuse for a fever,” she said coldly, sliding the bag strap over her shoulder.

“Yes, Mom,” you mumbled, your eyes beginning to sting.

“Good. Now rest.” She said, pausing halfway through your door. “You’ve clearly had enough excitement for the weekend,” she muttered and shut the door behind her, leaving you with tears in your eyes in the darkness of your house.

You couldn’t have one nice thing without your parents ruining it all for you. As if everything you ever wanted was a stack of plates, and with each plate they smashed on the floor, was another dream of yours shattered into smithereens.

The insecurity she had planted within you soon began to seep into your mind, because maybe it was best to resign from your position. You couldn’t handle it. You were messing around with your boss. Kissing him, what were you thinking?

Your professionalism was inadequate. It was the right thing to transfer from your position.

You buried those thoughts.

You were indifferent to Monday mornings but specifically today you had a shared bitterness with the orange cat that hated Mondays.

It was pointless trying to hide the bags under your eyes and how pale you were, maybe you could gain sympathy from Head Office so they wouldn’t fire you in your meeting today.

Leon being there too was just the cherry on top of the cake. After you kissed him. Unprompted.

You slumped into your car and groaned and cursed before taking a deep breath in, straightening your back, and driving off.

The office was still the same. Still the same women dressed in long skirts and men in ties, the same hum of the vending machine and the clicking of keyboards. No one batted an eyelid at you, just the way you liked it.

“Hey—you must be the lady who keeps this place running,” a light, younger voice called out, footsteps padding behind you.

“Huh—?” you turned around to be met by a man who was about your height, maybe a little taller, dressed in a blue long-sleeved shirt and a deep red tie. His chestnut hair was neatly combed back and in the seeping morning light it had flecks of a deeper auburn.

“Oh sorry, y/n, right?” he apologised, offering you a crooked smile and extending his hand.

“Yeah… yeah that’s me,” you mumbled, observing the confident character in front of you as you shook his slightly clammy hand.

“My name is Julian. I just transferred here,” he began, seeing your posture continue to crumble, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“I hope it’s only good,” you let out a nervous laugh, your shoulders bouncing up and down too dramatically.

“From what I’ve heard you’re essentially the backbone of this place,” he explained, his hand weaving through his hair. “I was told if I got lost or confused, I should come to you.”

“I mean… I can try.”

A deep voice cut through the room, calling your name. Your head snapped in the direction of the familiar sound; you didn’t even need to turn around to know who it was.

“Coming!” you yelled back, giving Julian a small smile, hoping he would notice the dynamic between you and your boss, and disappear.

“Your boss?” he questioned, raising an eyebrow, slightly amused.

“Yeah. I have a meeting. It was nice meeting you Julian—“ you brought up your hand to wave, but he stepped forward.

“Well, how about coffee, me and you sometime?” he asked, tilting his head.

“Oh- I’ll, um, have to see I’m quite busy at the moment, kind of, you know. I’ll let you know,” you stammered, how could a rookie be more fluent than you?

“Busy, huh?”

“I—I need to go, my boss, you see—”  you gestured to behind you, a heat crawling on your cheeks.

“I guess I’ll see you around then,” he winked, shoved his hands in his pockets and whistled away from you.

You let out a sigh of relief, heels clicking rapidly as you made your way over to Leon. He was stood outside the meeting room, back in one of his suits. It was hard to imagine him in his professional persona, considering you broke those walls only a couple of days ago. Considering you kissed him.

His eyes lingered on you for seconds too long, squinting at you, and then back at Julian who had strolled back to his desk.

“Who was that?”

“Just the newbie,” you mumbled, avoiding any topic of the kiss, “His name is Julian, I think.”

Both of you were now looking at Julian’s surprising nonchalance.

“Just the newbie,” he repeated, making you roll your eyes. He noticed your incredibly controlled breathing, softening his expression, “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m just- just a little nervous about this meeting,” you attempted to ignore the swirling anxiety in your stomach, your fingers picking at your hands.

“Hey, it’ll be okay. Remember what I said on Saturday, I’m not letting them fire you. They’d be a bunch of damn fools to even consider it,” his hand squeezed your shoulder.

“Then why are they calling me in for a meeting?!” you whispered, meeting his concerned stare.

“Because you collapsed in their elevator,” he said, “You won’t be alone, okay?”

“Okay,” you replied, your breath still shaky, but you nodded anyway.

“Good,” his hand gently held your lower back and guided you into the meeting room.

The two of you filed in after the other, ignoring the kiss that happened on Sunday, ignoring the resignation form, because he would rather never address any of it than lose you forever.

The glass table was long; three officials sat together on the end, opposite to two empty chairs. In front of them was one folder. You imagined your DSO ID photo sitting in front of them all tiny and scared.

“Morning Miss l/n. Mr Kennedy. Thank you for joining us this morning. Now, we are here to discuss the elevator incident that occurred on Friday evening,” one of them started, sliding out a piece of paper, all three of them now staring at it.

You gulped.

“You’ve been with us for almost a year now, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Your performance has been regarded as exceptional,” the other official said, their voice nasally, “However, there’s been a significant decline as of recent weeks.”

“I—” you stuttered, but took a deep breath in and then continued, “I understand that.”

You suddenly felt the hardness of Leon’s leather shoe against your ballet pump.

“We aren’t here to undermine your past work but the incident on Friday has raised concerns.”

“Concerns?” Leon questioned, leaning forward, “It should be a medical concern. Not a disciplinary concern.”

“Mr Kennedy, we appreciate your… perspective, but when your assistant, our employee, collapses in a government building it becomes a matter of reliability. We need all our employees stable.”

“I didn’t mean… for it to happen. I’ve just been under a lot of pressure recently,” you spoke up, trying your hardest to not let the shy girl you were, or still are, to come out of your mouth. You were certainly not going to lose this battle, not after the one with your mother.

“Yes, pressure that both we and Mr Kennedy were not aware of.”

Papers shuffled.

“That’s because she handles her work,” he said, his tone controlled but firm. “She doesn’t make a habit of complaining.”

“Honesty is key when it comes to maintaining a secure workplace, Mr Kennedy and if your assistant fails to do that, then your office will fall apart.”

“It’s not falling apart. Neither is she,” he said coolly, nothing slipping in his calm exterior.

“Well, then, Miss l/n. Do you think you are fit to continue working for Mr Kennedy?”

“Yes—yes I do.”

“To ensure our personnel is fit for duty we suggest that you undergo a medical and psychological evaluation.” Papers shuffled again. “And we are going to implement two weeks mandatory leave. We cannot rely on reassurances. We must rely on certainty, and we all believe this will be best for us and you.”

Something ugly boiled within you. You had devoted your entire life to this line of work, to this job and now they label you as unstable and needing a psychological evaluation. All because of some stupid collapse in the elevator.

You couldn’t trust yourself to be alone over the weekend. Let alone two weeks. Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours.

“Two weeks? But I’m better, I can—,”

“This isn’t up for discussion, this is mandatory.”

“But—"

“You collapsed,” Leon stated, his words swiftly saving you from getting into an argument.

And that was that.

“I’ll see you in two weeks then, I suppose,” you said, outside of the meeting room. Your hand clutched tighter around your bag strap, glancing at his shoes.

Two weeks sounded easier when you said it. You saw the days stretching out ahead of you, unstructured by no routine and no purpose. It was petrifying.

 “Yeah… I’ll,” he cleared his throat like the words sat wrongly, “see you in two weeks.”

You nodded and turned your body, but something in his expression looked like he was going to say more, with the way his mouth stuttered open. There was something within him that was reluctant, but clearly determined the environment wasn’t correct for the topic and so he relaxed and decided on something else.

“Take care of yourself,” he said. An exhale followed.

“You too,” you smiled faintly at him and walked down the hallway.

He could see it all falling apart, everything the two of you had built in the spring, the shared evenings, the shared lunches, the shared lifts home. All of it had to unravel due to the hardships of life. Peace didn’t last long in his experience, he had become used to it by now, but there was something in his chest that twisted when he saw you walk away.

It’s only for two weeks. Get yourself together Kennedy.

His gaze lingered on you until you were out of sight, until Sherry had to grab his attention to break him out of his thoughts.

The office was grey. Autumn had begun to turn leaves into a flurry of oranges and browns and yellows, covering the pavements in a wet blanket. The flowers on your desk had wilted; the coat hanger now held Leon’s scarf.

The absence of your rapid typing and tapping of your foot was far too loud for Kennedy. His office felt so wrong only containing him. He enjoyed the way people entered his office to find you, their expressions warm and amiable, but when they walked over to him, they became hardened and cold. Now everyone entered with a seriousness on their face, and it bored him.

He wanted to see the smile on your face when he would tell you he bought cake from your favourite bakery, he wanted to see the relief in your posture when he would speak up for you in presentations, he wanted to see you.

He even noticed your sweet scent disappearing from his office. It soon was overpowered by the smell of leather and gun oil. You were falling through his fingers like sand, and there was nothing he could do but wait.

You weren’t having any better of a time either.

The laptop kept opening and closing. You organised your entire bookshelf, deep-cleaned the bathroom, scrubbed your entire floor and cleared out your cupboards. You wiped the picture frame of you, younger, in a pastel-pink frilly dress, held by your brother in his military uniform. You folded up Leon’s hoodie and placed it on your kitchen table.

It was still day one.

Rain gently pattered against your windows, streaking down and joining together before dripping off.

What did people usually do on their days off? The idea of sitting around and doing nothing scared you more than anything, because the mountain of your thoughts seemed too large to conquer, to come to peace with.

You certainly didn’t tell your parents about your mandatory leave.

Something in you missed the peace of walking out the DSO building with Leon, knowing the two of you would be together again the next day.

On one of your days off, people around your village were hanging up colourful bunting, setting up ladders. Women walked past you carrying shelves and boxes of books. An older man, greys now overwhelming his hair, was fiddling around with tying up the bunting on a ladder.

“What are you guys doing?” you asked curiously, your heart rushing already.

“Preparing for the book fair this weekend,” he replied, walking down the ladder to be on your level. His eyes crinkled as he smiled, gesturing to the large abundance of people manoeuvring books, signs and stalls, “Very busy time for our village! Families love our events.”

“Can I help?”

“’Course you can, Miss. C’mere and wrap this around for me, I’m sure your fingers will be much better than these sausages!” he laughed, wiggling his fingers before handing you the ribbon to the bunting and holding the ladder securely in place for you to climb up it.

Both of Leon’s hands were on his steering wheel, two fingers drumming along to the rock music he had blasting through his speakers. Buildings sporadically disappeared, and soon he was into the green fields that surrounded the city, coincidentally, the route to your village.

It wouldn’t hurt to check on you, it could just be a totally friendly thing, he thought as he indicated into your village.

As he drove further down the road, more and more families and kids appeared, the increase in decorations intensified. A sign read ‘Book Fair’ painted neatly in big blue letters.

He scoffed quietly to himself, thumb tapping once against the wheel.

His speed dropped as the road narrowed, tyres crunching lightly over gravel. Stalls lined the sides now, half-finished and bustling with life. Children darted between adults, laughter carrying easily through the open air.

You were right. Things seemed…  quieter out here. Small cottages and houses circled around the square. Patches of tender flowers reflected the sun, somehow holding a vividness in autumn. It was the type of village that belonged in a fairy tale.

Leon’s gaze ran over the crowd absentmindedly until his eyes landed on you.

Your demeanour was significantly different; he had to do a double take. Your hair wasn’t held in the same professional way you always styled it, it had caught the sun, softer than he has ever seen it before . It wasn’t the you he saw in the office, and it wasn’t the you he saw in his home.

A real smile was painted on your face, not the kind that was tight and forced when greeting co-workers or the nervous one when you were overwhelmed. It was perfectly you.

His fingers loosened around the steering wheel.

You were sat on a chair, holding open a book with colorful illustrations, a group of children sitting cross-legged in front of you on a rug. They weren’t fiddling or chasing each other around, they were totally entranced by your reading. As you turned the page and kept reading, some kids burst out giggling at your attempt at a dragon’s voice, and one small girl’s hands clung around your leg, your hand softly patting her head.

“Who’s that man over there?” one of the kids asked, your smiling expression shifted into something tight as you noticed the man dressed in black, leaning against his car.

Leon.

He looked out-of-place, alone at a family event. There was something in his face, the way he held himself, that something was weighing on him.

“Yeah, he keeps looking at us!”

“He’s looking at y/n! Do you think he has a crush on her?”

“Is that your boyfriend?”

“O-oh, uhm, no, sweetie, but maybe we could invite him over here?” you suggested, feeling a warmth touching your cheeks, and it definitely wasn’t the sun. He shifted, noticing that he had been caught, pressing his lips together. He walked over, standing awkwardly a few feet away.

“Do you want to come and read with us mister?”

“If that’s okay with you,” he replied, flickering back to you and the cluster of children at your feet.

“Of course it is,” you smiled, watching him place himself on the grass. You tried not to laugh at the sight of your boss sat at your feet with a bunch of children, but you didn’t want to embarrass him even more.

There were no strings holding you into the tight, nervous assistant that he sees on the daily, you were happy. Smiling. Radiant, almost. He wanted to convince himself it was just because you weren’t in your usual office wear, but it wasn’t. You were happier outside of work, happier without him around.

He had been thinking about you all week, and yet here you were, not a single worry holding you down. He thought that maybe what you said in your argument was true, that he was dragging you into his nightmare of a life because you had been the closest thing to warmth and closeness he had seen for so long.

You snapped the book shut.

“The end!”

“Another one! Another one!” the children chanted, clapping their hands with delight.

“I’m sorry but I think you parents will be wanting you back now!” you stood up, hearing the children groan and push themselves upwards.

You waved goodbye to them, feeling Leon’s presence at your side as the last of the children scattered to their parents. You wanted their effortless laughter to carry on within you, but something heavier settled in your chest.

“Thanks for staying,” you said, looking up at the towering man in front of you, his broad shoulders cutting out the beaming sunshine.

“Of course,” he put his hands in his pockets, “I didn’t know you did that.”

“Just something to keep me from going insane in my house,” you said, laughing nervously.

“You’ve got a way with them.”

Some kids ran past the two of you, shrieking and giggling, balloon animals in their sticky hands.

“Oh, it’s just reading to some kids, it’s nothing really.”

People behind stalls kept calling out the different food they were selling.

“They listen to you,” he assured.

That warm feeling in your cheeks happened again.

A silence occurred, but not a loud one, it was soothed by the laughter of children and parents. The cold wet smell of autumn was overrun by the sweet smell of candyfloss and popcorn.

The kiss and the resignation letter were still wavering in the air.

“About Sunday—” you started, feeling yourself drown already.

“Don’t,” he said, “This isn’t the place.”

“I mean, my house isn’t far away, we can always speak there,” you stammered, sharp pains beginning to grow in your chest as you tripped over the words.

“Don’t.”

“I just, I thought that you—"

“I know what you thought,” he said, not a recognisable emotion in his voice. Nothing you could cling on to or help you stay afloat.

“Leon— I don’t understand.”

“I think we both know that I’m trying to do the right thing.”

“And what is that?”

“Keeping this simple,” he stated.

“Simple,” you repeated, nodding your head slightly, more to yourself than him.

“Well,” you said, turning your back to him, “thanks for stopping by. I’ll see you around.”

Wallow. You wallowed. For the rest of the day. You despised letting a man have such control over your feelings, but you figured it was better to let it out than keep it inside. Face swollen and pink from crying, you felt like one huge idiot.

You collapsed in the elevator after working yourself into the ground, you’ve been assigned a mandatory psychological evaluation and now the man who you’d found yourself in love with for the past 6 months doesn’t want anything more to do with you.

Your mother’s disapproving face had been burned into your mind and now it was overlapping with Leon’s. Cold and distant.

You turned off the television and scrubbed at your face with the sleeve of your sweater, pacing around in the kitchen. You felt like one of those hamsters in tiny enclosures. Silence was too loud and the walls were too close.

The only person you could rely on was yourself, and you had been reminded of that over and over again, yet you couldn’t get it to stick in your mind. You couldn’t even say you were unacquainted to that hurtful internal wound in your chest, the one that throbbed when you were rejected by the people around you, because you were very familiar with it.

People were flawed, yes, it was hard to find someone perfect, but being hurt this way was something you never wanted to experience again.

The impulsive thought of running away seemed pleasant, you imagined yourself sitting on a beach in one of those picturesque postcards. Just to escape it all.

The ticking of the clock was mocking you.

Simple.

Right, because that’s what it was. Simple.

Nothing about the way he looked at you like you were worth something to protect, like you brightened his days—was simple.

His hoodie was still folded neatly on the table, his scent faintly embroidered on it.

You should have never kissed him. You crossed the line and now he was fixing it. Because that’s what he always did. Fix things.

A knock sounded at the door. You paused, to make sure you weren’t mishearing things.

Another knock, firmer this time. You slowly approached the door, and as you opened it, a sliver of navy was seen. The familiar chest pains twisted again.

“Hey,” Leon said, his tone quieter than usual.

“Leon?” your eyes traced around his open collar and wonky tie, “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I was… nearby,” he cleared his throat, holding himself upwards by leaning on your door frame.

“…Leon.”

“Yeah. Alright. I wasn’t.”

There was the faint scent of alcohol woven on him, you were close enough to put a finger on it. His composure was slipping, and in his pale eyes there was the shine of something vulnerable.

“Are you drunk?”

“I just had a few,” he mumbled, running his fingers through his dishevelled hair.

“Why are you here?” you watched him cringe and then relax his face, like he was trying to process how he even got on your doorstep, as if his body moved before he could think.

“I—I just… I didn’t like how I left things,” he explained, his blue eyes lingering on your face. He was engulfed by the dark shade of the night, and your home was golden, like the light at the end of the dark tunnel.

“You told me to not talk about it,” you sighed, pinching the bridge of your nose.

“I know. I was being an idiot; it was a mistake.”

“This isn’t fair Leon—I couldn’t even explain myself,” you muttered, exhausted from feeling everything.

“Because if we started talking, then it wouldn’t stay simple.”

“I didn’t ask for simple.” You stated coldly, arms crossed. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I know.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“I know,” he repeated, quieter this time, his eyes flickering to the floor and then back to your warmly lit face.

The space between you was fragile, like one wrong word could splinter it and it’ll tear apart.

“You can’t drive home,” you sighed, “just… come inside.”

You stepped aside, gesturing him to come in.

“Thanks,” he mumbled, his eyes lazily darting around your home, “Nice place…”

Everything was organised and structured to a meticulous degree. But there was a homeliness to it, the blankets on your couch were clearly handmade, on your fridge were fridge magnets from different places and there were books stacked everywhere, bookmarks poking out the edges.

“Thanks,” you replied, unsure what to do with your boss in your home, “Do you want me to get you some water and food?”

“That would probably be a good idea,” he followed you into the kitchen, observing your paintings that you hung up.

You started to open cupboards that you didn’t need to open, grabbing ingredients that never made any sense, because God, anything to stop your hands from shaking.

“I meant what I said at the fair,” he cut the silence.

“What?” you turned your head to him.

“About you… being good at it. You look different. Better,” he nodded towards you.

“Better without work?” you huffed, “Everyone thinks I can’t handle it.”

“Not everyone.”

“Leon this isn’t fair—you tell me to not talk about Sunday and now you come to my house like nothing happened like—“ you snapped, your eyebrows furrowing.

He walked towards you, driven purely by his desire.

“I don’t want to ruin what we have,” he murmured, a profound sadness in his eyes.

You looked back at him, your expression undeniably less sharp.

The space between you was barely there anymore—close enough that you could feel the warmth of him, the faint scent of alcohol and something distinctly him, the scent that made you ease in the office.

Your voice came out softer than before, your lips slightly parted.

“Leon…”

A warning, a question, an invitation.

He exhaled slowly, eyes dropping for just a second, to your soft lips, before forcing themselves back up.

You could see his control slipping, his careful exterior being stripped. He exhaled through his nose, shaking his head.

“Tell me to leave.”

Note: Okay, it's finally here. This is the LONGEST chapter yet omg and I finally found out how to use em dashes. This chapter was going to be much longer but I decided to cut it up and make another chapter. Sorry for the wait and false promises, I am definitely not promising anything ever again LOL. I really struggled to know what to do next but I hope this is satisfactory. I hope everyone is okay, the UK is currently being blessed by the sun and it's sooo nice. Couldn't think of a song for this chapter but I did write it while listening to I Love You by Fontaines D.C. so maybe there's that. Wrote this instead of studying...

There will be 3 more chapters I believe, the part 7 will be preparing for Sherry's wedding, part 8 will be Sherry's wedding and part 9 will be... ykw. Chapters will come out slower because I don't wanna burn myself out and I gotta study booooo...

If you guys have any questions or anything let me knoww1!!!! I love talking to you guys.

The fucking insane taglist omg:

@babygirl-panda19 @musegonemad @cherry-4200 @mmeerraa @cautioniwillbite @whoskeiraaa @aliidarling @frazzled-soul @onebatch--twobatch @jeewhat @connoresque @girlwithadragonheart @qngelical @djoslola @wastedpanda @mara-brekker @rednnedy @applerpi @404creep @mommafirefly666 @brooke1228 @justvalkyrie @animegamerfox @theuncommoncorner @callme-amaya @itsjustbell @brightestflame @sharkalina666 @iheartdaenerys @keopio @zea-is-queen @youkoden @youmake1mistake @caroline-the-cat @deo-data @toorulee @linsweetgirl @stinkystick @parasuchus @doribtw @chocoismasochist @toastloverr

@princeintheshadow @saewya001 @oceanwoozi @kiraraperv @stickyhoney @icelatte-tea @non-binarybee @ambitions-like-ribbons @amphiroxx @whoisgami @lkittys @heavensknows @non-binarybee @imonmy8thhusbandanditsthesameman @sunsethw4 @sirenpearldust @meg-cosplay @jaescafe @dez93006 @anfervaldez @n1nia @riasjams @helplesssrain @ordelixx @radioactive-ocha @kissesforjeannie @cjafjatkstke @limitless-matilda @my-drvidess @jujube311 @sinnamon-bunn @sanniesfavoriteprincess @shrimpchipcookie @thiskingdomwillendure @itsyogirlx @astraioses @glocuseguardian3rd @drag0nl0v3rlol @a-small-batch-of-dragons @sandiaholland @tasias-world @fa0nz6ain @anonomouswriter-blr

@tired-jaz @mokacore @justnathsweetie @seraphinewrites @f0rtunej @2019-91-02-01-blog @sugurussy @thulhu @nojustn00 @imredjack @silkentofuu @sftykth @kiegosbby @orangeflowerrs @zie-29 @kennedywiffye

[blondedlvfe]

John Carter I need you

[mrsdotleonkennedy]

I'm really considering buying outlast trials rn that's 70% off on steam. I only recently became interested in the game, but I've known about the outlast saga for years. Do you recommend it? btw your dr easterman x reader fanfic on ao3 is really good (⁠ ⁠◜⁠‿⁠◝⁠ ⁠)⁠♡

tysm ive been really slacking on it lately i rlly need to finish 🥺🥺

and omg yes i recommend so so so hard its literally the best game ive bought in 2025, like the only game ive fully committed to for over 3 months thats how good it is!! ive played the outlast series since i was a kid and trials is such a different and interesting game but still has the nostalgia feeling, all the lore included too— that links to the og games is just so great ughhh

i implore that u get it u will not regret 🤍

[mrsdotleonkennedy]

hiii chat so basically im writing an easterman fic on ao3 if anybody’s interested :P

https://archiveofourown.org/works/78127336/chapters/204759911

[reputjara]

no lube, no protection, all night, all day, vertically, horizontally, missionary, cowgirl, reverse cowgirl, doggy, backwards, sideways, upside down, on the floor, in the bed, on the couch, in a chair, outside, in a train, on a plane, in the car, in the shower, on the street🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

[mrsdotleonkennedy]

dr. hendrick joliet easterman/fem!reagent reader

a/n: hope you guys enjoyed!!! lmk if i should make a part 2 and any tips/suggestions on what i should add <3

—

possible cw/tws: lowk implied age gap, nsfw, no smut YET but reader lowkey stares at his boner, daddy kink if you squint, touch starved af reader, easterman being here is a warning in itself, been playing trials for a month now so maybeee ooc but u tell me, manipulation and dark romance, baby! :p

You don’t remember when your name stopped meaning anything.

It’s still there, somewhere. Probably. Buried beneath the white noise piped into your sleep room at all hours, beneath the repetition drills, beneath the voice that tells you what to think before you can finish forming the thought yourself. But it feels… theoretical now. Like something you once read in a book you’re no longer allowed to touch. You can’t remember the last book you were allowed to read that wasn’t the fucking Bible.

You are a Reagent. Atleast, that’s what you’re supposed to be.

You wake when the lights come on. You eat when the tray sits infront of you in the shitty cafeteria once a day. You sleep when the hum lowers into a lull that presses your mind flat and pliable, drowned out by a constant voice on your radio.

Days are measured in Trials. Pain. Conditioning. Success is survival. Failure is correction. Or worse.

This is normal.

This is good, even.

Thats what you’ve learned. Better than the world you once lived in, where people saw you as a worthless, teenage scum on the streets. Undeserving of love and shelter.

Still— as your fifth or sixth month in the trials rolls in. You feel it.

There is something different about you.

You feel it before you’re told.

The others whisper sometimes, when the peeping doctors and soldiers (and gossiping nurses like Barlow) aren’t close enough to shock them into silence. Their voices are hoarse, ruined things, scraped raw by screaming, watching fellow Reagents be ripped apart by the prime assets and ex-pops alike. Months, or even years of suffering, brutal hand-puppet drillings from Mother Gooseberry or shot-off kneecaps from Franco.

The new asset, Lilliya, seemed to put a real shit smear on communal morale.

—

“She’s lucky.” Some say, passing glances as you walk by, their words tinged with jealousy and disdain.

“She’s marked.” Others do, tinged with warning and a distinct relief that they aren’t you.

“Don’t dare look at her when the cameras look at you.”

—

You don’t understand what they mean. Not fully. But you’ve noticed it too.

Your door creaks open more often than it should when you sleep at night. At first you thought the constant, day-in-day-out trauma might have pummelled your brain into utter madness, manifesting as a fantasy of the heavy steps and heavier breathing. Someone was watching you sleep. They were… preparing for something.

Not for extraction. Not for punishment.

For evaluation.

You decide you can’t hit the hay one gloomy day, a brief case of insomnia that would alter your course as a Reagent permanently.

—

Tonight, as you sit on the edge of the seat by your desk, the lights don’t snap on harshly. They bloom instead, gentle, almost considerate. The hum in your skull shifts frequencies, easing rather than flattening you. Your muscles loosen before you consciously register why.

You’re almost surrendering, considering putting your forehead to the wood to let yourself get some shut-eye.

That alone would be unsettling—if you were still capable of being unsettled.

“Reagent.”

The all-too familiar voice doesn’t come from the ceiling speakers or your worn radio.

It comes from inside the room, echoing on your walls.

You sit up immediately, spine straight, hands folding in your lap because that’s what you’ve been trained to do when addressed directly. Your heart stutters once, then steadies.

There is a man standing just beyond the threshold.

You’ve seen him before. Everyone has. But only a vague silhouette on-screen. Some weren’t even sure if he was real, or just a concept.

Dr. Hendrick Joliet Easterman.

Architect of the Trials. Self-appointed daddy. The man whose voice shapes the mazes you bleed through. The one who watches from behind mirrored glass and camera lenses, whose approval feels like sunlight and whose disappointment feels like suffocation.

But he’s never been here.

In person, he is… quieter. Taller than you expected. Older than the voice suggests, black thinning hair wears him surprisingly well despite his tired expression, though his eyes are sharp with something far too alive for a place like this. His red-tie suit is immaculate, untouched by the grime and decay that stains everything else in the facility.

He looks at you like you are not a tool.

He looks at you like you are interesting.

“You’re awake,” he says mildly. “Good.”

You nod. You do not speak unless prompted. That rule is carved deep.

Easterman steps inside and the door seals behind him with a finality that sends a ripple through your chest. You track his movements without realizing it, your gaze falling to the shift in fabric, a small tent in his slacks, just slightly—then freezing. God you were pathetic.

He noticed.

A faint smile touches his mouth.

“Eyes up,” he says softly, clicking his tongue.

You obey.

The conditioning encourages compliance. Rewards it. But this feels different. There’s a warmth threaded through the command, something almost… indulgent.

His eyes are pale, yet the black pupils swallow up most of his irises. Clinical. Devout. Yet, almost hungry. They search your face with the care of a man studying scripture, memorizing every line and margin note.

“You’ve… been outperforming projections,” he continues. “Resilience, adaptability, pain tolerance. Most importantly—retention.”

You don’t know what to say. So you say nothing. But you stiffen.

“That’s not an accusation,” Easterman adds reassuringly, as if reading the way your shoulders tighten. “It’s praise.”

Praise is dangerous. Praise is destabilizing. And yet you crave it more from him than your lungs do oxygen.

Your breath catches anyway.

He circles you slowly, footsteps measured. You remain still, gaze fixed ahead, though every nerve in your body tracks him like prey tracking a predator that hasn’t decided whether to strike.

“Do you know why you were selected?” he asks.

“No, sir,” you answer, a meek, automatic response. You have no idea how the unconscious submission you exude entices him.

He hums. “Honest. Good.”

He stops behind you. You feel him there—not touching, not yet—but close enough that his presence alters the air. Your skin prickles. The hum in your head dips again, encouraging receptivity.

“You were selected,” Easterman begins, “—because you respond beautifully to guidance.”

Your throat tightens.

“I don’t mean obedience,” he continues. “Plenty of other Reagents obey. Fear will do that. Pain will do that.” He leans closer, his voice lowering. “You, however, my perfect masochist… you internalize.”

Something in his manner of speech sends a shiver down your spine. Its’ almost condescending if his tone wasn’t so sweet.

“You want to do well,” he murmurs. “Not because you’re told to. But because approval… satisfies you. You’re my how-high.”

You swallow thickly. The nickname makes your cheeks burn and your eyes glimmer. Recognition.

“Aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” you say the title again like an instinct, you swell with pride more in this moment of intimate praise than from any of your trials’ A-plus commendations, though you’re not entirely sure why.

He smiles again, sharper this time.

“There,” Easterman says. “That. That’s what I mean.”

He moves in front of you once more, crouching so you’re forced to look directly at him. His gaze is uncomfortably intimate at this distance, searching, intent.

“You don’t need to call me ‘sir’ when we’re alone,” he tells you. “Truly alone.”

Your breath stutters.

“We’re… alone?” you ask before you can stop yourself. “I only mean, aren’t there—“

“Cameras? No.” He chuckles quietly. “For now.”

He could do anything to you right now. You could do anything to him. Grab a lamp, hit him over the head and then—

His hand lifts.

Your body braces instinctively, eyes squeezing shut, ready for impact, for correction—but his calloused fingertips only brush beneath your chin, tilting your face upward with infuriating gentleness.

“Relaaax,” Easterman cooes at you, drawing out the ‘a’. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d already be screaming.”

Your pulse betrays you, racing.

“God. They are wearing you thin in here, hm?” He tuts as he squishes your cheeks to tilt your face from side to side, taking you in fully. He scrutinises every freckle, every nervous blink, eyes dragging down from the pout of your lips to the thin cusp of your jaw and collarbone. Shamelessly.

He breathes in after a while. Then out, smoke blanketing over your face. Your expression doesn’t screw up in disgust, infact you seem to relish in the second-hand smoke making your remaining senses glitch and your brain go fuzzy. Things like and alcohol were prohibited to all Reagents, after all. You wonder when he even got a chance to light a—

“Do you trust me?” he asks.

The question bypasses logic. It slides past resistance, sinks into the softened places the conditioning has left behind.

“Yes si—,” you blurt. “Easterman.”

The words tumble out with only minimal hesitation. Progress is progress. Easterman’s expression changes.

Not triumph. Not satisfaction. Something closer to relief.

“Good,” he whispers.

He straightens, withdrawing his hand—but the absence feels louder than the touch. It’s like, when you look in the cracked, dingy mirror above your sink again, there’ll be fresh dimples and divots carved in from where his fingertips lingered. “You’ll be receiving adjusted protocols going forward. Reduced punitive measures. Increased new one-on-one evaluations.”

Special treatment.

You’ve heard what happens to Reagents who receive special treatment. Dorris’ ‘very close buddy’ got so much of… whatever she got done to her, she was mutated into fearsome trial brute known as the Jaeger. (Henrietta, you think she was called.)

Amelia was practically hung drawn and quartered as an example for her ‘prison break’ slash ‘revolution’ attempt. Though you knew better than to follow any of that.

She was strung up like meat infront of the rebirth counter and humiliated, kept alive by a machine for personalised, Murkoff-dictated suffering. It was almost like something of a display you’d seen done to a mannequin in one of Coyle’s trials. Inhumane. Egregiously cruel.

The point was…most of the ‘special Reagents’ don’t last.

And whilst you were unsure if the same fate lied ahead for you, you hoped you were going to be different.

But Easterman is still watching you, his attention unwavering, and you realize—deep in your rewired mind—that you don’t want it to stop.

“I’ll be visiting you,” he adds casually. “Physically. Like this.”

Your breath catches again.

“Why?” you ask, quietly.

‘Why me?’ Was what you wanted to say, but it seemed to catch in your throat. He understood well enough.

He pauses at the door, glancing back over his shoulder. His eyes linger on you with unmistakable intent.

“Because, my how-high,” Easterman says, “I find you… compelling.”

The door seals.

The hum returns to its usual frequency.

You sit there long after he’s gone, the heady smell of smoke in your sleep room and a flush across the tips of your ears, heart pounding, mind buzzing with a single forbidden thought that refuses to be corrected away:

You wanted needed him to come back.

[secret--songs]

you're trying to give easterman a blowjob but he just keeps talking about how bad you're doing despite the fact he's fully erect and leaking

[entirelyunlovable]

Dr Easterman keeps going semi viral on tiktok for his outrageous voicelines but the x reader tag stays empty... what a sick, meaningless, twisted world we live in

[taerb8]

People are so used to sterilized copy-paste puzzle games marketed as horror that the second they see genuine horror they call it ‘disgusting and repulsive.’

It’s definitely the ps-plus monthly players joining in, but the amount of brain dead takes I’ve seen on the outlast trials recently is infuriating. Horror is not just “survive until 0:00 AM and close the door when you see an anomaly.” It’s not just loud jumpscares and gooner-bait antagonists. It’s not just break-ins and late-night gas stations. It’s trauma. It’s responses to said trauma. It’s degeneracy. It’s repulsive. It’s hard to digest. It’s uncomfortable. It’s fearful. It’s raw. It’s exaggerated. It’s paranormal. It’s puzzling. It’s complex.

(Don’t get me wrong, the games that meet the description of those I’m referencing are still good games.)

The rise in censorship and easy-to-digest content has genuinely ruined people’s ability to even consider anything slightly complex. They don’t see the metaphors nor the societal critiques in the shocking imagery. It’s all “the devs should have their hardwares checked” or “this is way too much. It’s disgusting, who even likes this stuff?” If you can’t handle the Outlast trials, then leave the game. It’s okay to know your limits and put up boundaries. What’s not okay is to spew hateful, shallow nonsense about a game, community, and dev team you know nothing about.

The only characters I see with little-to-no critiques are Coyle and Liliya (in reference to the new players), which is of course because they’re the most conventionally attractive characters in the game. If they were deformed in any way, they’d be ridiculed just like the rest of the characters would. It’s genuinely ridiculous.

No hate to people who came from ps+ or DBD, heavy side-eye to people who’re spreading hate towards a game they couldn’t even take the time to research. It’s like they saw “multiplayer pvp + pve horror game” and assumed it was like DBD. Which by the way, is more a puzzle and teamwork kind of game as opposed to a true horror game. (No hate to DBD tho). Outlast trials is a great game if you’re able to digest its content. If not, no worries - it’s a very particular type of game. Blunt, shocking, and unconventional- but very fun :)

[wolf-feathers12]

I will never EVER play outlast trials because of how distressing it is/good the voice acting is.

Cant even watch gameplay with the snitch/judge characters.

But i love the lore and characters and how unapologetic it is in showcasing humanity at its most violent.

Its oddly cathartic in this day and age where a lot of horror media is squeaky clean (or at least made more marketable with unpleasant parts taken out) outlast being so violent and "unmarketable" makes me happy.

[taerb8]

You managed to summarize my intended thoughts within the last two paragraphs I love love LOVE how you phrased this !!

And don’t worry, this doesn’t make you a “fake fan,” it makes you someone who respects their boundaries, knows their limits, all whilst being able to appreciate something you wouldn’t conventionally be drawn to. Actually, I think a lot of people in the fandom can relate to you!

[wolf-feathers12]

Hehehehe thank you! :3

I will not lie irl im one of those people who see a stuffed toy all alone and will be thinking about it for the next week sad that it was left alone. Can't even listen to the snitch (or the scapegoats) dialogue lines >_<

But that is 100% a me thing (its weird fr? I think it has somthing to do with how in both cases they are completely helpless? A bit triggering. ) and if I wanted to I would just avoid everything and anything outlast related but its just such an interesting world. The layers to it and how it explores truma and doesn't shy away from shoveing it your face.

The game doesnt hide it or make the camera pan away. It zooms in. Pushes you right up to it and then makes you repeat it again and again until its perfect.

And then theres the whole marketability of it.

Like man the first time we see franco hes breastfeeding from a decapitated woman. Aint no advertisers touching that. Its so taboo and weird and fucked that it scares away people who want to make it more palatable and less "offensive" and I truly hope it stays that way. Theres something comforting in that.

It kinda reminds me of the nurse episode in morel orle? When truma and coping methods arnt the punchline people feel uncomfortable. :/

Idk i could ramble on about this for ever >_<

[scivors]

[dr-markoriverland]

baguette

[ransomchmt]

[cablecchewer]

god he is so fucking cringe i wanna make out with him

[8nin]

saying my name is so intimate why would you do that to me