OSCAR ISAAC GQ 'Men of the Year' (2025)

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
styofa doing anything
No title available

#extradirty

Product Placement
Peter Solarz
Not today Justin
Game of Thrones Daily
d e v o n
todays bird

roma★
i don't do bad sauce passes

titsay
taylor price

No title available
trying on a metaphor

No title available
Misplaced Lens Cap

blake kathryn
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
seen from Thailand

seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from France

seen from Australia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia
seen from Canada
seen from Brazil
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany

seen from Australia

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Türkiye

seen from United States
@nenelysian
OSCAR ISAAC GQ 'Men of the Year' (2025)
got a crick in my neck and a frog in my throat and a chip on my shoulder and a stick up my ass and now you're gonna stand there puttin words in my mouth? haven't I been through enough?
the thing about phone in bed is that it's so awesome. almost makes you feel like betraying & destroying yourself for nothing isn't all so bad
there desperately needs to be a separate option to report ads for hijacking your touch screen or automatically launching your browser/app store the moment you scroll past it. "malicious" is not a strong enough word. i need the "go fuck yourself and die in a pit of boiling acid x10000" option
on your back, director
you were sent to kill the prime minister, not straddle the man guarding him. unfortunately, director hotchner seems more interested in testing your limits than turning you in.
✉ curious about virelia's chain of command? the internal affairs index is open for review
pairing: aaron hotchner x bimbo!reader warnings: fem!reader, virelia au, bimbo!assistant!reader is now a super secret undercover assassin (everybody clap!), power imbalance always, workplace hierachy/superior-subordinate relationship, sexual tension disguised as hand-to-hand combat, knifeplay but it's training (true), female manipulator, morally grey reader, hotch gets pinned teehee, slight angst????? reader hints to a tragic background wc: 1.1k
There’s always a moment, in every mission, where the performance starts to slip. When the lashes stop fluttering quite right, where your lip gloss doesn’t distract the way it’s supposed to, where you laugh at the wrong thing or blink too slow or something just a little too smart.
Like how yesterday you forgot to giggle in the right pitch when that senator made a joke. How you flinched when they mentioned the Prime Minister’s next tour stop, how you answered a question in French when you were supposed to be fluent in Spanish. You wore red when you should’ve worn cream.
You’ve been letting your real self leak through, just enough for someone like him to smell the gasoline.
And now Director of Protective Intelligence Aaron Hotchner (shadow man himself, protector of the powerful, holder of the world’s sharpest gaze) has requested a private combat assessment.
You don’t buy the formality.
He’s not a man who wastes time. He doesn’t blink unless there’s something to see.
Which is why you think — no, fear — he’s already onto you.
He’s the kind of man who spends his life tracing danger in its earliest outlines. And you, unfortunately, are a masterpiece of danger.
“You’re holding back, Director,” you say, and your voice is like candy dipped in arsenic. “I promise I don’t break easy… unless you want me to.”
It’s a reckless thing to say, borderline suicidal, but the line was ten miles behind you, no longer just toeing it, but rather tangoing with it, giving it a lap dance, moaning in its ear.
Distraction is the only weapon you haven’t drawn in earnest, and your last chance at control lies somewhere between his restraint and your mascara.
“I don’t break things I don’t intend to keep.”
His arm hooks around your waist. Your back slams against his chest, forearm pinning you just above your ribcage. You can feel every breath he takes against the shell of your ear.
“That seems, like… a little counterintuitive, don’t you think?”
He fight the urge to squirm against his crotch just to earn yourself some sort of reaction.
“You misunderstand.” His hand doesn’t move, but it might as well have, fingers tapping against your side. “I don’t break to destroy. I break to test. To expose stress points. Weakness. Loyalty.”
And suddenly you can’t tell if he’s testing your cover or deciding where to cut it open.
So you smile. Always smile. Tilt your head just enough to look over your shoulder.
“Well, you should definitely keep me then. I’m super low-maintenance.”
You drop your weight without warning, twist, pivot, drive your elbow back.
His chest absorbs the blow like a concrete wall, but it stuns him long enough for you to slip free.
His gaze drops then, pointedly, to the pink curve of your sports bra, then lower.
When he meets your eyes again, his brow lifts. “I’ve seen less upkeep on armored vehicles.”
You want to scoff at him. But this is what you wanted is it not? To dilute yourself to something that men underestimate. They’re less likely to see the gun cocked and aimed if they’re too busy staring at your ass.
“If you keep talking like that, people might think you’re developing a sense of humor, Director Hotchner.”
You spring forward, arm cutting toward his centerline.
He shifts at the last possible second, boots sliding across the mat as he redirects you past him, hand snapping out to guide your wrist just enough to throw you off balance. It’s less a block, more a correction.
“Humor gets people sloppy,” he murmurs, voice near your ear as he redirects you past him. “You don’t strike me as sloppy.”
“You’re right,” you say, “I wouldn’t want to be sloppy.”
Your fingers move to toy with the zipper of your jacket, slowly, because that’s the key with men like him. Everything has to be slow. Down, down, pause, down. Exposing a little more pink bra fabric and a lot more cleavage.
His gaze follows and — ding ding ding — we have a winner.
You use every second to your advantage.
In one fluid motion, you’re on him, shoulder to his chest, knee between his legs, momentum slamming him into the mat.
The mat meets his spine with a satisfying thud, and by the time he’s caught the fall, you’re already there.
Knees bracketing his hips. Blade cool at his throat.
He looks good like this.
“If I were an enemy,” you say, “you’d be dead right now.”
The knife can’t do any damage, it’s made for training, but the implication is there, primed at his jugular.
You’re both breathing hard, warm breath colliding in the scarce space between you, your chest pressed close enough to his that you could count the buttons on his shirt with your sternum.
Nine. In case anyone was particularly curious.
You can feel the flicker behind his eyes, the way he’s recalibrating, re-arming. You expect the push, the order, the reprimand of some kind.
But instead, he just looks at you.
“Would I?” he asks, voice low and lazy like he’s already run simulations and hated every outcome.
And you get the feeling he’s not just asking about this moment. He’s asking about you. What you are. Who you are. Why he hasn’t stopped you.
Suddenly your brain, which has been trained to anticipate and to lie beautifully and convincingly on command, is just… blank. For once in your life, you don’t have anything to say. Not a script, not a fib, not even some breathy deflection with a giggle at the end, just the raw, terrifying urge to speak.
To say something real. To tell him.
And that alone is enough to set every alarm you’ve ever been trained to ignore screeching in your body.
You were raised in rooms with no windows. Taught to shoot before you could tie your shoes. Taught that trust was a weapon in other people’s hands, not yours.
You know thirty-seven ways to kill a man with what you’re wearing right now. You’ve practiced dying so many times you can fall without bracing. You were trained to smile while your mind ran calculus on exits and angles and fatal vulnerabilities.
You’re supposed to be impenetrable.
And yet somehow, here you are, straddling the Director of Protective Intelligence, palms sweating, thoughts looping around the strange thought that you want to be seen.
Just for one goddamn second, to be a person instead of a persona.
When your voice finally returns, it feels like barbed wire.
“You would. You need to work on your reaction time. And your footwork.”
“We’re supposed to be assessing your instincts. Not mine.”
“Sure.” You press your lips into a thin line. “Just know that if I wanted you to keep you on your back, Director, I have easier methods.”
You drop the blade beside his head without ceremony, letting it clatter just close enough to remind him who won. At least, outwardly.
Your fingers stay behind, traitorous things, brushing over the spot where steel kissed skin, rubbing soft circles like you're checking for a heartbeat. Or forgiveness. Or both.
Then you push off, rising from him in one movement, adjusting your hemline like it matters, like anything you wear could cover what you’ve already exposed.
If this were something else maybe you’d lean in and kiss him. Maybe he’d catch your wrist and say don’t go. Maybe you’d believe him.
But this isn’t something else. You don’t get to want things. You don’t get to feel things.
You get a ticking clock. Kill Prime Minister Robinavitch and don’t get caught.
this fic was part of my 6k celebration: maria's internal affairs
✧ to learn more, click here!
LITTLE MISS PRIM-AND-PROPER ⋆˚࿔
when the crew discovers your secret tramp stamp, jack accidentally reveals he knows far more about it than he should
𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・ interested in how the pitt crew got approved for a week in greece? the original invitation is still posted
PAIRING: jack abbot x shy!reader WARNINGS: fem!reader, reader wearing a bikini, shy!reader, secret relationship, tramp stamp, nosy coworkers, suggestive banter, implied intimacy PROMPT: here! WC: 1.2k
It’s too bright out today. Blindingly so. Like the sun crawled out of bed nursing a petty grudge specifically against your corneas and decided today was the day it would exact revenge.
Your palms form an ineffective visor above your eyes, everything still burns despite this.
The sand throws light back at you in sharp, splintering flashes, like someone crushed up a chandelier and scattered it along the shore, sea spread out before you in that lurid, too-perfect blue that does not look real anywhere outside of vacation brochures and edited Instagram posts.
You squint toward the shoreline, blinking against the glare until Emma and Joy emerge in pieces.
A moving arm. Emma springing up and down at the edge of the surf. Joy beside her, louder, both hands around her mouth with the grave urgency of someone trying to rescue you from land.
Which is ironic because you are on land. And land is safe.
Land is reasonable. Land is not going to seize your ankles with freezing water and stop your heart out of spite.
Whitaker’s speaker thuds behind you, the bass breaking open in the breeze as Joy yells, “Stop being such a wuss!” and Emma adds, a little gentler, “Come on, it’s really not that cold!”
“They're just gonna keep bugging you, you know,” Jack butts in, flipping another page of his book with a flick of his wrist. “Might as well rip the band-aid off.”
You glance sideways at him, stretched beneath the umbrella like some indolent deity, skin still glistening from the generous layer of sunscreen you smeared into his chest earlier, fingertips skittering shyly over muscles and bones as he tolerated it with begrudging patience.
His shoulders, however, still blush pink at the edges, a physical monument to yesterday’s disregard for your very detailed and considerate planning.
Jack Abbot would rather burn a little than admit you might know best. The eternal martyr, sacrificing comfort at the altar of pride.
You didn’t give him the chance today.
“But the sand,” you protest, words coming out a little more whiny than intended, each syllable a tiny balloon of anxiety popping mid-air. “It gets wet, Jack, and then it sticks in between my toes, and dries in weird little crusty patches, and then I’m stuck thinking about that all afternoon instead of, I don’t know, enjoying myself, which is the entire point of a vacation — at least as far as I understand vacations, and —”
Jack’s book snaps shut decisively, interrupting your spiraling train of thought.
He stares at you, expression caught somewhere between amused tolerance and weary affection, as though he’s watched you spin yourself dizzy like this too many times before. And he has.
“Hey.” His voice is level, gently pulling you back to earth by the scruff of your neck. “We’re at a beach. Sand is inevitable. Rinse it off, dry your feet, move on. You’re preemptively ruining your own day, you realize that, right?”
A helpless little pout blooms across your mouth, the tired-and-true expression you reserve for only the direst emergencies. Which, admittedly, occurs more often than you’d like to acknowledge.
It’s practically foolproof.
And the way Jack’s gaze softens in increments demonstrates that.
He sighs in response, an unconvincing performance of irritation, eyes half-lidded in exaggerated exasperation.
“Look,” he mutters, resignation thickening his voice, “if it gets that bad, just come back up here and I’ll...I don’t know, help rinse the sand off myself, if that’s what it takes.”
“Kay,” you mumble, the concession melting off your tongue in the most petulant way possible, fingers fussing at the edges of your cover-up, dragging it upwards.
“There we are,” he drawls, squinting to look at you. “Atta girl.”
You resist the urge to stick out your tongue at him as you pull it fully off.
And when you do, a sudden, piercing wolf-whistle splits emerges from somewhere in the sea of your peers.
You reel backwards until the backs of your legs nearly knock into Jack’s chair.
You freeze when you get your bearings, cover-up still bunched in your fists, shoulders crawling toward your ears as Dana’s voice sails across the beach.
You think it might be loud enough to alert passing boats.
“Well, damn. Didn’t have you pegged as the type.”
For a second you think she means the bikini, which is revealing, yes, but nothing crazy.
And that would be bad on it’s own, honestly, because it’s weird enough to have your coworkers perceive you in swimwear, but then Santos gasps from your left.
“Little Miss Prim-and-Proper has a tramp stamp?”
You can feel your eyes double in size.
You release a strangled little laugh. At least, you meant for it to be laughter. You think it sounds more like a sparrow smacking headfirst into a glass window.
“Oh, it’s — it’s nothing,” you insist, swatting a hand. You hope no one notices that the pitch of your voice has risen several octaves. “I honestly forgot it was there.”
A lie. A terrible one at that. Because yes, obviously, people forget about permanent body art all the time. Perfectly normal. Perfectly believable.
You turn so your back is toward the ocean, blocking the majority of everyone’s view of the damning evidence as your palm flutters helplessly near your hip.
Whitaker rolls slowly onto one elbow from his spot on a towel, eyes narrowing. “Is it, like, supposed to be symbolic?”
“Is — what?”
“The tattoo,” he elaborates, waving a hand in your general vicinity, like he’s reluctant to approach it directly, wary of frightening you off. Valid concern. You do feel like a flight risk at this exact given moment. “Does it represent something meaningful?”
Dana snorts into her drink. “Yeah, kid. It means she had a wild semester and access to eighty dollars.”
You part your lips, words half-formed. Explanations or possibly just meaningless static. More likely the latter.
Because with everyone’s eyes suddenly looking at you waiting for you to say something, the attention feels a little too overwhelming.
“It’s a pomegranate,” Jack announces suddenly, rescuing you from yourself. You could kiss him right then and there. “For Persephone. Rebirth, renewal, growth, all of that. She got it sophomore year of college.”
“Yeah,” you agree faintly. You glance helplessly from face to face, feeling every glance bounce painfully between you and Jack, dissecting the air between you into tiny, fragile pieces. “It’s, um — exactly that.”
Samira’s the first one to offer a reassuring smile. “Oh, that’s actually really beautiful.”
You release another round of nervous laughter, shoulders inching down cautiously. A little uncertain whether you’re in the clear just yet.
Apparently not.
Langdon jerks his head toward Jack in one jerky movement, sunglasses nearly tumbling from the bridge of his nose. “Hang on. Why the hell does he know that?”
Your stomach does a violent drop. Like someone yanked a trapdoor beneath you and forgot to cushion you fall.
Shit.
Of course. Why wouldn’t this happen?
Because clearly, the tattoo itself was only a minor humiliation, the polite opening number before the headline act of Jack publicly revealing his encyclopedic awareness of the ink approximately one inch above your ass.
But this is salvageable, right? It’s plausible that you would’ve told him this on a night shift after too much adrenaline and too little sleep.
Your gaze swings toward Jack, wordlessly pleading, imploring him to explain this all away, practically mentally gripping him by the collar and begging for mercy, but he only shrugs. Lazy and indifferent with the tilt of his burnt shoulders.
“Kind of hard to miss from certain angles.”
You watch everyone’s faces go slack jawed.
You don’t wait around the witness the dawning realization behind you.
There’s no need; you can feel it spreading through the air like spilled ink soaking silently into paper.
A terrible little chain of silence, then gasps, then hissed laughter like matches flicking alight one by one. You’ll never live it down, you think.
Someone’s voice calls after you, but you’re already moving towards the ocean.
Suddenly, wet sand seems acceptable. Inviting. Wonderful, even.
this fic was part of my 2 year celebration: maria's summer in santorini 𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・ to learn more, click here!
MARIA'S SUMMER IN SANTORINI MASTERLIST
TIGER SHARKS ⋆˚࿔
you lose your bikini top and decide to use jack as a human shield
𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・ interested in how the pitt crew got approved for a week in greece? the original invitation is still posted
PAIRING: jack abbot x reader WARNINGS: fem!reader, reader is topless, nipple mention, flirting, sexual tension, partial nudity, alcohol mention, both jack and r are tipsy, kissing!! PROMPT: here! WC: 1.2k
“You made me lose it.”
The complaint is half-swallowed against the wet skin of Jack’s back and the dull crash of the waves.
You cling tighter as Jack wades through the surf, arms hooked around his neck, cheek pressed between his shoulder blades where the sea has left him slick and gold and gleaming.
Every step moves you against him, your body sliding closer, nipples flattening to the hard line of him, and when he laughs, the sound moves under your skin before it reaches your ears.
A small, private earthquake.
He turns his head just enough that water slides off the edge of his jaw. “I did not make you do anything. You did that all on your own to avoid my excellent points about tiger sharks.”
“That’s not a true recollection of the events and they only sounded excellent because you were saying them in your stupid doctor voice,” you grumble, chin now hooked over his shoulder while the waterline drops lower and lower around his legs, the drag of the tide giving up on both of you inch by inch. Near the shore he slows, more careful now, one hand firm beneath your thigh while his prosthetic sinks a little into the uneven sand before he shifts and steadies and steps again. “You were supposed to agree with me.”
Jack smiles.
“I’ll try to remember that next time.” He steps out of the water, dragging both of you into the moonlit shallows. “Agree with you first. Correct the shark misinformation second. Recover the missing bikini top…never.”
He puts emphasis on the misinformation part.
You roll yours eyes and cinch your arms tighter around his neck.
The second you clear the waterline you seem to realize the ocean was doing more for you than you gave it credit for. In the water, at least, there had been plausible visual confusion. Distortion.
Out here there is only the moon, a waxing gibbous tonight, and your own bad luck.
Your bikini top had not come off in any glamorous way either.
A wave basically clotheslined you mid-argument, you went under still debating your point, and by the time you surfaced your top had been ripped clean off.
You had crossed both arms over your chest and stared at Jack with horror.
He, to his credit, or maybe to his deep private enjoyment, had just turned around so you could climb onto his back and use him as a human wall and shield.
“Convenient,” you murmur. “I’m starting to think you have a vested interest in the bikini top staying missing.”
“Trust me,” he says, voice dry, “if I had a vested interest in seeing you topless, I’d prefer it happen under circumstances that involved fewer opportunities for you to drown.”
You glance toward the vacant stripe of shoreline, suddenly grateful for the hour. Almost midnight. No passing strangers, no coworkers smoking in little clusters on the sand, no one to witness you wrapped around your attending in wet bikini bottoms and not much else besides nerve.
Lucky. Because this whole thing seemed like a very good idea twenty minutes ago and now feels a little less airtight.
You’re both tipsy, brined with salt and that strange vacation logic that makes every bad idea glow with intrigue. This was not among the more sensible things either of you had ever done.
But you had tilted your glass toward him, smiled over the rim, and said please in that sweetly loaded voice that seems to dissolve whatever remains of his better judgment on impact.
Cause and effect. Something you love to keep in your back pocket for emergencies.
You bite back a grin. “Jack, are you trying to tell me there are circumstances under which you’d find this whole situation acceptable?”
The beach house looms closer with each step. Most of it is dark now, but one light still burns upstairs. His room, you think.
Jack lets out a low, quiet laugh and hikes you a little higher on his back.
“Yes,” he says simply. “Ideally somewhere private. Dry. Preferably with you in my bed.”
A little startled giggle escapes you before you can stop it. You press your face at once in the curve of his neck. You’re not sure you can believe he’d say something like that so plainly.
As if that was the most ordinary thing in the world to tell you.
“Oh.”
Entire vocabulary gone. Reduced to a single syllable by one middle-aged man with a good mouth and a bad attitude.
“That’s all you’ve got?” he asks, dry amusement curling through the words. “Interesting. You seemed a lot more talkative in the ocean.”
“I was talkative because we were discussing facts,” you mumble. “Tiger sharks are mostly found in tropical and subtropical water, yes, but sharks generally can end up in weird places sometimes, so I feel like I was making a broader point about ocean unpredictability, which was valid.”
“Uh-huh.”
The sound is mild, but dismissive enough to make it clear he is not entertaining your argument as anything but cute deflection.
By then the porch is beneath him, old boards washed pale under a flickering lamp to the right of his shoulder. You worry about splinters on his bare foot.
He lowers you carefully from his back, slowly enough that your hands trail over him in stages, shoulder to arm to chest, your palms smoothing there as though your body is reluctant to stop touching his.
He doesn’t let it.
Instead of setting you down and stepping away, he catches you before your balance can settle, your feet coming to rest over his, your toes tucked against the tops of them so you never quite have to meet the porch at all.
You stay suspended against him, your naked chest pressed to the front of him, every chilled inch of skin suddenly aware of where he is warm.
Your nipples tighten into points almost immediately.
“You get shy when I’m direct,” he says, eyes on your face like he’s studying something newly confirmed. “That’s useful information.”
“Why? Do you like making me nervous? I don’t know what that says about you.”Your fingers flex once against his chest.
He tilts his head.
“I think I like knowing I can,” he says. “There’s a difference.”
“And what exactly are you planning to do with that information now that you have it?”
Jack’s eyes flick once to your mouth, then back up.
“Depends. How cooperative are you feeling?”
It is a ridiculous question, considering your current position, considering the fact that you’re still practically draped over him, and maybe that’s why you don’t answer fast enough — because he takes the pause as permission and closes the distance himself.
His mouth is warm and salt-touched and far too certain, and when he kisses you it feels less like a question than a decision, one he’s been circling for a while and has finally chosen to act on.
For one strange second you forget every single thing you’ve ever known, including your own name, the year, and the fact that human beings typically continue breathing through moments like this.
Then the air comes back all at once and you pull in a startled breath against his lips.
When he draws back, his forehead stays close to yours.
You can still feel the shape of the kiss still in your lips, in your throat, in the pit of your stomach where everything has gone loose and sparkling.
“Oh, that’s horrible,” you say.
Jack’s brow lifts in surprise. “Horrible?”
“Yes. Very manipulative.” His hands slide up and down your bare sides. “You lured me into a vulnerable conversational position and then took advantage of the pause.”
His mouth twitches. “That’s one interpretation.”
“It’s the correct interpretation.”
He laughs again, hand shifting higher on your back, feeling the goosebumps there.
“C’mon,” he says. “You can keep telling me how wrong I am inside.”
“Good,” you mutter, ignoring the impulse to reach up and kiss him again. “Because I was planning to.”
“I know.”
this fic was part of my 2 year celebration: maria's summer in santorini 𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・ to learn more, click here!
MARIA'S SUMMER IN SANTORINI MASTERLIST
A VERY PUBLIC OFFERING ⋆˚࿔
you and jack finally get a second alone on vacation, so he bends you over the balcony and fucks you while everyone else drinks downstairs.
𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・ interested in how the pitt crew got approved for a week in greece? the original invitation is still posted
PAIRING: jack abbot x fem!reader WARNINGS: 18+ MDNI explicit sexual content, AFAB reader, smut, PWP-ish elements, unprotected sex??? kinda it's just not mentioned if there's a condom involved or not, praise kink, slight degradation, semi-public sex, exhibitionism, voyeurism (potential), one brain cell between this two tbh PROMPT: here! WC: 0.8k
Jack makes a conscious effort not to dwell on the consequences of what, in hindsight, had been a truly abysmal series of decisions.
Best case scenario he’d be labeled as a pervert. Worse case, he’d lose his job and spend the rest of his life unable to show his face anywhere in the city of Pittsburgh without wanting to walk in traffic.
And honestly, it would all be deserving. There are very few respectable interpretations of having his subordinate bent over the balcony railing where anyone with functioning eyesight could look up and catch them in the act.
It’s made worse by the fact that every time his cock drives into you, another sweet little mewl spills out, each one louder than the next. It leaves him with a brutal urge to hear it again, makes him less careful than he ought to be. Makes the risk feel secondary.
He tells himself his coworkers on the patio are too drunk to notice. Most of them seem to be. They’d all been generously overserved at dinner, then even more generously self-served once they stumbled back to the Airbnb.
So drunk that he’s pretty sure Santos had Whitaker by the shirt at one point and shoved him straight into the shrubs bordering the patio while yelling something about George?
He hadn’t caught the rest. Hard to focus on much of anything when you’re clenching around him like the way you are now.
“Poor thing,” he says, leaning down close enough that his mouth brushes the soft shell of your ear. “You must’ve been so desperate for it to let me have you out here like this.”
You let out a weak little whine, head lolling against his shoulder.
“S’your fault.” Then, more broken on the next thrust. “Y-You made me like this.”
He has no rebuttal for that. He is responsible for the behavior you’ve displayed on this trip.
Desperate. Pent up, restless, a little spoiled from how thoroughly he tends to you when you’re home and no one else is around to interrupt. Usually, if you want him, you get him. In the kitchen. In the shower. Half asleep in his bed with his hand already between your legs before either of you say a word.
But this trip has been one long exercise in frustration. Coworkers roaming in packs. Thin walls. Doors opening without warning. Someone always needing something stupid, always shouting down the hall, always appearing right when he gets his hands under your dress.
So when you finally get him alone on the balcony, all it takes is one look. One kiss. You settling into his lap while he sprawls back in the chair, drink loose in one hand, the other already sliding up your thigh. After that, there’s no stopping it.
Now your panties are tugged aside, your dress bunched at your waist, and the obscene little sounds of him pushing into your soaked cunt disappear beneath the music and laughter below.
“Yeah,” he mutters. Soothing something he has no intention of fixing. “Know I did. Sorry, baby.”
Your fingers reach behind you for him, interlacing with the hand he has on your hip.
“Jack… please, ‘m so close.”
He reaches down through the slick heat between your thighs and presses two fingers to your clit, working you harder.
“That’s it. My good girl.” His voice drops lower. “Better be quiet unless you want everyone downstairs finding out just how good you take my cock. ”
And you do try. He feels it in the way your body tightens against him, in the way you bite down on the sound for half a second too long.
But then your pussy clenches hard around him and whatever noise you were trying to swallow slips free anyway. Such a pretty sound it nearly takes his knees out from under him.
Jack’s hand stays at the swollen bundle of nerves at your clit, working you through it because he’s selfish enough to want every shudder of your orgasm, every pulse.
He gives two more rough thrusts, maybe three, and then he’s done for too, climax hitting him hard and mean, his jaw going slack as he presses deep and rides it out inside you.
He stays folded over you after, chest heaving against your back, lips finding the strip of skin where your dress has slipped off one shoulder.
He tastes the coconut lotion there. Hint of tiare flower, half faded now beneath sweat and night air and sex. Summer in a bottle. It makes his head feel pleasantly blank all over again.
So he presses slow kisses there, then more, then drags them up toward the strap of your dress like he can’t quite stop.
His voice is still rough when he mutters sweet-nothings into your skin: Sweet girl. So good for me. Knew you could do it.
Then you’re turning in his arms as much as the angle allows, all wobbly and sweet, reaching back for his face. Your kiss lands crooked at first, more smile than anything, but he kisses you anyway, like he’s got all the time in the world.
It is, briefly, a perfect moment.
Then he opens his eyes.
Robby, down on the patio, tips his glass toward him.
Jack closes his eyes once.
Fuck.
this fic was part of my 2 year celebration: maria's summer in santorini 𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・ to learn more, click here!
FIND OUT WHERE YOU’RE STAYING: HERE!
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MARIA'S SUMMER IN SANTORINI MASTERLIST
MRS. LANGDON HAS A NICE RING TO IT ⋆˚࿔
after a swim leaves your hair tangled, frank ends up helping you brush it in the bathroom.
𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・ interested in how the pitt crew got approved for a week in greece? the original invitation is still posted
PAIRING: frank langdon x er!barbie reader WARNINGS: fluff, female!reader, sexual tension, flirting!, reader has longish hair (mentions of it being down her back), langdon brushes/towel dries your hair, being interrupted by perlah..., frank being grump and hot as always, mrs. langdon allegations PROMPT: here! WC: 0.8k
“Do you do this for all the girls?”
You’re a drowned thing perched on porcelain, damp and ungainly and trying very hard not to think too hard about the fact that Frank Langdon is standing between your knees with a hairbrush in his hand.
A sight for sore eyes if you’ve ever seen one.
Your hair hangs wet down your back while he works through it in sections, slower than you expected, rougher than necessary, and still somehow not rough as you would like.
But that’s an inside thought.
He catches on the knots, drags them loose with a muttered exhale, then smooths the strands down with a concentration that feels almost insulting in its sincerity.
Like this is annoying. Like you are annoying. Like he is being dragged through some inconvenient act of service by the cruel hand of fate and his own intact moral code. And maybe he is. You can’t remember in truth.
All you know is he looks very nice like this.
Sun-burnished and tired and quietly put-upon, with that hard mouth of his set in a line severe as a coastline in winter.
And you, with your pink little arsenal of good perfume and brighter smiles and the ability to joke your way out of almost anything, are suddenly defenseless under the close-up precision of him.
Every crease at the corner of his eyes. All of it too distinct. Too lovely.
“I don’t do this for you, either. You were standing there looking helpless.”
Which is rude, first and foremost. Rude and also difficult to dispute.
You don’t even have a real comeback ready because your brain is still trying to reconstruct the chain of events that got you here.
You’d only come inside to assess the damage, meaning a quick mirror check, maybe a mournful little silence for the state of your hair, and suddenly there he was in the mirror behind you, a cloudfront of shoulders. Like the patron saint of disapproval had decided to manifest in broad shorts.
Then there were words. Something cutting and dry from Frank, something sparkly and defensive from you, words back, words forth, words that shouldn’t mean anything at all.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, in the strange conversational undertow you two are always getting dragged out by, the distance closed without permission, and he ended up with a brush in his hands and between your legs.
How many times can you mention this before it gets old? You’ll test it to find out.
You puff a dramatic little breath out through your nose. “Helpless is such an ugly word, you know. I prefer temporarily glamor-compromised.”
His brows furrow.
“Fine. Temporarily glamor-compromised, then. Doesn’t change the fact that you were still standing there like a drowned kitten, obviously needing someone to step in.”
He drags the brush through the ends of your hair with slow, unhurried strokes, and the mismatch of him is almost enough to make you dizzy. His voice still carries that rough scrape to it, but his hands are built and used with such care.
You wonder if this is what he’s like in action at work. You’d never seen it, really, given your aversion to anything gross and scalpel-y. You avoid the trauma bay at all costs.
But it’s a nice thought to imagine, if you scratch out the gruesome parts and just focus on what his hands would be like under such pressure. Careful and precise and exacting.
You lean forward before you can think better of it, knees knocking into his sides, and lift a finger to tap the tip of his nose.
“I think,” you murmur, watching his face up close like it might tell on him, “you might just enjoy fussing over me.”
He doesn’t flinch like you thought he would.
Instead, his fingers gather the strands at the nape of your neck and give a small pull, bringing you that fraction closer.
Close enough that the rest of the room drops away. Close enough that your eyes snag on the places the sun has kissed and then, apparently, bitten him a little.
Cheekbones lit with more warmth than usual, and sprinkled across both, so faint you almost miss at first, are freckles.
You stare for a second too long, because really, what is that about? What bureaucratic failure in the heavens allowed this man to be built with that level of unnecessary ornamentation?
“And I think,” he says, lowering his voice an octave, “you enjoy being fussed over.”
You feel your mouth run dry, taking an unnecessary swallow to try and reduce some of the swelling.
“Maybe I do —”
The bathroom door swings open.
Perlah stops dead in the threshold.
Her gaze moves once. Up your glistening legs, to your perch on the marble counter, to Frank standing squarely between them with one hand still tangled in your hair like this is a normal occurrence. Like this is some totally reasonable use of departmental time and resources.
Whoops. Might be hard to explain this one.
One of her eyebrows lifts in a slow, gorgeous arc, the expression of a woman upon whom fate has just bestowed a gift basket full of gossip.
“My mistake,” she says with a sweet as poison grin. “Didn’t realize Mr. and Mrs. Langdon had the bathroom occupied.”
“It’s actually Dr. and Mrs., if we’re being tradi —” you start at the exact time Frank says, “Leave.”
She lifts her hands in surrender as she starts to back out.
“Leaving.” There’s a sing-song quality to her voice.
The door swings shut behind her.
You imagine the entire Airbnb will know about your made-up transgressions in approximately 0.3 seconds.
You clear your throat. “For the record, Mrs. Langdon really does have quite a nice ring to it.”
Frank’s stare is pointedly blank. A stare so incredulous it could stop a pulse at twenty paces. The kind that should, by all logic, make you behave.
It does not.
“Get down from the counter.”
this fic was part of my 2 year celebration: maria's summer in santorini 𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・ to learn more, click here!
MARIA'S SUMMER IN SANTORINI MASTERLIST
garrett graham ❄︎ team effort.
pairing – garrett graham x reader summary – everyone keeps asking for too much. garrett has a very simple solution. warnings – fluff, established relationship, people-pleasing, boundary issues, garrett being protective, strong language, alcohol mention notes from me – based on this ask!! so so cute, thank u babe! word count – 2.1k
navigation – masterlist |
Garrett notices it first at Malone’s, which is annoying because Malone’s is loud, sticky, crowded, and absolutely not the sort of place where he should be having emotional realisations over his girlfriend’s inability to say no.
She’s tucked into the booth beside him, one knee pressed against his thigh under the table, her drink sweating a wet ring onto the wood in front of her. The place is packed in the usual Friday-night Briar way, all flushed faces and hockey jackets and girls laughing too loudly over music.
Dean’s somehow acquired a tray of shots no one asked for. Logan’s flirting with a girl at the bar. Tucker sits across from them, calm as ever, eating fries.
Garrett has one arm stretched along the back of the booth behind her shoulders, his fingers idly playing with the ends of her hair.
She looks pretty tonight in that slightly dangerous way she gets when she’s made herself look casual on purpose.
Little skirt. Sweater slipping a little off one shoulder. Gloss on her mouth that he’s been trying not to stare at too obviously because she gets shy when he looks at her like that in public, even though she had been in his lap thirty minutes before they left, kissing him stupid in his bedroom while wearing that exact same gloss and making very few arguments about public decency then.
That’s the thing, she isn’t shy with him. Not when it’s just them and his door is closed and she’s stealing his shirts and talking shit from the middle of his bed like she owns both him and the mattress.
She can be bossy, ridiculous, soft in that greedy sleepy way after sex when she tucks herself under his chin and mumbles half-formed complaints about his cold feet even though his feet aren’t anywhere near her.
But out here, with everyone watching and liking her and wanting a piece of her, she gets quieter. She makes herself easy to need. Easy to ask. Easy to lean on. She smiles before she’s decided if she means yes. She nods while her fingers have already gone tense around her straw.
And Garrett, unfortunately for everyone, has started noticing. It happens three times before he says anything.
First, a girl from one of her classes slides up to the booth and asks if she can send over her notes from Tuesday because she missed half the lecture and you always write everything down so neatly, babe, you’re literally a lifesaver.
Garrett feels her knee press a little harder into his under the table. She smiles, quick and sweet, and says, “Yeah, of course, just text me,” even though she’d told him in the car she hadn’t even finished her own summary yet because the week had been brutal.
Second, some guy from a group project appears beside them holding a beer and a sheepish expression that Garrett immediately doesn’t like. “Hey, sorry, I know you’re out, but could you maybe fix the slides before Sunday? You’re just better at making them look, like, less shitty.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. Garrett watches the pause happen in her body before anyone else would catch it. The tiny lift of her shoulders. The way her thumb rubs once over the condensation on her glass. Then she says, “Yeah, I can look at them,” and the guy grins like he’s just successfully outsourced guilt.
Garrett’s jaw clicks. Dean’s eyes flick to him. Because Dean, for all his crimes against taste and door-knocking etiquette, has predator-level instincts for upcoming drama. His mouth twitches around the rim of his drink.
“Don’t,” Garrett mutters.
Dean lifts both hands. “Didn’t say anything.”
The third one is the one that makes Garrett set his beer down a little too carefully. A puck bunny named Kelsey, who’s sweet enough in a mostly harmless, very shiny way and has been around the hockey house enough to know better than to flirt with Garrett anymore, bounces up with her phone already in her hand.
“Oh my God, there you are. Can you please help me with something? My roommate’s birthday thing is tomorrow and I told her you’d probably make those little cupcakes you brought to Tucker’s party because they were so cute, and I know it’s last minute, but you’re so good at that stuff.”
Tomorrow is Saturday. Tomorrow she has a paper to finish, a brunch with her friends she already tried to cancel once, and plans with him that he has been looking forward to with what he would personally consider a normal, chill, masculine amount of anticipation.
He hasn’t been mentally organising the entire day around keeping her in bed until noon and then taking her to that diner she likes where she steals his hash browns. That would be insane. He’s very normal about his girlfriend.
She smiles anyway. “Um,” she says, soft enough that Garrett’s attention sharpens around it. “Yeah, maybe. I can probably–”
“Nope,” Garrett says.
The table goes quiet in the satisfying way a table does when the captain voice comes out without warning.
She turns her head toward him, eyes widening. “Garrett.”
He doesn’t look at her yet because he knows if he does, she’ll do that thing where she says his name like she’s embarrassed and fond and mortified all at once, and he’ll be tempted to soften before the point lands. So he looks at Kelsey instead and gives her his nicest, most public-facing smile, the one that has made professors extend deadlines and girls forgive him for sins he’d absolutely committed.
“She’s not making cupcakes tomorrow,” he says easily. “She’s busy.”
Kelsey blinks. “Oh. I mean, it’s totally fine if–”
“She’s busy,” he repeats, still pleasant. “Sorry, Kels.”
Kelsey looks a little surprised, then shrugs and laughs it off with a, “No, yeah, totally, sorry, babe, don’t worry about it,” before drifting back into the crowd with her phone still in hand, probably already searching for another girl with a functioning oven and weaker boyfriend security.
But beside him, his girlfriend has gone very still.
Dean’s grin spreads slowly across the table. “Wow.”
Garrett points at him without looking. “Shut up.”
“I’m just saying. Very brave. Very feminist of you, speaking over a woman like that.”
“Dean,” Tucker says mildly.
“What? I’m processing.”
Logan appears at the edge of the booth, because the scent of Garrett doing something emotionally revealing has summoned him from the bar. “What’d I miss?”
“Garrett just became her secretary,” Dean says.
Garrett leans back, arm still behind her. “I became her union rep.”
Tucker nods like this is fair. “Better benefits.”
She makes a tiny sound then. She looks down at her drink, and Garrett feels the heat of her embarrassment without needing to see her face properly. It moves through her in little tells he knows too well now: fingers to the straw, mouth pressing together, knee shifting away and then back again like her body can’t decide whether to hide from him or lean into him.
Garrett’s humour softens before his mouth does. He ducks his head closer, voice dropping under the noise. “Baby.”
She gives him a look from under her lashes. “You can’t just say no for me.”
“I can, actually. Felt pretty natural.”
“Garrett.”
“What?” He lets his fingers slide from her hair to the back of her neck, thumb rubbing once under the edge of her sweater where her skin has gone warm. “You were about to spend your Saturday making cupcakes for some girl’s roommate because she called them cute.”
“She was being nice.”
“She was asking for free labour.”
Her mouth twitches before she can stop it, which feels like a personal win.
“I could’ve said no,” she says, but there’s not enough force behind it to convince either of them. Her gaze drops again, softer now, landing somewhere near his collar. “I just didn’t want to make it awkward.”
Garrett looks at her for a second. The whole bar keeps moving around them, bodies and noise and sticky light, but the booth seems to pull inward a little, shrinking down to the line of her shoulder against his ribs and the careful way she’s not looking at him too directly.
“Babe,” he says, low enough that Dean’s nosy ass has to pretend very hard not to listen. “You are allowed to make things awkward.”
She snorts, quiet and reluctant. “Easy for you to say. You make everything awkward on purpose.”
“Yeah, and look at me. Thriving.”
“You’re not thriving. You got banned from the student union coffee cart for arguing about oat milk.”
“That was a misunderstanding.”
She actually laughs, small but real, and some of the tightness leaves her shoulders. Garrett’s hand stays at the back of her neck, warm and steady. He watches her fight with the smile on her mouth like she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction, which is fine. He has plenty of satisfaction. He’s rich in it. Obnoxiously wealthy, really.
He bends closer, lips brushing her temple because he can get away with that in public and because he likes the way she tilts into him even when she’s trying to be cross. “Let me be the asshole sometimes.”
She turns her face slightly, just enough that her cheek brushes his jaw. “You’re already the asshole sometimes.”
“Exactly. I have experience.” His thumb moves again, slow over the delicate knobs at the top of her spine. “You don’t have to say yes to everybody just because they like you.”
She stares at the table for a second too long, at the fries, the damp glasses, the little chaos of napkins Dean has somehow shredded into a pile. When she speaks, her voice comes out quieter. “I know.”
Garrett doesn’t push. He’s learning that with her. The same way he’s learned that she gets overwhelmed at parties before she admits it, that she says I’m fine in a tone that means please notice but don’t make me explain this in front of people, that she can be the girl everyone loves and still go rigid when too many expectations hook into her at once.
So he keeps it simple. Keeps it warm and a little teasing because that’s where she can breathe. “Here’s the system,” he says. “You look at me. I say no. They get mad at me because I’m a huge dick. You stay perfect and beloved.”
She rolls her eyes, but her shoulder settles more fully into his side. “That’s not a system.”
“It’s a great system.”
Across the table, Tucker lifts a fry. “For what it’s worth, I support the system.”
Dean nods gravely. “Same. Mainly because watching Garrett politely tell people to fuck off is one of the few joys he provides.”
Logan slides into the booth beside Tucker with a fresh beer. “Wait, are we weaponising Garrett’s resting captain face? Because I’ve been saying we should do that for years.”
She groans and covers her face with one hand, but she’s laughing now, soft and helpless behind her fingers. Garrett feels it against his ribs and smiles down at her like an idiot, though he would deny the idiot part in court.
“See?” he murmurs, kissing the side of her head again. “Whole team effort.”
She drops her hand and looks up at him at last, eyes warm and slightly embarrassed and full of something that makes his chest go a little stupid. “You’re annoying.”
“Yeah,” he says, grinning. “But you picked me.”
Her mouth curves. “I did pull Garrett Graham.”
Dean gags immediately. “Please don’t say his full name during couple foreplay. Some of us are eating.”
Garrett flicks a fry at him without looking away from her. “You did,” he says, smug and soft at the same time because with her, apparently, he can be both and survive it. “So use me.”
Her eyebrows lift.
“Not like that,” he says, then pauses because, false advertising helps no one. “Also like that. But right now I meant for saying no.”
She laughs again, brighter this time, and tucks herself closer under his arm, her hand finding his knee beneath the table and squeezing once. Her fingers stay there afterward, warm through the denim, like some part of her has put down a weight she didn’t realise she’d been carrying.
A few minutes later, when the group project guy circles back and starts with, “Hey, sorry, one more thing–” she doesn’t answer right away.
She looks at Garrett.
Garrett smiles. “Nope,” he says, cheerful as hell. “She’s off the clock.”
The guy blinks. “Oh. Okay. Yeah, no problem.”
He leaves.
She stares at Garrett for a second, then bites her lip around the smile trying to happen. “You enjoyed that way too much.”
He leans in, brushing his mouth over hers once, soft and quick and shameless enough to make her cheeks go pink. “Baby,” he says, voice low, grin right there against her lips. “You have no idea.”
❄︎ ❄︎ ❄︎
to be notified when i post new fics, follow @kooksandpearls-library and turn on notifications! i no longer use a taglist for garrett fics.
ever since i was a little girl i knew i was doomed to take things too seriously and think about them forever
me: 🧍🏽♂️
my nervous system: we are going to get in so much trouble seriously
BRACHYURA ⋆˚࿔
langdon discovers your weakness: being correct. you discover his: needing to argue with you about it
𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・ interested in how the pitt crew got approved for a week in greece? the original invitation is still posted
PAIRING: frank langdon x nerd!reader WARNINGS: fluffity fluff, nerd!reader, sunshine!reader, intern!reader, pre-relationship pining, academic flirting, shirtless langdon, reader is clumsy, langdon manhandling once again, beach setting, slow burn as always PROMPT: here! WC: 0.9k
You’re crouched by the rocks, thinking (maybe overthinking, definitely overthinking) about how tides are basically nature’s very slow, very patient way of rearranging furniture, nudging the shoreline grain by grain. Erosion as decoration, oceanic feng shui.
Your toes, lacking imagination or enthusiasm for your existential oceanic musings, wriggle unhappily in gritty sand, damp and insistent, like the world’s least appealing exfoliation treatment.
But you’re stubborn, and stubborn means you’ll ignore discomfort if there’s something captivating enough to distract you. And just ahead, caught in the safe anonymity of shadow, is a small crab. It skitters sideways, freezes mid-motion, as though playing the world’s tensest, tiniest game of red light, green light.
You’ve never really gotten the hang of “enjoying” the beach like a normal person, have you?
Even as a kid, your beach trips meant scraped knees and awkward contortions above tiny tide pools. Scientist postures adopted decades too early. Your mind always running away from you, darting through an endless maze of questions that refused resolution.
Once you tried to smuggle an entire jar of seawater home, insisting it was important, vital even, despite overwhelming visual evidence that it was just… salty water with a few grains of drifting sand.
“Brachyura,” a voice says from behind you, abrupt and far too close to your ear to belong to a stranger. Your breath hitches and your foot slides ineptly in the damp sand.
Gravity lurches enthusiastically toward public embarrassment, already whispering promises of sandy humiliation, but a pair of hands find your shoulders, tugging you gently upright like an oversized marionette whose strings they’ve begrudgingly learned to untangle.
You crane your neck up, blinking upward through eyelashes clumped from salt air.
Langdon.
Fresh from the water, apparently. Incarnation of stern practicality wrapped in saltwater shine. Hair dripping small rivulets of ocean down his neck, skin glistening damply, sunlight skittering over his features as if it, too, is uncertain it will find a kinder place to rest.
“I — uh, well yes, that’s — technically that’s just the infraorder,” you stumble hurriedly, words tumbling like dominoes, trying desperately not to acknowledge the persistent warmth of his hands still bracing your shoulders. You straighten your spine, awkwardly graceful (okay, mostly awkward), as your mouth rushes ahead without permission from your brain — “Which is good, infraorders are perfectly good places to start, broad strokes and all that, but, if you want specificity, which I assume you do, since you’re you and everything, accuracy-wise, I’d guess Grapsidae? Because of, um, the carapace? Although I realize that’s probably not visible from your angle, which makes this an educated guess — or maybe an overly ambitious one? Anyway, I might be wrong — though, honestly, I don’t really think I am.”
Langdon’s eyebrows lift fractionally, and without explicitly calling out your obvious spiral into nervousness (small mercies), he simply crouches next to you, hands moving from your shoulders to his knees, leaning forward into your shared fixation on the tiny creature.
“Carpace shape would definitely clarify,” he agrees softly, eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Of course, if accuracy’s our goal — and you’re right, that’s very much my thing — we could always catch it and verify. Or is speculation more your comfort zone?”
“Catch it?” You practically squeak, eyes wide, picturing your clumsy human hands accidentally crushing something so small and helpless, immediately spiraling into guilty imagined apologies and crab funerals (poorly attended, perhaps only yourself, a few baffled seagulls, and the soundless waves). “No, no, speculation is good. Excellent, actually. Much safer for everyone involved, particularly tiny, defenseless beach residents.”
“Probably wise,” he murmurs, his voice barely louder than the tide hushing at your feet. “Better not to risk it. I suppose some things are best left unconfirmed.”
You shift infinitesimally closer, almost involuntarily, and find your voice tumbling out again before you can reconsider, earnestness coloring each syllable: “I'm still inclined to think it's Grapsidae, though.”
Langdon hums in soft acknowledgment, a small sound that vibrates through him into you, startlingly intimate in its resonance.
“Confidence is appealing, even misplaced confidence,” he remarks casually. “Though I’d argue it looks more Portunidae.”
“No — no, see, Portunidae is — well, not impossible exactly, but definitely unlikely, because the back legs on Portunidae are paddle-shaped, distinctly modified for swimming, right? And this crab, if you look closely, has pointy, ordinary walking legs, which —” Your eyes flicker upward, catching the small, barely-there curve of his mouth. “Oh. You’re… you're totally messing with me right now, aren’t you?”
Langdon’s smile broadens just enough to confirm your suspicion, eyes glinting. He lifts one shoulder in a lazy half-shrug, lightly apologetic in theory, not remotely in reality.
“Guilty. Sorry,” he admits. “I have this innate desire to contradict you. Consider it a character flaw.”
You tilt your head slightly, making an unsuccessful attempt at hiding your grin, cheeks undeniably warm. Purely sun-induced warmth, naturally (or at least that’s what you tell yourself).
“That explains everything,” you say, affecting an exaggerated, mock-serious air. “Honestly, this puts your whole personality into clearer perspective.”
Langdon chuckles quietly under his breath, the sound rare and low enough to draw your eyes back to his face. “Well, now you know. Incurably flawed, I'm afraid.”
“Deeply incurable.”
He holds your gaze for a second longer, a quiet smile playing softly at the corners of his mouth, before turning toward the distant line of waves.
“Come on,” he says, voice gentle, almost affectionate. “Let's walk. We'll leave our mysterious friend to its existential privacy.”
You follow, still smiling, sand soft beneath your feet and heart inexplicably lighter.
this fic was part of my 2 year celebration: maria's summer in santorini 𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・ to learn more, click here!
FIND YOUR SUITCASE HERE!
MARIA'S SUMMER IN SANTORINI MASTERLIST
Migraines are literally the stupidest thing in human evolution. "Oh no, we're experiencing too much Thing! Better send a rail spike through the skull and blind ourselves about it" like c'mon, man
𓈒 ˳ ˳ 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐁𝐎𝐁𝐁𝐘 𓈒 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓 4.
pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby (bb) contents/warnings: graphic violence, blood, body horror, self-worth issues, internalised blame/anger suppression, mentions of past emotional neglect in relationship. notes: This part got very long so if there's crustiness I'm sorry, but this one is vvv important for overall plot and setting up future stuff. Genuinely thank you SO much for the insane amount of warmth and support on the series so far!
📹 better bobby series masterlist.
You wake up still pressed into his chest.
For a moment, you don't remember why, and then you do. All at once. The grin in the dark, the teeth, the wet, tearing sounds. Your whole body tightens. Better Bobby's hand is already on your back, moving up and down your spine, languid and unhurried, like he's been doing it for hours. Maybe he has.
You don't know how long you were out. Sleep here isn't sleep the way you understand it. It's more like your body surrenders to exhaustion while the yellow hum rocks you under, and when you surface, it's never with the feeling of having rested. Just the feeling of having stopped.
You pull back. Slightly. Just enough to see his face.
He lets you. His hand stills on your back but doesn't lift. He watches you with those pale eyes. They’re Bobby's eyes. Exactly Bobby's, the same shade, the same lashes, the same way they catch light and hold it. His expression remains open and patient under your scrutiny, and he doesn't fill the silence. He just waits. Let's you look at him.
You've never studied him this closely before. You've been careful not to. Because looking too hard at Better Bobby means seeing the places where the seams should be and aren't. Confronting how good the copy is, how flawless. The earring sits in his lobe at the exact same angle, and the chain drapes across his collarbone with the exact same weight.
Even the small scar on his jaw from when real Bobby walked into a cabinet door at nineteen is right there, a perfect replica of a wound that happened to someone else's body.
You sit up. Put distance between your body and his. Not much—a foot, maybe less—but enough that the air between you becomes a boundary instead of a shared warmth, and you see him register it. The slight tension at the corner of his mouth. The way his hand hovers where your back was and then settles, open-palmed, on the blanket beside him.
He doesn't chase you. He lets you keep your distance.
“Are you afraid of me?” he asks.
His voice is soft. Bobby's voice is never careful, not even this version, but soft, like someone asking a question they're not sure they want the answer to.
You don't answer that. Instead, you say, “Are you going to hurt me?”
He blinks.
“The way you hurt that thing.” Your voice is steadier than you expected. Flat, almost. The flatness of a person who’s run out of room for new fear and is now operating from somewhere clinical. Survival-practical. “Whatever it was. The sounds it made. The sounds you made.”
There’s movement behind his eyes. He doesn’t flinch, but you spot a shift, a recalibration, like a camera adjusting focus. He remembers what you heard. That low rumbling from his chest that didn't belong in any throat shaped like a human's.
“No,” he says. Immediate. No hesitation, no pause to consider. The word comes out of him with absolute certainty, like a reflex. “No. Never.”
You watch him closely. He looks back at you. The fluorescent light buzzes overhead, casting that flat, shadowless yellow across everything. Better Bobby's face is open and sincere, but you don't believe him. Not completely. Not after what you heard through your closed eyelids. The shrieking and the wet dragging sound and the silence after, the horrible, total silence. The way he'd come back to you without a drop of anything on him. Like unmaking something in the dark was a minor errand.
And not after Bobby. Not after learning what it looks like when someone says I would never and means it and does it anyway. With the slow, grinding, erosive negligence of a man who might have loved you once but still started disappearing while standing right next to you.
Bobby never hit you. Never raised his voice in a way that carried a threat. Not once. Bobby simply stopped. Stopped seeing you, stopped hearing you, stopped reaching for you in the morning, and the absence was its own kind of violence, bloodless and total.
Now you're in a yellow hallway with a thing wearing his face telling you never with the same mouth and you cannot—you cannot—take that word at face value. Not from that face. Not anymore.
And he sees it. The disbelief. He reads it on your face the way real Bobby used to read light through a viewfinder. With instinctive precision, without needing to be told what he's seeing.
Better Bobby reaches out. Tips your chin up with one knuckle. Gentle. So gentle. Guiding your face back to his when you'd started to drift, to look away, to find a spot on the yellow wall that was easier to stare at than his eyes.
“Why do you think I chose this face?”
He says this face with an edge to his voice. Not quite contempt, not quite amusement. But snide. A little sharp. The closest thing to edge you've ever heard from Better Bobby. This brief flash of awareness that the face he's wearing belongs to someone else. Someone who wasted it, and he knows it, and he wears it anyway because—
You're silent.
Better Bobby smiles. Gentle. The sharpness folds back into warmth the way a blade folds back into a handle.
“I heard you,” he says quietly.
Your breath catches.
“From the other side. Through the wall.” He says it simply, his thumb working carefully over the dip of your chin. “He used to come to the store. Bobby. In the beginning. Before you worked the night shifts alone. He'd come hang out, and you'd be downstairs together, and I could hear you. Both of you. I could hear what it sounded like when he was still—” He pauses, expression twisting. You see him choose and settle on his next words. “When he was still trying.”
The lights flicker. Once. Settle again.
“And then he stopped coming. And you were alone down there. And I could hear that too.”
Your chest goes tight.
“You used to talk,” Better Bobby goes gently, watching your face. “Not to anyone. Not on the phone. Just—out loud. To the room. To yourself. To him, even though he wasn't there. Do you remember?” His thumb traces your jawline, feather-light. “You'd say things like he doesn't listen anymore. And 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?”
Your eyes burn, blurring his familiar features.
“And I don't think he sees me. I'm standing right in front of him, and he's looking through me like I'm furniture. Like I'm one of Clark's display pieces. Something you walk around.”
“Stop,” you whisper.
He doesn't stop, but his voice goes softer. Almost tender.
“You were so lonely.” He says it like it's the saddest thing he's ever learned, and maybe it is. Maybe loneliness sounds different from the other side of a wall. Rawer, louder, the way a voice sounds in an empty room because there's nothing else to absorb it. “And so sad. And so angry, baby—”
You flinch because you don't—you weren't angry. You were hurt. That's a smaller, quieter, more acceptable thing than anger.
Because anger would mean admitting that what Bobby did wasn't just a failure of attention but a choice. Night after night after night, a man choosing the path of least resistance over the person lying next to him, and if you let yourself be angry about that, then the whole careful belief of maybe it's me, maybe I'm asking for too much, maybe love is supposed to feel like this after a while collapses, and what's underneath it is—
“—you were so angry, and you didn't even let yourself feel it. You said it like it was your fault. Like if you could just be more interesting or prettier or less needy, he'd—”
Hot, liquid feeling surges up from your chest to your throat. “Stop.”
He stops. But his eyes don't leave yours, and in them you can see that he knows. He heard it all, you realise. Every whispered self-indictment, every quiet renegotiation of your own worth to accommodate Bobby's shrinking attention.
He heard the thing underneath it too, the thing you buried so deep you forgot it was there.
The rage. The white-hot, screaming, incandescent fury of a woman 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.
You buried it because anger felt like giving up. Because if you were angry, it meant something was wrong, and if something was wrong, it could be over. If it was over, then you'd given your whole heart to someone who let it sit on a shelf and gather dust, and that was unbearable. So you turned the anger inward instead, folded it into self-doubt, and let it eat you rather than the situation, because at least that way the situation could still be saved.
Better Bobby heard you bury it. He heard the burial, and he heard the body underneath it, and he's looking at you now with something that isn't pity or judgment. Isn't the performative concern that Bobby used to deploy in those final months when he bothered to notice you were hurting at all. That tight-jawed what's wrong that really meant please don't make me deal with this.
This is something else. Recognition. The look of a thing that knows what it sounds like when someone swallows their own rage until it poisons them. Until it makes them abandon everything they once knew for a world of yellow, buzzing lights and monsters in the dark.
“It wasn't you,” he says, his hand cupping your cheek. His palm is cool, his fingers curving, and he holds you there. There’s no force, no hard grip, he’s just holding. Cradling. The way you'd hold something you found in the dark that was shaking. “It was never you. You could've been perfect. You were perfect. And he still would've pulled away because that's what he does. That's how he's built. He gets close, and it scares him. So he retreats, and that's his malfunction, not yours.”
It’s then you start crying.
Not like earlier. After the attack. That was shock, adrenaline, your nervous system shorting out.
This is different. This is slow and terrible, coming from somewhere so deep you didn't know the room existed.
It's the crying you should've done months ago, in the apartment in Santa Clara, on the nights when Bobby was asleep three feet away, and you were staring at the ceiling, wondering when you became the kind of woman who measures love in absences. He didn't kiss me today. He didn't ask about my day. He didn't look up. Keeping count. Tallying the deficit. The anger you didn't let yourself feel and the grief you couldn't afford mixed with the loneliness you absorbed like radiation, quietly, invisibly, until it changed the composition of your bones.
Better Bobby pulls you in when the first sob breaks. Slow and careful, his arms folding around you, and your face presses into his chest.
He holds you while you shake apart. His hand moves on your back, but there's more uncertainty in it now. He pauses at your shoulder blade. Adjusts. Resettles his palm. Like he's figuring out the right pressure in real time. Learning the weight of comfort.
His chin rests on top of your head, and you can feel the slight furrow of his brow against your hair, the way his body is holding very still around the motion of his hand. He’s noting each shudder, each ragged breath, trying to understand the mechanics of this. What crying is. What it means. Why your body does it and what it needs from his.
“I love him,” you choke out. Waterlogged. Muffled against his chest. “I love him so much. And he just—he stopped. He just stopped, and I keep thinking if I'd done something different, if I'd been—”
“No.” Firm the way a hand on your shoulder is firm when you're about to step into traffic. “Don't do that.”
“—if I'd been less”—”
“No.”
His arms tighten around you. You feel his jaw clench against the top of your head, a brief flash of what might be anger.
At the sentence, at the shape of the thought, the idea that you would carve yourself smaller to fit inside Bobby's shrinking attention span. His hand on your back goes still and then resumes, slower, like he's reminding himself to be gentle.
“You did nothing wrong,” he says into your hair. “You loved someone. You loved them well. And they couldn't hold it. That's not a flaw in the love. That's a flaw in the hands.”
You cry until there's nothing left. Until you're just breathing, wet and ragged, against his chest. The sobs eventually thin to hiccups, then to shudders, finally settling into a deep, wrung-out stillness, the exhaustion that comes after.
Better Bobby holds you through all of it. Doesn't shift. Doesn't pull back. Doesn't ask if you're okay, which is a kindness in itself because the answer is obviously no and being asked to say it out loud would be one more weight.
When you finally pull back, your face is swollen, and your eyes are raw. Better Bobby looks at you with an expression you've never seen on Bobby's face. Open and bewildered, creased with tenderness in a way that seems to be happening to him without his permission. Like he reached for the right emotion, grabbed something bigger than he expected.
He touches your face. Thumbs the tears off your cheekbone, one side and then the other, careful, methodical. His brow furrows. Curious. The furrow of a thing encountering a phenomenon for the first time and finding it far more complex than anticipated.
“Sad,” he murmurs. Almost to himself. Almost wonderingly.
You sit together in the yellow light for a long time. The hum fills the silence.
Then you reach out and touch his face.
Your fingertips on his cheekbone. Tracing the line of his jaw. The scar from the cabinet door. The corner of his mouth where real Bobby's grin always starts, one side before the other, that lopsided asymmetry that used to make your heart stutter.
Better Bobby goes still.
Then he hums. Low in his throat. Warm. A sound that starts in his chest and travels up through all of him like a vibration through a struck bell. His eyes close. His head tips into your palm like a cat pressing into a hand, like he's been waiting for this, this specific thing, your skin on his skin, voluntary and gentle, initiated by you.
The difference matters; it matters enormously, you can tell by the way his breath changes, goes uneven, almost delicate.
His lips part, just slightly, lashes fluttering against your thumb.
“That feels good,” he whispers huskily. And then, quieter, with a note of genuine wonder, “How odd.”
You watch him lean into your hand, and the expression on his face is unguarded in a way that makes your chest ache. Bobby's face, but not Bobby's expression. It could never be Bobby's expression, you realise suddenly, because Bobby would've turned it into a joke by now, would've kissed your palm or made a quip or done something to break the sincerity before it got too heavy.
Your hand stills on his cheek. He opens his eyes. Looks at you.
“I need you to make me a promise,” you say.
There’s another ripple in his expression. The tilt of his head. That almost animal curiosity, the slight cock to one side that doesn't quite track as human body language. “A promise?”
“Yes.”
He studies you. Processing. “What is a promise?”
The question is genuine. Not rhetorical, not evasive. He's looking at you the way he looked at your tears. With concentration, focus, and a desire to understand. You can almost see the gap between knowing the word and understanding the weight, and he's standing at the edge of it, waiting for you to build the bridge.
“It's—it's a commitment. Something you say that you can't take back. Something you keep even when it's hard. Even when you don't want to. Even when circumstances change.” You swallow thickly. “When you make a promise, you don't break it. That's the whole point. It's the one thing that's supposed to be unbreakable.”
Better Bobby is quiet. Considering. His eyes move across your face in that precise, reading way.
“I understand,” he says carefully, solemnly. Like he's holding the concept in his hands and turning it to see all sides. “An oath. A contract between two beings that supersedes circumstance.”
You blink. “Something like that.”
He angles his face closer, attention fixed and unblinking on you. “Then ask.”
You drag your eyes over his face. Bobby's face, Bobby's eyes, Bobby's scar. The face of a man who loved you and couldn't say it and showed it by looking away until you forgot what it felt like to be seen. The face of a thing that isn't that man and chose to wear him anyway because it heard you through a wall and wanted to be the version that stayed.
“Promise me… you won't hurt me,” you say quietly. “Not the way he did.”
The words hang in the yellow air. The hum shifts. Not louder, but denser somehow, as if the walls themselves are listening, as if the promise is being registered by something larger than the two of you.
Better Bobby's expression changes. Curiosity dissolves. What replaces it is—
You don't have a word for it. Not solemnity, a gravity older than language. It rises from the part of him that isn't Bobby: the vast and ancient thing beneath the boy’s face. The part of him that understands what you are asking is not a small thing. That the promise you want is, for a being like him, a kind of architecture. A structure that, once built, holds.
“I promise,” he says. No hesitation, no charm, no Bobby-grin to soften the weight of it. Just the words, low and clear, carrying the same absolute certainty as his no earlier. A reflex, a law carved into whatever he is at a level deeper than the face, deeper than the voice. “I will not hurt you. Not the way he did. Not any way.”
His hand covers yours on his cheek. Presses it there. Holds it.
“I don't know how to break a promise,” he tells you, quieter now. “But I think that's the point.”
You nod, unable to speak. Your hand is on his face, cool to the touch, and his hand is on your hand. You watch each other for a long time, unwilling to move first.
He breaks the stalemate first, taking your hand into his.
“Come with me,” he urges with that restrained excitement in his eyes, barely contained behind Bobby's careful coolness. Something almost boyish in its sincerity. “Somewhere that's not yellow.”
You look at his hand, using your other to wipe the tear tracks off your face. “Is it safe?”
And then it returns.
Not the gentle Better Bobby who strokes your hair and says I've got you. The other one. It surfaces behind his eyes like a shape moving under dark water. Vast, amused, ancient. His chin dips slightly. His mouth curves.
And for a half-second, the thing looking out at you from Bobby's face is not performing warmth or mimicking tenderness. It's something that has walked these hallways since the beginning. Something that heard you through a wall and chose to want you rather than simply take you, and the distinction between those two things is the only reason you're still breathing.
“Baby,” he drawls, and his voice is Bobby's, but the tone is deeper, older. “I am what's safe here.”
It lasts a second. Less. Then he blinks and the ancient thing submerges and Better Bobby is back, warm-eyed and easy-mouthed, holding his hand out to you in the yellow light like nothing happened.
“Come on,” he says, lighter now. Normal. That crooked half-grin back. “Trust me.”
You take his hand, and he pulls you up.
He leads you through the hallways. Different route this time. Sharper turns, narrower corridors, and Better Bobby moves through them with liquid confidence, his hand secure around yours, his pace unhurried. You pass through a section where the carpet gives way to tile, and the tile gives way to something that feels like packed earth beneath your feet.
The walls shift from yellow to grey, and you tense, your grip tightening, and he squeezes back. Once. Reassuring.
Then the hallway opens.
You stop.
It takes your brain a moment. Several moments. Because what you're looking at doesn't belong here, can't belong here, is fundamentally incompatible with everything you've experienced in this place so far, and yet here it is: sky. Actual sky.
Not blue exactly, but deeper and richer. The colour of late afternoon, easing toward evening, a gradient of gold and amber, close to violet at the edges. And beneath it, trees. Dense, old-growth, the kind of towering canopy you'd find in the Santa Cruz Mountains, all ferns and filtered light and the rich, complex smell of living earth. A path winds through them, beaten dirt, dappled with sun.
You can feel it on your face. Not quite the real sun of your world, but it’s not fluorescent.
You stand in the threshold between the hallway and the forest, and you don't breathe because if you breathe or blink, it might disappear.
“Level 14,” Better Bobby announces behind you casually, tracking your reaction. “Some people call it Paradise.”
“How—”
“Doors.” He shrugs. “Everything here has doors. Entrances and exits. You just have to know where they are.”
You step forward. Grass. Real grass, or something so close you can't tell the difference, and the sensation is so overwhelmingly normal after the carpet and concrete and yellow that your eyes fill again, and you press your hand over your mouth.
Better Bobby steps up beside you. He's watching the trees with that curious expression, head slightly tilted, but underneath it, there’s satisfaction. Quiet pride. He found this, and he brought you here because you were crying on the floor, and he didn't know what else to do except find you somewhere beautiful.
You grab his hand.
Hard, sudden, fingers lacing through his, knuckles blanching. Because there are trees and you don't trust anything that looks like the real world, because the real world abandoned you.
Better Bobby looks down at your joined hands, and his lips part. That smile appears again. The new one, the one still taking shape on features designed for smirking, learning in real time how to hold something softer. Slow. Almost shy.
He doesn't comment. Doesn't tease. Just holds your hand back and starts walking.
“It's safe here,” he tells you, feeling the tension in your grip, the coiled readiness. “This level is safe. Nothing hunts here.”
“You said the yellow—Level 0 was safe.”
“Level 0 is my territory. Things occasionally wander in.” He says my territory without emphasis, but the words land heavily anyway, carrying the weight of what you saw behind his eyes a few minutes ago, the brief flash of the creature that owns these hallways. “Here—” He gestures with his free hand. The amber light moves across his skin, and he looks different in it, softer. More like Bobby at golden hour on the fire escape back home, and the resemblance hits you like a fist. “Nothing wanders. Nothing wants to wander. It's peaceful. Even the things that live here are gentle.”
You walk. He leads you deeper, and the canopy closes overhead like a ceiling, green and gold, light falling in shafts through the leaves and landing in warm patches on the path. You hear birdsong. Birdsong. You haven't heard birdsong in… you don't know how long. The sound cracks something open in your chest that you thought had scarred over.
Your grip on his hand loosens. Slightly.
The path winds along a stream. Clear water over smooth stones, the sound of it gentle. Nothing like the dripping in the pipes on Level 2. Simply water moving over rocks because gravity says so.
The path opens into a clearing. Tall grass. A meadow ringed by trees, the canopy breaking to reveal that impossible sky, and in the centre a fallen log covered in moss, the kind of thing you'd find on a trail in Big Basin or Castle Rock. The kind of thing you and Bobby used to perch on when you went hiking in the early days and kiss until your mouths went numb.
Better Bobby guides you to the log. You sit. He sits beside you. Hands still joined.
A bird—small, brown, ordinary—lands on a branch above you and turns its head and looks at you with one bright black eye, and you stare back at it, your chin trembling. Because it's a bird, just a bird, and you'd forgotten how much of the world you were missing.
“I didn't think this place could be beautiful,” you say quietly, looking at the amber light filtering through the canopy, the way it falls on the tall grass in warm pools. “I thought it was just… yellow. And carpet. And things with teeth.”
“Most of it is,” Better Bobby replies honestly. Not sugar-coating it.”But most of anywhere is. The trap of this place, if you can consider it one, is that you’d never want to leave. How could you? When everywhere else there’s death.”
“This is different.”
“Why?”
“Because it shouldn't exist. Because this whole place is wrong. It's not supposed to be here. None of it. And somewhere inside all that wrongness, there's this—” You gesture at the meadow, the sky, the bird, the stream. “It doesn't make sense.”
Better Bobby is quiet for a moment. Watching you the way he does—full attention, total focus, the listening that feels less like politeness and more like study.
“Maybe that’s exactly why it exists,” he says. “Maybe it was built by mistake. Or maybe it exists because nothing is ever just one thing.”
You turn to look at him. He's sitting beside you in amber light with his earring catching gold instead of fluorescent. And his face is Bobby's face, but the expression on it is something Bobby hasn’t worn in a long time, if ever. Patient, present, content with simply being here without reaching for a camera, without filtering the moment through a lens, or needing a barrier between himself and the thing he's looking at.
“I don't want to call you Bobby anymore.”
He goes still.
The uncertain one. A brief, visible tension through his shoulders, his jaw, the hand holding yours tightening by a fraction. His eyes flick to your face, and the light in them is guarded in a way you haven't seen from him before. Wary. Like you've touched something unexpectedly tender and he's bracing for what comes next.
You see the calculation, the quick processing, and you understand. He thinks this is the beginning of something else. A rejection. A pulling away. You're not Bobby, you'll never be Bobby, and I don't want the reminder. He's already building the wall behind his face, that smooth, easy mask he can slip back into, the charming nonchalance to protect himself.
“You're not him,” you go on quickly. Before the wall finishes closing. “That's—that's the point. You're not him. You're something else. And it feels wrong to call you by another person's name when you're your own—” You fumble. Gesture at him, at the clearing, at everything. “Your own being. Your own person. Or—whatever you are. Whatever the word is. Entity?”
His jaw loosens, shoulders dropping a fraction. The wall stops building.
“What would you call me?” he asks quietly. Like the answer matters more than he wants to show.
“Maybe… BB?” You say it, and it feels right. Simple. Still him, still connected, but his. Not borrowed. Not a copy of a copy. “If that's okay?”
He's quiet for a long moment, simply gazing at you. The light shimmers on his face, and his expression shifts through layers. The careful architecture of Better Bobby rearranging itself around this new information, this small, enormous thing you've just given him. A name. His own name. Not the one he stole. The one you chose.
You lean your head against his shoulder lightly.
You can feel it through the contact between you, through the place where your temple rests against his shoulder. Something in him settles. Deepens. A satisfaction so total it's almost palpable, like a beam slotting into place.
He likes it. Being seen as separate, being known as his own being. Not the understudy, not a replacement, not the better version of someone else, but simply a version of himself. You can feel how much he likes it in the way his thumb resumes its slow circuit over your knuckles, in the way his head tips to rest on yours, in the breath he lets out that sounds like it's been held for centuries.
“BB,” he repeats, testing it. His voice comes in a low, warm rumble. Bobby's timbre with something deeper underneath, and the two letters sit in the balmy air, small and perfect.
“Yeah,” you breathe. “BB.” A beat, then, “Thank you. For hearing me.”
A hum starts low in his chest, a thrum you feel before you hear it. It travels the length of his arm to where his fingers are laced through yours. He squeezes once, and when he speaks again, the easy charm has drained out of his voice, leaving it quieter, almost reticent.
“I was lonely too,” he admits.
Your heart squeezes, quick and helpless.
You sit together for a long, long time, the light pooling thick and lazy around you. And for the first time since you fell through the wall, what settles in your chest isn't fear, isn't confusion, and not grief.
It's peace.
The walk back is different.
BB leads you through the same threshold, and the yellow returns, followed by the buzz that resettles on your skin like a coat you forgot you were wearing. But something in you has shifted. Loosened. The meadow is still sitting inside your chest, warm and quiet. You carry it back into Level 0 the way you'd carry a cupped handful of water.
And you're talking.
Actually talking. Not the halting, guarded exchanges of the past weeks. Or the questions that go in circles, the silences that stretch like hallways.
You're talking, and BB is listening. Somewhere between the threshold and the familiar territory of your room, you say something about Clark—about the time Clark tried to assemble a display bookshelf himself and got the shelves in upside down, and you'd had to redo the entire thing at midnight while Clark stood behind you insisting it looked fine—and BB laughs.
It's a good laugh. It's Bobby's laugh. Low, surprised, that huff through the nose that real Bobby does when something catches him off guard, and it makes you smile. Actually smile. Your cheeks ache with it.
You can't remember the last time your face did that.
“He sounds like an idiot,” BB remarks, grinning. That cocky half-grin, the one that crinkles one eye.
“He's not—okay, he's a little bit of an idiot. But he means well. He’s just going through a rough patch right now. He doesn't know how to—”
“Accept help?”
“I was going to say read an instruction manual.”
BB snorts. “Same thing.”
He bumps your shoulder with his. Easy. Playful. And you bump him back, and the normalcy of it—the sheer, stupid, ordinary normalcy of walking and talking and bumping shoulders with someone—is so sweet it makes your throat tight with a different kind of ache. An emotion closer to joy, which is worse because joy in a place like this is borrowed.
“You know,” you begin, squinting at him, “for a—” You stop, gesturing vaguely at him. “You're not bad company.”
“Not bad company.” He puts his hand over his chest. Bobby's mock-wounded face, the one real Bobby used to pull when you beat him at cards. “I'm overcome with emotion.”
“Shut up.”
“No, no, I'm serious. I'm going to treasure this moment. Not bad company. I'm getting that tattooed.”
“Can you even get a tattoo?”
His mouth hooks into that infuriating half-smirk that unfailingly warmed your blood for years, “Baby, I can do whatever I—”
He stops.
Mid-word. Mid-stride. His body goes rigid so fast it's like watching someone get hit with a current. Every muscle locking at once, his hand tightening on yours hard enough to hurt. His head turns. Not the way a person turns their head. The way a thing turns. Too sharp, too angular, his chin cocking to one side at a degree that doesn't belong on a human neck with a faint click. His eyes go flat and dark, and the creature behind them surges to the surface, breaching deep water.
You suck in a breath, eyes snapping around you, searching. “BB?”
He doesn't answer. He's listening. Every line of his body orients toward something you can't hear, his nostrils flaring slightly, and the hum in the walls shifts tone. Barely. A semitone. Like the whole level just inhaled.
“BB, what—”
He moves.
He doesn't explain. His hand releases yours and both of his are on your shoulders, turning you, walking you. Fast, with an urgency you haven't seen from him before, not even with the strange thing in the hallway. His jaw is set, eyes scanning the corridor with a focus that's mechanical, inhuman, processing information from sources you can't perceive.
“Please talk to me—”
“Shh.”
It’s not BB's voice. But an older rumble. Something that's done calculating, moved on to acting, and doesn't have the bandwidth for warmth right now.
He takes you to your room. The warm nest. The blankets. He guides you down with one hand on the back of your head, the way you'd ease someone into a car, pulling the blankets around you, and you grab his wrist because his eyes are wrong. They're flat, black, and old.
The thing in the hallway, whatever it is, has made him become the thing he was in the dark with the Smiler, and that version of BB is a version you can't reach.
“Stay here,” he instructs sternly. His voice is low and tight, thrumming with that sub-frequency that vibrates in the walls. “Don't move. Don't make a sound.”
“What's happening? What's—”
“Stay.”
He looks at you. One second. A flash of the warmth—buried deep, almost submerged, but there, still—and then his expression closes like a door slamming. BB straightens and turns toward the hallway.
You blink, and he's gone.
Just gone. Between one blink and the next, the space where BB stood is empty. The air where his body was is settling, displaced, like water closing over the place where a stone sank.
The hum holds its earlier shifted note. That slightly wrong semitone, tense and high, like a held breath.
You sit in the blankets with your knees pulled to your chest, heart in your throat, and stare at the empty doorway and beyond it, listening intently.
Nothing. No tearing. No shrieking. No sounds at all. Just the hum and the buzz and your own breathing and the silence so total it frightens you more.
You wait.
The meadow is still inside you: the bird, the stream, the warm light, the way BB laughed when you told him about Clark's bookshelf. The stupid, gentle joke about the tattoo, the way his shoulder bumped yours, and you bumped him back, and for thirty seconds, you forgot where you were and what he was, and the whole impossible situation felt like a walk home from somewhere good with someone you liked.
You press your face into your knees. You wrap your arms around yourself.
You wait.
BB comes back eventually.
You don't know how long it's been. Time in the Backrooms is a broken clock. Sometimes the minutes stretch into hours; sometimes what feels like an afternoon is over before a thought can finish forming.
You've been sitting in the blankets, knees to chest, listening to the hum slowly, slowly settle back to its normal pitch, the tension of Level 0 releasing one degree at a time. You didn't sleep. You didn't move. You just sat and breathed, holding the meadow inside you like a candle flame in cupped hands.
You hear him before you see him. Footsteps. Slow. The particular rhythm of his walk. Bobby's gait, but smoother, more intentional, the way a predator moves even when it's not hunting. Then his shape appears in the doorway.
Something's off.
He's standing the way he always stands—one shoulder against the doorframe, hip cocked, that easy lean—but the details are wrong. Slightly. His edges are too sharp. The line of his jaw looks as if it were drawn rather than grown. His skin has a quality to it, like wet paint, freshly applied. And his eyes.
BB’s eyes are settling. That's the only word for it. The flat, black depth that swallowed the warmth when he left is receding, draining away, and Bobby's eyes are rising to the surface again. You watch it happen. You watch him reassemble himself.
He was something else, you realise. Whatever he went to do, wherever he did while away, he dropped Bobby's face to do it. And what you're looking at now, standing in the doorway, is the process of putting it back on. Climbing back inside the shape of a person. Buttoning up the human suit.
“BB.”
He blinks. The last of the darkness drains from his eyes. He looks at you, and the warmth returns. In layers, like watching a photograph develop, his shoulders relaxing at the sight of you. The too-sharp lines of his face soften into the Bobby you know, and his mouth does that almost-smile, the one that says I'm here without words.
“Hey, baby.”
“What happened?”
Not a question. A demand. You say it flat and steady, holding his gaze, and you don't let him do the easy-grin deflection, the don't worry about it. You've had enough of that for one lifetime. You made him promise.
BB reads it on your face. The refusal to be contained.
He exhales through his nose—Bobby's habit, the one that means I don't want to talk about this, but I'm going to—and pushes off the doorframe and comes to sit beside you on the blankets. Close. His knee touches yours.
“There's something new,” he says after a pause. “In the Backrooms. Something I haven't encountered before.”
You stare. “An… entity?”
“Yes.” He turns the word over like he's not sure it's sufficient. “It’s been… circling. Mainly the perimeter of Level 0. Not entering. Not yet anyway. Just... moving along the edge. Testing it.” His jaw works. That muscle at the hinge, the one that flexes when Bobby's thinking, when Bobby's holding something back. “It's been doing it intermittently. Coming close, then retreating. Like it's taking measurements.”
A shiver skitters down your spine. “What does it want?”
“I don't know.” And you understand that BB doesn't say I don't know often or easily. BB is the thing that knows this place, that moves through it like blood through a vein, that owns Level 0. Admitting ignorance is not in his nature. It sits wrong on his face, like a shirt buttoned crooked. “It's different from the others. Not like the Smiler. Not like the Howlers, either. Not like anything in my experience. It's very new.” A tense pause, then, “And very, very powerful.”
The way he says powerful makes the hum in the walls dip. Just for a second. A brief, almost subliminal drop in frequency, as if Level 0 itself heard the word and flinched.
You stare at him, your heart thrumming in your chest. Bobby's face, creased with a concern that doesn't quite fit the cocky architecture of it. BB in a rare moment of honesty about his own limits. Something new, he said. Something powerful. Something that makes a thing that unmade another entity with its bare hands sit next to you on a pile of blankets and admit it doesn't have an answer.
You exhale, turning to stare at the yellow wall instead.
“I want you to teach me,” you tell him after a moment.
His head turns. The dog-tilt. Quick, surprised.
You look back towards him. “About this place. The levels. The entities. The doors, the rules, whatever—I want to understand it. I don't want to just—” You gesture at the blankets, the room, the warm patch you've been sleeping in for however long you've been here. “I don't want to be something you put in a nest and guard. I want to know what's out there. How to move through it. I don't want to be helpless whenever you leave.”
BB studies you. That long, reading look, line by line, extracting meaning. You expect resistance. Protectiveness. The instinct to keep you in the soft, warm place where nothing can touch you, where he can fold himself around you like armour and pretend the world ends at the walls of this room.
Instead, slowly, he nods.
“There are rules,” he insists. The caution is audible. Measured, considered, a thing that’s used to absolute control, negotiating the edges of a concession. “I go with you. Always. You don't wander alone. Not until you understand enough.”
“Okay.”
“And there are levels I won't take you to. Places where my presence doesn't offer the protection it does on 0. Places where—” He pauses, choosing his words the way you'd choose a path through uneven ground. “Places where going would be… foolish.”
“Okay. Deal.”
You watch him watch you, just like earlier in the sunlight. “Okay,” he says eventually. “I'll teach you.”
Time passes.
You don't know how much. The Backrooms don't have seasons, don't have sunrise and sunset. No reliable Monday into Tuesday into Wednesday that structures a life on the other side of the wall. What you have is rhythm—the rhythm of sleep and waking, of walking and resting, of BB's hand on yours as he leads you through doorways you're learning to see.
You miss the real world.
It hits you at strange moments.
Not when you'd expect, not during the long stretches of yellow or the nights when the hum shifts pitch and BB goes rigid and watchful beside you. It hits you in the quiet. In the nothing moments.
You'll be sitting in the nest sketching a corridor layout, and the pen will skip, and you'll shake it the way you used to shake the pens at Clark's register. And the muscle memory will drag the whole world through.
The smell of the showroom, lemon polish and particleboard, the radio playing low from the boombox behind the counter, the particular quality of California dusk through the front windows when the strip mall parking lot emptied out.
The apartment. The couch. The sound of Bobby's camera clicking in the other room.
You miss rain. Not Level 14 rain, or drizzle of the Poolrooms. Actual rain, East Bay winter rain, the kind that hammered the apartment windows and turned the parking lot at Clark's into a shallow lake and made Bobby curse because he'd left the car windows cracked again.
You miss the smell of wet asphalt. You even miss traffic. The dull boredom of a slow Tuesday shift with no customers, leaning on the counter with a magazine, watching the clock crawl toward closing.
You miss cereal. The specific crunch of it, dry, eaten by the handful out of the box at midnight because you were too tired to make real food after a close. You miss the weight of your own blankets on your bed, not the gathered nest-pile BB assembled for you. You miss the answering machine clicking on. You miss the phone ringing at all.
You think about going back.
Not the way you thought about it in the first weeks. That was rantic, clawing, animal desperation to find the wall you fell through and push back to the other side. That's burned out. What's left is quieter. More deliberate. A slow, circular calculation that runs in the background of your brain like a programme you can't close: Is there a way? If BB knows the doors, if the doors go between levels, if levels connect to each other in ways that don't follow geometry, could one of them connect back? Could there be a threshold that opens onto Clark's storage basement, onto the real world?
You don't ask BB. Because the calculation always stalls at the same place, the same, indestructible wall.
The wall in your chest. The one built from the last six months of your life in Santa Clara, from every unanswered question and unfinished sentence and cold sheet and blue TV light and grunt.
The wall that asks one simple question: Go back to what?
Go back to the apartment where Bobby looked through you like glass? Go back to the doorway where you stood with your keys in your hand and your heart in your eyes, and he didn't look up? Go back to being the woman who measures love in deficits, who keeps count of kisses the way she keeps count of inventory, watching the numbers dwindle, knowing exactly what the shortage means, and not being able to stop counting.
Bobby is probably relieved.
The thought arrives fully formed, mid-step, on a walk through Level 4, and it stops you so completely that BB turns back, his hand sliding to the small of your back, his head doing that quick, concerned tilt. You wave him off. Fine. I'm fine. But the thought is there now, lodged behind your sternum like a splinter, and you can feel it every time you breathe.
Bobby is probably relieved. Bobby is probably sleeping diagonally again. Bobby is probably eating cereal over the sink, leaving his bowl on the counter. Watching TV with his feet up and the apartment is probably messier, quieter. Less cluttered without your books and your magazines and your shoes by the door.
Your presence in every corner asking to be noticed.
Bobby is probably lighter, breathing easier. Maybe he looked up from the television one day and realised the doorway was empty and felt—what? Guilt? Or the guilty cousin of relief, the exhale of a man whose obligation to pretend has been finally lifted?
You haven't felt needed in months. Not once.
The realisation surfaces slowly, a gradual saturation of a truth you've been standing ankle-deep in since before you fell through the wall.
Bobby didn't need you. Bobby needed the idea of you—the girlfriend, the warm body, the person in the apartment who made it feel less empty—but he didn't need you. The particular, inconvenient you who wanted to be talked to and looked at and held and kissed goodbye every morning. That version of you was too much work.
That version required maintenance he couldn't be bothered to perform.
But the ache—god, the ache. It hasn't faded. You thought it would. You thought time and distance and the sheer alien absurdity of your circumstances would erode it the way the Backrooms erode seemingly everything. Until the original shape is unrecognisable.
But the ache for Bobby sits in the centre of your chest like a second heartbeat, stubborn and alive, and it doesn't care that he let you down.
It doesn't care that the last thing he gave you was a grunt. Love has no quality control. Love doesn't audit the recipient and adjust its intensity based on merit.
You still love Bobby with the same enormous, stupid devotion you loved him with on that Thursday morning when the sun was on the sheets and he ignored the phone and pulled you closer and rasped stay. That love has not diminished by a single degree despite every reason it should have, and the persistence of it is the cruellest thing about being here.
Because it means you’re aching for a man who made you feel invisible while standing in front of a being who has never once looked away.
You cry about it. Once. In the nest, in the dark, turned away from BB, muffling it in the blankets.
He doesn't say anything. His hand finds your shoulder. His thumb moves, once, twice, a slow circuit over the curve of bone. He doesn't ask what's wrong because he already knows—he's always known, he heard it all through the wall—and the kindness of his silence, the restraint of it, the choice to hold space instead of fill it, makes you cry harder.
You stop crying. You wipe your face. You pick up the notebook.
And you start mapping instead.
BB finds the notebook for you. God knows where, god knows how, a composition book with a mottled black-and-white cover and pages that smell like basement storage.
You hold it and the weight of it in your hands feels so familiar it aches. The pen he gives you is a ballpoint, blue ink, the cheap kind that skips if you press too hard. You uncap it and the click of the cap settles something in your chest. An old reflex. The same one that used to kick in when you opened the inventory binder at the store.
The satisfaction of a system, a structure, a way to organise chaos into a shape you can hold.
If you can't go back, you'll go forward. If you can't be needed there, you'll be needed here. Anything but the slow decay of being unwanted. And then, one day, when you're ready, you'll ask BB to find you a door back.
One day.
Level 0 comes first. The hallways you know, the ones BB takes you through, the turns and junctions and the places where the carpet changes texture and means something. A border, a threshold, a shift in territory.
You draw diagrams. Floor plans. Rough, imprecise, the proportions wrong because the proportions are wrong. Because the hallways don't obey geometry in any way you can verify. But the act of drawing them—of putting pen to paper, using the things Clark used to tell you about rendering shapes and rooms—makes it less vast. Less formless. Containable.
The pen moves and the world shrinks and for the first time in months you have purpose.
BB watches you work with undisguised fascination.
He sits beside you while you sketch, his chin on your shoulder, his breath warm on your neck, and sometimes he corrects you (that corridor turns left, not right or there's a junction there you haven't found yet) and sometimes he just watches your hand move and hums in his throat. That low, warm rumble that you've started to associate with contentment.
His chin digs into your shoulder when he leans in to see your shorthand and you flick his nose without looking up and he huffs—offended, amused, delighted, nosing closer—and the exchange is so easy, so thoughtless, so much like two people who’ve known each other long enough that the edges have been worn smooth by repetition.
Half the time you forget he's not human.
That's the truth you don't examine too closely. Because it would mean confronting what it says about you, about your standards, about how broken your idea of normal has become.
But BB sits beside you with his chin on your shoulder and his warmth against your side. He asks about your shorthand, remembers the answer, asks follow-up questions. He brings you food without being asked.
The line between an inhuman entity wearing a man's face and a person who cares about me blurs until it's less a line and more a smudge, a gradation, a slow dissolve from one thing into the other.
He cares for you. Genuinely. Not the way you care for a pet.
You see it in the small things first. The way he checks the temperature of the carpet before he lets you sit, and how he positions himself between you and the corridor when you sleep. His head turns toward you when you shift in the nest, tracking your movement the way a compass tracks north.
Most of all in how he says your name. Not baby, not the endearment—your actual name, the one he uses rarely, carefully, like he's holding it in his mouth and tasting each syllable. When BB says your name, it sounds like a discovery. Like a fact he's still pleased to know.
“You're organising it,” he says one day. Amused. Impressed. “The way you organised the inventory at the store.”
“It helps me think.”
“You're applying human systems to a place that doesn't follow human rules.”
“Is that a problem?”
He considers this. His head tilts. “No,” he replies slowly, like he's arriving at a conclusion that surprises him. “No, I think it might be… useful. No one's ever tried to map it like this. Most wanderers are too busy surviving to catalogue."
“Well,” you say teasingly. “I've got you for the surviving part.”
He goes quiet. You glance up from the notebook. His face is going through layers again, rearranging, the cocky default giving way to the newer expression underneath. The one that showed up when you named him. A door opening inward.
He catches you looking, and the default snaps back, the half-grin, the raised eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he drawls lightly. Entirely failing to conceal the sudden warmth radiating off him like heat from a furnace. “Yeah, you do.”
You add to the notebook every day. Layouts, landmarks, and the sensory details that serve as navigation.
BB takes you exploring.
Not every day. Some days the hum is wrong, or BB is tense in a way he won't explain, or you can feel the level holding its breath the way it did the night he disappeared and came back wearing a freshly assembled face. On those days, you stay in the nest. You write in the notebook. You read the pages you've already filled and trace the paths you've already walked and commit them to memory because memory is the only filing system you've got.
On those days, the ache comes back—Bobby's hands, Bobby's mouth, the way he used to drop his forehead against yours in the dark and whisper your name, just your name, over and over—and you let it sit in your chest and you don't fight it. But you don't follow it, either.
You just write around it. Inventory the grief the way you inventory everything else. Label it. File it. Move on to the next entry.
But most days, BB takes you out.
Level 1, first. BB walks beside you, and his posture changes here. Subtly mostly, the ease tightening into a coiled attention. His head on a swivel, hand at the small of your back with a pressure that says I'm tracking everything in this room and nothing will get within twenty feet of you.
You sketch the layout in the notebook while he stands guard. You mark the exits, the supply caches, the places where other wanderers have left graffiti on the shelving units. Messages, warnings, crude maps of their own.
You get braver. You ask questions. About the Smilers, the Howlers, about the hierarchy of things that live here. How they relate to each other and what makes some dangerous and some merely present.
BB answers. Not always fully, not always clearly. There are concepts here that he doesn't have a human language for. Mechanics that exist in the gap between what he perceives and what your brain can hold, but he answers, and you write it all down, and the notebook fills.
You develop a routine. You wake up, eat whatever BB has found or produced, and you walk. You explore together, map, and come back. You sit together in the nest afterwards and talk.
And the talking is easier now, less charged, less careful. You tell him about your life. The books you loved. The way you used to organise your bookshelves by colour rather than by author, because it made you happy to look at them. The hiking trails in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Big Basin and Castle Rock, the way the redwoods smelled after rain.
He listens the way he always listens. Total attention. Full presence. The thing Bobby couldn't do. The thing BB does like breathing.
And you catch yourself, one evening, doing something unthinkable.
You’re sitting in the nest with your notebook open, pen behind your ear, telling BB about the time you got lost on the Skyline-to-the-Sea trail. You had to navigate back using a park map you'd annotated so heavily it was more your handwriting than cartography. BB’s laughing. That low huff through his nose, his shoulder pressed against yours.
You're laughing too, and the yellow light is warm, and you realise, suddenly, that you haven’t thought about Bobby in three days.
The guilt is instantaneous.
A hot, lurching, physical thing that grabs you by the sternum and pulls. Three days. You went three days without the ache, and the absence of it feels like a betrayal so total it makes you nauseous. As if the love you carry for Bobby is a fire that requires constant tending, and you let it gutter, and that makes you—what?
The kind of woman who forgets? The kind who moves on? The kind who finds comfort in a pair of borrowed eyes while the original owner of those eyes is somewhere in Santa Clara, probably sleeping diagonal, probably relieved?
You go quiet. BB notices.
His shoulder presses against yours (a question, not a demand), and you shake your head, picking up the pen. Start sketching a corridor you mapped that morning, but the lines are slightly too hard, the ink pressing dents into the page.
BB watches your hand and says nothing, and the nothing is the right thing, the exact right thing, and you hate him a little for being so consistently, unbearably right.
You grow comfortable.
Not comfortable like safe, or comfortable like home. Because this place is neither of those things, and you know it. The notebook full of entity classifications and danger ratings is proof that you know it.
But comfortable the way you get with a person—a being, entity, a whatever-he-is—when enough time has passed that their presence stops being a question and starts being an answer.
You stop flinching when he appears in doorways. You stop tensing when his hand finds yours. You lean into his shoulder when you're tired, and he holds steady. The meadow on Level 14 becomes your Sunday, your weekend, the place he takes you when the yellow gets to be too much, and you need to remember what sky looks like.
You stop keeping count.
You don't notice it happening. It's quiet cessation of a habit so ingrained you didn't know it was still running until it stopped.
No more tallying. No more, he didn't today, that's the fourth day in a row. Because BB doesn't generate deficits. BB doesn't create gaps to count. He’s present the way the hum is present. Woven into the structure of your days so thoroughly that his attention isn't an event anymore, it's an environment.
You live inside his attention the way you live inside Level 0. It's just where you are.
But the ache for Bobby doesn't go away. Only migrates from the centre of your chest to somewhere deeper, somewhere quieter, a room in the back of you where it can sit with the memory of your first kiss and his arm around your shoulder by the ocean and the way he used to say stay and mean it.
You don't visit that room every day anymore. But you know it's there. You can feel its weight when you lie down at night, BB's arm around your waist, his breath on your neck.
The ache says remember, and you say I know, and you close your eyes, and you stay.
Your handwriting fills the notebook. Page after page. The careful, slightly messy script. A system. A structure.
A way to survive.
“It's circling again.”
You look up sharply.
BB is standing at the edge of the nest, head tilted, that almost-human listening posture—chin cocked, eyes unfocused, his whole body oriented toward a frequency you can't hear. His jaw is tight.
You set the pen down. “How close?”
“Closer than last time,” ee says evenly, too evenly. “It's running along the edge and then pulling back. Then running a little further.”
Ignoring the sudden chill at your nape, you say, “Like it's looking for a gap.”
His eyes flick to you. A beat of surprise follows. Quick and subtle, the kind he still has when you demonstrate that you've been paying attention to the lessons, that the notebook isn't just busywork but comprehension.
“Yes,” he agrees. “Like that.”
You pull your knees up. Wrap your arms around them. The notebook sits open on the blanket beside you, the page half-covered in your shorthand. A corridor map, danger annotations, the new symbol you invented last week for an unknown entity, and behaviour unclassified. You used it for the first time yesterday. The ink is still dark.
“What are you going to do?”
“I need to check the perimeter. See if anything's shifted. If it's been probing a specific section or moving along the full boundary.” He's already calculating. The ancient one surfaces behind Bobby's eyes, not all the way, just enough to sharpen the edges. To give his posture that predatory geometry that doesn't belong on a twenty-something in a crop top. “I want to understand its pattern before I kill it.”
“BB.” You say his name, and he stills. Focuses. The ancient thing recedes a fraction, and the warmth returns to the surface. You hold his gaze and say, carefully, gently, “Be careful.”
His mouth parts.
He crosses the nest in two steps. Drops into a crouch in front of you, his knees on the blanket, and his hand finds the side of your head. His fingers glide over one side of your face slowly. He strokes, long, gentle, from your temple to the nape of your neck.
“Stay here,” he says gently, his thumb tracing the curve behind your ear. “Stay in the nest. Don't go into the corridor. Not even the first junction.”
“I know the rules.”
“I know you know.” His hand stills in your hair, cupping the back of your skull. He dips his head until his forehead is close to yours, not quite touching, his breath warm on your face. His eyes are darker, layered, and the thing behind them is looking at you, too. For a moment, both of them are present. BB and the creature he's built on top of, and both of them are saying the same thing. “I'll be back.”
“You better be.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. Just barely. The private curve that's his and not Bobby's, the one you named into existence in a meadow on Level 14. He presses his lips to your forehead. Holds them there for a beat. You feel the hum vibrate through the contact, that low sub-frequency that lives in his chest and transfers through skin, settling behind your sternum like a second pulse.
Then he straightens. His hand slides from your hair. The softness drops from his posture in a single clean motion.
What's left is the thing that walks these hallways, silent and certain and very, very old.
He rounds the corner, and the yellow swallows him.
You pick up the pen. Open the notebook to a fresh page. You write: Entity X — perimeter — closer. Testing the boundary for gaps. BB checking pattern. Unknown motivation. Unknown capability.
You underline unknown twice.
Eleven minutes.
You know this because you've been counting.
Your brain just does it now, keeps a running tally of the seconds since his silhouette disappeared. Because your body has learned that when he's not here, the math of your survival changes.
With him, you’re the safest thing in this strange place. Without him, you’re a girl sitting on a damp carpet in a place that eats people. But BB always comes back, you remind yourself. Always.
You're sketching the rough map of the corridors you explored yesterday, trying to get the proportions right on a hallway junction that you're fairly sure had five walls, when you hear the footsteps.
Not his. His steps are almost silent, a predator's tread, weight distributed in a way that isn't quite human. These are boots. Multiple sets. Heavy, deliberate.
You close the notebook slowly.
Six figures come around the corner.
Not researchers BB warned you about. Wrong uniforms, wrong insignia, a logo you don't recognise stitched onto black tactical gear. They're armed. Not with the improvised weapons most wanderers carry. Real weapons. Professional grade. The kind that suggests funding, organisation, a chain of command that exists somewhere outside this place.
The one in front spots you and signals the others to stop. He says something into the radio on his shoulder, clipped and fast, and you catch the words “confirmed,” and “companion” and “entity absent.”
They waited for BB to leave.
“Ma'am.” The lead one steps forward. Voice flat. Professional. “You need to come with us. We're here to extract you.”
Your body tenses at those words, coiling, and you stand at once. “No.”
It comes out sharper than you expect. Hard-edged. The backrooms have made you harder than you realise.
“Ma'am, that's not—”
“I said no,” you repeat firmly. “I'm not going anywhere with a bunch of strangers.”
His jaw tightens. He glances at the others. Some signal passes between them. A shift in posture, a nod, the silent language you’re not privy to.
He reaches for your arm.
You hit him.
A closed fist, fast, driven by weeks of survival instinct and adrenaline and the specific, white-hot fury of being grabbed by a stranger in a place where the only person who touches you has earned it inch by inch.
Your knuckles connect with his cheekbone. The man’s head snaps sideways, and for one bright second, you feel savage satisfaction.
Then three of them are on you.
You kick. You bite. Drive your elbow into someone's throat and hear someone choke behind you. You're feral with it. No technique, no training, just the scrappy, vicious fighting of a girl who's survived the backrooms and is not going to be dragged by men who couldn’t even bother to introduce themselves.
Your nails rake across someone's forearm and draw blood. You wrench free of one grip and slam your heel into a kneecap. Someone swears, loud, furious.
“Fucking—hold her, HOLD HER—”
A hand fists in your hair. Yanks. Your neck snaps back, and your eyes water. Someone wrenches your arm behind you hard enough that the joint screams. You thrash, snarling. Your free hand catches someone across the mouth. You feel a tooth cut your knuckle.
The lead one is in front of you again. There's a red mark blooming on his cheekbone where you hit him, and his professionalism has curdled into something uglier.
“You want to do this the hard way?”
You spit at him. It catches his vest.
He hits you.
Open palm across your face. Your head rocks to one side. The world around you whites out for half a second, and then there's carpet under your hands and knees. Your lip throbs, burning numb, and you can taste copper in your mouth, dribbling. A boot slots between your shoulder blades, pressing you flat, and your cheek presses against the damp fibres.
Your wrists get pinned behind you roughly at an angle that sends bright, screaming pain up to your shoulder.
“Stay DOWN—”
You’re on the floor, bleeding. There’s a boot on your back and hands pinning your wrists. You’re away from the only safe thing in this place, and the carpet is wet against your split lip. You’re afraid. For the first time since your encounter with the Smiler, you’re terrified. Immediate, animal fear of being held down by someone stronger than you.
You open your mouth. You fill your lungs.
And you scream.
“BB—”
One word. It tears out of your throat raw and desperate, hitting the yellow walls, and the walls absorb it, and the walls move.
The fluorescent lights don't flicker. They detonate.
Every tube in the hallway blows simultaneously, glass raining down like ice, and in the darkness that follows, the hum of level 0 drops—drops—drops into a frequency that you feel in your teeth, in your ribs, in the boot on your back that suddenly isn't pressing as hard because the man wearing it has stopped breathing. Not dead. Frozen.
The way an animal freezes in terror when it smells something at the top of the food chain.
The walls crack. Clean fissures running floor to ceiling, splitting the drywall in deliberate, surgical lines, as if something were tearing its way through the building's architecture. The carpet ripples under your cheek. You feel it. The backrooms responding, contracting, the whole of level 0 seizing like a body in pain.
The boot lifts off your back.
Not because the man chose to move it. Because the floor tilted. Subtle. Just enough to shift his weight. Just enough to free you. The backrooms—him, it, the thing that is both—clearing the path.
You hear them before you see them react. The soldiers. Breathing fast. The click of weapons being raised. Someone screaming “what the fuck what the fuck what the—”
He comes out of the dark.
Not through a door but from the dark itself. Like the darkness peeled open and someone stepped through the seam.
He’s not fully human-shaped.
The Bobby suit is slipping. Shoulders too wide. Arms too long, hanging at angles that make your hindbrain scream. His fingers have too many joints—you can see them in the fractured emergency glow of the one tube that didn't shatter—long and wrong, curling like they're remembering a shape that predates hands.
His face is still Bobby's face but the geometry behind it is pressing outward, cheekbones like blades, jaw too sharp, too angular, the skull beneath rearranging itself into something that was never meant to be looked at directly. And his eyes are black. Fully, completely, endlessly black. Two holes in the front of his skull that open onto something without a floor.
He sees you on the ground.
The blood on your lip. The bruises on your skin. The tear tracks cutting down your face.
BB sees the boot print on your back.
There’s a sound.
It booms from the walls, the floor, and the ceiling simultaneously. From every surface of level 0, because he is level 0, and every square inch of it is snarling.
The remaining fluorescent tube doesn't shatter.
It melts. The glass softens and drips. The carpet under the soldiers' feet goes wet, soaked, saturated, as though the floor is turning into a swamp.
You press your face into the carpet and close your eyes.
It takes less than a minute.
You don't watch, but you hear it. Screaming that starts human and ends keening. Wet sounds. Heavy sounds. The particular acoustic signature of a body being opened by something that doesn't need tools. That horrible, snarling, clicking growl of pure rage.
One of them manages to fire a weapon, and the sound of the shot is enormous in the enclosed hallway. It cuts out, followed by a crunch of bone, and another, and another, and another—
Then there's nothing.
Silence.
The level settles. The hum reasserts itself, climbing back up from that sub-basement frequency to its usual buzz. You can feel it in the carpet against your cheek, scratchy and too warm.
One fluorescent tube fizzes back to life overhead. Yellow. Sickly.
You feel the air change. The temperature drops, and you know he's close before anything touches you.
When it does—a hand on your shoulder, delicate, so delicate—it's not quite a hand yet. Too many joints. The fingers too long, still retracting to Bobby's proportions, still remembering how to be the thing that strokes your hair instead of the thing that just—
You turn over.
He's crouching over you. Still wrong. The proportions haven't settled. BB’s arms are too long, and his spine is curved at an angle that doesn't work with human vertebrae. His face is a rough draft. Bobby's features sketched over the older, sharper one. Black fluid coats his hands. His jaw. His chest. Not all of it is black.
His eyes are still dark, but the blue is bleeding back in around the edges. Like ink dropped into water, spreading, reclaiming.
You reach for him.
Your hands are shaking so badly that you miss the first time.
Your fingers slip against the wrong texture of his jaw, the skin too smooth, too cool, still settling back to its bony configuration. You reach again, and this time you get his neck (too long, the vertebrae too prominent, sharp ridges under your palms where Bobby's neck was smooth), and you pull.
You pull yourself into him, and you cling.
Arms around his neck, face buried in his throat, legs curling up, making yourself as small as possible against his chest because if you can get close enough, maybe nothing will ever reach you again.
You wrap yourself around him with a muffled sob. One sob, then another, then a third that breaks open into something ragged and ugly and not at all brave.
You’re shaking and bleeding, crying into the neck of a monster, and you don't care. You don't care about the wrong temperature, the wrong shape or the black fluid soaking into your shirt.
You don't care.
BB freezes. One second. Two. The violence still running, the gentleness needing a moment to boot up. You feel it. The exact instant the system switches. His whole body shudders once, and then his arms come around you.
Tight. So tight. He scoops you up like you're nothing—one arm under your legs, one around your back—and pulls you into his chest and holds you against him like he's trying to absorb you. Like he could fold you into his body and keep you there where nothing touches you ever again.
His chin comes down on the top of your head. His whole body curves around you. You feel the strength in every inch of him. The same strength that just did what it just did, repurposed. Every ounce of force that tore six armed men apart, now calibrated with impossible precision to the exact pressure of holding without breaking.
“I'm here.” His voice. Rough. Not fully Bobby's voice yet. There's an edge underneath it still, something vast and deep, like hearing someone speak from several floors down. “I'm here, baby. I'm here.”
You press closer. Your fingers curl into the fabric of his jacket. Bobby's jacket. Your face is against his throat, and you can feel the absence of a pulse under your cheek. No heartbeat. Just the hum. His hum. Vibrating through his chest and into yours.
“They—” Your voice is thick, muffled against his skin. “They grabbed me, they were trying to—I fought, I tried to—”
“I know.” His hand finds the back of your head. Cradles it. His fingers—the right number of joints now, almost fully Bobby-shaped again—thread into your hair the way they do in the nest, slow, gentle, the careful repetitive motion that means safe, you're safe, I'm here. “I know. It's over.”
“There were six of them and I couldn't—”
“You don't have to.”
His other hand finds your face. Tilts it up. His thumb traces your split lip with a touch so light it barely registers. Just the ghost of contact, the pad of his thumb skating over the cut, and you watch his jaw tighten. The blue in his eyes flickers. Darkness swims underneath it, surfacing and submerging, and you know he is looking at the blood on your mouth, and memorising who put it there, and the fact that they’re already dead is not enough. Will never be enough.
“Does it hurt?” Quiet. Bobby's voice now, almost entirely. That specific soft register he uses in the nest, the one that makes your chest ache.
“A little.”
His thumb moves to the bruise on your cheekbone. Traces the edge of it. Down to your jaw. Along the finger-shaped marks on your wrist, and the sound he makes is barely audible. Low, tight snarl. A vibration caught behind his teeth.
“I should have been here.”
“You came.”
“Not fast enough.”
You almost laugh. What comes out instead is a wet, clogged sound. “You came very quickly, BB.”
“Not fast enough,” he repeats, and means it.
You put your head back against his chest. He holds you tighter. He hums. Shaky at first, the frequency wobbles. Then it steadies. Finding its rhythm. His song. The one that doesn't exist anywhere outside of him.
You feel the backrooms settle around you both. The lights dim softer. Temperature rises, degree by gentle degree, until the air feels like a room in a house instead of a hallway in purgatory. He’s doing that. Rewriting the space around your body because you’re shaking, and he can't make you stop shaking, but he can make everything else softer.
“BB.” Your voice is small. Muffled against his chest.
“Yeah?” Immediate. Soft.
“Don't leave.” You swallow. Press your face harder into the fabric of his jacket. “Just—for a bit. Don't leave.”
His arms tighten, cheek pressing against the top of your head. You feel him breathe—not because he needs to, but because you need to feel it, and he knows what you need, even before you know it yourself.
“Never,” he whispers.
One word. A law. Written into the fabric of this place. Never. As in: the sun will come up. As in: water runs downhill. As in: I will be here.
You close your eyes.
The shaking ebbs, not all at once but in increments, your body releasing its grip on the panic the way a fist unclenches. One finger, then another, then another. His hand keeps moving over your hair. Rhythmic. Patient. He will do this for as long as you need.
He will do this forever if you let him.
You stay like that. On the floor. In the hallway. Curled in the lap of a thing that’s just killed six men.
The backrooms are changing. You can feel it beneath you, a shuddering grind. Hallways folding. Routes sealing shut. The architecture of level 0 quietly, methodically, permanently rearranging itself around you both. Doors that used to lead here now lead nowhere.
He’s taking you somewhere no one will find you.
And you let him. Eyes closed. Face against his chest. Listening to the hum.
You let him.
M.E.G. INTERNAL — MAJOR EXPLORER GROUP
DEPARTMENT OF ENTITY RESEARCH & CONTAINMENT
▓▓▓▓▓▓ CLASSIFIED // LEVEL 4 — RESTRICTED // URGENT REVIEW ▓▓▓▓▓▓
INCIDENT REPORT: IR-0-27 DOCUMENT ID: MEG-ENT-0000-IR-0-27 CLASSIFICATION: LEVEL 4 — URGENT FILED BY: Operations Director ██████ DATE: ██/██/199█ RE: Unauthorised Engagement With Entity 0 / Companion — Hostile Extraction Attempt by External Agency STATUS: CRITICAL — ONGOING CONSEQUENCES
SUMMARY OF INCIDENT
On ██/██/199█, at approximately ██:██ hours, a six-person tactical unit operating under the authority of ██████████████████████████████████ (hereafter "the Agency") conducted an unauthorised extraction attempt on the individual designated "the Companion" in M.E.G. Entity 0 documentation.
M.E.G. had no advance knowledge of this operation. We were not consulted or informed. We were not given the opportunity to do what we have spent the last eighteen months doing, which is explicitly and repeatedly recommending against exactly this course of action.
Our recommendation, stated in Section 7.2 of the Entity 0 dossier and reiterated in no fewer than six inter-agency memoranda, was as follows:
"Do not intervene. Do not extract. Do not, under any circumstances, threaten the Companion's safety within Entity 0's perceptual range."
The Agency disregarded this recommendation.
All six members of the tactical unit are dead.
RECONSTRUCTION OF EVENTS
The following timeline has been assembled from recovered equipment (three body cameras, one partially functional radio unit) and corroborating seismic data from M.E.G. monitoring equipment on Levels 0 through 3.
██:██ — Six-person tactical unit enters Level 0 via access point ██████. Equipment and insignia consistent with ██████████████████████████████████. The unit is armed with ██████████████████████████████████. They are equipped for a hostile extraction. This was not a rescue. This was a retrieval.
██:██ — Unit locates the Companion in a hallway junction on Level 0, sublevel ██████. Entity 0 is not present. Body camera footage confirms the unit waited for Entity 0 to leave the Companion's immediate vicinity before approaching. This indicates prior surveillance. The Agency was watching. We did not know they were watching. This is itself a security failure that is being reviewed separately.
██:██ — Unit lead makes verbal contact with the Companion. Instructs her to comply with the extraction. Companion refuses. She states clearly, on camera, that she does not wish to be removed. Her exact words are "No" and "I'm not going anywhere."
██:██ — Unit lead attempts physical restraint. The Companion resists violently. Body camera footage shows her striking the unit lead in the face, drawing blood from a secondary operative, and disabling a third with a knee strike before being subdued by multiple operatives simultaneously. She fought like someone who has been surviving the Backrooms for ██████, and it shows. The Companion is subsequently struck across the face by the unit lead and forced to the ground. Bruising consistent with forcible restraint is visible on both wrists.
I will repeat that for the record: a civilian who had clearly, verbally, on camera refused extraction was beaten to the floor by a six-person tactical unit.
██:██ — M.E.G. seismic monitoring stations on Levels 0, 1, 2, and 3 register a simultaneous anomalous event. The reading does not correspond to any known geological or structural phenomenon. Dr. ██████ has described the waveform as "an earthquake." I am including her analysis verbatim because I do not have a better description.
██:██ — The Companion screams.
██:██ — Entity 0 arrives.
The gap between ██:██ and ██:██ is approximately 1.3 seconds. Entity 0's last confirmed position was ██████████████████████████████████, an estimated █████████████ meters from the Companion's location. It covered this distance in 1.3 seconds. We do not have a theoretical framework for this. We are not going to develop one. It doesn't matter. What matters is what happened next.
██:██ (CONCURRENT) — What we did not understand at the time—and what has only become clear through post-incident analysis—is that Entity 0 did not move through the Backrooms to reach the Companion. It moved the Backrooms.
Temporal monitoring equipment across Levels 0 through 266 recorded simultaneous, catastrophic time distortion events at the moment of Entity 0's displacement. On Level 1, clocks ran backwards for approximately 3.7 seconds. On Level 2, a monitoring team reported experiencing the same eleven-second interval twenty times in succession. On Level 49, two operatives aged approximately 6 years in the space of 1.3 real-time seconds. Medical examination confirmed accelerated cellular turnover consistent with temporal compression. Both operatives have been placed on medical leave.
Entity 0 tore through the temporal fabric of the Backrooms to close the distance between itself and the Companion. It did not navigate. It did not transit. It ripped a hole through the structure of the intervening space.
The damage on the lower levels was temporary. The damage on Level ███ was not.
Level ███ is gone.
Level ███—a fully mapped, documented, and intermittently populated level of the Backrooms—no longer exists. It was not sealed. M.E.G. operatives who attempted to access Level ███ via three separate confirmed entry points found nothing. Not empty corridors. Not blank walls. Nothing. The space that Level ███ occupied is simply absent. As though it was never there at all.
Entity 0's transit path between its last confirmed location and the Companion passed directly through Level ███. The conclusion is unavoidable: Entity 0, in the 1.3 seconds it took to reach the Companion, annihilated an entire level of the Backrooms as collateral damage. The way a bullet destroys the wall behind the target. Level ███ was simply in the way.
We do not know if there were casualties. Level ███ was classified as intermittently populated. Wanderers passed through; some may have been sheltering there at the time of the event. We will likely never know. There is nothing left to recover. There is nothing left to examine. An entire level of reality was erased in 1.3 seconds.
Dr. ██████ has requested that this section of the report be classified as Level 5. I have denied this request. Everyone needs to read this. Everyone needs to understand what we are dealing with.
██:██ through ██:██ — Body camera footage for this period is partially corrupted. What remains has been reviewed by myself, Dr. ██████, and Dr. ███████████. Dr. ████ has declined to review it. Her decision is respected.
Entity 0 was not in its standard manifestation. I am not going to describe the specific deviations in this report. The footage is available for personnel with Level 4 clearance and a strong stomach.
The engagement lasted approximately 42 seconds.
Entity 0 did not use weapons. Entity 0 is the weapon.
All six operatives were killed. Cause of death for four: ████████████████████████ Cause of death for the remaining two: ██████████████████████████████████. Recovery of remains has been deemed inadvisable at this time, as Entity 0 ██████████████████████████████████.
██:██ — Final body camera footage shows Entity 0 approaching the Companion. It is partially restructured to its usual template, but not fully. The Companion does not retreat. She reaches for it. She clings to it. Entity 0 gathers her. The word "cradles" appears in three separate reviewer notes, and I am allowing it despite its lack of clinical precision because nothing else is accurate, and assumes a protective posture. Audio, though degraded, captures the Companion's voice saying something indistinct, and Entity 0 responding with a single word. Audio analysis has been unable to confirm the word. Dr. ██████ believes it was "never." The camera fails shortly after.
ASSESSMENT OF CONSEQUENCES
I said in Section 7.2 of the Entity 0 dossier that I did not want to see what it does to us. I have now seen it. I was right not to want to.
But the killings are not the primary concern of this report. Soldiers die. Operations fail. This is the nature of work in the Backrooms. The primary concern is what this incident has done to years of carefully maintained observational neutrality between M.E.G. and Entity 0.
Entity 0 tolerated us. That is not an exaggeration or a simplification. We have operated monitoring equipment on Level 0 for eighteen months. Entity 0 knew it was there. It knew we were watching. And it allowed it, the way a homeowner allows a bird to nest in their gutter. Not because they approve, but because it doesn't bother them enough to act.
That tolerance is, as of this incident, in question.
Within 48 hours of IR-0-27, the following changes were observed:
Level ███ remains nonexistent. Repeated attempts to locate it via all known access points have failed. Dr. ██████ has formally recommended that it be struck from the Backrooms cartography index. The level is not missing. It was unmade. The temporal scarring along Entity 0's transit path shows no sign of healing or regeneration. This is, as far as we can determine, permanent. An entire level of the Backrooms has been permanently destroyed as a byproduct of Entity 0's emotional response to a threat against the Companion.
M.E.G. monitoring equipment on Level 0, sublevel ██████ through ██████, ceased functioning. Not damaged. Removed. Every sensor, every camera, every seismic monitor. Gone. No debris. No evidence of destruction. The equipment is simply no longer there.
Three M.E.G. personnel conducting routine observation on Level 0 reported that the hallways they had used for months had "rearranged." Routes that previously led to confirmed Companion sighting locations now terminate in dead ends. Level 0 has been restructured. We believe Entity 0 has deliberately altered the architecture to prevent future observation.
The Companion has not been sighted since IR-0-27. She is not at any previously confirmed location. The blanket nest—documented across seven sighting reports as Entity 0's primary base of operation with the Companion—is empty. Every blanket, every scavenged item, every trace of habitation has been removed. As though no one was ever there.
Entity 0 has not been sighted on Level 0 since IR-0-27.
The implication is clear: Entity 0 has relocated the Companion. To where, we do not know. Dr. ██████ has proposed that they may have moved to a sublevel of Level 0 that is not represented in our current mapping. A level beneath the level, a space that Entity 0 has carved out or always possessed and simply never used until now. Until it had a reason to hide something it could not afford to lose.
We have, in the space of one unauthorised operation conducted by an agency that ignored every warning we provided, lost the single greatest research asset in the history of M.E.G. entity studies. The Companion is gone. Our access is gone. Years of carefully accumulated observational data has been rendered functionally useless because the subject has moved to a location we cannot find and sealed the door behind it.
FORMAL OBJECTIONS
I want the following on the record:
M.E.G. explicitly, repeatedly, and in writing recommended against any attempt to extract, contain, or engage the Companion. These recommendations were provided to the Agency through proper inter-organisational channels on ██/██/198█, ██/██/198█, ██/██/198█, ██/██/199█, ██/██/199█, and ██/██/199█. Each was acknowledged. None were followed.
The Companion was not a hostage. She verbally refused extraction, clearly, and on camera. The Agency proceeded with force. This is not a rescue. This is an assault on a civilian by a government-adjacent organisation operating without jurisdiction inside a space they do not understand.
The Companion was injured. She fought back and was beaten to the ground for it. She bled. And the thing that has been protecting her heard her scream its name. We told them what it does to things that threaten what belongs to it. We told them. They didn't listen. At least six people are dead because they didn't listen.
Entity 0 has, until now, operated within a framework that M.E.G. was beginning to understand. It was predictable. Perhaps not in its actions, but in its priorities. The Companion was the variable. The Companion was the key. And now the Companion is gone, and Entity 0 has demonstrated that its response to perceived threats is not merely violent but architectural. It didn't just kill the threat. It restructured its entire domain to prevent the threat from recurring. It sealed Level 0. It erased its footprint. It took its Companion, and it disappeared.
An entire level of the Backrooms was destroyed. Gone. Erased from existence as collateral damage during Entity 0's transit. If there were wanderers sheltering on Level ███ they are dead. Or worse. Or something we don't have a word for because the space they occupied no longer exists in any meaningful sense. We will never know. The Agency's unauthorised operation may have cost lives far beyond the six operatives they sent in, and we have no way to calculate the true body count because there is nothing left to count.
We do not know where Entity 0 is. We do not know if it will allow future contact. We do not know if, the next time an M.E.G. operative enters Level 0, Entity 0 will distinguish between us and the Agency. We may have inherited the consequences of someone else's stupidity, and we may pay for it in personnel.
RECOMMENDATIONS
All M.E.G. operations on Level 0 are suspended indefinitely pending reassessment.
The Agency is to be formally censured and barred from independent Backrooms operations until further notice. Their response to this censure is noted and disregarded.
No further attempts to locate, contact, or extract the Companion are to be conducted by any organisation, under any authority, for any reason.
If—and I stress if—Entity 0 re-establishes contact with M.E.G. personnel, the interaction is to be treated as a diplomacy scenario, not a research scenario. Entity 0 is not a subject. Entity 0 is, functionally, a sovereign power that we have just watched an allied agency declare war on. We will conduct ourselves accordingly.
Someone needs to tell the Agency what "apex predator" means. I have included a dictionary to help and clear the confusion.
Filed: ██/██/199█
Operations Director ██████
Addendum, handwritten:
She screamed his name, and the level cracked open.
I've been doing this for eleven years. I have never seen a response that fast. 1.3 seconds. It wasn't travel. He didn't cross the distance. The distance stopped existing. She called, and the Backrooms folded to put him where she was. And everything between them—every hallway, every corridor, every room, an entire level—ceased to exist because it was in his way.
The body camera audio from the aftermath is mostly static. But there is a moment, mostly degraded, where you can hear humming. And underneath the humming, faintly, a voice. Hers. Saying "don't leave." And then his. One word.
We are not dealing with an entity that lives in the Backrooms.
We are dealing with the Backrooms. And it is in love.
God help us all.
▓▓▓▓▓▓ END OF REPORT // FILE STATUS: OPEN — NEVER CLOSED ▓▓▓▓▓▓
Girlhood is trying to figure out which fictional man you wanna read a fic abt before bed


