☆ ──꒰summary꒱ ❞ Valarr is finally in your bedroom, and you’ve prepared everything to be absolutely perfect for your first time. but… it seems like he has a little secret of his own, too.
contains! modern!valarr, loss of virginity, awkward sex, fluff!
authors note: i kind of really hate this… so sorry in advance to anyone reading it lol
೯⠀⁺ ⠀ 𖥻 𝗢 ⠀ᰋ you sat on the edge of your mattress, the sheets pristine and pretty; you had prepared for this, and you wanted it to be perfect, even aesthetically. a vanilla cupcake candle burned on your vanity, and the lights were dimmed enough to set the mood without inhibiting your ability to see what was going on.
Valarr stood before you, his expression stern and unreadable as a granite statue carved in the shape of a very pretty man. he didn’t smile, but his eyes tracked the quick pulse in your throat. he was always so… unperturbed. it was irritating that you could never quite get a grasp on what he was thinking.
“you’re shaking.” he noted.
“i’m just… it’s cold,” you lied, your voice pitching an octave too high, making it obvious.
his hand cupped your jaw, “i’ll warm you up.” he leaned in, lips meeting yours in a kiss that felt calculated and dominant. you let out an unconscious whimper, your hands moving to wrap themselves around his neck. Valarr didn’t hesitate, he moved with a confidence that seemed rehearsed, pulling your shirt over your head with ease— he’d obviously done this a thousand times over, and the fact made you blush, embarrassed of your inexperience.
you gasped as the cool air hit your skin, nipples hardening instantly. his gaze drifted down, lingering on the curve of your breasts. “you’re beautiful,” he said. he hooked his fingers into the top of your skirt, pulling it down along with your underwear, sliding them over your thighs, exposing your damp heat to the lighting you had constructed so perfectly.
you squeezed your eyes shut, breath coming in slightly panicked hitches, anxious. “wait,” you whispered, “Valarr, i.. i’ve never actually…”
he paused, “done this before?”
“yes,” you breathed, “i’m a virgin.”
he stared at you for a long moment. he stood up slowly and began to strip, his movements suddenly less fluid. oh god. you had ruined it. he pulled his shirt over his head, then kicked off his jeans and underwear, revealing a thick, pulsing cock that stood rigid. he climbed onto the bed, “it’s fine. i’ll just… i’ll take care of it.”
he hovered over you, his chest heaving. he tried to guide his cock toward your opening, but he missed entirely, the tip sliding uselessly across your thigh with a wet, slapping sound.
“ow,” you said, a laugh slipping out, “you hit my leg.” he froze and flushed a deep crimson. he tried again, pushing forward, but he angled himself too high and rubbed himself through your labia.
“is it supposed to be this hard to find…?” he mumbled, mostly to himself, his usually stern voice gone, replaced by something frantic.
you blinked up at him, “what?”
he collapsed forward, burying his face in the crook of your neck, letting out a muffled but clearly defeated sigh. “i’m, uh… a virgin too.”
you let out a startled laugh, “you’re kidding! you acted like a pro!”
“i didn’t want you to think i was some… loser or something.” he groaned.
“well,” you whispered, reaching down to feel the heat of him, “i guess we can figure it out together.” the next few minutes were embarrassing chaos. Valarr tried to push inside but he was too fast, his cock slipping out with a loud, wet squelch as he lurched forward.
“sorry! god, i’m sorry.” he gasped, breath hot against your ear.
“it’s okay,” you giggled, though you winced as he tried again, his cock this time thrusting in deep, bumping up against your cervix with a blunt force that was too much too soon. “wait! stop! too far, too far.”
“like this?”
“no… a little to the left… no, oh my god, Valarr. the other left.”
the two of you fumbled, hips clashing awkwardly, skin sticking to skin with a tacky sound. finally, with a clumsy heave and a sharp intake of breath from you, he slid in nicely. it wasn’t a smooth glide, it was a tight stretching squeeze that made you both freeze. Valarr began to move, but his rhythm was erratic. he pushed too deep, then he pulled almost all the way out.
“faster, please,” you told him through gritted teeth. and he obeyed, ramming into you until friction built and your breaths turned into jagged sobs of pleasure.
your legs locked around his waist, and Valarr’s face twisted in a grimace of intense concentration, as if he were solving a complex equation. “i think i’m… i’m going to…” he stuttered out.
“me too!”
Valarr gave a final, overzealous thrust that made him groan loudly as he came in time with you. he collapsed on top of you, heavy and panting, your limbs tangled in a messy heap of exhausted limbs.
“well… that was an experience.” he whispered into your hair.
you smiled, pressing your face into his chest, “we were terrible.” he laughed into agreement.
☆ ──꒰summary꒱ ❞ Valarr is not a man of many words, but he will make sure that you understand who you belong to
contains! violence, death, targcest, suggestive content requested material
೯⠀⁺ ⠀ 𖥻 𝗢 ⠀ᰋ the dust almost choked out the smell of horse sweat and grass. almost. you scrunched your nose and tried to strategically only breathe in the scent of your crushed lavender perfume, but it was mostly useless.
you watched as the knights, lords sons and common men alike all flitted restlessly around, either atop their steeds or on the ground, inspecting their armour to make sure it was in the most perfect of conditions for the tourney; if they couldn’t win, perhaps they could look good enough to find themselves a wife.
ser Berenger steered his stallion toward the royal box, his armour gleaming under the midday sun, the serpent on his breastplate so intricate it seemed to snake and writhe around in the shadows and light that bounced upon its metal scales. he looked up at you, eyes gleaming with hope, “my lady,” he called, pointing his lance up towards the box, “grant me your favour, and i shall carve the prince from his saddle in your honour.”
you smiled, a shy curve of your lips. ser Berenger was a handsome man: blonde and broad framed. he was the son of a lord, and a very good hunter. the man was one of the better options for a targaryen princess to wed, even if he was a bit dull. you untied a pale purple scarf from your hair and leaned over the railing.
“ride well, ser.” you dropped the fabric and he caught it as it fluttered down, tying it tightly around the hilt of his lance.
in the distance, Valarr sat atop his great black charger. his face remained a mask of stone—as it always did—eyes narrowed, nostrils flared, watching your silk scarf cling to somewhere it didn’t belong.
the herald blew the horn. the clash of lance and armour sounded like a thunderclap as Valarr hit ser Berenger with the force of a landslide. his lance was shattered into splinters, and the blonde man was flung backwards, armour clattering violently against the hard earth.
the crowd roared, two thousand hands coming together to celebrate the unhorsing. but Valarr did not celebrate. no, not yet. he spurred his horse forward, the animals hooves drumming a frantic rhythm. he leapt from the saddle before the horse had even stopped.
“you dared take my favour,” Valarr said, voice low.
the other man groaned, struggling to sit up, still winded. “it was but a game, my prince—”
Valarr didn’t let him finish. he seized a mace from the dirt, discarded from a previous joust, and lifted it above his head.
you gasped but didn’t look away, your hand darting out to grip your fathers arm out of fear.
Valarr’s first blow broke ser Berenger’s visor, the steel crumpling as if it were made of copper. the second crushed his jaw and pulled a ragged scream from the man’s mouth. the third and fourth sounded wet; the mace was bloodied, chunks of facial viscera clinging to it and being dirtied on the ground. Valarr continued to bring it down until the knight stopped moving beneath the heavy metal, until he was naught but a mangled piece of flesh. he stood over the corpse, chest heaving, blood splattered across his pale cheeks.
the body was dragged away by two green-faced squires who desperately tried to look away from his mangled face. the day continued on, and Valarr remained victorious throughout the entirety of it.
when nightfall came, you retreated to your tent despite begging your father to let you sleep in his with him, the gore of the morning still fresh on your mind. Maekar was stern as ever and banished you to your own makeshift chamber with a pat on the cheek.
you lay beneath your sheets, the flickering light of a single candle flickering across the walls of the tent, making strange shadows dance around the linens, as if mocking you in your wakefulness with each shape that almost resembled a moving mace and a cracked face. a shadow eclipsed the light as the tent flap opened.
Valarr stepped inside. he had washed the blood from his skin, but the tang of iron still clung to him, like death itself had shackled itself to his bones. he had exchanged his knights armour for something softer and quieter, and moved with almost no sound, leather boots pressing softly into the rugs. he sat on the edge of your bed—a cot draped in red and black fabrics, a lambs skin over your pillow so you could sleep in luxury—and the mattress dipped under his weight.
you stirred, moving your eyes from their place on the tent’s wall and blinking up at him in the dimness. “cousin?” you whispered, “what is it?”
he reached out, thumb grazing your cheek, tracing the line of your jaw and watching you as he did so, like he was waiting for you to startle like a spooked rabbit ready to bound away. his hand lingered then slid down to the column of your throat. your pulse fluttered for a reason you didn’t know. maybe it was the remnants of earlier in the day.
“were you frightened?” he asked, “when i killed him?”
you shuddered, remembering the sound that had come from the dead man as Valarr stole away his life. “yes.” your fingers dug into the linen sheet, pulling it up to your chin, “i’ve never seen you… like that.”
Valarr leaned closer, the heat of his body radiating through his tunic. he shifted and his thigh brushed up against your hip through the sheets. “do you know why i did it?” he asked.
you shook your head slowly, looking up at him through your lashes, eyes locked onto his mismatched ones.
“because i cannot have another man after you like that,” he murmured, “do you understand?”
“he was only asking for a favour.”
Valarr leaned down, lips hovering just an inch from your face, his breath warm. “he had more in mind for you than getting a favour. i will not tolerate another man dreaming of you.” he shifted again, pressing his weight more firmly against you, the suggestion of his desire hard and insistent against you. “you are to be mine, cousin. now, do you understand? answer me, briefly.”
you nodded quickly, a strange heat blooming down below. “yes. yes, Valarr.”
he lifted his hand from your neck and moved it back to your cheek, stroking your cheek with his thumb tenderly until finally backing away entirely. “good girl.”
Warning: suggestive and alcohol consumption (don't do drugs or alcohol kids.)
Also i would like to thank my best friend/editor @cautiousemu20143 . fOR EDITING This , because the first draft was laughable at best.
They were sitting around a circular table. Albert was sitting beside her. The woman he hated initially because she seemed like every other noble he knew. The woman who he married. Anyone in his position would think the same, because she was uptight and beautiful, judged people, gossiping about whatever happened in the Noble world. She carried herself with an air of confidence everywhere she went.
Albert had very deep rooted disdain for people like her. When Royal balls were held, he had no choice but to put on a polite smile to mask his aversion. Though the strange thing was he felt comfortable around her even if he hated it so much. But that is until he finally got to know her.
One day, actually one night, she was sitting out in the garden because the lights and the music combined with the people was too much for her. Albert, being in the same predicament, except for the fact that he hated the people more, had also come outside to find solace in the cold air hoping to calm his boiling blood. Shame, when he walked in the garden surrounded by trees, he saw her sitting on a bench.
She turned his head towards him, understanding that he also wanted some peace and there was no other place she said, "Lord Moriarty, you should sit. We shall not converse because frankly I don't want to and I assume neither do you. But please be mindful and take a seat far away from me as we both are unmarried and I'm without a chaperone."
He was surprised by her words. It came out of nowhere. Though he didn't like her , he sat on the other far end of the bench. The only thing in that moment was the two of them sitting in silence with a gentle breeze making the tree sway with it. He was confused by her sudden words and why she had said it to him
""Why, if I may ask, did you allow me to sit? You do not seem to want company."" He finally asks, breaking the silence.
"I thought we agreed that we shall not converse."
He looks at her, "When did I ever agree to such a thing?"
"You implied it when you sat down."
"Very well then, you don't have to answer."
There is a moment of silence.
Then, she also glanced at him. "Well, you seem fatigued, mentally, of course." She turns her head back towards the flower bed. "As much as I am."
Albert, who didn’t expect her to ask him to take a seat, definitely didn’t expect her to say this. After that they both sat in a comfortable silence of quiet understanding. He was itching to ask her what she meant but he didn’t want to break this peaceful moment.
Then the evening came to a close and they went their own ways.
Albert didn't expect her telling to say, well he actually didn't expect this whole situation. Yet, he was sitting on the same bench with her, confused with how she understood what he had mastered to hide. After that they both fell into a soft silence of understanding. Albert didn't want to ruin it by asking anymore.
Then the night ended.
After that gala, they met many times, talking about different things and Albert started to realise that maybe, just maybe she is not as bad as she might seem. Even different from the other nobles. Slowly but surely, they started to fall in love. Then got married.
He told her about Lord of crime and how they were all helping to change London . To transform the world. And She joined. She attended every ball, every party, every social event to collect information.
Currently, that's what they were doing. Well actually, what she was doing. Albert was just gawking at his wife. He knew she was more than capable of getting the right information, so he just sat back and relaxed.
He was sitting upright with his right hand on the table and his left hand was playing with his wife's hair. Tonight was one of the rare nights where she wore her hair down with two braids starting from each of her temples to the back of her head. Her hair reached to her waist, making Albert's job easy. Job as in playing with her hair. He twisted the ends of her hair, curling it around his finger and feeling it in between his fingers.
She was talking to the target until the target turned his attention to something else and she finally turned her head towards Albert.
She just looks at him. Albert had a smirk on his face. She raised an eyebrow at him. He just shrugged his shoulders with an innocent look. She glanced down at his hands with which he was playing with her hair and back into his eyes. He lightly tugged on her hair. She narrowed her eyes at him. He brought his hand up to his mouth and gently brushed his lip against her hair before kissing it. The hair slipped from in between his fingers and fell back to its place .She huffed out a chuckle as a smile bloomed on her face.
After getting the information they needed, they left. It was already late at night and the dinner party definitely ran later than anticipated . They reached home even later. She wanted to inform William as soon as they reached but Albert assured that it could wait until tomorrow, because he was probably with his wife and Albert wanted the same.
She walks out from the bathroom in just a robe, scratching her head and she stops at the edge of the bed. The room is lit up by a few candles. She looks around the room for Albert. He was not in the room. She had laid out a night gown on the bed before going for a bath. As she was bending down to pick up the gown, she heard the door open and footsteps moving towards her. A smile formed on her lips.
"Haven't changed yet?" She looks at Albert holding up a glass of wine.
"I was about to."
"Go ahead then." Albert walks around the bed and sits on the bed looking at her. He raises the glass to his lips, the faint curl of a smirk lingering there. He looks at her in her robe through the rim of the glass. "Don't mind me, I will just watch."
Her smile twists into shock and she scoffs out a chuckle. "I can't believe you."
She picks up the night gown, shaking her head in disbelief, she walks behind the wooden dressing screen. It is a dark wooden screen with intricate design and holes- some big and some small- all over the panels with a wooden frame. She looks at him through one of the holes and throws the night gown over the edge of the wooden panel.
Albert's eyes search all over the panels and finally meet hers through one of them as he takes a sip. She removes her robe and then also throws it over the edge of the wooden panel and pulls down her night gown. She puts on the night gown. All the while, his gaze wandered across the panels, taking in every fleeting glimpse of skin they revealed.
Albert makes himself comfortable in the middle of the bed against the headboard with his legs on the bed.
"I am eighty-two percent certain that you bought that dressing screen, just to torture me." He announced, keeping the empty wine glass on the bedside table.
She walks out from behind the wooden dressing screen towards the bed. "Torture you? How so?" She questions.
"Well, I didn't get to see my beautiful wife." He replies.
She climbs onto the bed, attempting to settle in her usual spot. "You see her now. And move, I need space."
"I hoped to see more." Albert gently grabs a hold of her wrist.
"Too bad. Next time." She scrunches her nose at him, teasing him. He pulled her hand, as she was settling into her spot ,making it easy for her to straddle his lap.
"Albert!" She lightly punches his shoulder with the side of her palm.
"Yes, darling?" He smiles at her. His hands move up from her thighs where the night gown has been stretched, pulling it up with his hands.
"Albert." She places her hand on top of his to stop it from going any further.
"What? I am making sure it doesn't tear." Still pulling the night gown up. He leans in, leaving trails of kisses on her neck.
"Making sure how? By removing it?" She rolls her eyes.
"If I have to."
"Ugh." She laughs and raises her head to look at the ceiling. Albert smiles and kisses her in the middle of her neck. He moves his hand from her thighs to her waist gently rubbing circles. She lowers her head and he captures her with a kiss. Albert lets his hands drag down to her thighs and moves them over and under. He gently picks her up and he moves them both. Without breaking their kiss, he lowers her back onto the bed and towers over her.
She breaks the kiss and says, "I love you." as her breath tickles his lips.
"I love you, darling." He kisses her back.
And the night ends with more kisses and less than needed clothes with the sound of soft gasps and whimpers.
tw - dub/con, afab!reader, cockwarming, medical malpractice, nonconsensual drug use, manipulation, unbalanced power dynamics, and obsessive behavior.
[commissioned piece. donate to palestinians in gaza here.]
“It really is a shame to lose such a lovely patient.
His hand drifted from your thigh to your hip, rocking you back as you tried to squirm away from him. He was too deep, too big, and you’d been sitting on his cock for too long. Whenever you tried to shift your weight, though, the arm wrapped around your waist would tighten its hold and drag you back into place, leaving your ass slotted against his hips and your cunt struggling to clench around his base. You didn’t know how long he’d kept you like this, but it must’ve been longer than an hour, if not two, three, four. Despite your foggy senses, you could feel slick dripping down your thighs, an empty void in the pit of your stomach where pleasure should’ve been. You could remember hearing that Harper was a good doctor, but that couldn’t be right. Doctors weren’t supposed to make you feel so bad.
“I mean, I know it should be a doctor’s goal to see their patients off as happy and as healthy as can be, but—” He paused, sighed, and you could picture him rolling his eyes, feigning wistfulness as he let out an airy chuckle. “Good, obedient patients can be so rare, especially in a town like this. I’m allowed to mourn the loss of my best charge yet, aren’t I?”
You felt him twitch inside of you, and in search of a distraction, your gaze fell to the collection of papers fanned out over the desk in front of you. You knew you were supposed to be reading them, but the text seemed so impossibly small, and your last round of medication was still clouding your senses, making it hard to focus on much of anything beyond the throbbing in your core, the feeling of his cock stretching you open despite your body’s best attempts to force him out. You could recognize the phrases, signal out words like ‘unfit’ and ‘dependent’ mixed in with the rest of the benign text, but when you tried to put it all together, none of it made sense. It was all you could do to check the boxes Harper pointed to, sign your name on any dotted lines that hadn’t already been filled by his. You could only hope that, when you finished, he’d let you stand up, get off of him, go back to your cozy room with its nice, soft padded walls. You couldn’t imagine having to sleep in his office, again.
“And you’ve been so cooperative, too,” he went on, his chin coming to rest on your shoulder. You felt his lips against the shell of your ear, then your cheek. “Always taking your medication, always following your treatment plans, always coming to our little sessions with an open-mind – the pinnacle of an ideal patient. Honestly, sometimes I think I could tell you to stick your hand in a vat of boiling water, and you’d do it with a smile on your face. All for the sake of your recovery, of course.”
It was him moving, this time – shifting forward until your stomach was pressed against the blunt edge of his desk and he was all-but draped over you, his body pressed flush against yours. You let out a pitchy whine by way of protest, but Harper didn’t seem to notice, only humming as his hand found yours. “Almost done, little mouse. Just one more page.” He was practically cooing as he took you by the wrist, guiding your hand to the bottom of the final page. Two thick, cutting lines occupied most of the available space, his neat signature taking up the first. He brought you to the second, almost daunting in its vacancy, his index finger tapping against the back of your hand. “You remember your name, right? Can you write it for me?”
It was so hard to think, to stay awake, to try and remember a time where he hadn’t been planted so deeply inside of you. “If…” you started, only to trail off. You blinked once, then twice, and did your best to force your tongue to move. “If I do, can I go home?”
Usually, Harper hated it when you talked about the orphanage, about school, about home. You hadn’t meant to, you just wanted to go back to your room, and you moved to correct yourself, to promise that you didn’t want to be anywhere but this hospital, his hospital before he frowned and prescribed you another electrotherapy session, another dose of the small, white pills that left your thoughts blurred and your body hot. But, anything you might’ve been able to spit out died with a breathy laugh, a peck to the corner of your jaw. “Of course,” he purred, rocking his hips gently against yours. “Sign, and I’ll take you home tonight.”
For the first time in weeks, you felt yourself start to smile. Hastily, smudging the ink more than once, you scrawled your name across the brutal line, dropping the pen and going slack against Harper as soon as you were finished. There was another open-mouthed kiss to your throat, then the dip of your shoulder, and he dragged you back onto his lap with a playful squeeze to your thigh, a grin pressed into the crook of your neck. You squirmed unabashedly, now, your hands graspingly weakly at the arms of his chair in hopes of pulling yourself to your feet, but Harper held you tight. “Where do you think you’re going, little mouse?”
“I need to— You said I could go—”
“Just give me another minute, darling.”
His cock pulsed against the walls of your cunt, and you felt something break open inside of you.
“I want to appreciate this moment before we get you to proper, brand-new home.”
tw - stalking, unhealthy relationships, mentions of masturbation, obsessive behavior, and medical malpractice galore.
Harper is the kind of man who can't help but study what he loves.
It's a bad habit - an unfortunate combination of natural curiosity and burning academic passion that always seems to end with a mess and a few broken toys. A childhood fascination with insects might lead to shoeboxes full of tattered wings and twitching bodies. A passing interest in hemogobular coagulation would be poured into a university internship that gave him access to more pints of blood than he knew what to do with, despite his best attempts to put it all to good use. A lasting fondness for hypnosis could, theoretically, earn him a small collection of pocket watches, a soothing timbre that often played underneath his passive speaking voice, and a few asylum patients too far gone to ever truly recover.
His research wasn't always destructive, but it could be. His love tended to veer towards obsession; the kind of burning infatuations that could leave more than a little devastation in its wake, if he wasn't careful. A measured amount of collateral damage was acceptable, compared to the alternative.
He studies you, too. Idly, at first - nothing more than an intrusive thought allowed to fester during your all-too-infrequent appointments, a quick jolt of excitement when he noticed your name on his schedule - then more consciously, in the form of an extra question asked at the very end of his time with you, a note tacked onto your file that doesn't strictly have to do with your health. His chances for observation are limited. You rarely make it to your therapy sessions, no matter how often he insists you should see him, and you're sturdier than he'd like, too used to being thrown around and mistreated to come running to him every time you scrape your knees. That's something he decides he doesn't like about you fairly early on. Part of a case study is deciding which parts of your subject will need to be adapted, and even you aren't beyond correction.
He records your reactions to his mis-prescribed medication with a religious sort of zealousness, reviews your symptoms and lab results while fucking his fist in-time with your pulse. He makes sure to visit your bedside personally whenever you find your way into his emergency room, and you're rewarded for your newfound attentiveness with a healthy supply of shots that leave you too removed from reality to remember your time on his examination table. Harper's always preferred the written word, but he find himself with a budding appreciation for film during his nightly evaluation of your records. His memory is keen enough, but there's nothing quite like being able to study your body detail by detail whenever he isn't fortunate enough to have access to the real thing.
He thinks, as he watches a pair of his nurses drag you through the asylum doors, that it might be time to start the next leg of his study. Studying is useful, but you've always benefited from more proactive measures, more personal attention. It'd be a discredit to his occupation if he was too preoccupied with his own little pleasures to see to the needs of his favorite patient.
It's far past time he moved on to more hands-on research methods, when it comes to you.
Warnings/Additional Infos: 18+(smut), Non-con, Afab reader (no pronouns), Obsessive/Yandere themes/behaviour, Medical themes, Mentions of shock-collars, Syringes, Imprisonment, Abuse of power, Slight dissociation, Mentions of alcohol, Aphrodisiacs, Cunnilingus, Self-victim blaming (?), Slightly violent thoughts, Former defiant/mentally exhausted reader, veeery slight Stockholm Syndrome towards the end
Sometimes little breezes of wind flow by even when the windows are all closed, you had always found it a bit odd. Was something open? Where did that random breeze just come from? You noticed one of them as you laid there in your bed, staring out of the dingy little window at the sundown. The last rays of the blood orange sun seemingly dancing with gold illuminated clouds.
One of them kind of looked like the small bunny pin Robin had given to you on your birthday a few years ago. The thought made you feel warmer and you almost smiled.
But there was no way anything was open. Nothing could be opened in this cramped little room. Not without a key that is.
You shivered under your blanket. You were not cold. Even if something was indeed open, it was summer. The 19th of july in fact, you made sure to keep track. The school year was reaching it's end with all of the final exams having been finished which would send Sydney to collage, Robin into a full-time job, Kylar to god knows where and Whitney (to River's horror you bet) to retake the year. Probably. Maybe. You didn't know, it didn't really affect you here. You were just trying to pass the time. Not trying to think about how this room was in the abandoned part of the property and that there was no (living) soul within a 50 metre radius of you most of the time you spend here.
You could ask for another book or puzzle or whatever but the thought of having to ask for the most basic forms of entertainment made your jaw clench and none of them could replace going out with your friends or being able to run your hands along trees like those you could see outside your window behind the walls of this place. And it would only be an empty distraction from he fact that you were slowly going absolutely fucking batshit in-
The turn of a lock outside your door made shivers run down your whole body again. You hadn't even noticed the small clock beside your bed striking 9.
"Good evening dear", he smiled, stepped into your room and made sure the door behind him was locked. Good, atleast that meant no "tests" today.
"Evening doc...", you mumbled dryly not meeting his gaze directly.
"Harper", he smiled again and you briefly wondered if he'd still smile like this if someone were to push him into a woodchipper.
"Sure...", you murmured, still not looking up. You knew that his aggravating fake demeanour was better then the alternative. You had learned that the hard way being too cocky. It had brought you into this room in the first place.
This was usually the part where he'd sit down on the edge of your bed and pretend to be a normal therapist. Ask you how you were feeling, if you needed anything, discuss changes about your medication (trying out anything to make you more susceptible and willing) the likes, you were his little experiment after all. It was grating but better than the times he actually tried to have a "normal" conversation with you.
One may wonder what made your little shenanigans so scientifically groundbreaking that they had to be studied so closely. You figured that you might have not been the first patient that opposed him or had been suspicious about him from the very start before you ended up here. Not like it mattered, no one would believe you anyway. But you had stopped asking yourself the "Why me?" question long ago, it's not like it would change his sick little interest in you.
He moved over to you. Instead of sitting down though, he came to stand right in front of you. A bit bewildered, you now looked up at him completely. His entire face was flushed, his blond bangs sticking to his forehead as he smiled down at you, breathing heavily. He lifted his hand and traced two digits gently over your cheek. In that moment you caught a whiff of something pungent. Whisky... Your breath hitched in your throat. This was not something that had ever happend before. You've never seen Harper drunk and it put you on edge. It was always a bit unnerving when his professionalism hung on by a thread. His piercing gaze never left your face. And yours was frozen on his as well. You didn't know what you were doing to him when you looked up at him with big eyes like that. So "tough" but just a deer caught in headlights-
"How... how are you feeling darling?", he questioned, a shaky exhale and you got the feeling that he actually wanted to say something else, his composure oh so fragile..
You swallowed thickly before responding:
"I'm... fine..."
Your palms were getting sweaty.
Harper nodded. "Stick out your arm", he ordered gently. You hesitantly did as you were told and he pulled out a a syringe holding a bright pink liquid. His favourite little solution. For the blink of a moment you considered snatching and stabbing him with it. But the shock collar around your neck served as a not so gentle reminder why you shouldn't.
The needle pricked your upper arm. A familiar feeling of dazed warmth seemed to wash over your entire body. Harper shrugged off his doctor's coat, hanging it neatly over the desk chair beside your bed. He turned towards you. You were gently pushed down onto the hospital bed as well as stripped of your blanket. He moved on top of you lifting your patient's gown just above your chest. A garment that never failed to turn him on. Your only source of protection deprived left you bare before his eyes.
His gloved hands traced over your slit, elicting a shameful tingle that traveled up your belly. The latex slowly dipping into your warm lips. You bit down on your tounge. Without warning he pinched your clit. A yelp escaped your parted lips while your hands clenched around your pillow to supress a moan.
"...It seems your reactions to stimulation have gotten stronger...", he noted quietly, looking up with a sleazy smile. He continued: "But... I wonder..." Harper looked down. You tensed as you felt his breath on your cunt. Two gloved hands parting your lips just as a tentative lick over your folds had you gasping again. This time, the moan slipped from your lips like second nature. You cursed in the back of your mind while similar sounds escaped your lips in the time the doctor had his face buried in your thighs. He could hardly call this professional anymore..
Two gloved digits prodding your entrance snapped you out of your thoughts. Looking down you didn't think it was possible for his face to get more flushed. The invasion of your walls and a flick of his tongue over your nub had you throwing your head into the pillow again, almost biting your lip bloody trying even harder to supress the sounds coming from you. The confusing feelings of pleasure and shame overwhelmed you. A voice at the back of your mind was nagging you why you let him do this to you? You would've fought him tooth and nail almost a year ago, consequenses be damned.
A yelp escaped again. Another finger was added and the tip of his tongue kept teasing. The teeth on your lower lip were starting to break the skin. Harper's latex gloves kept moving in and out, elicting lewd squelching sounds that made you cringe. He closed his lips around your clit and started sucking. It was too much. The heels of your feet dug into his sides. You were so close and it made your cheeks burn with shame...
But nothing. He had suddenly stopped. Your pussy clenched in disappointment which made you want to bash your head into a metal pole as soon as you felt it. Harper's clothed lap met your bare crotch as he sat between your legs. His arms supporting his weight on either side of you. His face almost leveled with yours. His panting was now even heavier than before. Eyes half-lided and riddled with a near animalistic lust. It made a whimper fall from you, eyes growing wide. He got to working on his belt and pants as soon as he heard it. Trying to make yourself as small as possible, your arms clutched over your chest. The clinking of a belt made your pussy tingle and you tried to stop tears from forming. A deer caught in headlights.
"Don't... don't worry... it won't hurt, you're almost dripping..", Harper assured you quietly under his breath, the last part an octave lower, tracing his exposed length over your puffy folds. That just made everything worse. You dug your nails into your chest, closing your eyes which caused tears to spill over your cheekbones. He glided into you without much resistance. More and more shame kept bubbling in your gut. He groaned slightly as he started to move. So pretty, you were so pretty...
His lips pressed against yours and his tongue invaded your mouth. His hand crept over your stomach and dipped under your hands which were protecting your chest, stroking and grabbing. It was a sloppy kiss, uncoordinated and rough. Not like him. He sped up the pace, the slapping of skin against skin getting louder. Everything was so overwhelming, little moans kept escaping you like prayers. You still didn't want to feel pleasure from this...
Harper pulled away, a trail of saliva connecting you two. He cooed at you:
"D-don't- ahh... don't cry... it's- hnggh.. okay to feel good. Just give in..."
The hand that was stroking your chest trailed down and found your clit again. The contact coaxed more lewd sounds from you. When had he taken his gloves off? He kept rubbing your clit with his thumb while his cock pumped against that one spot, that he knew had you seeing stars.
It was just too much.
The orgasm that crashed down on you was brutal. Mouth hanging agape, your back arched involuntarily. Guttural sounds spilled out of the back of your throat. But the high didn't stop. It kept crashing down on you as he kept going, courtesy of the aphrosidiacs. Clenching the bedsheets, your eyes rolled into the back of your skull. You couldn't care about the way you looked right now. The mind numbing orgasms overriding every last bit of hesitation that you had left.
Harper's movements grew faster and more sloppy. His face inches from yours, glazed with a love drunken expression. You registered him talking again:
"Haah... I lo-"
Cutting himself off, he buried his face next to yours into the pillow. A low groan slipped from him while something warm filled you as you came crashing down from your high.
It was hard to catch your breath. Your heart was still pumping at such a high rate and your throat felt so raw you are certain you must have been screaming. Harper stirred beside you. A soft kiss was placed upon your temple and it made your stomach flutter.
Yep, you were slowly going absolutely fucking batshit insane.
Pairing: Yandere!Harper x Reader (Degrees of Lewdity).
Written for a very lovely anonymous commissioner.
Word Count: 7.0k.
TW: AFAB!Reader, Non/Con, Extremely Unbalanced Power Dynamics, Mind Control/Hypnosis, Oral Sex (M. Receiving), Forced Masturbation, Medical Malpractice, Emotional Manipulation, and Nonconsensual Drug Use. Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Harper’s office was the warmest place in the asylum.
It might’ve been more accurate to say that it was the only warm place in the asylum, really. The communal rooms were inhospitable - too much plastic and too little body heat. The dorms were drafty in a way your cheap, tear-away blankets couldn’t keep out. Even the courtyard was freezing more often than not, any sunlight that might’ve trickled through the forest’s dense canopy immediately smothered by stone walls and wrought-iron gates long before it had a chance to reach the ground. You got used to going about your day half-frozen. It was the seeping kind of cold, the type that soaked under your skin and left you too numb even to shiver. Some days, you even found yourself envying the patients in straitjackets. At least they had something thicker than sheer cotton scrubs between them and the cold.
Harper’s office was a respite, in comparison. You spent the bulk of your free time curled up on his velvet-lined sofa, buried underneath a well-padded quilt with one of his less boring coffee table books in your hands. He was at his desk, an old-fashioned tape-recorder to his left and a laptop open in front of him, his hands moving gracefully over the keys as he jotted down notes from his last session. Whether he was in the room or not didn’t really impact your enjoyment of his hide-away, but the company was nice. The other patients weren’t much for conversation, and the staff— Well, there was a reason you liked Harper so much. That everyone liked Harper, really.
Thankfully, he was nice enough to pretend he liked you, too. At least enough to let you whittle away the hours until your release on his couch.
You were just beginning to nod off to the steady sounds of keyboard clacking and tape-recorder whirring when he called your name. Begrudgingly, you raised your head and found Harper smiling toward you as he nudged a small stack of documents to the edge of his desk with a pen. “Walk these to the archive for me, would you?”
You frowned, but sat up. “Don’t shove your work off on me, old man.”
“You don’t seem to be terribly busy with your own.”
“I’m a patient. I’m supposed to be resting.”
“Technically, according to the schedule our orderlies so lovingly put together, you’re supposed to be in the middle of a group session at the moment.” He cocked his head to the side. “Would you prefer it if I asked you to make your way down to the rec room, instead?”
A chill ran up your spine at the thought of sitting through another group therapy session. They weren’t worth the effort it took to attend. Most of the patients were so heavily sedated, they couldn’t remember their own names, let alone why they were here. Those who’d escaped their introductory appointment with minimal medication, like you, were similarly unhelpful. The questions posed were meaningless, the responses a never-ending onslaught of violence and rape and trauma retold in disjointed, half-remembered bits and pieces. You wanted to be sympathetic, to nod and coo and heal, but you couldn't take it. You’d all come from the same miserable town. You didn’t need more suffering. You had plenty of your own.
And so, you pushed yourself to your feet, marching over to Harper’s desk and snatching the documents away. He leaned back, his grin cat-like in its utter and complete self-satisfaction. “See?” he asked, in the same tone he used during your private sessions, when you finally divulged the intrusive thought or traumatic experience he’d been attempting to pry out of you for the better part of a week. “Was that so hard?”
“You’re a tyrant.”
“I am a doctor merely trying to see that my charge stays active.” And then, almost purring, “Would you have me do less for my favorite patient?”
The praise was half-hearted. Worse than that, it was cheap. The same kind of flattery that you’d employed across a hundred odd-jobs to milk marginally bigger tips out of a thousand love-starved clients. You knew that, and yet, heat rushed to your face all the same, the inside of your mouth going dry and cottony. You rushed to turn away from him, muttering an excuse as you made a run for the door. It wasn’t until you were safely across the threshold that you stopped, sucked in a deep breath, and allowed yourself the smallest, faintest possible smile.
You didn’t like it here. You hated the people, the staff, the chill. You couldn’t wait to leave.
But a tiny, guilty part of you was thankful that, if nothing else, you had Harper to make it all just a little bit easier.
~
You never had night-terrors before the asylum.
You hadn’t really dreamed at all. You hadn’t slept enough. Robin used to find you curled up in empty classrooms, trying to get a few minutes of shut-eye in before a semester-defining exam. Bailey would have to pick you up from one of your many part-time jobs at least once a month because you’d passed out from sheer exhaustion in the middle of your shift. In the asylum, you couldn’t work yourself to the brink. You were never sleep-deprived enough to lull yourself into that dreamless, pitch black, death-like sleep. Most nights, you didn’t have anything better to do than to sleep. It was awful. It was a waste of time. It wasn’t like you.
Worst of all, it meant you dreamed. They were awful, vicious things; all shifting colors and whispering voices and grabbing hands. Sometimes, you’d get lucky, be able to enjoy a couple minutes of some half-remembered schoolyard scene or a pleasantly ungrounded fantasy before things devolved and you found yourself pinned to a tile floor, fingertips biting into your hips as some heavy, amorphous mass with molten gold hair and acid pink eyes. It was an unfortunate coincidence that the monster in your worst dreams resembled Doctor Harper. It wasn’t his fault you were here. You only had yourself to blame, for that.
Not-Harper’s unoccupied hand found its way to your neck, the heel of its palm biting into your nape. The floor was so, so cold and the thing on top of you was so, so hot. There was a voice whispering in your ear - detached and disorienting - and below that, another sound, more melodic, more predictable. Something harsh and solid ground against you from behind. In the corner of your eye, the needle of a syringe caught the light, its tapered point angled toward your neck. You tried to squirm away, but the tile was slippery and the mass was so heavy and it was all so, so hopeless. The needle plunged down, down, piercing the side of your throat and—
And you woke up screaming. Your voice echoed off of the bare cement walls of your room, unswallowed and unanswered. You bolted upright, clinging to your paper-thin blanket. Pathetic. This was all so pathetic. You were alone in an insane asylum miles and miles outside of town. The orderlies weren’t on patrol and the nurses didn’t care. No one was coming to—
Three sharp knocks against your door, evenly paced and just short of forceful. A voice called your name, soft and masculine and achingly familiar.
Harper.
“Come in,” you managed, after a long beat. A latch slid out of place and your door swung open.
He must’ve been working late. It had to be closer to sunrise than sunset and he had the look of a man who’d spent the night burning the candle at both ends. His lab coat was missing and his shirt had been unbuttoned two degrees past the collar, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The fact that he was still in the building at all surprised you. You’d assumed he lived in town.
Your confusion must’ve been obvious. In place of a greeting, he offered an explanation. “I was passing by and heard the commotion. Are you alright?”
You nodded hastily. “Just a bad dream.”
“Ah.” And just like that, he was a man of science again, latching onto the first scrap of evidence you provided and jumping to the most rational conclusion. Pulling your door shut, he crossed the room and fell onto the foot of your bed. There was no hesitation, no pause to seek permission. He was acting like he owned the place - which, to be fair, you were pretty sure he did. “You know,” he started, adjusting his glasses. “Dreams can often signal to areas of tension within in the subconscious. Your brain might be drawing your attention towards, say, fresh trauma you haven’t allowed yourself to process.”
You grimaced. You knew what he was dancing around. Lately, Harper had lost interest in your miserable upbringing, pitiful social life, and self-destructive coping mechanisms. Rather, he’d taken to asking after the reasons behind your interment incessantly. And, if you’d been able to, you would’ve given him what he wanted gladly. You would’ve laid out every thought, every feeling, every factor that left you stranded in his care. But you couldn’t. You wanted to, but every time you opened your mouth, you just—
You couldn’t.
You shrank into yourself, dropping your eyes to the sheets. “I… I’d rather not talk about that, right now.”
“I see.” Immediately, the softness in his voice was gone, replaced by cool professionalism and the slightest trace of disappointment. He stood, starting for the door. “I suppose we’ll see how you’re feeling in the—”
You acted on reflex — lashing out and catching his wrist. To his credit, Harper didn’t flinch. He didn’t even seem all that surprised.
“Can you stay?” The question was a slurred rush, too embarrassing to properly separate into distinct words. “I mean, just for a few minutes. I don’t want to— I can’t—” You forced yourself to pause, to breathe. “I don’t know if I should be alone, right now.”
Harper regarded you for a long moment. In the darkness, he was more shadow than not. A stock silhouette in place of anything more recognizable, anything more welcoming. “You understand that I’m not on duty.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“And I really ought to be using this time to tend to personal needs. For my patients’ sake as well as my own.”
“Right. Of course.”
“Then again, if there was some way you could help me…” He trailed off, clicking his tongue. “I might be able to make an exception.”
Your mind was a blank expanse. You knew he was alluding to something, but you couldn’t begin to guess what.
“Help with… paperwork?”
A breath of a laugh, thin and sardonic. His eyes fell to your lips, then his belt. Understanding dawned on you immediately.
A bottomless pit opened up in your stomach. You couldn’t help it. You laughed. “That’s a little unprofessional, doctor. Even for you.”
He shrugged. “It’s perfectly natural. Most practitioners end up leaning on their favorite patients more than they should, in times of stress.”
Again, there was that rush of warmth, that bone-deep satisfaction. The word played over in your head, again and again. Favorite. Favorite. Favorite. Your hands were on his belt by the time you thought of a decent justification. You’d done more for worse men. He wasn’t forcing you, or blackmailing you, or even really pushing. You didn’t want to do this, but you wanted him to stay. You’d do whatever you had to, if it meant not having to spend the rest of the night alone.
You moved swiftly, mechanically. Unbuckle his belt, undo his fly, ease his pants down just far enough to free his cock. He was already hard enough to wrap your hand around. Rather than consider the implication, you decided just to be thankful he’d made your job that much easier.
And, for what it was worth, he had a pretty dick. Longer than average, too thick to be considered lean but not bloated enough to make you massage your jaw on reflex. No prominent veins, thankfully — those had always left your throat sore. The tip was a nice, rosy pink. You might’ve appreciated the color, had you been in a state to appreciate anything.
You made a point not to look at him as you brought your lips to his head. This would be easier if you were clinical about it, so that was what you tried to be. You divided your work into neat, impersonal steps. Lap the flat of your tongue over his tip then take him into your mouth. Wrap your hand around his base and pump. Try (and fail) not to cringe at the taste of his bitter pre-cum. All perfectly doable. All perfectly normal.
You were just starting to bob your head when you felt his palm against the back of your skull, urging you lower, deeper. You obeyed as much as you could — swallowing him down until he hit the back of your throat. Your gag reflex had been trained away years ago, but still, there was only so much you could do to suppress biology. Tears formed in the corners of your eyes, a low whine bubbling up from your chest. All to be expected. You were at your limit. Harper was smart. Harper would see that.
Except, he didn’t. He pushed harder, and you felt his cock nudge into your throat. Immediately, you floundered, your hands lashing out to catch his dress pants. You glanced up before you could stop yourself, finding Harper’s face. His expression was impassive, bordering on curios. His lips were curved into a smile, the same one he wore during your appointments, all gentle compassion and tender patience. But his eyes—
It might not have been so bad, had they not been so intently focused on you.
"Breathe, love.” His voice was enough to pull you back into reality. Again, his admission echoed in the back of your mind. Favorite, favorite, favorite. “Almost there, just—”
His hips jutted forward and you choked around him. His cock twitched in response, an airy groan slipping past his lips. You wanted to do this right. You wanted to make him happy, to make him proud of you. Your tongue swirled where it was trapped underneath his shaft, your throat convulsing as you forced yourself to take him that much deeper. You were fully crying, now, tears dripping from your chin onto your thighs. Harper shut his eyes, his nails biting into your scalp. That meant you were doing a good job. That meant you were his—
Cum flooded down your throat, hot and searing. You could feel it moving through your chest, burning a hole in your stomach. Harper didn’t thrust, or jerk, or move in any way. He just held you there — close and safe and loved.
That night, you fell asleep to the feeling of his hands petting over your hair.
Somehow, it wasn’t quite the comfort you thought it would be.
~
For whatever reason, you expected sucking his dick would be enough for Harper to stop asking the only question you wouldn’t answer.
It was not.
You were exposed to all of his tried-and-true methods, first. Writing in private journals that he always found an excuse to read, reacting to increasingly bizarre prompts all vaguely reminiscent to your life outside of the asylum, answering prying questions for hours after your session was supposed to end. Eventually, Harper got frustrated. He scowled more often, spoke to you more coldly, withheld praise he used to dull out like medication. Then, when you failed to meet his agitation with compliance, he got creative.
“I wanted to try something new, today.”
Your heart dropped into your stomach. You had to fight not to bolt from the chaise lounge you were currently laid across. You understood why you couldn’t see him in his personal office for your actual appointments, but awareness did little to endear you to the counseling room. It was too big. The lights were too bright. You always seemed to be freezing.
“Do I get to say no?”
He laughed and stood, neglecting to answer.
You focused on the ceiling. You could hear him approaching you, feel his shadow block the light. The cushion below you dipped as he propped a knee next to your hip. “It’s called recovered-memory therapy, with the added help of tactile stimuli.”
“Tactile stimuli…” You blinked slowly. “Like a therapy dog?”
“Close, dear.” You weren’t looking at him, but you didn’t have to. His smile was more than audible. “Can you roll over for me?”
You couldn’t. You didn’t want to. You started to sit up, but Harper only took it as a sign that further assistance was needed. He caught you by the waist, turning you over and forcing your stomach flat against the lounge. Your breathing picked up, teetering on the edge of hyperventilation. You did your best to wrangle it back to a steady pace.
“This was the position you described in your dreams, yes?” He straddled your thighs. His chest pressed into your back, too close. Too warm. “How did you say your attacker was touching you, again?”
You hadn’t. You wouldn’t. But Harper sighed and frowned and looked so, so disappointed and you couldn’t stop yourself, the words spilling out before you had a chance to patch the leak. “They were holding my— my neck, and their hand was on my— my—”
“Right. Of course.” His hand fell to your hip, then hesitated. “If you’d feel more comfortable touching yourself, I’d understand. If not…”
You shook your head vehemently. You would do whatever you had to so long as it meant he wouldn’t put his hands on you. You couldn’t take that. Not again.
He helped you onto your knees. Slowly, mechanically, you worked a hand between your thighs and began to rub circles into your clit through the thin material of your uniform. The action was without sensation. You might as well have been brushing your teeth.
He rested a hand on the back of your neck. He wasn’t cruel enough to choke you, but he wasn’t kind enough to give you space, either. “Good. Very good. Now, tell me about the day you realized you needed my help. Start from the beginning.”
It felt as if you’d swallowed a needle. You did your best to speak around the obstruction. “I was— I had to visit you. Something happened at school, but that’s not important. You gave me a shot, and it made my head a little fuzzy, so you left me—” Your wrist slipped, and you applied a little more friction than you meant to. Something dull and electric ran up your spine — just strong enough to be mistaken for pleasure. “So you left me alone to wait it out. Just for a few minutes. You said you’d be back in a few minutes.”
“And I was.” He knew this part as well as you did. This retelling was not for his sake. “But, what got to you first?”
“A nurse, I think.” Someone in a uniform. Someone who worked at the hospital. Someone who meant to do you harm. “I don’t know. I can’t remember his face. I just— I was on the ground, and he was holding this— this thing up to my neck, and he must’ve gotten me because—”
Your voice hitched. Harper bowed his head, pressing his lips into your temple. “It’s alright. You’re safe, here. You can tell me anything.”
It would’ve been easier to believe that if he hadn’t literally been pinning you down.
“I don’t know what happened,” you said, sincerely. “I blacked out. When I woke up, the body was gone, the cops were there, and I was covered in blood.”
“A psychotic break.” He’d never sounded so pleased. “Do you know what that means?”
You shook your head. You didn’t want to know, either, but he told you anyway.
“It means that you need much, much more care than we initially anticipated.”
You tried to pull away, to go slack, but his hand slipped between your thighs, cupping your own. He pressed your middle and ring fingers into your clit, guiding you into an awkward, vertical motion. You let out a distressed whine, squirming underneath him. “But— We’re fin—”
“I know.” Another kiss, this one to the corner of your jaw. “This is a reward. You did so well.”
You wanted to argue, but he applied more pressure and suddenly, you were too busy melting underneath him to do much of anything.
It was humiliating — how quickly you came. You hadn’t been touched in months. You were sensitive, and deprived, and so, so afraid. Harper hummed as you jerked and twitched underneath him, only letting go of your hand once the last of your spasms had died out and you were no more fun to play with than a toy after its batteries had been drained. Even then, he held you there, his grin biting into your cheek.
Your nightmares were immediately forgotten. Whatever landed you here in the first place, no more than a distant concern.
You had to get out.
~
Surprisingly, as your release date approached, Harper retreated. He reverted back to the way he’d always been — calm, collected, careful not to push the boundaries of your patient-doctor relationship. Sometimes, you’d wake up to his silhouette in your doorway, but there were no more late-night requests, no more innovative new strategies to your care. When you began to skip your appointments with him, he didn’t say anything. When you stopped coming to his office in your downtime, his only response was to give you a wide berth, in return.
On the morning of your release, he came to fetch you himself. You were already wearing — had been since the night you before — the sundress you’d arrived in. It fit poorly, which made sense. It’d been months. Hospital food and a largely sedentary lifestyle meant your body had changed, lost definition, gained new curves. Still, you felt safer in the remnants of your old life, your real life, than you ever had in your stale uniform. Harper regarded with narrow eyes and a pleasant smile before turning on his heel and signaling for you to follow.
You expected to be taken to the front gates. That was how you saw the other patients leaving, as rare as it was for the asylum to actually let one of its patients go. Instead, Harper led you down the familiar route to his office, pausing outside the shut door. '“You know,” he started, slowly, adjusting his glasses. “I do mourn that our time together has ended so quickly.”
You forced yourself to shrink, to simper. “I’m sorry, doctor.”
“There’s no need to apologize. It’s really very selfish of me.” And then, leaning down, lowering his voice into a conspiratorial murmur, “Can I tell you a secret?”
You wanted to cover your ears. You wanted to say no. You wanted to run.
You nodded.
“I’m afraid it’s rather selfish, but—” He paused, his grin widening. “No doctor has ever truly wanted to let their favorite patient go.”
Immediately, you relaxed. Honestly, it felt a little silly to have ever been scared at all. What else did you think he was going to say? Of course you were his favorite patient.
He’d always been your favorite doctor.
Without another word, Harper opened the door and ushered you inside. Bailey sat on one end of the well-worn sofa, elbows braced on his knees and mouth twisted into a distinct grimace. You perched on the other end, pulling your legs up and tucking them underneath you. You’d always been so comfortable here, so warm. It was difficult to remember why you’d stopped coming by.
Bailey shot you a frown. “Don’t get comfortable, brat. We’re leaving as soon as the doctor signs your paperwork.”
“About that,” Harper said, leaning against his desk. “I believe my patient has something to say to you.”
You did? Oh, of course you did. How could you be so absent-minded?
“I don’t want to go.”
Your voice was bright and clear. This was the most sure of yourself you’d been in months.
Bailey seemed less convinced. “Run that by me again?
It was hard to imagine how you could’ve been more clear. “I don’t want to leave.”
He looked to Harper. “Get out.”
Harper didn’t move. “Please, Bailey. We’re all friends here.”
Bailey didn’t respond. He held his ground until, with a sigh, Harper rolled his eyes and left the room. Once the two of you were alone, Bailey went on. “Look, kid.” He sounded exasperated, as if this was chore that had already run long. “Whatever he told you, don’t believe it. Harper’s full of shit. Whether it was about new treatments or hallucinations — just forget about it. There’s nothing he can do for you in here that he wouldn’t have already done out there.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
He groaned. “Yes, you do. I didn’t drive my ass all the way out here just for you to—” He broke off, running a hand over his face. “Robin misses you.”
Oh, god.
Robin.
Several things became undeniable at the same time. You didn’t want to leave. You had to go. You hated the asylum. The asylum was good for you. You’d been kept here for months with no progress. Your treatment wasn’t over, yet. Harper was a good doctor. The best doctor. You were so, so scared of him. He hated you. He was bad to you. He hurt you. You were his favorite—
There was no good way to describe the feeling of being suddenly aware that half your thoughts were not your own. It was a little like believing, firmly and undoubtedly, that your head was above water, only to blink and find that you were already drowning.
You took a deep breath. You were fine. You were in control of yourself. You wanted to leave. All you had to do was tell Bailey that. All you had to do was say the only thing you’d been able to think for weeks, now.
“I don’t want to go.”
Your tongue tasted like sulfur. You could feel the blood boiling underneath your skin. You tried again.
“I don’t want to go.”
Bailey sat up. You pressed your thighs together. Again.
“I don’t want to go.”
Again.
“I don’t want to go.”
Again.
“I don’t want to—”
“Alright, kid, I get it.” He gestured dismissively, then called for Harper. “You can come back now, freak.”
Immediately, the door swung open and Harper sauntered across the threshold. His grin was wide and fanged, dripping with fresh venom. “I believe my patient has made the necessity of our work clear.”
“Crystal.” Bailey stood, but hesitated before exiting. He fished something out of his front pocket - a business card for the orphanage, its edges soft and its corners bent. A phone number was printed neatly along the bottom. His office landline.
Wordlessly, he held the card out to you. You stared at it blankly for a second, then another, before reaching up with shaking hands and grabbing his wrist as tightly as you could. Bailey jerked back on reflex, but you held on, letting him drag you to the floor. The business card was gone - no longer a matter of concern. You wouldn’t let go. No matter what happened, you wouldn’t let go. Not until you were home. Not until you were far, far away from Har—
“That’s enough, dear.” Instantly, your body went slack, your hands falling to your sides and your arms going slack. Bailey stumbled back as Harper cocked his head to the side, feigning a pout. “I’m afraid you might have to leave. Your presence seems to be causing quite a bit of agitation.
There was a sneer, the beginning of a snarl, but Bailey caught himself before things went further. With no emotion more apparent than schooled apathy, he turned and left — slamming the office door behind him. Leaving you alone.
Harper let out a low, breathy sigh. “Good riddance,” he said. He bent down, picking up the card Bailey had dropped. His eyes skimmed over it before, with no small amount of delight, tearing into pieces and letting them flutter back to the ground. “Never did like that one. He can be awfully possessive with his toys for a man who casts them into the world so carelessly.” And then, to you, “It’s a good thing that you landed in my care, isn’t it?”
You didn’t respond. You couldn’t. The only words you seemed capable of saying were still heavy on your tongue, and you wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of repeating them again. Harper didn’t seem to mind. With no great urgency, he gathered you up in his arms and set you down on the edge of his desk. Your body, still limp, collapsed against his, but he only laughed and wrapped an arm around your midriff, holding you that much closer to his chest. For lack of an ability to speak your mind, you groaned — the sound throaty and thoroughly miserable. Harper’s smile bit into the side of your skull.
“Something on your mind?”
“I hate you.”
“I thought you might say that. It’s an occupational hazard, you know — something they warn you about in school.” His fingertips skirted up your back, following the curve of your spine. “I hope you appreciate that hatred is something I’m still allowing you to feel.”
Allowing. Like he had total control over you. Like your free will was a privilege you ought to be thankful not to have been stripped of. You thought about shoving him away, but every time you tried to move, your vision blurred and your body grew heavier, as if you were suddenly on the verge of falling asleep. As if you were back on the hospital floor, dead weight on top of you and a needle in your—
The realization was sudden and jagged, as obvious as it was sickening.
“You’re the reason I’m here.”
“Of course.” He made no attempt to deny it. If anything, he sounded a little smug. “It’s clever, isn’t it? Hypnotism is so finicky, and no matter what I do, it always seems to wear off sooner than I’d like. This, though—” He bowed his head, burying his face in the crook of your neck and inhaling deeply. “This works. One injection, a compelling trigger phrase, and you’re as suggestible as a newborn lamb.”
“But— But I hurt someone. All the blood, and the—”
“There was blood, certainly. Compliments of our generous donors. And you worked yourself into such a frenzy, I doubt the powers-that-be would’ve questioned it if I’d asked to have you locked away for the next, oh, twenty-five years?” He paused to chuckle. The sound was thin and airy and cruel. “It lasts, too. You’ll be able to go months between doses. Just think of the applications. No need to break-in cattle, not when two shots a year will have them so wonderfully obedient. And the brothels, Briar’s been complaining about worker retention for—”
You cut him off with a low, warbling sob. You didn’t want to cry in front of Harper. No part of you wanted to give him the satisfaction. You’d managed to hold it in for weeks — through probing and prying and late-night check-ins. But there was something about his tone, so eager to strip away your free will and sell you off to the highest bidder. It was the happiest you’d ever seen him. It was the proudest you’d ever made him.
The dam broke open. Tears streamed down your cheeks, hot and humiliating. You clenched your jaw, grit your teeth, but you couldn’t seem to bite back the pitchy whines and miserable whimpers that bubbled up from some deep, primal cavity. You couldn’t cover your mouth. You couldn’t even raise your hands to try.
Harper’s expression dropped. He pulled back, already cooing, already peppering kisses over your cheeks. “Now, now, there’s really no need for that. You, my dear, are far too precious to give away.” He pulled you into his arms, letting your body slump lifeless against his chest. Rounding the desk, he fell into his chair and arranged you to straddle his lap, a knee on either side of his hips. “What would I ever do without my favorite patient?”
Sudden, searing agony. The room went blurry. Your vision flashed white. You collapsed against him willingly, now, burying your face in his lab coat just to block out the world as it spun around you. Harper sighed, pressing a long kiss into the top of your head. His hands found their way to the back of your sundress. Fabric shifted, a button falling out of place, and you felt the bodice go slack.
“Raise your arms for me, love?”
With all the obedience of a programmed machine, you raised your arms above your head. Your dress pooled at your waist, as limp and as useless as the body that was no longer under your control.
There was no attempt to undress you properly. He worked efficiently, slipping his hand underneath your skirt and cupping your cunt. The pad of his thumb circled your clit once, twice before his interest drifted and he pulled your panties to the side. The insertion was abrupt — bordering on painful. Three fingers at once with minimal prep. You’d had things shoved into you before, often roughly and never with your permission, but you’d never had it done so slowly or with so much care to soak in each little pained sound you offered by way of response.
It would’ve been better, had he been a little more rushed. Unfortunately, even at his most monstrous, Harper was still a man of science. He moved at a languid pace, pumping his wrist lethargically, pausing often to stretch or curl or grind against the walls of your cunt. It should’ve stayed that way — dry and harsh and uncomfortable — but despite the lack of pleasure, you could feel yourself getting wet, hear the slick squelching as he moved inside of you. “So resilient,” Harper praised. “It’s impressive, really. Even trapped, you try to make the best of things.”
Not that he was helping. The heel of his palm came up, grating against your clit. The room suddenly seemed too hot. Your face wouldn’t cool down. You felt sticky all over. How you’d ever taken comfort in this was a mystery. You would’ve preferred to be left out in the cold forever, if it meant not having to bear another second of his warmth.
And your stupid arms were still stuck above your stupid head. You whined, clenching and unclenching your fists, and Harper took pity on you. “Around my neck, now.” And then, when your hands moved to wrap around his throat, “Nicely, please. The way you know you should.”
Glowering, you draped your arms around his neck. The closeness was terrible. The fabric of his dress shirt was coarse against your bare chest. He spread his fingers apart and you lurched into him, attempting to seek shelter in the source of your agony. It was awful, but bearable. You’d survived worse. You’d even come out the other side with your dignity more or less in-tact. You just had to stay calm. You weren’t here. You were somewhere else. You’d left the asylum. You were with Bailey, back at the orphanage. You were going to see—
“It’s alright, dear.” Harper’s voice was a hook, piercing your mind and dragging you back into reality. “You deserve it. You can let go.”
He was so fucking calm. That was the worst part. He was so calm, so put-together, so unaffected, and you weren’t allowed to be. The moment the words left his tongue, your body was on fire. There was no bliss to it. The pleasure was scalding and invasive. The physical symptoms, ungraceful and involuntary. Your mouth fell open, but any sound you might’ve made was cancelled out by your sudden inability to breathe. Your hips rocked against his hand, trying in vain to prolong the intolerable. Your thighs snapped together, pressing into his sides with enough force to make your muscles ache. He watched you all the while, eyes half-lidded and head cocked to the side. The same way he might’ve looked at an especially endearing lab rat, or a patient report that was just a touch more interesting than he’d expected it to be.
Eventually, thankfully, the last embers of your involuntary climax burnt themselves out. You slumped against him — too exhausted to need mind-control as a pretense for your reliance. For a long time, Harper let you stay like that. Unmoving and unthinking. Even that mercy, though, was eventually withdrawn. His hands found their way to your sides, his fingertips massaging circles into your back. You whimpered at the contact, but he only hummed.
Slowly, his touch drifted north. Untangling you from him, he eased you away from his chest. “You didn’t think we were done, did you?” His gaze fell to his belt, lingering for a moment before darting back up to meet yours. “Whenever you’re ready, dear.”
You might’ve laughed, if there had been any part of you left in a state to appreciate the irony.
It was a small kindness that you didn’t have to think about what you were doing. You watched from a measured distance as your hands undid his belt, as a fist mechanically pumped over his cock until he was leaking onto your knuckles. There was no reluctance, no emotion to it, only a dull understanding of the steps that needed to be taken and the awareness that with or without your mind, your body would see the task through. Harper’s hands fell away from you entirely as you shifted onto your knees, aligning the head of his cock with your abused entrance. He leaned back in his seat, putting that much more distance between you and him. Giving himself a better view.
Even if you’d had more control, you doubted you would’ve been more gentle with yourself. You bottomed out in the first stroke, your hips settling against his as his cock filled you to bursting. Adjustment was unnecessary. Discomfort was a part of the treatment, not a symptom of your condition. It didn’t fade as you rocked and ground against him, only sharpening into other, more acidic byproducts. Pain. Overstimulation. Pure and utter loathing.
Harper made no attempt to help. He seemed more than satisfied to let his experiment run its course untampered with. His hands kneaded at the arms of his chair, curling and flexing in-time with your mechanical bouncing. A blistering red spread over his cheeks, although you couldn’t be sure if he was getting off on what you were doing or the fact that you were doing it at all. He was moaning unabashedly — little, breathy, lilting noises that would’ve had you assuming he was the one being tortured. Worst of all, there was this look in his eyes. Not love, not really, but something tangential. Adoration. Fascination.
Sickness.
Sick and desperate. You rolled your hips and he buckled into himself, letting out a rough groan. Immediately, his hands were on your hips, guiding your ministrations, forcing you to move faster, to take him deeper, to somehow bend even further to his whims. You felt him twitch. A moment later, Harper lurched against you, his mouth finding your throat. You could feel his breath, hot and humid, then his drool as he lapped over your skin. It was disgusting. It was horrible. It was—
“Cum,” he ordered, his eloquence lost to pleasure. “Like you want this. Like you love me.”
And you did. Holding him tight, crying his name, making it seem like there wasn’t anywhere in the world you’d rather be. Harper followed shortly — desperate in spite of his composure. There was no attempt made to pull out. He dragged you flush against him, keeping his cock buried inside of you as he came undone, leaving you full and heavy and tainted. Claiming your mind wasn’t enough, apparently. He had to leave his mark on your body, too.
He didn’t let you go, after he finished. Part of you hoped that he would — that you’d be allowed to steal an unsupervised shower and slink off to your cell to sleep away the misery. Instead, he clung to you, draping himself over your rigid body as he panted and trembled. Eventually, he seemed to pull himself together, regaining just enough of his composure to grin and reach for something behind you.
You heard a drawer slide open, metal clack against wood as he removed a long, rectangular box. “…I have something for you,” he started, the words slurring into one another. “I thought I ought to give it to you later on, in a more controlled environment, but—” A pause, a laugh. “I suppose I’ve gotten rather sentimental, haven’t I?”
He placed the box on the arm of his chair and, with a single hand, pulled the lid off. You recognized the contents at a glance. A syringe — its needle infinitely long and the fluid in its barrel an acidic shade of pink. He took it up gingerly, resting his thumb over the trigger and holding it up to the light. You didn’t ask, but he told you anyway. Still playing doctor, even now. “Your current dose should last another month, but I thought it best to re-up now. To ensure that our relationship remains as productive as it has been, so far.”
He brought the needle to your neck, aiming for the patch of skin his mouth had sought out time and time again. You were shaking, in spite of your paralysis. It took everything you had to speak, and even then, you could only manage a few pathetic little words.
Pairing: Yandere!Dick Grayson x Reader (+Batfam) [DC].
Word Count: 3.8k.
TW: Non/Con, Fem!Reader, Omegaverse, Alpha!Dick, Beta!Reader, Kidnapping, Forced Mating, Knotting, Panic Attacks, Suicidal Ideation, Forced Proximity, Fingering, Group Sex, and Nonconsensual Touching. Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Every morning, you woke up underneath Dick Grayson.
That was to be expected from an alpha, or so you’d been told. They tended to be clingy, physical, never satisfied unless their mate was within their sight or, better yet, in their arms. It was perfectly natural, but knowing that did little to alleviate the hot, damp weight of him on your back, didn’t make the smell of sweat and bodies that dragged you from your sleep any less smothering. His arm was a steel bar across your waist, his legs a pair of writhing snakes that tangled around and immobilized yours. Regardless of how much distance you put between yourself and him in the night, his face always seemed to find the crook of your neck, his mouth never more than an inch or so from your mating mark.
The mating mark you, biologically, weren’t supposed to have. But you guessed what was ‘natural’ mattered more for him than it did for you.
Worst of all, he always woke up after you. It was a shared symptom of his late-night patrols and the domestic, homebound instinct most alphas felt to make their den and maintain it. You were left to lie awake for the better part of an hour, swallowing back the feeling that you ought to find a way to crawl out of your own skin, before he began to stir – groaning as he groggily lifted his head. He squeezed your body against his once before rolling over to drag a hand over his face, wiping away lingering exhaustion. You savored the distance the same way an alcoholic savored fine wine: already desperate for another glass.
You made a valiant effort to get away, shuffling towards the edge of the mattress as you muttered some excuse about showering or brushing your teeth. Of course, Dick was quick to stop you and of course, his chosen method of persuasion was touch-based. He sat up, resting his back against the headboard. An arm lashed out, curling around your midriff and dragging you into his lap. Your knees landed on either side of his waist, your ass slotted against his crotch. You could feel his cock pressing into you, stiff and leaking. Your revulsion must’ve shown on your expression, because Dick laughed and rolled his hips against you.
“Can’t help it,” he muttered, voice still thick with sleep. “You just smell so good in the morning. Guess you wouldn’t know that, though.”
Right. Obviously. Because, of the two singular drawbacks to being a beta, there was only one Dick would ever dare to mention out loud. He loved holding your weak sense of smell over your head, reminding you that there was a whole, invisible world defined by scents and pheromones that was entirely inaccessible to you. It’d never been an issue before you met him. From what you’d heard, pheromones were just another way to tell how a person felt, easily replaced by a keen eye for micro-expressions or a careful ear for tones, and you didn’t find being able to tell the exact notes of a person’s unique musk all that appealing.
Then again, if you did have a better nose, you might’ve been able to tell Dick (or, rather, Nightwing, at the time) was going into a rut the night you met, the night he saved you from an armed robber and so heroically offered to walk you home. You might’ve been more aware of the pheromones you were radiating – scared, helpless, in need of protection – and what they would do to alpha at his most eager to lay claim. You might’ve been able to get away from him before he pinned you down on the floor of your living room, dug his teeth into your throat, and bound you to him permanently. His family had told you, afterward, that splitting up a bonded pair was dangerous. Separation from his mate could make Dick irritable, obsessive, hyper-violent. No part of you liked being stuck with him, but the Waynes had promised that you would like version of him that distance bred less. Moving in with his pack, playing mate – that was the safer option. The more humane option.
It also conveniently ignored the second drawback to being a beta: your unwavering preference for your own company. You weren’t supposed to have a mate. You weren’t supposed to join a pack. That was for alphas and omegas with their primal, hormone-driven brains; the ones too busy sucking and fucking to notice people like you quietly keeping society on-track in the background. You’d been made for long periods of isolation, peaceful nights in empty beds, the muted tranquility of mental silence. Crowds made you anxious. Too many voices in one room left you on the verge of hyperventilating. The thought of gushy, romantic sex (the type with lots of skin-to-skin contact and so, so many fluids) made you want to throw up. These were undebatable facts of your existence and traits which Dick trampled over daily with no small amount of zeal.
He grinned, easy and loose, as he slipped a hand into your panties. Two fingers found your slit, tracing over it as the heel of his palm ground into your clit. Sex, real sex, was thankfully off-limits. His dick (or, more accurately, the knot at its base) would kill you. Literally. His constant, pleading pawing wasn’t much more bearable, though.
“It’s stronger in the morning.” Right. Back to your scent. His fingers slipped inside of you, pushing in to the knuckle. “I mean, I can always pick it up, but right now, I don’t even have to try. ‘s like I’m drowning in it.”
You swallowed back a whimper, forcing your tongue to work the way you needed it to. “That sounds terrible.”
“It’s perfect.” He curled his fingers, interrupting his otherwise lazy pumping, then ground into your clit with that much more force. “You’d drown in me if you had the chance to, right?”
You could hear your own slick noises echoing off the walls of his bedroom. “I’d rather just drown you.”
He laughed, bowing his head and pressing an open-mouthed kiss into your collarbone. “I wouldn’t mind.”
Irritation sparked, hot and fierce. Your hands shot for his neck, but Dick’s grin only widened. Without pulling out of you, he rolled over – throwing you down to the mattress and landing on your back. His arm was trapped underneath you, but he didn’t seem to care, didn’t let it slow down the harsh way he flicked his wrist or the invasive curling of his digits inside of you. You thrashed, then when that failed, clawed at the sheets, as if tearing through silk and cotton would do anything to get him off of you. Not that your resistance lasted long enough to matter. It only took short, pitiful seconds for him to make you cum – dragging a miserable whine out alongside your climax. Immediately, you went limp underneath him, and Dick kissed the nape of your neck, humming as he pulled away. Over your shoulder, you could hear an awful, wet sound, like a tongue running through fingers. You did what you could not to put an image to the noise.
When he was done, Dick rested a hand on your back, rubbing circles in your shoulder blade. “Sorry, baby,” And then, stifling another laugh, “You’re just so cute when you’re all—”
His touch drifted south, skirting over the length of your spin. You shrieked into the mattress, arching your back on reflex. Trying to get away from him. Dick sighed.
“Can’t run from me forever.” As if to prove his point, he gathered you up in his arms, pushing himself to his feet and starting in the direction of the en-suite. “One day, I’m gonna have to make you see that.”
You could only groan in response.
~
Breakfasts at Wayne Manor were always difficult to get through.
Late in the morning, after the brunt of the pack had a chance to sleep off the worst of last night’s patrol, every available member of the family gathered around a single, narrow table to clack utensils against porcelain and scrape chairs across the floor and speak to each other as loudly as they possibly could. The others were allowed to choose seats at random, but somehow, you always seemed to end up near the head of the table, stuck between Dick and the Pack Alpha, Bruce.
You hated it. You hated the proximity, too many bodies crammed into too small of a space. You hated the paranoia, never able to eat in comfort knowing another hungry mouth could steal the food off your plate at any time. Most of all, you hated the volume. So many voices layered on top of one another, you couldn’t be bothered to differentiate between Stephanie’s laugh and Cassandra’s quiet hum, Jason’s sardonic drawl and Tim’s mechanical droning. After a while, it was all just noise.
You felt a headache coming on. This was to be expected at this point in the day and thus, warranted no reaction more apparent than a half-hearted scowl and a pair of eyes narrowed toward your plate.
As always, you ate too quickly and were forced to stay too long. When you tried to get up from your seat, Dick’s hand found its way to your thigh, gently urging you back down. He was smiling, again – the golden boy grin, all clear blue eyes behind dark, disorderly hair. You hated that smile more than you hated every other part of Dick combined. Without it, you never would’ve trusted him. You never would’ve let him into your home. You never would’ve found yourself trapped in his.
You never would’ve let him touch you.
You started to turn to him, to make it clear that you were finished and you needed to leave, but someone cleared their throat to your right. Of course.
How could you have forgotten about Bruce.
You braced yourself before turning to him. Dick squeezed your thigh by way of reassurance. It didn’t help.
Bruce Wayne was the Pack Alpha of secondary sex bio-essentialists’ collective wet-dream. Well over six feet tall with the build to match, he towered over the rest of his family with an air of calm, analytic judgement. Even his gaze felt too heavy, as if a weighted pole had been dropped onto your shoulders whenever he deemed you worthy of a stray glance in your direction. Your loathing for him was no less intense than the loathing you held for Dick, but the tone of it was different. You hated Dick because of what he’d done to you, what he continued to do to you. You hated Bruce because of how easily he could fix it and how consistently he decided not to.
“Don’t forget your medication,” he started, slowly, drawing out each word as he gestured to the small collection of multi-colored pills on the edge of your plate. Supplements, you’d been told, to make up for the general lack of activity in your current life. You tried not to take them when you could get away with it, if only because it was one of your precious few ways to maintain your independence. “You won’t like that happens if you miss a dose.”
An order, albeit not a cruel one. He was talking to you like one of his children. Like a member of his pack.
Your head pounded.
“I—” You paused, swallowing. The juxtaposition was dizzying. He was an older man and you were in his home. You wanted to do what he said and be done with it. He was an alpha and you were nothing. You wanted to do anything but listen to him then run as far as you possibly could. “I don’t want to.”
His cold gaze flickered from you to the rest of his table. In turn, the others went quiet, their attention naturally gravitating to Bruce, who then directed it to you. The noise had been unbearable, but the silence was worse. Six pairs of eyes, all focused unblinkingly on you. You would’ve sat through a thousand family meals if it meant they would all stop looking at you like that.
With shaking hands, you snatched up the pills and choked them down dry. Bruce nodded. Dick beamed.
You wanted a long second for their attention to disperse, then another. It never did. Your vision blurred around the edges as you scrambled out of your seat, muttering excuses. This time, no one stopped you.
You wanted your bedroom – safe and dark and isolated – but the kitchen was closer. Your temples throbbed. Your heart threatened to beat out of your chest. So busy trying to steady your own frantic breathing, you didn’t notice the footsteps until you were leaning over a counter, eyes clenched shut and hands flat against the cool marble. You thought it might be Dick, at first, come to check on his upset mate. You should’ve known he wouldn’t be so attentive, that the world wouldn’t be so kind.
A lean arm wrapped around your midriff, its owner’s chest soon pressed against your back. You saw a flash of gold in your peripheral, felt soft lips on the shell of your ear.
Stephanie. Another alpha. Perfect.
She was surprisingly quiet. There was a slight hum, a breath of a laugh, but nothing else as she nuzzled into your shoulder. Rather than an act of mercy, her silence came off as a show of further sadism. It meant you had to be the catalyst for your own misery.
“What are you doing?”
“Comforting you.” A purr started up deep in her throat. You felt the reverberations against your skin. “You should see the pheromones you’re releasing, right now. I’ve rescued hostages giving off weaker distress signals.”
Another set of footsteps, another body placing itself too close. You glanced to your left and found Tim pulling himself onto the counter, his dark eyes wide. He was an omega, but that did little to endear him to you. Alphas tended to be more aggressive, but there was something about the cloying, saccharine way omegas held themselves that made you uneasy. They went through life expecting to be loved. Your lack of affection was regarded less as an inability and more as stubbornness. Something meant to be resented or, better yet, overcome.
“It really is strong,” he mumbled, edging that much closer to you. “Not that I’m complaining. It’s nice. Calming.”
Stephanie snickered. “Don’t listen to him. He says you smell like the ocean.”
Your nose wrinkled. Every soul born and raised in Gotham knew the coastline’s dead-fish, rotting-trash stench by heart. Tim scowled.
“I did not. It’s more like—” He cut himself off, pausing to think. When he went on, his voice was more distant, as if drawing from a well-loved memory. “Bruce took me to Italy for a case, once. The air was so—so fresh. There was salt, and sunlight, and something sweet, like—”
“Caramel,” Stephanie finished. Her purring was getting louder. Her hands began to wander, slipping under your shirt and pressing flat against your stomach. She was unbearably warm, and you could feel her palms sliding up, up, her breath against your throat as she sought out your—
“Please,” You were so quiet, you could hardly hear yourself above the static in your ears. “Stop.”
Her grin pressed into the curve of your neck. “Why would I do that, sweetheart?”
“I don’t like being touched. It’s not—” Your body was too hot. You were burning alive. “It’s not right.”
She laughed – loud and bold and searing. “Of course it is, honey. This,” She dragged her blunt nails over your chest for emphasis. “is how we show we care. Don’t you want us to care about you?”
No. You didn’t. You wanted something, anything else. You opened your mouth to say as much, to scream, but Tim was fast.
“Let her go, Steph.” Sweet, soft, nearly pleading. Obediently, Stephanie pulled away, and you sucked in a deep breath. Those piercing, beady little eyes of his never fell away from you. It seemed to turn the air hostile, filling your lungs with acid in the place of relief. “She’ll come around, soon.” And then, quietly, almost to himself, “She’ll have to.”
His words rang in your ears for seconds. She’ll have to.
Meaning, they’d make you.
All the warmth left your body at once. It was strangely calming – the rush of cold; the way your heart beat so fast, it might as well have not been beating at all. Without a word, you slipped out from underneath Stephanie, and she let you. Tim whispered something and Stephanie laughed, but the details were lost in translation. It didn’t really matter. They’d said what they needed to.
You couldn’t get to the roof, so you settled for Bruce’s office. It was on the uppermost floor, with a balcony that looked out over the manor’s gardens. His door was unlocked, so you let yourself in. Bruce was at his desk. You passed by him without acknowledgement.
He only got to his feet as you stepped outside. The guardrail was tall enough to press into your stomach as you peered over it. Fifty feet to the ground, more or less. You’d been hoping for more, but it would do the trick.
You leaned forward, bowing your head low and using your arms to better ease your body over the side. Eventually, your center of gravity tipped, your feet kicking off the ground as you teetered on the railing and started to—
A fist curled around the collar of your shirt, jerking you back and throwing you to the ground. You blinked, and then, Bruce was kneeling above you, his hand around your neck and his gaze steely. Your skin crawled underneath his palm.
“I had higher hopes for you,” he muttered. His free hand slipped into his coat pocket, drawing out a thin black box. “We thought you were coming along.”
You hesitated to respond, but there was only one thing you were ever going to say. That you could say, anymore. “Please don’t touch me.”
He scoffed, the noise dry and humorless. The box was placed next to your head, the lid carefully removed. You saw the flash of something long and silver in your peripheral, felt a pinch at the base of your neck. Heat flooded into your veins, thick and primal. You caught the distant scent of something sweet, and then, you were gone.
~
The room stank of sweat, salt, and sugar.
You came into consciousness slowly, only able to take in one foggy detail at a time. You were in an unfamiliar bed, too large to be your own. Dick was above you, kneeling in between your legs, his face flush and his hands planted on either side of your head. In the corner of your eye, you could see Tim and Stephanie on the other side of the too-big mattress – Tim on his back and Stephanie moving above him, bouncing on something you couldn’t see. Behind them, of course, was Bruce. He leaned back in his armchair, expression bored but cold eyes watchful. The Pack Alpha, residing over the rituals of lesser creatures.
Dick’s breath hitched and you realized, rather belatedly, that he was inside of you. Really, actually inside of you. Deep, deep inside of you.
Oh no.
Your hands shot to his shoulders, nails burrowing into muscle. “Dick, Dick, you have to—”
He hushed you, falling that much lower. His lips found the curve of your neck, ghosting over a patch of scarred skin. Your mating mark. “’s alright, baby. You’re so—” He moaned, rolling his hips against yours. “So tight.”
“You need to pull out.” You could feel it – beating against your entrance, a swollen mass at the base of your cunt. It was too thick, too hard, too big. He was going to split you open. He was going to fucking kill you. “I’m not supposed to—”
“But you are, baby. You are.” He pulled away, his pace falling into something blissfully lethargic. A hand slipped between your body and his, two fingers finding your clit. Dread and pleasure pulsed through you in tandem. You didn’t want this. You couldn’t. It wasn’t in your nature. And yet, your hips bucked against him and your cunt ached. Your mind was suddenly in the backseat, watching in horror as your body begged to be taken care of.
“Tried to let the pills do their work, take things slow, but B decided it was time to go all the way.” He grinned, kissing your forehead. You could smell something on him, underneath the sweat and closeness. Sharp mint and chalk in sunlight. Then, below that, something else. A steady, indescribable reek that seemed to whisper ‘love me, love me, love me’ into the back of your skull. Your pussy clenched that much tighter around his cock. “Tim even offered to help. Having another omega’s pheromones to copy should make the first time a little easier.”
Another omega? He made it sound like Tim wasn’t the only—
Understanding dawned on you, cruel and terrible. Of course. The pills. The shot. The pack’s insistence that, one way or another, you’d come around. It was all you could do to blink up at Dick. Your voice was weak, when you finally found it. Cloying and submissive. “I’m a beta.”
“You used to be,” he sighed, the contentment in his voice only rivaled by his sheer, unrelenting joy. One of his hands fell to your hip, steadying you. “I couldn’t stand to watch you suffer like that. Not when we could make it so much easier.”
You opened your mouth to protest, but all that came out was a long, desperate whine. You’d never felt so empty, so cold, so in need of something hot and warm and filling. Dick seemed to sense the change. He groaned as he thrust into you, forcing your cunt to take him to the hilt, then deeper still – bullying his knot into your unwilling body. You stretched to accommodate him. It was painless.
It was natural.
You felt him pulse against the walls of your cunt, locking your bodies together. Something hot and thick flooded into you, filling you up in a way you’d never thought to conceive of. Above you, Dick panted, his hair hanging over his face and his eyes half-lidded. His smile was pulled wide enough to strain.
You took a deep breath and regretted it immediately. It hung thick in the air, inescapable despite your best attempts to block it out.
Sea salt and caramel – so strong and so defined, you could only wonder how you’d never noticed it before.
This is based on a manga isekai one-shot I saw on tik tok that I can't find again. Please let me know if y'all know what I'm talking about LOL. Also, sorry if this is the mischaracterization of the century BUT I live for the idea of twisted Qifrey.
Summary: Yandere!Qifrey who erases your memories to stop you from leaving him.
The first time you met Qifrey, you thought you had met a real-life angel. You were just on the outskirts of Kalhn with your apprentice, practicing flying. What started off as practicing drawing sylph shoe seals turned into you flying through the air at rapid speeds.
Curse you for wanting to show the consequences of drawing asymmetrical lines without endangering your apprentice. You thought you'd be able to adapt and come to a quick stop, but you underestimated the powers of a really, really, really long line.
And that's when you ran into him. Or rather, flew into him.
Flushed red, you immediately tried to untangle yourself from his embrace when you realized it wasn't your own efforts that had brought you to a stop. Yet, you couldn't help but freeze at his melodic laugh. It was so warm and bright you instinctively glanced toward the face such a laugh could possibly belong to.
A soft smile paired with kind eyes and pure white hair. He was ethereal.
Though while your eyes saw kindness, your body felt something else. His grip. It was tighter than it should have been. It didn't feel quite right, but that thought quickly faded when he gently asked if you were alright.
Maybe you shouldn't have ignored that first sign.
After that, you continued to run into each other. Whether it was at the magic supply shop or in a simple bakery, his presence became a welcome surprise. It wasn't long before he was standing outside your atelier, hiding a blush behind some flowers. They were small and wild, and he tells you his apprentices picked them out with a sheepish voice.
That was the start of it all.
It was a quaint and simple relationship, but it was yours. Late night conversations after the kids were asleep. Romantic notes quietly slipped into cloaks. Stolen kisses when you least expect it. You felt like you were in a dream.
So much so that you sometimes felt a nagging sensation telling you to wake up. There'd be moments where his eyes appeared darker than usual. Colder than usual.
It came and went so quickly that you always felt foolish for imagining a darkness that belied the way he looked at you.
It wasn't until the third time you argued about the dark bags under his eyes that you came to know his obsessive nature. When you kept secrets from the Knights Moralis, when you lied to the witches in the Great Hall, you thought you were doing it all for his sake. But now, you weren't so sure it was the best thing for him.
His obsession with the brimmed caps was taking a toll on him, and you couldn't stand to watch it anymore.
Your love for him would never change, but you couldn't let it go on like this lest you watch him lose himself more. It was destructive and all-consuming and terrifying. So, you did what you thought was best for both of you.
You broke up with him.
If your heart wouldn't let you betray him and report him to the Great Hall, then you would protect that very same heart by not letting it bear this overwhelming weight any longer.
You swear you remember saying the words, the sting of tears in your eyes. But when you see that dark look in his eyes, and your eyelids begin to grow heavy, you know all too well what has been done to you.
"Qifrey, you can't possibly think that this is the solution," you desperately spit out before your tongue grows too heavy to speak.
He's holding you in his arms as the two of you sink to the floor. Just like the first time he held you, you feel that tight grip on your arm. But now you knew what that grip was.
It was possessive.
"I know, my love," he says, gently stroking your hair as your bleary eyes fight to stay open. "But I won't repeat the same mistakes, I swear it."
He places a tender kiss on your forehead, and you find your mind feeling lighter.
"This will be the last time. After all," he says, a weak smile gracing his face. "Twentieth time's the charm."
You could see the sunset behind tall trees, Coco's mom also watching with a shy smile as the sky slowly changed color. Every second that passed was like a needle pricking your skin covered in fur. You could feel your heartbeat beginning to rise as the anxiety of the eminent disaster just waiting to happen.
But only you knew. Everything else was the same as ever. The slow wind getting chiller as the night rised. Coco was moving around lighting candles as the shop was getting darker. You could see the curiosity in her eyes as she moved around, seemed distracted by her own mind. You know she was counting the seconds as much are you were, but her reasons are far less stressful. You were still being carried in the improvised "canguru pouch" mom made. You have memorized her heartbeat at this point, if one day you ever go blind and lose your sense of smell, you could find her with just her heart. Quite poetic, actually. Coco's mom organized the earned money from the costumers, today was one of those busy days. Coco folded and stored different fabrics, each in their respective place she had learned in her desire to help her mother run the shop. It made you sad how easy of a future Coco could have had if things weren't going the way they are. She would have inherited her mother's shop, her mind sharp and trained to keep it open until the day she passed it to her own kids, or decided to follow a different path in life. But it was still a distant future, one only you knew was not going to happen.
(=^. .^=)S
The sun has long gone, the moon was as bright as ever. The grass was humid Underneath your paws as you waited outside.
You knew what was going to happen, so it would be foolish and dangerous to wait inside, there is no way you can guarantee your survival if you stay inside, even with Coco. With this, when Coco's mother decided to close the shop, you left and stayed outside, and now here you are, waiting right in front of it, there is some foots separating you from the front door, but you were ready to flee if needed.
The only problem, you don't have a plan. You couldn't make one.
How could you convince qifrey to take you with Coco? It couldn't be that hard actually, you just hope she loves you enough to not leave you behind.
'Am I.. really letting this happen? I feel so coward in doing this, I have all it matters to change the future, yet I am just waiting outside like a fool.' you blamed yourself.
'I could change this, i could give Coco a better future if I try. But what about the consequences? What could possibly happen? If only I was sure of the future, even if I know what's waiting.'
The truth is, you know the future. Long ago, you had readen the manga, but that was in a distant past. Your memories are foggy and incomplete, you don't even know how you got this feline body.
But there is one thing you are sure of, and it is of this very specific day. The day everything changes on the life of your beloved owner.
But you aren't sure of anything besides that, you would have to learn with her how things work in the life of the witches.
Tump! You heard the smack of boots against wood.
Qifrey was here. It was time.
Your heartbeat spiked, you saw the moment he fleed and a dense energy took the house, a bright glow coming from Coco's room and the sound of glass cracking was heard as the crystal begun to spread.
You saw it, Your mom leaving the front door scared, her breath uneven and her face scared.
Your ears started to ring, muffling all the sound around you. You shrinked and puffed your tail, your ears flat against your head and your eyes blown, dark pupils shrinking to adjust to the light and fear. You arched your back and backed away a feels steps as she stopped in front of you before the crystals got her feets.
It grew around her body, her eyes searched for you one last time, her face forever freezed in the last emotion she felt, fear.
For her life, for yours, for her daughter's.
In her mind, the last thing she saw was your scared little body, watching her with guilt.
And then, silence, or at least you think there was silence. You couldn't know, your ears ringing and your heartbeat the only thing you could hear.
And you stayed there for God knows how long, letting the situation sink deep in your mind, and the guilt rotting in your bones.
'It is your fault.' the thought hammered in your brain as you sat in front of her crystalized body. A numbness spreading in your body slowly, the world around being shut down to begin a panic attack.
Do cats have panic attacks? You hoped not.
But it was getting hard to breathe, your fur covered body was getting heavy and dense.
You lowered your head, the grass starting to switch colors and distorting into unknown shapes. Where you going insane after loosing your mother?
Before you could feel the sharp edges in your form, everything stopped suddenly. You turned your head fast to look behind you.
Qifrey landed in front of the crystal statue, but he was quick enough to see the unnatural way your eyes glowed the second you turned your head to look at him. The glow was gone as fast as you turned your head, but he saw it.
He choose to stay silent about it, watching you carefully before speaking:
"Let's go, it's not safe to stay here any longer." And he turned around to walk away, a sleeping Coco in his arms.
You didn't wait to follow after him.
You both walked for a while, the wind and leaves shaking where the only thing you could hear. Qifrey had his steps silenced in some way, not a single sound leaving his boots, but you didn't complain, not like you could anyway.
You arrived at a little camp, definitely his, there was blankets on the dirt and a little fireplace with a singular spark, shilly illuminating his stuff. He carefully left the sleeping Coco close to a tree and you sat beside her. Watching as he quietly put his things away, you couldn't help but to think back to the house you just left behind.
Now things are changing, and you are no longer sure of the future.
You would have to get used to headaches in order to recover some memory about the story.
Your thoughts were cut short as Qifrey took Coco again and didn't wait for you before walking east, you following right behind him in the dark.
'Can he even see? It's so dark around here.. even for me.' you didn't let your mind wonder further, choosing to walk beside him.
You both walked and walked and walked, maybe for some good 40 minutes before he stopped close to a cliff. More ahead was a chariot. One very similar to the one he fixed the same day.
He didn't hesitate, getting close to the chariot and talking with the owner before entering. He held the door for you, and you quickly followed after him, jumping on inside as the door closed and it started to move, leaving the ground.
You looked around on the small floor, close to Qifrey's feet's, but he scooped you in his lap after setting Coco on his side. His eyes soft and tired as he ran his fingers through your black fur.
"We are going to arrive in my Atelier by the morning, you should rest too." His soft voice coaxed you. Even with his kindness, your ears were still flat in your head. The guilt never left you.
But soon, the tiredness finally catched up with you, your eyes heavy and your slow purr was the only thing awake in you as you relaxed in his lap. Qifrey let a small sigh as his eyes turned sharp and his hand stopped in your head.
(=^. .^=)S
You woke up with the feeling of small arms holding you safely in a careful embrace.
As you opened your eyes, you noticed you were outside, Coco was carrying you, a blanket covering her body, you could hear her sniffing, trying to hold back her tears, the weight of everything getting to her. You fully wished you could hug her, instead you purred and rested your head in hed chest. She hugged you tighter, as if trying to keep you forever.
"Coco?" Qifrey asked a little ahead, turning back on his heels and approaching her as he noticed her tears.
"What's the problem?" He asked carefully.
"Mama.. how could I leave her? I promised I wouldn't do that. I—"
"Coco.. you shouldn't blame yourself. You didn't know what could happen." Qifrey turned to the atelier, grabbing a kind of plate hanging from the wall. "Here, you should wash your face."
He opened the plates and water filled the space left, forming a ball for water.
That... Wasn't the first time you saw this magic, but it was very interesting to watch.
"This is were you are going to live from now on." Qifrey finished.
Coco lowered you on the ground, rushing to hold the "ball of water" with her hands. Analyzing it carefully. Her sadness giving place to curiosity. "Um.. this is..?"
"It's water!"
"Humm.. but it is floating on a ball.."
"Ah, almost forgot!" Qifrey deliberately ignored her statement, instead opening the door and rushing inside. "Let me get you some fresh new clothes." He vanished, leaving you and Coco by the door.
"Ha? Wait! How do I use this thing? Can I grab a bucket or something?" Coco panicked, still holding the magic water device.
You boldly entered, taking a feel steps ahead of Coco, giving the atelier a good look. To the side, you could see pink hair and curious eyes watching Coco.
".. Sr. Qifre—"
"Don't worry! This magic is easy to handle." The new girl eased, assuming a cute posture as Coco finally noticed her. The pink girl looked at you, her smile growing bigger.
"YOU HAVE A CAT? Wooow, he's so cute! Can I pet him?" She lost her posture, rushing to get closer to you as you watched her curiously.
"Ah... This is Miss paws.. she is actually a girl cat.." Coco corrected, getting shy from the approach.
"Hello there, Coco and miss paws! Here, let me help you with that, this is called a Water Droplet Floater." The girl took the device in her hands. "You open the lower plate and the water will flow!" As she explained, she poured some water for Coco, before lowering it towards you. You took the opportunity and tried yourself, sticking your tongue close to the blorb and the water started to flow, allowing you to drink from it.
"This is really cool, thank you!" Coco thanked her.
"Thank you for the thanks! By the way, I'm Tetia!"
"Ha? Oh, nice too meet you Tetia, I'm Coco."
As they talked, you finished drinking, now paying attention to the new blue haired girl that arrived, her light blue hair and expression sounded familiar to you, but you couldn't get the hold of who or why.
"If Tetia starts to get loud, just ignore her and she will shut up eventually." The new addition to the group adviced. In her hands laid a kind of plate holding something you couldn't see doing to your height. The girl looked at you with the same expression she had the whole interaction, but you could see the glow in her eyes as she looked at you. Maybe a discreet fan of cats, huh?
'I don't remember how many girl Qifrey had as apprentices, but I'm sure there are more than two at least.. where is the other ones?' you stopped to pay attention to the girls, instead, you decided to take advantage of your small body and little need of manners to start exploring the atelier, walking around the stone floor and leaving the front door.
Coco and the blue haired girl watched as you left around a corner, Coco was close to calling out for you, but Qifreys arrival distracted her from your explorer self.
As you walked carefully, you took note of the places you could nap or climb, if you were going to stay here for now, you should make yourself home at least. The atelier was a cute place, there was rugs and plants everywhere, stairs that would go up and down, it looked easy to get lost in here, but every corridor had different decorations and doors, making each one unique.
You saw bathrooms, a kitchen, closed doors you couldn't open for obvious reasons and a lot of interesting things to be curious about, things only witches know how it works.
'Could a cat be a witch?' you suddenly asked yourself. Maybe you could cast spells with the tip of your claws or tail.
'Maybe it won't be that bad.. Coco will get used to this place quickly, I'm sure of it.' you thought, and getting close to an open window, you climbed all the way to the windowsill. A cold breeze greeted you with the warm sun, outside there was a vast camp of grass and some trees, flowers popped here and there around the grass and very far ahead you could see a tiny dirt path leading somewhere.
'Yeah, i won't be bad..' you concluded, sitting and appreciating the view, you also took this opportunity to think about what is going to happen next. 'I should have stayed close to Coco, I actually have no idea of what is going to happen after today. And thinking about that, what am I going to do now? Could I help in some way? Should I just stay low and let things move for themselves? No... I don't want to laze around, I want to do something to help, but what?' you wondered, the question laying heavy on your mind. You want to help somehow, but in what exactly could a cat be useful? That got you to think.
'This.. this isn't actually my real body, I need to remember that.. Maybe Qifrey can help me get my human form again? I know turning into a cat has something to do with that brimhat witch.. probably..' the holes in your memories were sure going to be a hassle..
'Gosh, if only I could get my memories in place..' You lamented with a mournful meow. Your tail flicking from one side to another to show your stress.
You were unaware of your surroundings, too deep in your own little head to notice the white haired men approaching you.
"Here you are, Coco was worried for you, little one." he offered to you, making you jump from surprised and taking a little laugh from him.
You meowed in protest. 'Don't go scarring cats like that! What if you make me lose one of my lives?'
"I'm sorry, did I scare you?" He joked. "Let me make up for you getting you some food, what do you think?"
His offer got a meow of approval from you, your mood easily improving. 'Qifrey sure is a good person! You are climbing in my list of cool people very fast!'
He started walking, having you to accompany him in the way of the kitchen
You indead where hungry, you didn't bother to eat the other day, too busy having your last moments with mom. The thought made you sad for a minute, i would always do, you still blamed yourself for not doing anything to help, but you decided to not drown in it.
As you follows him, you failed to notice the 180 turn in his humor, his expression suddenly getting serious. You also failed to remember you actually knew where the kitchen was, and the place he was leading you was very far from it.
You both stopped in front of a door, was that the kitchen? Didn't look like it. The tension grew by the second as Qifrey turned to look at you, you stared back at him, a bad feeling starting to grow in your stomach.
He was not getting you food, that's for sure.
And it was clear he wasn't when he grabbed you by the nape before you could flee, a scared and desperate meow left you before you could understand what was happening.
He quickly opened the door and closed it after entering holding you, a soft click following after. The image of the door slowly faded, leaving only the wall behind it.
I had to rewrite the ending of this chapter twice... Anyways. I wish to thank every person reading this for the support in the last chapter! I'll be continuing this story, so don't worry.
prince valarr stumbling upon a hidden away maiden sheltered from the rest of the world⊹ ࣪ ˖ꫂ᭪݁
-sheltered!reader x valarr targaryen, nothing crazy just fluff! might make into a series if ya'll like? sorry if there are any spelling mistakes lol ᥫ᭡
the forest was a never ending blanket of ancient green, your world was a small, sun-dappled clearing, a cottage of mossy stone and thatch, and the familiar, comforting scents of drying herbs and woodsmoke.
you knew the language of the birds and the rustle of a badger in the undergrowth, but the language of men was unfamiliar, left to gather dust on a shelf you never touched. your grandmother had taught you all you needed to know, how to mend a tear, how to read the phases of the moon, how to coax life from the stubborn soil, and most importantly, that the world beyond your little wood was a place of sharp edges and loud noises.
so you stayed, content, safe, and utterly, beautifully alone.
until the day the quiet was broken. it was not a loud noise, but a wrong one. a twig snapping with a weight too great for a fox, a rustle of leaves that sounded like a clumsy stride, not a graceful deer.
fear, cold and sharp, seized you. it was the feeling your grandmother had warned you of, the prickle on the back of your neck that meant danger was near. your first thought was of the iron poker by the hearth, but your hand, trembling, closed around the handle of the broom you had been using to sweep the threshold. it was flimsy, made of birch with twigs and a long, smooth handle.
you crept to the edge of the cottage, your heart a frantic drum against your ribs. a figure emerging from the shadows of the old oak, tall and broad-shouldered, cloaked in fine fabrics and worn leather. he moved with a limp, and as he stepped into a patch of sunlight, you saw the dark stain spreading on his thigh and the grimace of pain that twisted his handsome features. he was not a monster from a fireside tale, but a man, and a wounded one at that.
yet the fear was a wild thing inside you, and it did not care for reason.
he took another step closer, raising a hand as if in greeting, but your arm was faster, swinging the broom with all your might. the birch twigs connected with his chest with a loud thwack.
he grunted in surprise, more than pain, stumbling back a few unsteady steps. his eyes, almost two different colors, widened in utter disbelief. he looked from you, wild-haired and wide-eyed, to the broom in your hand, and a slow, breathless laugh escaped his lips. it was not a mocking laugh, but one of genuine, astonished amusement.
"seven hells," he breathed, wincing as he shifted his weight. "i’ve been greeted with swords, with scowls, with silence, but never…never with a broom stick."
you froze, the broom still held aloft, your courage evaporating as quickly as it had come. the man was not advancing, his posture non-threatening, his expression more pained than predatory. and his laugh…it had been like the sun breaking through stormy clouds.
"i-i apologize." you stammered, your voice barely a whisper, soft from disuse. "i was frightened. i thought you were… i don't know what i thought."
"i’m not here to hurt you," he said, his voice gentle, a low rumble that was strangely soothing. he slowly, carefully, lowered himself to sit at the base of a tree, his movements stiff. "as you can see, i’m in no state to be a threat to anyone. my horse threw me a league back, and my leg is none too pleased about it."
guilt washed over you, hot and swift. you had struck an injured man! you, who had never harmed a living creature in your life! lowering the broom, you took a hesitant step forward. "are you… are you badly hurt?"
"just a twist, i think. and a fair bit of bruising." he offered you a small, weary smile. "though my pride may never recover. being bested by a maiden and her broom is a tale i'll have to keep to myself."
a faint blush warmed your cheeks. you set the broom aside and knelt a careful distance from him.
"i have some salve. and bandages. it… it might help."
"your ladyship is too kind," he said, his eyes watching you with an intensity that made your stomach flutter.
busying yourself with examining his leg, you worked in silence, your hands gentle as you cleaned the graze on his leg and applied the cool, soothing salve. he watched you, his gaze never leaving your face. it was a look of such open curiosity and warmth that it made you feel shy, but not frightened.
you could feel the rough texture of his breeches beneath your fingertips, the solid strength of his thigh, and you found yourself wondering about the life of a man who traveled alone through the woods.
when you were done, you sat back on your heels.
"there. that should feel better soon ser."
"it already does," he said as he shifted, testing his leg with a cautious wince.
"i am in your debt, kind…maiden." he hesitated, as if searching for the right word. "apologies, i do not even know your name."
you told him your name, the sound of it feeling strange and new in the open air.
he repeated it, rolling it on his tongue as if it were a precious thing. "a beautiful name." he looked at you, a strange, hopeful light in his eyes. "do you know who i am?"
you blinked, truly perplexed. you searched his face, the fine cut of his jaw, the noble line of his nose, the expensive-looking fabric of his tunic, now torn and muddy. he was clearly a man of some standing, but his world and yours were as separate as the earth and the stars. you knew no names but the names of herbs and trees. you shook your head, your expression one of simple, honest confusion. "no ser. should i?"
the relief that washed over his features was so profound it was like watching a mask fall away. the tension in his shoulders eased, and the smile that returned to his face was real, pure, unadulterated joy.
"no," he said, hiding a laugh, "no, you shouldn't." he held your gaze, and in that moment, the world, which had always been so small and contained, seemed to expand infinitely. "my name is valarr. just valarr."
"valarr," you repeated, the name feeling both foreign and familiar on your lips. it was a good name. a strong name. you tilted your head, your curiosity finally outweighing your shyness. "what is it you do, valarr? when you're not… falling from horses in the woods?"
he let out a soft chuckle, "a good question." he looked down at his hands, calloused and strong, then back at you. "i serve. in a way. i am a knight of sorts, to protect and to serve the realm."
a knight. the word was grand and faraway, like something from a story. it didn't quite fit the kind-eyed man who had laughed at being hit with a broom.
"that sounds… very important."
"it has its moments," he said, his tone light, but his eyes held a shadow of something heavier, something you didn't understand but could feel.
"my duties call my lady. i cannot linger, as much as i might wish to." he pushed himself to his feet, testing his leg carefully. it held his weight, though he still favored it slightly.
"how will you get back?"
"my horse didn’t get far, and i’m walking much better now. your salve is a miracle. thank you truly."
your heart sank at his words. he was leaving. the clearing already felt colder, emptier. "oh," was all you could manage, your voice small. "no thanks are necessary ser…"
he saw the look on your face and his own softened. he took a step closer, closing the distance between you until he was near enough that you could see the flecks of darker brown in one of his eyes. "i will not forget this. i will not forget you my lady."
with one last, lingering look he turned and walked back into the shadows of the ancient wood, his figure disappearing between the trees until the only proof he had ever been there was the disturbed earth and the fading warmth of his skin on your fingertips.
and so you were alone again, the cottage was just a cottage now, the clearing just a clearing. for the first time in your life, your small, safe world felt too small, and you found yourself looking to the edge of the trees, waiting for the day a knight would find his way back to you....
SORRY STOP IT I just imagined something like bobby dragging it through panties till they're soaked like no penetration for a while just rubbing through panties as some foreplay idk if I explained it well I can't really put it into words I can just imagine 😵💫
OBESSED WAITTTT...i saw a video like this on x the other day...totally give bobby...
bobby franklin fucks your panties ⊹ ࣪ ˖
you're lying back on the bed, propped up on your elbows to watch him. bobby's standing at the foot of the mattress, his eyes dark and fixed on you. he's already hard, his cock hard and flushed as he grips it in his fist. but instead of climbing on top of you or telling you to turn over, he just looks.
"spread your legs," he says, his voice rough. you do it instantly, knees falling open. your favorite panties, the light blue ‘tuesday’ cotton ones he loves, are already damp from anticipation.
“aren’t you gonna undress me?” you bat your lashes at him,
he moves closer until his knees are pressing against the edge of the mattress. with his free hand, he traces the line of your panties along your hip, fingers dipping down to brush against the fabric covering your clit.
"nah. not yet babe." he murmurs, his voice dropping low, making your stomach clench. "i like these."
you raise an eyebrow. "you like them more than you like me naked?"
"didn't say that," he chuckles, his fingers still tracing patterns through the fabric.he shifts his position slightly, aligning his cock with your covered folds. the first contact makes you gasp, even through the fabric.
the friction is incredible - the cotton creating just enough resistance to drive you wild while still allowing you to feel every ridge of him. your panties grow damper with each pass, the light blue fabric darkening where you're dripping for him and where his pre cum in touching.
"you're so wet already?" he observes, his voice tight with restraint.
"you are the one staining them with pre-cum…" you manage, arching your hips to meet his movements.
“dirty, dirty mouth…” he tsks as his fingers hook into the waistband of your panties, tugging them aside just enough to reveal your slick folds. his eyes darken as he takes in the sight, his thumb brushing over your clit and making you gasp. "so fucking pretty," he murmurs, almost to himself.
then, just as quickly, he shifts the fabric back into place, covering you again. your breath hitches in confusion and anticipation.
“bobby, you can admire my pussy any other time just please…quit fucking around…”
before you can ask what he's doing next, he guides his cock through the leg hole of your panties, the head dragging along your inner thigh before nestling right above your bare pussy.
"better?" he asks, his voice tight with control as he starts to move. the cotton clings to him, soaked with pre-cum, and you can feel every ridge and vein.
"bobby..." you whimper
"shh," he cuts you off, his pace quickening. "wanna fuck your cute little panties right now, hold on."
each pass of his cock against your panties sends sparks through you, your panties grow darker with every thrust, completely soaked though now, his hands gripping your hips as he fucks into the fabric with more urgency.
"you're gonna ruin these!" you manage to gasp, half complaining, half loving it.
"i'll buy you new ones. i promise." he grunts, his hips snapping forward.
your boyfriends pretty blue eyes locked on where his cock disappears into the leg hole of your panties, the fabric stretched tight around him.
his movements falter for a moment as he releases his grip on your hip. instead, his hand captures yours, his fingers wrapping firmly around your wrist. he guides your hand down between your bodies.. your own hand is trembling as he presses it flat against the soaked fabric of your panties, right over the hard, thick length of him.
"feel that?" he breathes, his voice a ragged whisper against your ear. "feel me fucking your panties, baby?"
you can only whimper in response, it's intoxicating…the heat, the weight of him, the way the fabric is stretched taut.
"touch it," he commands, his voice tight with need. "rub the tip, c’mon sweetheart, make me cum right here."
your heart pounds in your chest as you obey, your thumb finding the swollen head of his cock through the panties. the cotton is so wet it's almost transparent, and you can feel every contour of him as you begin to circle the sensitive tip. bobby groans, his hips bucking into your touch as you tease him.
"fuck, just like that," he pants, his movements becoming more erratic.
he grunts out unintelligible praises, his hands gripping your hips again as he drives into you with renewed urgency. "fuck- don’t stop-"
you don't, your fingers pressing harder against his tip, "don’t cum on them, i’ll have to throw them away."
a broken, desperate laugh escapes his lips, his hips bucking wildly against your hand. "can’t hold it babe…i promise- i promise to take you anywhere you wanna go to get some nice fucking panties worth a month’s rent…”
you can only nod, your body trembling as the friction.his gaze drops from your eyes down to your boobs, "play with your tits. squeeze them, c’mon."
you slowly, deliberately, move your hand away from his straining cock, bringing it up to cup your breast. his eyes follow every movement, glued to your fingers as they begin to circle your hardened nipple through the thin fabric of your shirt.
"that's it," he groans as he continues to fuck into the soaked cotton. "pinch it. hard."
you obey, rolling the sensitive bud between your thumb and forefinger, a sharp gasp escaping your lips at the sensation. “bobbyyy-” you moan out like a porn star.
bobby's hips stutter at the sound, his control clearly fraying. "fuck, you're so hot," he pants, his eyes flicking between your face and your busy hand. "pull up your shirt. i wanna see."
“hurry up and cum so you can fuck me for real!” you groan, but still you obey and with your free hand, you bunch the material of your shirt up, exposing your breasts to his heated gaze. the cool air makes your nipples pebble even more, and you waste no time in resuming your attention on them, alternating between plump peaks.
"jesus christ," he swears, his thrusts becoming erratic, losing their steady rhythm. "gonna fucking cum. gonna ruin these panties just like i promised."
you moan, arching your back as you squeeze your tits, "do it, bobby" you breathe, your earlier complaint completely forgotten. "please..."
that's all it takes. with a guttural groan, bobby's hips slam forward one last time, and you see a spreading wetness bloom even more so on the fabric. then the hot, thick pulse of wetness seeps right onto your skin. he keeps grinding against you, drawing out his orgasm as he spills himself all over the delicate cotton, marking them completely.
"well," he says, his voice husky. "i'd say those are officially garbage."
Ok, Aerion’s turn: cockwarming just to drag out the reader’s orgasm #iloveyou
boy has been wanting to get you pregnant so BAD lols
aerion didn’t pull away when the aftershocks faded. instead, he smoothed his hands over your hips, his eyes drinking in the sight of you spent beneath him.
"come here," he murmured, his voice rough with unsatisfied hunger. you shifted, and he guided you until you were straddling him, sinking down slowly onto his length, taking him deep, inch by agonizing inch. the feeling of being filled again to the brim was overwhelming, a perfect, heavy stretch that had you gasping into his mouth as he shushed you with a kiss.
"stay here with me, warm your prince’s cock…" he cooed, his hands cupping your face, pulling you down again for a slow, deep kiss. he tasted of you, sweet and musky, and it made your head spin.
he didn’t let you sit still. instead, he began to grind his hips upward, a shallow, torturous thrust that rubbed against that sensitive spot deep inside you without ever pulling out.
"its best to stay seated on a man’s cock after making love…," he whispered against your lips, he held you close, his arms wrapped tight around your waist, keeping you pressed against him, plugged up with his warmth.
"just stay on me," he groaned, his breath hot against your skin. "let me keep you full…”
+18｜qifrey forgot to give you aftercare... or did he?
you knew he was gentle by default, a witch who built his entire existence around caretaking his apprentices. perceiving his magnitude as a teacher, you’d fully expected him to brush your hair out of your eyes, kiss your forehead, and pour you a cup of water when it was over.
but instead, he just completely slumped against you, dead weight against your chest, dozing out the exact second he finished without a single word of aftercare or praise.
possessing a kind nature and an otherwise gentle disposition, it was plain that his dedication to the task would be absolute. he’d been so incredibly turned on by the mere sight of your bare body that it became impossible to hide the desperation he had kept locked away for years—in the deepest, coldest part of his heart. his pale, ink-stained hands were trembling as he parted your thighs, one arm locked firmly around your lower back while his hips rutted into you in a hasty, poorly coordinated rhythm that had you scrambling to clutch onto the mattress.
"l-love, am i doing it correct?" he’d pointed out, face buried firmly into the crook of your neck, his lips caressing your skin in messy smooches each time he slammed his pelvis against yours. his cock was throbbing inside, growing impossibly thicker as if it wasn't already big enough. “i-i never imagined it would feel like this...”
it was, to put it simply, violent when his apex hit. his spine arched, muscles locking into rigid stone as he came inside you. the force of it made him choke on the last breath he had, eyes rolling back in his skull with pure bliss. surge after surge of puffy liquid filled your womb until he was shooting blanks. yet, even then, his body still refused to soften, choosing instead to pour everything inside until you were full to the brim.
and then, nothing. just the heavy drop of his body flattening you into the mattress.
well—initially, you thought he was just worn out after everything that happened after hearing him letting out those flimsy huffs and puffs against your collarbone. but as the seconds ticked by, his limbs remained lax, lacking the usual soft twitch of someone drifting into a normal sleep. you tried to shift your hips beneath him, the ridiculously over-the-top-amount hotness of his overindulgence trickling down between your thighs.
and qifrey didn't groan or try to pull you closer like you expected him to do. instead, his hands were still sprawled awkwardly on the sheets, those long, slender fingers you adored staying fully unresponsive, no matter what. you suspected he might have pushed his own limits a little too far, his body overexerting itself just to empty himself into your womb.
“qifrey?” you whispered, placing a hand on his lean back, waiting for that familiar, reassuring hum. but for whatever reason, it didn't come. you pushed yourself up on one weak elbow, using your other hand to gently cup his jaw, tilting his face away from your neck. his blue eyes were half-lidded but empty, staring right through you without a single flicker of recognition. when you experimentally lifted his hand, his wrist stayed completely limp, dropping straight back like a broken doll's the moment you let go. he was just a vacant shell pinned on top of you, oblivious to the world around him.
awareness hit you, as you realized he hadn't just fallen asleep. as a consequence of the intensity of his arousal, he actually—
pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby(bb)
wc: 18.9k 🚬🚬🚬
contents/warnings: emotional manipulation, emotional neglect in a past relationship, internalised self-blame, discussions of infidelity, grief and loss, emotional dependency, body horror, strong violence, psychological horror, existential/cosmic horror, angstttttt.
notes: This took the pisssssssss. But here it is at long last. So much plot happens in this part it's actually dizzying. Originally wanted to cut it earlier but once you read the ending you'll understand why I pushed to get to it. So enjoy this behemoth and again massive, fat, joosy thank you to everyone for reading, messaging, liking, reblogging and apparently shouting out this series on tiktok??? hello? crazy. you guys are awesome. thank you 💕
📹 better bobby series masterlist.
“That goes on the left.”
“It's on the left.”
“My left. Not your left.”
BB holds the stack of notebooks. Your old ones, filled and dog-eared, the spines cracked from use. He looks at you with an expression of exaggerated patience. Bobby's face doing BB's particular brand of tolerant amusement, the one that says I have existed since before your species discovered fire, and I’m being told where to put stationery.
“Your left and my left are the same left,” he says. “We're facing the same direction.”
“We weren't a second ago,” you argue. “You turned.”
He looks down at his feet, then at the shelf. Then at you. His mouth twitches.
“Fine,” he says, and moves the notebooks to the other side of the shelf with the slow, deliberate care, making a point about how cooperative he's being. “Your left.”
“Thank you.”
“You're a tyrant,” he huffs, even though his eyes crinkle as he says it.
“I'm an organised tyrant.”
The apartment hums around you.
That's the thing you still can't quite get used to. The hum is different here. Not the flat, fluorescent drone of Level 0's hallways, that ambient pressure that sits on your skin like a low-grade headache. This is warmer. Rounder. A sustained note that lives in the walls the way heat lives in a radiator, and it fills the rooms, plural, with doors and corners and a kitchen with a window that faces a corridor that BB has done something to.
Strange and inhuman, so that the light that comes through the glass looks like late afternoon in the Santa Clara Valley, even though there is no afternoon here and no valley and no sun.
BB built this for you.
A hallway that hadn't existed. A doorway where a wall once stood. He carved a sublevel out of Level 0, the way you'd carve a space inside a block of wood, and what emerged was this: an apartment. Your apartment. Not a copy, not the uncanny almost-right, but a reconstruction built from the details he absorbed through the wall over months of listening and your own memories. The layout of the kitchen. The position of the bookshelves. The height of the counter where you used to lean while Bobby stood at the sink.
It's not identical. It can't be. Some details Backrooms can’t render right, some he interpreted rather than reproduced, and there are places where his understanding of home and yours diverge in ways that are quietly alien. The windows don't open. The bathroom has no mirror. The bookshelves are organised by colour, the way you described to him once, and seeing your preference rendered in physical space by something that remembered a passing comment had made your throat tight in a way you couldn't name.
He started building it after the agents.
You don't like thinking about the attack. Your body remembers it better than your mind does.
You remember the impact. The floor. A pressure on your chest that felt unbearable, like the air itself had solidified, and a pain in your shoulder that burned white and erased thought. You remember voices—clipped, tactical, coordinated, the language of people who had trained for this—and then BB's arrival.
You don't remember what happened to the agents. BB recounted what happened later, in clipped sentences, his jaw tight, his eyes carrying a darkness that took hours to fully recede, that there had been six. Human. Armed. Organised in a way that suggested training and resources, and a purpose that went beyond casual exploration. The encounter had been resolved.
He didn't elaborate on resolved. You didn't ask.
After that, BB locked Level 0 down. You felt it happen even as you clung to him after the attack, a shift in the hum, a tightening, like a fist closing around the entire level.
The corridors that used to carry the occasional lost wanderer, the stray explorer who stumbled in from Level 1 and stumbled out again, are now sealed. Thresholds that had been porous became walls. Doors that had been doors became surfaces. BB walked the perimeter for three days straight, and when he came back, his eyes were fully black, and the warmth took a long time to return, and the message was absolute: nothing gets in.
Nothing human, nothing inhuman, nothing with a weapon and a tactical vocabulary and the coordinates to find the corridor where you bled on the floor. Level 0 was his. Level 0 was yours. And the only things moving through it now were the two of you and the hum and whatever BB decided to allow, which was nothing, which was no one, which was the total and permanent closure of a territory around the person inside it.
You healed. Your lip closed over, your bruises receded. BB fussed over you, his face tight with concentration that you gradually recognised as fear. Not fear of the wound. Fear of what the wound meant. That you could be reached. That the corridors he'd taught you to walk and the levels he'd shown you and the notebook full of careful shorthand hadn't been enough to keep a human with a weapon from putting you on the ground in a place he'd told you was safe.
He'd been different since. Not colder, exactly, the warmth was still there, the hand on yours, the chin on your shoulder while you sketched. But warier. His attention, already vast, had developed a new layer, a peripheral vigilance that never fully shut off, a constant low-level scanning that you could feel the way you felt the hum.
He checked the corridors before you entered them now. He checked rooms you'd been in a hundred times. And he'd built this place—the sublevel, the apartment, the nest within the nest—and the message was clear even if he never said it aloud. Deeper. More hidden. Harder to reach. A space carved into the architecture of Level 0 itself, tucked beneath his territory the way a vital organ sits beneath the ribs.
You've been here a while.
Long enough that the first notebook is full and the second is two-thirds gone and the third is waiting on the shelf BB just stacked, its mottled cover still crisp.
Long enough that you've mapped Level 0 in its entirety, or as close to entirety as a place like this gets, and made partial notes on multiple other levels. Some detailed, some no more than a page of warnings and a rough sketch. It’s been long enough that your handwriting has changed. Gotten smaller, tighter, more efficient, conserving space the way you conserve everything here.
And long enough that the thing on the perimeter has become a permanent entry in the notebook. Updated weekly, the symbol you invented for it—a circle with a line bisecting it, unknown entity, behaviour unclassified—appearing on more pages than any other annotation.
It's still circling. Still testing. Running its vast, patient intelligence along the boundary of BB's territory and pulling back before contact. You've taken to calling it Entity X in your notes permanently, a placeholder designation, because giving it a real name would make it more solid, and it's already solid enough.
You can feel it sometimes. Not the way you feel the hum or BB's presence, but as an absence, a hot spot at the edge of perception, like turning your head toward a sound that stopped just before you heard it.
BB doesn't talk about it.
That's how you know it's bad. BB talks about Smilers with contempt and Howlers with mild annoyance, and the locked-down perimeter with the grim satisfaction of a thing that sealed its borders and dares anything to test them. He talks about the agents with a clipped exactness that betrays how much it shook him.
But Entity X gets silence. Gets the jaw-tightening. Gets the moments you've started cataloguing in a private section of the notebook that you don't label. The mornings when he's already awake when you surface, sitting at the edge of the nest with his posture too rigid and his eyes too dark, focused on a distance you can't perceive. The nights he disappears and comes back with the face not quite set, the edges sharp, the wet-paint quality that means he dropped Bobby to deal with whatever he found and hasn't fully climbed back in yet. He smooths over it. Deflects. Does the half-grin and the shrug and the it's handled that you've learned to read as I don't want you to carry this.
You let him think it works. You watch him reassemble his composure over breakfast, and you don't push. You don't pry. You simply add another entry to the private section, which is getting longer. The circle-with-a-line symbol fills the margins like a recurring dream.
Long enough that the thought of leaving has shifted from a wound to a question.
You think about it. Still. Not every day—not the way you did in the beginning, when it was a constant screaming pressure behind your ribs—but in the quiet moments, the ones between mapping and walking and BB's hand on yours. In the pauses. You'll be sketching a corridor junction, and your pen will stop, and you'll look at the lines on the page and think: I could navigate this now.
Not all of it. Not the deep levels, not the places BB won't take you. But the paths between 0 and 1, between 1 and the threshold levels, the routes that thread through the safer territories. You know them. You've walked them, mapped them in your own shorthand and committed the landmarks to memory. You’re no longer the woman who fell through a wall and couldn't find her way back. You could find your way back. Probably. If you wanted to.
If you wanted to.
The if is the problem.
The if sits in your chest like a stone, and you can feel its weight when you breathe, and you don't examine it too closely because examining it means confronting what's underneath. That the woman who fell through the wall wanted to go home with a desperation that burned, and the woman standing in a reconstructed kitchen organising shelves with an ancient entity is not sure she does anymore. Not because home stopped mattering. Because here started mattering too.
You feel loved here.
The admission lives in the back of your skull like a low-grade fever, always present, never quite articulated.
You feel loved. BB needed you before he loved you, or whatever the equivalent is for a being that predates human emotional language. But loved, in the clear, daily, accumulative way that love manifests when it's not grand gestures and declarations but shared laughter and proximity and a hand that finds yours in the dark without being asked. BB loves you pervasively, from every direction at once. And you’ve started to love him back, and the loving feels like betrayal, and the betrayal feels like breathing, and you can't tell anymore which one you're supposed to stop.
It's selfish. You know it's selfish. Somewhere on the other side of the wall there's a world you belonged to, a life with your name on it, and you're standing in a facsimile kitchen letting an inhuman thing shelve your notebooks and you're happy, or close enough to happy that the difference doesn't register, and the selfishness of that—choosing comfort over confrontation, choosing the being who stayed over the man you'd have to face—sits in your stomach like acid.
You don't say any of this. You lean against the kitchen counter, and you watch him arrange the shelf and try not to notice the tension he thinks he's hiding.
It's in his hands. The notebooks are stacked neatly, but his fingers linger on each spine a fraction too long before releasing, and there's a quality to BB’s movements—too measured, too controlled—that you've learned to recognise as the aftermath of a bad patrol.
He'd been out this morning. Before you woke. You'd surfaced to find the nest empty, and you'd lain there tracing the impression of his body in the fabric and counting the minutes until the hallway produced him again. And when it did, his face was smooth, and his smile was easy. He'd said morning, baby with the half-grin. You'd said morning, and neither of you mentioned that his eyes were still a shade too dark, that the blue was slow in rising, that whatever he'd encountered at the perimeter was still sitting behind his expression like sediment that hadn't fully settled.
He's protecting you from it. The way he shields you from the worst of the corridor checks, the way he smooths Entity X into a vague it's fine, it's the same, nothing's changed whenever you ask directly. He carries it alone because carrying it is what he does, because shielding you is coded into whatever he is at a level deeper than the face, and the tenderness of that instinct and the frustration of being managed by it exist in equal measure inside your chest.
You watch his hands on the shelf. You watch the tension he thinks is invisible.
The hum holds you both in its warm, low frequency, and somewhere from the apartment, the music starts.
A crackle of static first, the particular pop and hiss of a record that's been played too many times, and then the melody. Slow. Sweet. Old in a way that feels intentional, like the Backrooms reached into the past and pulled out the exact song designed to make your chest ache.
Vera Lynn. The voice is warm and rounded and impossibly clear for a moment, every note landing clean, and then the Backrooms stutter—a glitch, a skip, the audio hiccupping like a record needle jumping a groove—and the word when stretches, distorts, hangs in the air a fraction too long before the melody catches up to itself and continues.
—but I know we'll meet again some sunny day—
Another glitch. The word sunny fractures, splits into overlapping copies of itself that pile up for half a second (sunny sunny sun-n-ny) and then resolves, the song smoothing back out like water closing over a dropped stone. The crackle persists underneath. A warmth to the distortion, like listening to a broadcast from very far away, like the song is travelling through miles of wall and wire and yellow to reach you.
You go still.
Your hand rests on the counter. The song fills the apartment, and you feel yourself drift. Not physically. Internally. The song pulls at the room in the back of your chest, the one where the Thursday morning lives, the one where Bobby said stay and the sheets were gold, and the phone rang, and he ignored it because his mouth was on yours.
Keep smiling through, just like you always do—
A skip. Always repeats, layers, becomes a brief chorus of itself before the record unsticks and Vera Lynn carries on, serene, unruffled, singing about reunion to a woman standing in a place where reunion might be impossible.
You stare at the window. The fake Santa Clara light falls across your hands on the counter, and it's warm, it's exactly the right warmth, and the song is playing, and you are thinking about the front door of your real apartment, the one with the sticky lock that Bobby always meant to fix. The sound your keys made when you set them on the table by the door. Whether anyone has fixed the lock since you've been gone, or whether it's still sticky, waiting for your hand on the knob, waiting for you to come home and jiggle it the way only you knew how—
“Hey.”
BB's voice. Close. You blink. He's in front of you—when did he move?—and his head is tilted, his eyes searching your face. That total-attention read, line by line. He sees where you went. He always sees it. He can track the exact moment your gaze goes internal, the instant when the woman in front of him leaves the room, and the woman who misses Bobby takes her place.
He doesn't ask. He doesn't say are you thinking about him or do you want to talk about it or are you okay. He does something else instead.
He holds out his hand.
Palm up. Fingers open. The same gesture he made at the old nest, except the context has shifted, the weight of it is different now, heavier, more layered.
His eyes are warm, and his mouth is soft. Vera Lynn sings through the walls and glitching on the word again (a-a-again), and BB stands in a kitchen he built for you with his hand extended, and the look on his face says come here, come back, I know where you just went, and you don't have to stay there.
You seize his hand in yours.
He pulls you in. Gently. Your chest against his. His hand settles at the small of your back. Low, warm, the heel of his palm resting against the base of your spine, and his other hand keeps yours, lifting it, positioning your joined hands at shoulder height, the way you showed him.
You've been teaching BB to dance.
It started as a joke, a throwaway comment about how Bobby had two left feet and you'd tried to teach him once. He'd stepped on your toes, called dancing vertical suffering, and refused to try again.
BB had tilted his head. Asked questions. And the next evening, he'd stood in the middle of the living room with his arms stiff and his weight wrong and said show me, and you'd laughed but taken his hands and spent an hour teaching him a basic box step while he moved with the mechanical precision of something that had studied human motion extensively and participated in it never.
He's better now. Not fluid, not quite natural, still carrying that faint quality in his movements, the angles a half-degree too clean, but better. He can hold the frame. He can follow the tempo. Can move you through the small kitchen space without stepping on your feet.
'Til the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away —
The song glitches. Dark clouds becomes d-dark cl-clouds, a stutter that sounds like the record is caught in a groove, cycling, and then it releases, and the melody continues, and BB turns you slowly in the kitchen light.
You look up at him.
He's looking down at you. Bobby's face, close, the chain at his throat catching the warm not-sunlight, the earring a small bright point at the edge of your vision. His expression is—
You've run out of words for BB's expressions. The early ones had names: Bobby's grin, Bobby's smirk, Bobby's mock-wounded outrage. But BB has been building his own vocabulary of expressions on top of Bobby's, small deviations from the blueprint, micro-adjustments that belong to him and only him, and the one on his face right now is entirely his.
He smiles at you.
Small. Crooked. Genuine.
Bobby's grin was a performance, a weapon, a thing deployed with intent. This is quieter. Lopsided. One corner of his mouth lifting slightly higher than the other, the asymmetry creating warmth. It's the smile of a thing that learned to smile by watching a man smile and then, slowly, over months, forgot to copy and started to mean it.
You gaze at each other.
BB's hand is warm at your back, and your hand is in his, and you're standing close enough that you can see the individual lashes framing his eyes, dark against the blue, and the small scar on his jaw, and the way the not-sunlight catches the fine grain of his skin. Which is perfect. Which is too perfect, and has no imperfections except the ones he chose to replicate, and even those are too intentional, the blemishes of a face that was designed rather than grown.
You should look away. The tension is building in the space between your bodies the way static builds before a storm, and you should look away because looking at BB like this, in this light, with this song, is a door you're not sure you can close once you walk through it.
You don't look away.
BB's gaze drops.
To your mouth.
It's not subtle because BB doesn't do subtle. His eyes fix on your lips and stay there, and you can feel the weight of it, the physical pressure of being looked at that intently by something that ancient. Like a beam of light concentrated through a lens until it burns.
His breathing changes.
He doesn't need to breathe. You know this. You've known it for a while. The breathing is performance, a courtesy, a piece of the human costume he maintains because the alternative would unsettle you. But right now, in the kitchen, with his eyes on your mouth and the song glitching softly around you (we'll meet a-a-again), his chest expands and contracts, the air leaving him in a slow, uneven exhale, pushed out rather than released. Like whatever is happening inside him right now is too large for the shape to hold without venting pressure.
“Can I—” he starts.
Stops.
BB’s jaw twitches, that muscle at the hinge. His eyes are still on your mouth, and his hand tightens at your back. A fraction, barely perceptible, his fingers pressing into the fabric of your shirt, and his throat moves. A swallow. Another borrowed gesture, another piece of human machinery he doesn't need, except right now it looks involuntary. It looks real.
“Can I,” he rasps again, even quieter.
His voice has dropped into that low register, the one that carries the hum's harmonic underneath it. Not the ancient-thing voice. Or the vast, reverberating frequency he uses when something threatens his territory. This is… smaller. Almost shy. A resonance that sounds like it's coming from a place BB didn't know he had.
He trails off.
The kitchen is quiet. Vera Lynn has gone silent. The song caught in a glitch, a held note, the record spinning in a groove that won't release. Only sounds are the hum, BB's unnecessary breathing, and your own heartbeat, too loud in your ears.
"What do you want?" you ask, barely above a whisper.
You can feel the tension in him through your palm on his shoulder. Not the coiled readiness he carries in dangerous corridors. A different kind. A vibration, running through the muscle and bone of a body that is not muscle and bone. That is something else entirely, wearing the shape of a man who is shaking because he wants something and doesn't know how to take it without being taught.
BB makes a sound.
Low. At the back of his throat. A sound that lives in the space between a groan and a hum, that carries a wanting so raw it barely fits through his vocal cords. Throaty. Needy. And underneath it—beneath the borrowed voice, beneath Bobby's timbre and the human costume—a vibration that is entirely and unmistakably other. Primal.
His hand lifts from between your bodies. Unsure. His fingers drift upward, and his thumb finds your mouth. Presses against the swell of your bottom lip. Gentle. Barely there. The pad of his thumb traces the curve of it the way he traces the edge of a doorway when he's reading a room, with that same focused attention, that same reverent precision.
“A kiss,” he whispers.
His eyes lift from your mouth to your eyes. His thumb stays on your lip. The wanting on his face is so naked, so unperformed, so completely stripped of Bobby's armour and BB's composure that it makes your breath catch.
“You taught me to dance,” he goes on, the words coming out unevenly. Hushed. His thumb moves against your lip, the faintest drag, back and forth, and his eyes are dark and wide. The ancient thing behind them is nowhere to be seen. What's looking at you is just BB, just the being you named in a meadow, wanting something human with a desperation that borders on heartbreaking. “Teach me this. Teach me how to—” His breath shudders. Not a performance, a malfunction. A system overwhelmed. “How to do it right. I want to do it right. For you.”
Your breath hitches.
The conflict is a living thing in your chest, a creature with teeth and a heartbeat, pulling in two directions at once.
Bobby's mouth on yours on a sunny morning. BB's thumb on your lip in a kitchen that shouldn't exist. The man who kissed you like he invented it, and the being who is asking permission to learn how to. The love you carried through the wall and the love that grew on this side of it, stubborn and impossible and real, and the guilt, the guilt, the guilt that says this is betrayal and the counter-voice that hisses betrayal of what? Of a man who grunted at your goodbye? Of a love that was already starving when you left?
You want this.
The wanting is its own answer. It sits in your stomach, hot and undeniable, and it doesn't care about the guilt, and it doesn't care about the conflict. It doesn't care that the mouth hovering near yours belongs to a thing that heard you through concrete and chose to wear the face of the man who broke your heart.
You want this. You want him. BB. Not the face, or the copy, not the better version of someone else, but the thing underneath. The one who learned your name, kept your promise, built you a kitchen, and is standing in it now with his thumb on your lip, his body shaking, the word please forming on his tongue.
“Please,” he breathes, his thumb dragging across your bottom lip one more time. Feather-light. And his face is so soft, so open, so wrecked with the rawness of wanting something he's never had that the word comes out like a prayer. "Please."
You don't stop him when he leans in.
His lips brush yours.
The lightest possible contact. The surface tension of a kiss, the moment before it becomes one, and the touch is tentative. So fragile, and so different from every kiss you've ever experienced that your body doesn't know how to categorise it.
Bobby kissed like he was claiming, savouring. BB kisses like he's asking, begging. His mouth hovers against yours, barely touching, a question held in the millimetre of space between his skin and yours, and you can feel the tremor in his lips. He's shaking. Fine, continuous, a vibration that you feel more than see, and his breath—the breath he doesn't need—washes over your mouth in a warm, unsteady exhale.
Then the contact lands. Full. His lips press to yours, and the sensation is—
Heat.
Beyond warmth, beyond the gentle building of a slow kiss. A current that slams through your entire system, starting at the point of contact and radiating outward through your jaw, your throat, your chest, and the base of your spine. It's not natural, it can't be natural, because the body against yours is not a body and the mouth on yours is not a mouth, not really. It's the surface expression of something vast and old and powerful, and that power is in the kiss, threaded through it like voltage through copper, and your nervous system lights up like a circuit completing.
BB is worse.
You feel it happen. His skin, always cool, always that slightly-below-human temperature that you've gotten used to, goes hot. A flush of warmth that starts at his mouth and spreads, radiant, through his jaw and his neck and the hands on your body. His cool skin warms beneath your lips like metal left in the sun. Like the contact between your mouth and his is generating a heat that his body was never designed to process.
He makes a sound against your mouth. Soft. Greedy. A small, desperate noise that vibrates between your lips, and he can't stop it. You can tell. Because you can feel the way his jaw tightens and his breath catches. Like he's trying to contain it and failing, the sound escaping anyway, involuntary, the noise of someone encountering sensation for the first time and being unmade by it.
You tilt your head. Change the angle. Show him.
He follows. Quick, eager, that same devouring attentiveness he brings to every lesson. Your angle becomes his angle, your pressure becomes his pressure, and the speed at which BB adapts is inhuman. Seconds instead of minutes, the learning curve of a thing that absorbs information through contact.
Your lips part, just barely, and his mirrors the movement, and the kiss deepens, and BB's hand slides up your back and grips, bunching the fabric of your shirt between his fingers. The sound he makes this time is louder. A sigh that cracks open midway through and becomes a groan, low and shaking, shot through with that sub-harmonic frequency that you feel in your teeth.
His other hand finds the side of your face, cups your jaw. His thumb traces your cheekbone, and his mouth moves against yours. He's learning. You can feel him learning, cataloguing each shift in pressure, each tilt, each breath, mapping this the way you mapped his corridors, with hunger and the desperate focus.
You run your fingers through his hair. BB shudders. A full-body tremor, head to feet, and the sound he makes is a wrecked, bitten-off thing that lives somewhere between a gasp and a whimper, and his forehead drops against yours, and his mouth chases yours, his fingers tightening in your shirt.
When you finally part, his mouth follows yours. An inch. Reluctant. Not wanting the distance.
His forehead rests against yours. His breathing is ragged. Unnecessary, performative, and completely out of his control, great shuddering exhales that fog the negligible space between your faces. His eyes are closed. The lashes dark against his flushed skin, which is still warm, still radiating that unnatural heat, and his lips are parted, and his expression is—
Ruined. That's the word. He looks ruined. Taken apart at the joints and not yet reassembled. Every layer of composure stripped away. Bobby's armour, BB's own careful vaneer, the ancient thing's vast indifference. All of it gone, peeled back, and what's underneath is just this: a being, shaking, in a kitchen, with the taste of you on a mouth he built to say your name.
“Am I doing it right?” he whispers shakily, slightly dazed. “Was that good?”
His eyes open. Find yours. And the expression in them is so earnest. So genuinely concerned that the answer might be no, that he might have gotten it wrong. That the thing he wants more than anything he's ever wanted might be the thing he's worst at, that your chest cracks along an old fault line, warmth flooding in.
You smile. Your nose bumps his.
“You're a very eager student,” you murmur, your voice thick. Roughened.
The heat still sits in your veins, humming through the places where his mouth was, and the words come out low and warm but certain.
BB's face transforms.
The worry dissolves. What replaces it is satisfaction. Feline. Deep. The slow, spreading pleasure of a thing that’s been told it succeeded at the one task it cared about. And the expression settles onto Bobby's features in a way that is entirely BB's. Not the cocky grin, but quieter, more private, enormously pleased, a contentment so total it rearranges his face into a shape Bobby never wore.
He leans in. Presses his lips to your forehead.
Gentle. Unhurried, lingering. His mouth is warm against your skin, and you feel the hum transfer through the contact. That low, steady vibration, his frequency, the sound that lives in his chest and translates through his mouth into a pulse that settles behind your sternum like a second heartbeat.
He holds the kiss there. Two seconds. Three. His hand cradling the back of your head, his fingers in your hair, and the gesture is so tender and so completely his that the breath leaves your body in a long, slow exhale.
You close your eyes. Lean into it.
Bobby never used to kiss your forehead.
Bobby kissed your mouth, your neck, the spot below your ear that made you gasp. Bobby kissed with intent, heat, and skill. Bobby kissed like a man who knew exactly what he was doing and wanted you to know he knew.
But the forehead—that quiet, unhurried, undemanding press of lips to the place above your eyes—that was never in Bobby's vocabulary.
It was too tender. Too unperformative. Too much like a devotion and not enough like a statement. Bobby declared. And the soft devotional gesture of forehead to forehead, mouth to brow, the kiss that says I cherish you instead of I want you—that was always one of the doors Bobby bricked up, one of the tender things he couldn't do because doing it would've meant admitting the size of what he felt, and Bobby's whole life was an exercise in pretending the feeling was smaller than the room.
Vera Lynn unsticks from her glitch, and the last notes of the song drift through the apartment like smoke (some sunny d-day), and you are here. In a kitchen that was built for you by something that heard you cry through a wall.
You lean into lips gentle against your skin and close your eyes.
BB pauses at the threshold of the apartment.
He does this now, the pause, the backward glance, the half-second where his body is already oriented toward the corridor but his attention is still tethered to you.
It started after the first kiss. A new subroutine in him, a step added to the departure sequence that wasn't there before, and you've watched it develop over the past few days.
“Perimeter check,” he calls out casually. The half-grin flashes. “Back soon.”
You cross the kitchen, pressing your lips to his cheek. A quick, light contact, the kind of kiss that says be safe without saying it.
BB's hand catches your chin.
His fingers close around it,, his thumb and forefinger framing your jaw the way he'd frame a shot if he were Bobby, if he had a camera, if the instinct that lives in those borrowed hands were pointed at a lens instead of at your face. He tilts your head. Tips it up. Holds you exactly where he wants you.
And he kisses you.
Full, wet, unhurried, his lips parting against yours with a confidence he didn't have two days ago in the kitchen. He's been learning, replaying, refining, the way he refines everything, and the kiss he gives you now is deeper than the first, more certain, carrying the heat that slammed through both of you the first time and has been simmering since, banked but not extinguished. His tongue brushes your lower lip. His fingers tighten on your chin.
He makes that sound again. The low, needy one, the one that lives at the back of his throat with the purr, and he tries to swallow it, almost, but not quite.
BB pulls back. A centimetre, his mouth hovering.
“Was that okay?” he breathes out, his breath on your lips. His eyes search yours with that earnest, slightly worried focus. Still checking, treating every escalation like a threshold he needs your permission to cross.
You nod. You don't trust your voice. You stay close, your forehead almost touching his, breathing the same air, and the hum in the walls dips low and warm around you.
BB presses his lips to your forehead. Holds them there.
"Stay," he murmurs against your skin.
Then he's gone. The hum adjusts, tightens, and you're alone in the apartment with the ghost of his mouth on your brow and the taste of him on your lips.
You decide to sort the nest to kill time.
It doesn't need sorting, really.
BB arranges it with a precision that borders on pedantic, the blankets layered in an exact order, the pillows positioned at angles he's adjusted over weeks of watching how you sleep. But your hands need occupation, and your brain needs distraction, because the kiss is still on your mouth, the taste is still there, and the wanting is a warm, heavy thing in the pit of your stomach.
And if you don't move, don't work, don't put your hands on fabric and fold, you're going to lie down on this bed and think about his fingers on your chin and his tongue on your lip and the sound he made, and you can't afford to be that soft right now. Not while he's out there. Not while Entity X is out there.
You refold the top blanket. Smooth the creases. Adjust the pillow on the left side—your side, the one that holds the impression of your head—and reach for the second pillow, the one on BB's side that he doesn't need but uses because you told him beds have two pillows and he'd looked at you with that tilted curiosity and said why? and you'd said because that's how it works and he'd said that's not a reason and you'd said because it means someone else sleeps here too and he'd gone quiet for a long time and the next morning there were two pillows.
You're smoothing the second pillowcase when you hear it.
Your hand stills.
“—not about that, can you just—”
Your voice. Your own voice, coming from somewhere beyond the apartment walls, floating through the hum the way Vera Lynn had floated. Sourceless, directionless. Except this isn't music. This is you. A version of you from before, the you that existed on the other side of the wall, and the sound of your own voice reaching you from the yellow makes your blood slow in your veins.
“—I'm just asking if we're okay, Bobby, that's all I'm asking—”
And then his. Bobby's. The real Bobby, the original, the voice you haven't heard in—
You don't know how long. Months. Maybe onger. And the sound of it hits you in the sternum like a fist because it's exactly the same, the same timbre and cadence, the same tired dismissive flatness that used to make the back of your throat burn.
“We're fine.”
Two words. Tossed over his shoulder. The verbal equivalent of a shrug, of a turned back, of a man already looking at the television while his girlfriend stands in the kitchen with her hands gripping the counter and her chest full of words she's running out of courage to say.
“You keep saying that, but you don't—Bobby, can you look at me? Can you just—”
“I am looking at you.”
“You're not. You're looking at the screen. I'm asking you to turn around and actually—”
“What do you want me to say?" And there it is—the edge. The blade that lives under the casual, the sharp thing that comes out when he feels cornered, when the conversation is moving toward a territory he doesn't want to enter. Not anger. Worse than anger. Impatience. A man who’s decided this conversation is unnecessary before it started. “We're fine, babe. I'm here. What else do you want?”
“I want you to talk to me—”
“I'm talking to you right now. Stop trying to turn this into a fight.”
“That's not—Bobby, that's not what I mean, and you know it.”
Silence of a man who’s already disengaged follows, who’s pulled the drawbridge up mid-conversation and is now sitting behind his own walls waiting for you to exhaust yourself against them. You know that silence. You lived inside that silence for months. You drowned in it.
You set the pillow down. Your hands are trembling.
You know you shouldn't. Your instincts are screaming loudly. The animal brain hisses warnings. The brain that’s spent months learning the rules of this place and the first rule, the foundational rule, the one BB drilled into you before he taught you anything else, is stay in the nest. Stay in the apartment. Stay inside the protection he carved for you out of Level 0's guts.
But your voice is out there. Bobby's voice is out there. And the sound of that exact conversation—that devastating, ordinary conversation, the kind you had a hundred times, the kind that ended with you staring at the ceiling at two AM—is pulling at you the way gravity pulls.
Not curiosity. Recognition. The lure of an old wound being reopened.
You step out of the apartment.
The corridor beyond the front door is yellow. Long. The sublevel hallway that connects the apartment to the main body of Level 0, the passage BB carved like a throat between his territory and yours.
The fluorescent lights buzz overhead in that flat shadowless drone, and the hum is steady, even, unchanged. Nothing looks wrong. Nothing feels wrong, except that your voice is coming from the far end of the corridor, from beyond the doorway where the sublevel opens into Level 0 proper, and the conversation is continuing, rolling forward, playing itself out like a recording that doesn't know it's being listened to.
“—I feel like you don't even notice if I'm here or not. Bobby, do you notice? Do you notice when I'm standing right in front of you?”
Your eyes burn. The lump in your throat is solid, immovable, sharp-edged. You walk toward the sound. One hand trails the wall, and your bare feet are silent on the carpet, and the conversation beyond pulls you forward step by step.
“You're being dramatic.”
The words hit you like a slap. Not because they're new. Because they're not.
Bobby said that. Bobby said those exact words, in that same exact tone, with that exact tired, dismissive, I-don't-have-the-energy-for-this tone, and the accuracy of the reproduction makes your skin prickle because the Backrooms shouldn't have this.
The Backrooms shouldn't have the argument you had on a random Tuesday in October in a kitchen in Santa Clara. The Backrooms shouldn't know what Bobby sounded like when he was making you feel invisible.
“I'm not being dramatic, I'm being honest, I'm trying to tell you that I'm hurting and you won't even—”
“Hurting from what? Babe, I don’t want to fight. Stop turning everything into an argument.” Bobby's voice, louder now. The edge hardens into a wall. “You want me to sit here and—what? Have a feelings conversation? I'm tired. I worked all day. Can we just—can we not?”
You stop at the doorway.
The sublevel opens into the corridor beyond. Level 0 proper, BB's territory, the locked-down hallways that nothing enters and nothing leaves. The lights stretch into the yellow distance. The carpet extends, flat and damp, into the dark.
The conversation is louder here, bouncing off the walls, your voice and Bobby's voice layered on top of each other in a terrible intimacy, and your eyes are full, and the anger is back. The buried anger, the one BB identified months ago, the one you folded into self-doubt and swallowed. It's risen now, pulled to the surface by the sound of Bobby refusing, again, to try. To talk. To turn around and listen.
To look at you, see you standing there with your heart in your hands, asking for the bare minimum, and be told you're being dramatic.
The doorway is empty.
Your voices continue, playing in the walls. But there's nothing there, just the corridor. More of the yellow, and the dark at the far end, where the lights don't reach. Where the fluorescents give way to a blackness that is too thick, too solid to be ordinary shadow.
You stare at the dark.
The dark stares back.
Your sweat goes cold. A full-body temperature drop, your skin prickling from scalp to ankles, every hair on your arms standing in unison, and the moisture on your palms turns to ice water, and your heartbeat detonates. Slams against the cage of your ribs so hard you feel it in your teeth. Once. Twice. A third time that shakes your vision.
The conversation stops.
Your voice. Bobby's voice. Gone. Cut off mid-sentence like a throat being closed, and the silence that replaces it is not Level 0's silence, not the hum-filled quiet of a place holding itself still. This is the absence of sound. The void where sound should be. A silence so complete it has its own pressure, pushing against your eardrums, filling your skull with a static that isn't static but attention.
Vast, focused, oriented entirely on you.
The dark moves.
A motion that starts at the far end of the corridor and travels toward you with unhurried, deliberate patience, like whatever it is has all the time in the world and knows it. The fluorescent lights flicker (one, two, three in sequence), and when they reignite, they’re not yellow anymore.
They’re red.
A deep, arterial crimson that transforms the corridor into a visceral maw that looks less like a hallway and more like standing in the inside of a throat. The carpet darkens. The walls darken. Familiar geometry of Level 0 warps under the red light into a place you don't recognise, a version of BB's territory that has been flooded with something foreign, something that changes the colour of the air itself.
The lights flicker again. Red, black, red, black. A strobe, pulsing, each flash revealing the dark a little closer, a little more solid, a shape forming inside it the way a body forms inside smoke, and in the stuttering crimson you see it.
Your head tips up.
And up.
And up.
It comes into the red light the way a whale breaches water. Slowly, the sheer scale of it requiring a recalibration of your visual field that your brain refuses to perform.
Your legs won't move. Your body has locked up, every muscle seized in the ancient, primate, pre-verbal grip of a fear so total it bypasses the nervous system and goes straight to the marrow.
This isn’t the Smiler or the Howler. This isn’t six agents with weapons and tactical vocabulary. This is the thing in the notebook. The symbol you drew on page after page, updating weekly, tracking its movements at the perimeter with clinical detachment because clinical detachment was the only way to hold it at arm's length.
It's not at the perimeter anymore.
It's tall. Obscenely, horrifically tall. Its body fills the corridor from floor to ceiling, which suddenly seems too low, its shape pressing against the walls as if the hallway were built around it, or as if it had grown to fill the hallway.
It's shaped wrong, proportioned wrong, only vaguely humanoid silhouette stretched to the breaking point and then stretched further, limbs too long, muscular, joints articulating at angles that make your eyes slide off them like water off glass.
Its skin is more like a hide. Leathery. Matte. A deep, dark red that absorbs the crimson light instead of reflecting it, like something that was red once and has since become a surface that eats light and gives nothing back. No texture. No sheen. The flat, dead finish of something organic that has forgotten how to be alive.
And it has no face.
The surface where a face should be is smooth. Featureless. A blank expanse of that matte leathery skin, curved slightly, like the inside of a mask, and the blankness is worse than any feature could be because your brain keeps trying to find the face, keeps scanning the surface for eyes, mouth, nose, any anchor of recognition, any sign that what you're looking at is a being and not a wall of skin that has learned to walk.
Then the eyes appear.
They don't open, they emerge.
Bulging outward from the surface of the face, pressing through the skin like something hatching, the leathery hide stretching and thinning and splitting apart in wet, peeling seams, and what emerges is yellow. Burning, furnace-bright yellow, the colour of the fluorescent lights distilled and concentrated and superheated until it became something that hurts to look at. Two points of searing amber in the featureless red, and they fix on you.
They fix on you, and they don't move.
Tears spill down your cheeks.
The animal body's response to being seen by something that should not be able to see. A reflex, a pressure release, your system venting whatever it can in a desperate attempt to process the input flooding through it.
Your heart hammers inside your chest, your mouth bone dry. Your hands are numb at your sides, the fingers bloodless and tingling, and you can feel your pulse in your throat and your temples.
Entity X.
It's bigger than you thought. Bigger than BB's clipped descriptions and careful evasions.
It fills the corridor the way a flood would. Totally, leaving no space unoccupied. And those eyes, those burning yellow eyes, are locked on you with a focus that’s not predatory. Not hungry. Patient.
It’s been waiting for this, you realise with a lurch. To lure you out with the sound of your own voice and Bobby's voice and the argument calibrated to the exact frequency of your buried fury, and now that you're here, now that you're standing in the doorway with your tears on your face and your anger in your throat, it’s in no rush.
It has what it wanted. Your attention. Your recognition.
It reaches for you.
The arm extends. Long, impossibly long, the limb unfolding like a telescope, the joints articulating in that wrong way, and the hand comes through the doorway. Into the sublevel. Into BB's territory, into the space he carved and sealed and locked down, the space where nothing enters—
The hand comes apart.
Ribbons. The skin peels away from the fingers in long, wet strips, the flesh beneath splitting and curling back, and the arm disintegrates from fingertip to wrist to forearm in a cascade of shredding tissue that falls to the carpet in dark. Heavy coils dissolve on contact, eaten by the floor, absorbed into BB's territory like an immune response rejecting foreign matter.
The barrier—invisible, structural, woven into the very air at a level you can't perceive—is doing what BB built it to do. Unmaking anything that tries to cross inside and harm you.
You scramble backwards.
Your heel catches the carpet. You stumble, catch yourself on the wall, push off, and your body is finally moving, finally responding. The paralysis encasing you cracks, and the survival brain kicks online with a screaming urgency.
You back away from the doorway, and Entity X is standing in the corridor beyond it, and you watch in mute terror as its arm begins to regrow. The ribbons reverse, the skin re-knitting, the flesh sealing back over the bones with a wet, thick sound like clay being pressed into shape.
It tracks your retreat with those yellow eyes, and it’s not even slightly bothered.
It’s not bothered at all.
It reaches again. The same arm, healed, whole, the matte red skin glistening faintly with the residue of its own reconstruction. It pushes through the barrier, and the skin starts to peel again. It pushes harder, the arm advancing centimetre by centimetre through the invisible wall, and the peeling is slower this time.
The barrier is straining. You can feel it in the hum. A high, tight frequency that sounds like metal under stress, and Entity X is shredding its own flesh to reach you, and it doesn't flinch. Doesn't falter, those burning eyes fixed on you with an intensity that is not rage, not hunger, is something far worse than either.
It's insistence.
You turn and run.
The corridor stretches. Or you're running slower than you think, or the sublevel is responding to the breach by elongating, by putting distance between you and the doorway, and you sprint for the apartment at full speed. Your bare feet slap against the carpet, your breath coming in ragged, tearing gasps, and behind you, you can hear it.
Not footsteps. A sound like tearing fabric, like the barrier giving way fibre by fibre, like something enormous and patient methodically peeling through a protection that was supposed to be absolute.
You slam through the apartment doors, gasping for breath.
You scramble for the lock. It’s decorative, you know that, it's a human gesture in a human-shaped apartment, and it will stop nothing that just shredded itself through BB's barrier, but you still try, grabbing the bookshelf next. The one BB just arranged. Your notebooks cascade to the floor as you drag it across the carpet and shove it against the door. The wood scrapes, the weight of it pathetic against what's coming.
You grab the kitchen table. A chair. The standing lamp from the corner. Anything. Everything. Piling it against the door in a barricade of furniture that looks exactly like what it is: a pathetic attempt to buy time.
“BB!”
Your voice breaks on his name. Cracks open, raw, a scream that comes from the bottom of your lungs and fills the apartment and bounces off the walls he built for you.
“BB, COME BACK! BB!”
The door splinters.
Not from the hinges. From the surface. The wood bulges inward, warping, then splits along a line running from top to bottom, and through the crack, you see it. The red. The matte, light-eating red. And then an arm.
It comes through the gap the way the first one came through the barrier, fingers curling around the edge of the broken door, and the wood peels away from the frame in long strips. The apartment dismantles itself around the intrusion, BB's careful construction coming apart under the weight of something that will not stop.
The clawed hand reaches into the room.
You grab the lamp. The standing lamp, with a heavy brass base, the most solid thing within reach, and you swing it. It connects with the arm, bounces off the matte skin, and the impact travels up your wrists and into your shoulders, but the thing doesn't react. The arm keeps coming. You throw the lamp. Throw books. Throw a kitchen chair that shatters against the forearm and falls into pieces.
“Stay away from me!" You're screaming, your voice stripped raw, your body backing toward the far wall with nothing left to throw. “Get away—”
Entity X's eyes find you through the wreckage of the door.
Yellow. Burning. Fixed. It hasn't blinked. Through the barrier, through the peeling, the furniture and the lamp and the screaming. Those eyes locked onto you in the corridor, and they have not left you.
They’ll not leave you, and the constancy of the gaze is the most terrifying thing you've ever experienced because it means you. You’re the target. You’ve always been the target. Whatever this thing is, whatever it wants, whatever fuel it runs on—it wants you, specifically, personally, with a focus that transcends predation and enters the territory of purpose.
The arm reaches for you. Healed. Whole. The stripped flesh re-formed, the fingers extended, and it's close enough now that you can see the texture of the skin. Up close, it's not smooth; it's covered in fine, hairline fractures. Like dried earth, something that cracked and sealed and cracked again, a surface that has been broken and rebuilt so many times, the damage has become a pattern.
The arm detaches.
Ripped, torn from the shoulder socket with a violence so total the sound it makes isn't a tear but a detonation. A concussive, wet blast that shakes the walls and sends a spray of dark viscera across the ceiling and the wrecked furniture and your face, warm and thick, smelling of copper and something older, something mineral.
Entity X's arm hits the floor. The fingers are still curling. Still reaching. Oriented toward you, even severed from the body.
The thing that threw it is standing in the doorway.
It’s not BB and not Bobby.
Not anything that has ever worn a human face, and you understand this immediately, viscerally, in the part of your brain that predates language and operates on pure animal recognition: the shape in the doorway is wrong.
It's Bobby's height, but the proportions have shifted. The shoulders sit too wide, the stance too low, the geometry of the body rearranged into something optimised for destruction rather than disguise. The face is Bobby's face, but it's barely holding, the features sliding, the jaw too sharp, the eyes fully black. Two pits of absolute dark in a face that is coming apart at the seams.
The skin is cracking. Not like Entity X's fractures—like porcelain, like a mask that's been struck, fissures radiating from the jaw and the cheekbones, and through the cracks you can see—not flesh, not bone, but nothing. An absence. A dark so total it makes Entity X's darkness look like shadow.
He's covered in black. Head to chest, arms to elbows, the viscous substance coating his skin and matting his hair to his forehead, dripping from his hands in long, slow ropes. Whatever distraction Entity X deployed to pull him from the perimeter, BB didn't just fight through it.
He annihilated it. And he didn't stop to put the face back on before he came for you.
The hum collapses.
The ambient frequency of Level 0—the constant, ever-present vibration that’s been the background radiation of your existence since you fell through the wall—drops to a subsonic register that you don't hear so much as feel.
A pressure wave that presses against your eardrums, your chest, and settles at the backs of your eyes. The red lights in the corridor blow out. Every single one. The apartment goes dark except for Entity X's burning yellow eyes and the fissures in BB's cracking face, which glow. Faintly, coldly, with a light that has no colour name.
BB opens his mouth, and the sound that comes out is not a voice.
It’s the hum.
The hum itself, weaponised, concentrated, forced through a throat that has stopped pretending to be human. The sound fills the apartment, the corridor, the sublevel, more vibration than language, dragged through the collapsing shape of Bobby's vocal cords with a fury so enormous it makes the floor ripple:
“Clever distraction.”
Entity X turns.
The motion is glacial. Unhurried. The massive red body rotating in the wrecked doorway of the apartment to face the thing that just removed its arm, and even now—even turning to face BB, even orienting its body toward the threat—its eyes stay on you.
Its eyes stay on you.
The head doesn't move with the body. The neck articulates. Wrong, all wrong. Rotating independently of the torso at a degree that no anatomy should permit. The burning yellow gaze remains fixed on your position against the far wall while the body faces BB, the removed arm regrowing in wet, rapid pulses at the severed shoulder, rising to meet what's coming.
The fight starts.
You can't follow it. Not really. Not the way you'd follow a human fight, with fists and momentum and the readable physics of two bodies colliding.
This is different. These are two beings that don't obey the laws of physics, tearing at each other in a space that's coming apart around them.
BB moves the way he moved against the agents. Too fast, fluid, the human shape abandoned for something more efficient, more angular, more suited to what he actually is, and Entity X absorbs. Takes. Endures.
BB tears through its torso, and the flesh re-knits immediately. BB shatters its jaw with a crack, the featureless face splintering like ceramic, the yellow eyes bulging through the fissures, and the jaw reforms. BB puts his fist through its chest, and the chest closes around his arm, and for a terrible second, they're locked, joined. BB rips free with a sound like tearing metal, and Entity X is already whole again, already standing, already watching you through the chaos with those eyes that have never left, never wavered, never once looked at anything else.
You're behind BB. Pressed against the wall, moving when he moves, keeping his body between you and the thing, and you're trying to be small, trying to be invisible, but Entity X doesn't need to see you to know where you are. It knows. The way it knew your voice. The way it knew Bobby's voice. The way it knew the exact argument to play through the walls to bring you to the threshold.
BB is winning. At first. His speed is devastating, his fury enormous, and Entity X staggers under the assault, the massive body driven backwards through the wrecked apartment and into the corridor, and for a few brutal seconds you think he's got this, he's got it, he's going to unmake it the way he unmade the Smiler—
Entity X catches his arm.
The movement is casual. Almost lazy. One massive red hand closing around BB's forearm mid-strike, and the force of the stop shudders through the corridor, through the floor under your feet. BB wrenches. Twists. The hand doesn't open. Entity X holds him there—one-armed, the other still regrowing—and for the first time in the fight, it isn't retreating.
It's pushing forward.
The shift is tectonic.
Entity X drives BB backwards, and the corridor shakes around you. BB's feet leave the ground for a fraction of a second, and when he lands, his posture has changed. Less offensive, more braced, the shape of someone absorbing impact instead of delivering it. Entity X hits him. Open-handed, a strike that catches BB across the chest and sends him into the wall hard enough to crater the surface, and the sound BB makes is not a snarl. It's a gasp. A short, involuntary, winded exhalation, the noise of a body—even a body that isn't a body—taking damage it didn't expect.
And through it all. Through the fighting and the shattering and the black blood and the reknitting flesh.
Entity X's eyes never leave you.
The gaze stays locked on you with the serene, unwavering patience that knows this fight is temporary. That knows BB is between it and you, and that BB is the obstacle, but you’re the objective and obstacles, eventually, move.
BB goes down.
A blow you don't see—too fast, too angled, connecting with something vital in BB's body—and he hits the floor and doesn't get up immediately.
He gets to his hands and knees. The black blood drips from his mouth now, from his nose, from a gash across his chest that isn't closing the way Entity X's wounds close. His arms are shaking. The human face is flickering. BB, then the thing beneath, then BB again, the mask destabilising under the damage, slipping.
“BB!”
You're moving before you think. Scrambling across the wreckage, over the broken furniture and the shattered doorframe, toward him, toward the crumpled shape of him on the floor, and your hands reach for his shoulders—
“Stop.”
His voice. A snarled command, delivered with every frequency he has. Human, inhuman, the hum itself weaponised into a single syllable that hits you in the chest like a physical force and roots your feet to the floor.
He lifts his head. His eyes are black, and his mouth is black with blood. The expression on his face is wild, furious, terrified. An emotion he’s never shown you before, an emotion you didn't know he was capable of, and the terror is not for himself.
“Level 974.” He spits blood. Black. Thick. “Mr Kitty. You know the route. Go, now.”
“I'm not leaving you—”
“You’re a target.” Each word costs him. You can see it. The effort of speech, of maintaining the face, of holding the human shape together while the damage tries to unmake it. “As long as you’re here, it will not stop. It doesn't want me. It wants you. And I can't—” His jaw clenches, a tremor running through his arms. “I can't fight it and protect you. I need you gone. I need you out of range.”
Entity X rises behind him. The massive body straightening. The burning eyes on you. Always on you.
“BB—”
“I am older than this place.” Low. Fierce. Black blood on his teeth, and his eyes fully dark, the ancient thing speaking through the ruined face with a conviction that shakes the walls. “I’m older than the walls and the hum and the doors and it. I have survived every horror this place has made. But I cannot do it while I'm holding back.”
Holding back.
You understand, then. Instantly and fully.
He's been fighting at half capacity. Less. Fighting with one hand while the other shields you, positioning his body between you and the thing, dividing his attention between destruction and protection and losing ground on both. But it's more than that.
You look at his face—the cracking face, the flickering face, Bobby's features sliding and reforming and sliding again—and you understand the other constraint.
The one he'd never say. The Bobby suit. The face, the body, the human shape he's maintained for you since the day you came through the wall. It takes power to hold it. Focus. Resources currently being spent on keeping twenty-two-year-old Bobby Franklin's jaw attached to his skull, instead of being channelled into whatever he actually is underneath.
He's not just protecting you with his body. He's protecting you with his form. Keeping the familiar shape, the face you trust, the lips you kissed, but keeping all of it intact costs him, bleeds him, divides the vast and ancient thing into a fraction of its true capacity.
As long as you're here, he will keep wearing Bobby. As long as he's wearing Bobby, Entity X will keep gaining ground.
You’re not his weakness. You’re his ceiling. And as long as you're in this corridor, he will keep hitting that ceiling, and Entity X will keep pushing through it, and the math only ends one way.
“Trust me,” BB says, blood in his mouth, the face slipping. The thing underneath looks at you with an intensity that has nothing to do with age or power but with promise he made you, his hand on your cheek. “Run.”
You grab the notebook.
It's on the floor, knocked from the shelf in the barricade, pages bent, the cover dented.
You snatch it up. Press it to your chest. The routes are in there. Level 0 to Level 1, Level 1 to the stairwell threshold, the stairwell to the passage threading through Level 2 and opening into the long, dark corridor descending to Level 974. You mapped it. You walked it with BB at your side and his hand at your back, and you marked every turn, every landmark, every shift in the hum that signals a boundary.
You look at BB one more time. On the floor. Bleeding black. The face barely holding. Entity X rising behind him, vast and red and patient, those yellow eyes burning through the dark as it turns to follow you.
BB snarls, and Entity X’s legs crack beneath it.
You run.
Through the wrecked sublevel. Into the corridor, into Level 0, your notebook against your chest and your bare feet on the carpet and the sound of the fight erupting behind you. Massive, structural, the sound of two ancient things finally meeting without a ceiling, and you run toward the route you mapped, the path you memorised, and you don't look back.
You run until you can't hear it anymore.
The fight stopped being audible three corridors back; the sounds of two entities tearing each other apart swallowed by the hum.
What you're running from now is the silence. Weighted silence of a level that’s been breached, holding itself still the way an animal holds still when the predator is too close to outrun. The red light hasn't faded. It pulses occasionally, as if Level 0 itself is wounded and you're running through it.
Your bare feet slap on the carpet, the notebook clutched to your chest. The cover bent, the pages pressed against your sternum.
You're navigating from memory now, the left fork at the junction where the carpet gets warmer, the right turn at the corridor where the hum drops a semitone, the long stretch past the section with the water-stained ceiling tiles that marks the boundary of BB's inner territory.
You know this route, walked it with BB multiple times. Traced it in the notebook with blue ink and annotated the landmarks and tested yourself on it in the nest while BB watched with that quiet pride, and the memory of his face—the last time you saw it, cracking, bleeding black, the ancient thing surfacing through the fissures—makes your vision blur and you blink hard and keep running.
The corridor opens up.
You skid to a stop. The junction ahead is the one that leads to the stairwell threshold, the one that drops you into the transitional space between Level 0 and Level 1.
But that’s not why you stop. You stop because the corridor is full of furniture.
And you know this furniture. The recognition is immediate, physical. The flat-packed shelving units with the Scandinavian labels. The plastic-wrapped headboards stacked against the wall. A dining table, oak veneer, the floor model with the scratch on the left leg where Bobby kicked it once, carrying inventory, and the scratch is there, exactly where it should be. The recognition hits you like a blow because this is Clark's.
Clark's inventory: the same flatpacks and display pieces you organised on night shifts, labelled in your handwriting, and sorted by vendor into bins.
The Backrooms do this. You know they do. They absorb, they replicate, they pull pieces of the real world through the membrane and deposit them in corridors like driftwood. BB explained it once: the levels aren't separate from reality, they're underneath it, and sometimes the underneath leaks up and the above leaks down and things end up where they don't belong.
But knowing the mechanics doesn't prepare you for the lurch of seeing Clark's dining table in a yellow corridor, and you press your hand to the wall and breathe. The wall is warm under your palm, and you think of BB, and the thought is a blade, so you keep moving—
Voices.
Entity X's lure would be sourceless, directionless. These voices have a direction. They're coming from ahead and to the left, from the section of the corridor that bends around the stacked flatpacks, and they're real. Human. Layered on top of each other with the particular rhythm of people talking in a confined space, voices bouncing off hard surfaces, and you can hear—
“—I don't care, I'm going down there, let go of—”
“Bobby, stop, you can't just—we don't know what's down there, we don't know if—”
“—came through here, right? Through this wall, through this—whatever the hell this is. If she came through here, maybe she's lost, maybe she's—”
“Bobby. Baby. Listen to me—”
Your feet stop. Your lungs cease functioning.
Bobby.
Bobby's voice. Real, live, present. Happening right now on the other side of a bend in a corridor that shouldn't exist.
You'd know Entity X's trick by now, the sourceless quality, the way it comes from everywhere and nowhere. This has a direction. This has Bobby's actual vocal cords behind it. And it sounds different. The tired, dismissive Bobby who said you're being dramatic is gone. This voice is raw. Stripped. A man speaking through gravel, through grief so thorough it's changed the texture of his vocal cords. Desperate in a way Bobby never used to sound because Bobby never used to let himself sound like anything except perfectly at ease.
And the other voice. The woman. Calling him baby.
You step past the wall.
The corridor opens into a wider space. One of the junction rooms, the kind where several hallways converge, and the ceiling is higher, the fluorescents brighter, and the hum is louder because more of Level 0 is accessible from a single point. The flatpack furniture from Clark's store is stacked along the walls. A rope trails across the carpet from the far wall, where the concrete appears to dip into a dark space below.
Clark stands near the rope. Older than you remember. Heavier in the face, the circles under his eyes darker, his work shirt untucked and stained, his hands clenched. He looks terrified and dazed in equal measure.
And a woman. Young. Dark hair, cut short, slip flops. She's got one hand on Bobby's arm and the other pressed to her own chest, and her face is tight with a fear that hasn't fully landed yet, still hovering in the space between this can't be real and this is real, and I might die.
And Bobby.
Your Bobby.
He's standing in the middle of the junction room with the rope half-tied from his belt and a camera in his hand—of course, even here, even in the impossible, Bobby brought the camera—and he's thinner.
The crop top hangs differently on him now, looser, the chain at his throat sitting lower against collarbones that are more prominent than they used to be. His face is harder. The softness that used to live at the edges, the boyish quality, the roundness that you used to trace with your fingers in the morning light, is gone. Carved away. What's left is angular, drawn, the face of a man who hasn't been sleeping right for a long time. Who hasn't been eating right, either.
He’s been doing something to himself, or having something done to him, that has stripped the youth from his bones and left behind this sharpened, hollowed version of the person you loved.
You don't know how long it's been. You don't know what happened to him after you fell through the wall. You just know that the Bobby standing in front of you is not the Bobby you left, and the distance between those two versions is written in the new, foreign angles of his still handsome face.
The woman spots you first.
Her gasp is sharp, bitten off, the sound of a person encountering something that doesn't fit the parameters of what she was prepared for. Her hand tightens on Bobby's arm. Her eyes go wide, and her body shifts. Backwards, behind him, an instinct that tells you everything about their dynamic in a single gesture.
Bobby turns.
For a moment, there's only shocked silence. Bobby stares at you. You stare at Bobby.
The light buzzes, and the rope trails across the carpet. The woman's hand is on his arm, and Clark's flashlight beam trembles on the floor, and you’re standing ten feet apart in an impossible place, looking at each other for the first time since the doorway, the grunt, and the don't wait up and neither of you breathes.
Bobby's mouth moves. No sound, a rasp of breath. Then, cracking at the edges:
"Baby?"
His voice splinters on the second syllable. Splits open. The word comes out ragged, disbelieving, torn from somewhere deep, and the information—you, standing in a yellow corridor, alive, alive—is too big for his face, and the room.
You don't respond. You can't. Your throat has closed around a sound that won't form.
You're looking at him. Bobby. Real Bobby. The original. The man whose face you've been kissing on another body for who knows how long, whose voice you've been hearing through borrowed vocal cords, whose edges and angles and scars you've memorised on a copy so perfect you'd almost forgotten there was an original.
And here he is. Diminished and sharpened, desperate and real, standing in front of you in a crop top and a chain with a camera in his shaking hand, and the distance between you is ten feet, and however long it's been and all the things neither of you said.
Bobby drops the camera.
It hits the carpet with a muted thud.
Bobby, who’s never let go of a camera voluntarily in his life, who held onto the viewfinder the way other men hold onto control, lets it fall from his fingers like it weighs nothing. Like it was never important, like every hour of footage he ever shot was just a rehearsal for the moment he'd need his hands free to reach for you.
He yanks at the rope around his waist. His fingers are clumsy, frantic, tearing at the knot rather than untying it, his jaw clenched and his breathing coming in short, hard bursts through his nose. The woman takes a step toward him.
“Bobby, wait, you don't know if—”
He doesn't hear her. The rope falls. He steps out of it like stepping out of a skin he doesn't need anymore, and he starts walking toward you. Fast, accelerating, his stride lengthening with each step, his breathing growing more laboured, and the expression on his face is furious.
At the ten feet of carpet between his body and yours, at whatever he's been through since you vanished, at whatever it cost him, and he’s crossing it with the barely-contained ferocity.
He stops. Three feet from you. Two.
“Fuck,” he whispers, his eyes glassy, red-rimmed. His lashes are wet. Bobby, who doesn't cry in front of people, who presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and grinds the tears back, who’s never once let you see him break, is standing in front of you with tears in his eyes and making no effort to hide them.
“Fuck,” he says again, softer, cracking, his whole face contorting around the word like it's the only syllable left in his vocabulary.
He's looking at your face. Scanning every feature the way he used to scan you through the viewfinder, except there's no viewfinder now, no glass, nothing between his eyes and your face, and you can see the exact moment his brain confirms what his body already knows.
It's you. It's really you.
His hand lifts. Shaking. Visibly, violently shaking, the tremor running from his shoulder through his elbow through his wrist through his fingers, and his hand reaches across the two feet of air between you and lands on your shoulder.
You flinch.
Bobby makes a sound. A wrecked, gutted thing. Less than a gasp, more than a breath. His fingers tighten on your shoulder, involuntary, desperate, like he's afraid you'll dissolve if he loosens his grip. His other hand comes up and grabs your other shoulder, and he's holding you at arm's length with both hands, his face falling apart, the composure crumbling, and his voice when it comes out is barely there:
“You're real. God, please, tell me you're real, baby. Tell me this isn't—tell me I'm not—”
You're both breathing hard. Standing in a yellow corridor, his hand on your shoulder. Your body is rigid, his eyes wet as they drink you in, and the woman behind him is watching you both. Clark mumbles his disbelief faintly, and the world reduces to the two feet of air between your body and Bobby’s and all the wreckage on either side.
Bobby whispers your name.
Not baby. Your name. The real one, the full one, spoken so quietly you almost don't hear it, spoken the way you'd speak a word you're afraid will break if you say it too loud. Your name in Bobby's real mouth, the one that kissed you on a Thursday morning and said stay and meant it, and the sound of it cracks you open.
He throws his arms around you.
Without gentleness, without hesitation. Bobby grabs you with both arms and pulls you into his chest so hard you stumble, your bare feet sliding on the carpet. His arms lock around your back, and his face buries in your neck. He's holding you desperately, with the full-body grip, a man who’s just recovered the thing he was drowning without.
He's warm.
The realisation hits you with a horrible, dizzying vertigo. He's warm. His hands on your shoulders were hot. Searingly, really, shockingly hot after months of BB's cool skin, BB's below-human temperature, the constant slight chill of a body that generates heat only when kissed into producing it.
Now his whole body is pressed against yours, and he’s a furnace. Metabolic, organic, almost unbearable. The heat of blood moving through capillaries, of a heart pumping in a chest that rises and falls because it has to, because it will stop if it doesn't. He smells like soap. Faintly. Under that, sweat. Actual sweat, the salt-and-skin smell of a human body under stress.
And underneath that, barely there, weed. Like he smoked before coming down here. Like Bobby needed his hands to stop shaking long enough to hold the camera, and the specificity of it, the humanness of it, the biochemical reality of a man who self-medicates his anxiety with marijuana and has done it since he was nineteen, is so overwhelmingly, violently real that your knees buckle.
You cling to him.
Your arms come up—late, delayed, your body catching up to the fact that this is happening—and your fingers grab fistfuls of his shirt, and you hold on. He holds on too, and you're both shaking. Both gasping, making sounds that aren't words at the sheer impossibility of it all.
Just grief and relief and terror and love, suddenly all the same thing.
Bobby's hand is on the back of your head, pressing your face into his neck, and his chest is heaving, his pulse hammering against your cheek, and he's alive, he's alive, he came for you, he found the wall, and he came through, and he's here and—
“Bobby?”
The woman's voice. Small. Wary. She's standing behind Bobby with her arms wrapped around herself and her face pinched with confusion, frightened, and underneath both of those, a hurt she's trying very hard not to let surface. She's staring at you. At your head, pressed into Bobby's neck. At Bobby's arms around you, locked, total.
The way he's holding you like the building could come down, and he wouldn't let go.
Bobby pulls back. Only his head, only enough to see your face. His hands come up and cup your jaw, framing your face the way he used to frame shots, and his thumbs trace your cheekbones and his eyes drag over your features with the starving hunger.
“You're alive,” Bobby says hoarsely, his thumbs on your cheekbones and his eyes bright. “You're alive. I thought—the tapes, they went blank, they all went—I thought you were—fuck, you're alive. I missed so fucking much—"
The lights go red.
A sudden, total shift. Every fluorescent in the junction room snaps from yellow to deep crimson in the space of a single heartbeat, and the hum screams. A high, keening frequency that's less sound and more pressure, a vibration that pushes against your eardrums again and fills your skull. An alarm. Organic, not mechanical.
The level itself shrieks, Level 0 responding to a breach so severe that its entire frequency is destabilising.
You know this sound, know what it means. Your body knows before your brain catches up. The red means Entity X. The alarm means the fight has moved, or ended, or escalated beyond what the level can contain. The walls are wrong, and the carpet under your feet is vibrating with a frequency you've never felt before, and every nerve in your body is firing the same message: move.
You grab Bobby's hand. Hard. Your fingers lacing through his.
“Come with me. Right now.”
“What—what is that, what's happen—”
“Right now, Bobby.”
The woman closes the distance. She's been standing behind him, arms wrapped around herself, but the alarm has shaken her forward, adrenaline overriding the hurt on her face, and she grabs Bobby's other arm with both hands.
“Bobby is not going anywhere," she insists, her voice steady. Tighter than her face. “We came here together, and we're leaving together—back through the wall, not deeper into—”
You look at her. Really look at her for the first time. Dark hair. Round jaw. Pretty in a girl-next-door way. You focus on the way she holds Bobby’s arm, the way she positions herself behind him, and remember the baby she called earlier. You see it, and something cold slides between your ribs and sits there.
“Who are you?” you ask flatly.
Bobby's hand tightens in yours. “She's—this is Kat, she works at—”
A scream splits the corridor.
Not human. Long, oscillating, rising in pitch until it hits a frequency that makes the flatpack shelving units rattle against the walls. Howler. Close. Moving fast, drawn by the alarm the way predators are drawn by distress signals, and the sound of it snaps through the junction room like a whip.
“If you want to live,” you begin, your voice dropping into a register you didn't know you owned, calm, flat, cold, the voice of a woman who’s mapped multiple levels and catalogued fifty-three entity types and survived— “you'll follow me. Now.”
You pull Bobby. Bobby grabs Kat, and you move.
You lead them the only way you know how. By the notebook, by the months of repetition and documentation.
You check each junction against the layout in your head, cross-referencing the hum's pitch and the angle of the corridor walls. Left at the warm patch. Right at the stain. Down the corridor, where the ceiling drops by three inches and the air smells damp. Through the threshold that shifts from carpet to tile and tile to the stairwell that descends between levels.
Bobby is behind you. His hand in yours. He won't let go. His grip is crushing, his callused fingers locked around your palm with a force that will leave bruises, and every few steps, his thumb moves against your wrist. Some involuntary check, a pulse-read, confirming you're still there, still solid, still real.
“How long have you been here?” he asks. Moving fast, breathing hard, his voice pitched low. The camera is gone. Left on the carpet in the junction room, the first time Bobby has abandoned a camera since he was a boy. “How did you—are you hurt? Are you okay?”
“I'm fine.”
“You're not fine, you're barefoot in a—what is this place? Where are we?”
You work your jaw, scanning ahead to escape the storm of warring emotions in your chest. “Keep moving.”
“Baby—”
“Don't call me that.”
The words leave your mouth before you can catch them. Sharp. Reflexive. A flinch turned verbal.
Bobby's hand tightens on yours, and you feel the impact of the words travel through his grip like a current. A brief, rigid shock, a stiffening of the fingers.
You keep walking. The stairwell descends. Kat is behind Bobby, her hand on the back of his shirt, her breathing ragged, her head on a swivel. She's terrified. You can hear it in the quality of her breath. Short, high, the particular arrhythmia of a nervous system running on pure cortisol. But she's moving. She's keeping up. She hasn't frozen up.
Some distant, clinical part of you notes this with grudging respect.
Through Level 2. The dripping pipes and the dark. Bobby pulls Kat closer as the dripping grows louder and the shadows lengthen. Something in the walls makes a sound like breathing, and you watch him do it from the corner of your eye—watch his hand find her shoulder, watch his body angle between her and the dark—and the cold thing between your ribs turns over.
Through the transitional corridor. Down. The air changes again. Warmer, sweeter, carrying the faint smell of grass and dust, the signature of the levels that sit closer to the organic stratum. You check the notebook. Page thirty-seven. The route to 974.
Bobby is watching you. You can feel his eyes on the back of your head, on your bare feet, on the notebook clutched in your hand. On the way you navigate this impossible place with confidence. You feel him putting pieces together. That you’ve been here long enough to stop being lost. Long enough to have a system. To have bare feet, which means long enough to have stopped expecting to leave.
“You know this place,” he says. Not a question. His voice is careful, testing, wariness of someone who’s assembling a picture he doesn't want to see. “You've been—you've been here this whole time?”
“Yes.”
“Eighteen months?”
You pause. “Is that how long it's been?”
The silence behind you is devastating. Bobby's thumb stops its circuit on your wrist. Kat makes a small, wounded sound of realisation. If she wasn’t sure who you were before, she is now.
“You didn't know,” Bobby says quietly. “You didn't know how long.”
You keep walking. The corridor opens up, the air changing again. A final threshold, a shift in the hum, and the space ahead brightens. Not with fluorescent light but something softer, golden.
Scent of freshly cut grass, old wood and sugar fills your nose, followed by the particular mustiness of a house that’s been lived in by a being both patient and old for a very long time.
Level 974.
Mr Kitty appears at once.
One moment, the entrance to 974 is empty. The amber light, the corridor opening onto a landscape of gently rolling hills and scattered structures, some of them painted in colours too cheerful for the Backrooms, pinks and pastels that shouldn't survive down here.
The next moment, he's there. Tall. Black. A humanoid shape standing in the centre of the path, its skin the deep, light-absorbing matte of a body that exists as a silhouette even in full illumination. It has no face. The surface where features should be is smooth, blank, and featureless, but the blankness differs from that of Entity X.
Where Entity X's facelessness was a threat, a void, a surface that peeled open to reveal burning eyes, Mr Kitty's is gentle. Calm. The blankness of a thing that doesn't need a face because its presence communicates everything a face would. It stands with its long arms at its sides, and its smooth head tilted toward your group, its posture radiating patience the way the hum radiates sound.
Kat screams.
A sharp, bitten-off shriek at the wrongness of it, the too-tall body, the faceless head, the quality of ancient, unhurried presence that radiates from it. The scream bounces off the corridor behind you and fades into the amber light.
Bobby jerks to action. Reflex, instinct, the hardwired response to protect the person behind him. He steps in front of Kat, his arm sweeping back to push her behind his body, his jaw set and his eyes wide. His other hand still grips yours so tightly the bones grind together.
His body is a wall between her and the threat, and the positioning is automatic, total, the posture of a man who does this without thinking.
Your stomach hollows out.
A different emptiness than fear. A cavity that opens beneath your ribs and fills with something cold and acidic. You watch Bobby shield Kat with his body the way he should have shielded you, the way you wished he would have shielded you, the way you spent months standing in doorways wishing he'd turn around and step toward you and put himself between you and anything at all.
And he's doing it now. For her. The reflexive, unthinking protectiveness he could never perform for you when it was you who needed it. The muscle he let atrophy while you were his has somehow been rebuilt for someone else.
“It's okay,” you say, and your voice comes out even. Controlled. The cold thing behind your ribs makes your words clear. “He won't hurt you. He's safe.”
“He?” Bobby stares at the figure. The figure's blank face turns toward him. Bobby's hand tightens on yours.
“Mr Kitty.” You step forward. The tall, dark shape inclines its head toward you. A brief, acknowledging tilt, the gesture of a being that knows you and has been expecting you. “I need your help. Entity X breached the sublevel. BB is fighting it. I need—”
I'm aware.
The voice arrives inside your skull. A warm, dense pressure that fills the space behind your eyes and settles into your thoughts like sediment into still water. Mr Kitty's blank face is angled toward yours. The stillness radiating from him is calm. Steady.
The disturbance registered across many levels. The barrier on Level 0 has been partially compromised. Your boy is still engaged.
Your stomach knots. “Is he winning?”
That depends on your definition.
“Is he alive?”
A pause. Mr Kitty's blank head inclines slightly, a gesture you've come to read as contemplation. He does not die the way you understand dying. But he is diminished. The sustained engagement is costly. The red one first used other entities to weaken him.
“Can we use your house? I need to get them somewhere safe.” Your voice catches. “Please. Just…”
Follow the path, little one. You’ll see it in the distance. I need to check the perimeter first. It’s chaos out there. Something else might slip through.
You nod, gratitude plain on your face. Bobby and Kat are staring at you with matching expressions of blank, dissociated horror when you turn to them.
“You were talking to it,” Bobby blurts out, flat with disbelief when Mr Kitty flickers out of sight. "You were having a conversation with a faceless thing. What the fuck.”
“It's complicated,” you mutter. “Follow me. Quickly.”
You lead them up the path. The amber light is steady here, warm and sourceless, and the hills roll gently toward a cluster of structures.
Houses, loosely, buildings with doors and windows and roofs that approximate the concept of dwelling in the way the Backrooms approximate everything. Close enough to function but underlaid with a wrongness that only registers if you look too long. The second structure on the right is small. Wooden. A porch with a rocking chair.
The door opens when you touch it, and the inside smells like dust and old paper and tea and the particular warmth of a house that is, impossibly, safe.
Mr Kitty is already inside. Standing in the corner of the kitchen, his dark shape nearly touching the ceiling, his long arms folded in front of him with a stillness that radiates patience. The plate of scones sits on the counter beside him.
You usher Bobby and Kat inside. Kat's hands are shaking. Bobby's jaw is tight, and his eyes are moving—scanning the room, the windows, Mr Kitty's dark shape in the corner, you—with the frantic, comprehensive attention of a man who is trying very hard to apply logic to a situation that has left logic behind long ago.
“Sit,” you say. “Eat. Don't touch anything you don't recognise, especially the toys.”
You look behind them. The doorway is empty. The amber path stretches back toward the corridor, quiet.
“Where's Clark?”
Bobby's jaw tightens. He doesn't look at the door. “We got separated. The dark section, with the pipes. Something moved in the walls, and he panicked and ran the wrong direction and I—” He stops. Swallows. The guilt on his face is immediate, reflexive. “I couldn't go after him. I had to keep—I had to keep moving forward."
Kat puts her hand on his arm. “He had the rope. He can follow it back.”
“The rope was tied to me.”
The silence fills the room. You look at the door. Clark is somewhere in the Backrooms, alone, without a map, without a guide, without the months of hard-won knowledge sitting in the notebook pressed to your chest. Clark is somewhere in the dark, and he’s still a man who hired you, who complimented your attention to detail, told you once in an offhand way that seemed to surprise even him that you would’ve made a fine architect, like him.
“Mr Kitty,” you say, turning toward the entity. “Clark. He's on Level 2. Can you—”
I'm aware. I'll send guidance. The older male is frightened but unharmed. For now.
You cross to the window. The amber light outside is steady. The green hills are quiet. No red in sight. You press your palm flat against the glass and close your eyes, reaching the way BB taught you. Not with your hands but with the part of you that connects to the hum, the part that learned to feel Level 0's frequency like a second heartbeat—
Nothing.
“BB,” you call out. Into the glass and beyond it. “BB, please, answer me. BB?”
Nothing. The window is cold under your hand. He always answers you. Always. From any level, from any distance.
“Who's BB?”
Bobby. Behind you. Standing by the kitchen table, a scone untouched in his hand, watching you with an expression that has shifted from shock to something more complicated. Suspicious, calculating.
You turn back to face the window. “Not now.”
“You just called someone's name into a window. In a house inside a nightmare. I think now is pretty much exactly when.”
“Bobby—”
“Is it a person? Another… another one of those things, like the tall one? Are you with someone down here?” He sets the scone on the table. His frown deepens when you don’t correct him. “What—is he your new boyfriend or something? Does he have a face, at least?”
The laugh that comes out of you is ugly. Short, throaty, carrying a bitterness you didn't know you had room for on top of everything else. You turn from the window, glaring, ignoring the pang of relief, love, and warmth you feel at the sight of him despite it all.
“You don't get to ask me that.”
“I don't get to—I just found you. I've been looking for you for eighteen months. I sat in a basement and talked to a goddamn wall for seven months because I thought—because I hoped— nd you're down here with a name for someone and—”
“And what, Bobby? What were you doing while you were sitting in that basement? Because it looks like you were doing pretty well.” Your eyes cut to Kat, who’s standing by the counter with a scone in her hand and her face pinched still. “Looks like you bounced back just fine.”
The room goes quiet.
Bobby stares at you. The hurt on his face is immediate, unguarded, a direct hit. The flinch he didn't have time to armour against, the naked impact of being told by the woman he's been grieving that his grief wasn't enough. His jaw tightens, eyes hardening.
“You think I bounced back?” Low. Dangerous. Bobby's edge, the blade under the casual, the sharp thing that used to make you go quiet, except right now it's not going to make you go quiet because you’ve spent months in the impossible learning how to not go quiet. “You think—do you have any idea what it was like? You disappeared. You just vanished. No note, no call, no body, nothing. The cops thought I killed you. They hauled me in, sat me down and looked at me like I was something he scraped off his shoe. I sat there, and I took it because what was I gonna say? She up and vanished? The neighbours heard us fighting. Terrence would barely talk to me unless it's about searching for you. People won’t look at me around town. My own mother—”
“Bobby, maybe this isn't the—” Kat starts.
“And the tapes.” Bobby's voice cracks, just slightly. A tiny fracture in the anger and grief. “The tapes went blank. All of them. Every single one. Years of footage and it just—you just—disappeared. From the tapes, from people's memories, from everything. Terrence couldn't remember what you looked like. My mom called you 'Bobby's friend.' Nobody remembered you. Nobody, except me. And I thought I was losing my fucking mind because I could remember and no one else could, and the tapes were blank and you were gone and I had nothing, nothing—”
“I'm sure your new girlfriend was very comforting,” you cut in coolly. “In your grief.”
The words come out serrated. Cruel. You hear them leave your mouth, and you can feel the wrongness of them, the unfairness. This woman is standing three feet away, and you don't know her. You’re aiming your pain at her like a weapon because she's standing next to Bobby and keeping his name in her mouth, and the alternative is aiming the anger at yourself.
Kat's face goes white. Then red. Her hand tightens around the scone, and she sets it down on the counter, carefully, the controlled gesture of a woman who’s choosing her next words carefully.
“I kept him alive,” Kat says. Quiet. Level. A statement of fact delivered with a steady gaze. “When everyone else gave up or thought he was a killer, I was there. Every night. I didn't leave.”
Your mouth compresses into a bloodless line. “How noble.”
“You left.”
“I didn't leave, I—”
“I know, I’m sorry that came out wrong.” Kat's voice doesn't rise. It drops, gets quieter. Gets closer to the bone. “I know something happened to you. Clearly. Since you’re here. I know you didn't choose this. But he didn't know that. He sat in a basement for seven months talking to an empty wall, and then Clark kicked him out, and he sat in a parking lot, screaming at me because he couldn't scream at you, and I stayed. I stayed when everyone else left. So don't stand there and act like I stole something from you. I picked up what you couldn't carry anymore because you weren’t there."
The room vibrates. Not with sound. With the tension of three people, holding pain that doesn't fit. Pain that belongs to eighteen months of separation and misunderstanding and choices made in the dark by people who were all, in their own ways, trying to survive.
Bobby is looking at you. His eyes are red, jaw set, his hands fisted at his sides.
“It took months,” he chokes out. “It took months after Clark kicked me out. Months before—before anything. I was a wreck, and she was kind to me. I pushed her away, and I pushed her away, and I pushed her away, and eventually I—” He swallows thickly. “I had nothing. You were gone. The tapes were gone. And I had to—I had to keep living, baby. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I kept living.”
“I'm sure it was very hard," you bite out coldly. “Having to move on after seven whole months.”
“Seven months of sitting on a concrete floor talking to you.” Bobby takes a step toward you. His voice rising now, the anger competing with the grief, both of them pushing through the cracks in his face. “Seven months of bringing you coffee, your order, every night, and pouring it down the drain at two in the morning because you weren't there to drink it. Seven months of sleeping on your side of the bed because it still smelled like you for the first three weeks, and then it didn't, and that was worse. Seven months of saying I love you to a wall, night after night after night, and the wall never answered. So yeah. Yeah, it was hard. Sorry, it wasn't long enough for you.”
“Then maybe you should have told me you loved me before I disappeared.”
The words come out cold. A scalpel drawn across the exact right vein, delivered with a fury so controlled it's almost calm, practically a snarl. Your jaw sits tight, and your eyes burn, voice carrying the compressed weight of every night you lay three feet from Bobby in the dark and wondered if you were still visible.
“Maybe if you'd said it once—” Your voice cracks. Splits. Your anger rises like bile, flooding your throat, and you can feel it. The rage, the one BB heard through the wall, the one you buried under self-doubt and swallowed until it poisoned you. It's here. Right here. Pressing against your teeth, trying to get out. “Maybe if you'd just—maybe—”
You stop.
Your jaw clamps shut, your hands fisted at your sides. You can feel the anger writhing in your chest, trying to claw its way up your throat, and you swallow it. Again. The way you've always swallowed it. Push it down. Fold it in. Turn it inward because the alternative is letting it out, and if you let it out, you don't know what might happen, you don't know what it might burn down, you don't know—
In the corner of the room, Mr Kitty tips his head.
A slow, measured tilt. His blank face angling toward you with a quality of attention that's different from his usual patient stillness. Then the moment passes, and Mr Kitty's head straightens again.
Bobby is staring at you. The anger on his face has fractured. What's underneath it is worse. Hurt, raw and exposed. Kat stands at the counter behind him with her arms crossed and her face closed. The hurt she's refusing to show bleeds through anyway, visible in the set of her mouth and the brightness of her dark eyes.
You're about to speak. The words are loaded, chambered, aimed—the doorway, the grunt, the don't wait up, the months of feeling like furniture in your shared apartment and now learning it took him seven whole months of dramatic wall-performances before he found a fucking replacement—
And then you hear what he said.
You hear it. Underneath the anger, underneath the accusations. The specific, factual content buried in the grief.
Seven months of sitting on a concrete floor talking to you.
The basement. Clark's basement. The storage level, the concrete floor, and the wall that breathes.
Bobby sat in the basement and talked to the wall you fell through. For seven months. Talked to you, through the wall, the same wall that separates the real world from the Backrooms, the same wall that BB sat on the other side of and listened through. BB heard you through the wall. That's what he told you himself. I heard you. From the other side.
If BB heard you through the wall, then BB heard Bobby, too. Bobby's voice, Bobby's grief, Bobby's confessions and apologies poured into concrete for seven months. BB heard a man sitting on the other side of the wall begging you to come back, searching for you, refusing to give up.
BB heard all of it.
BB knew Bobby was looking for you. Knew Bobby loved you. Bobby was sitting three inches of concrete away from the woman BB was holding in the dark, and BB said nothing. BB held you while you cried about Bobby's indifference, and he said it was never you, it was his malfunction, and he knew (he knew) that Bobby was on the other side of that wall.
He chose, deliberately, consciously, with the full weight of whatever passes for his moral compass, to keep that from you.
BB let you believe Bobby didn't care.
BB let you grieve a living man.
And the worst part—the part that makes your vision narrow and your hands shake and something hot and corrosive flood the back of your throat—is that it worked. It worked.
You grieved Bobby. You swallowed the anger, folded the hurt inward, and accepted BB's version of the story. He got scared and retreated; that's his malfunction, not yours.
You let it hollow you out, let it carve the space that BB then filled, and the filling felt like love. The forehead kisses. The promise. The apartment he built for you, the bookshelves by colour, the way he learned to dance and to kiss and to hold you through nightmares. All of it—every tenderness, every moment you thought this is what it feels like to be seen, to be loved—was planted in soil he'd poisoned.
He didn't just withhold information. He cultivated your grief. He let the hurt grow until it choked out everything else, until Bobby was a wound instead of a person, until you stopped hoping for the door back because what was the point of a door that opened onto a man who didn't love you?
Except Bobby loved you. Bobby loved you the whole time. He loved you so much he sat on a concrete floor for seven months saying it to a wall that wouldn't answer and BB was on the other side of that wall listening and he heard every word and he held your face and said how odd and kissed your forehead and never once, not once, said he's looking for you, he's right there, he hasn't stopped.
The realisation doesn't land like a blow. It lands like a floor giving way. Every tender moment. Every I heard you and nobody else did. Every forehead kiss, every promise, every night in the nest with his cool hand on your back and his hum in your bones.
All of it built on an omission so vast it restructures everything it touches.
You want to scream. Want to put your fist through the window of this safe house and scream BB's name into the amber light and demand—demand—that he explain himself, that he look at you with those borrowed eyes and tell you why.
Why did he let you believe you were forgotten? Why did he let you ache for a man who was aching back, three inches of concrete and a universe apart, both of you reaching for each other in the dark while the thing between you held you close and said I've got you, baby, nothing touches you.
Nothing touches you. Because BB made sure nothing reached you. Not even the truth.
Part of you—small, stubborn, lodged behind your ribs like a splinter—whispers that he did it because he loves you.
That the omission wasn't deliberate cruelty but desperation. That BB heard Bobby through the wall and understood, with the clarity of a thing that’s never been loved or chosen, that the truth would take you away from him. That the choice was between honesty and losing the only person who ever said his name kindly. And the whisper sounds like BB’s voice, and it sounds like the hum. It makes your eyes burn because you understand desperation and loneliness, you understand choosing wrong because the right choice is unbearable—isn't that exactly what Bobby did? What you did by choosing to stay?
Isn't that the whole stupid, devastating circle? Bobby loved you and showed it by looking away. BB loved you and showed it by keeping you blind.
The whisper doesn't survive the inferno in your chest.
He knew. He knew. And he kept you anyway.
Your mouth opens. The questions forming on your tongue, taking shape, gaining mass—
A crack splits the room. Structural, not sonic. The walls of the house shudder. The windows fracture, the glass spiderwebbing from the centre to the frame in a pattern that resembles stress lines. Kat screams, a sharp, yelping sound. Mr Kitty straightens to his full height, his dark shape pressing against the ceiling, his blank face oriented toward the source of the disturbance with a sudden, absolute alertness.
Bobby is wrenched forward.
One second, he's standing by the kitchen table. The next he's airborne, yanked off his feet by a force that crosses the room faster than sight, faster than the sound that follows it. A percussive boom that blows the scones off the counter and knocks Kat sideways.
Bobby slams into the far wall, and the wall cracks behind him. He's pinned there, three feet off the ground, his feet dangling, his hands clawing at the thing around his throat.
BB's hand.
BB is in the room. Not entered, arrived, the air displacing around his sudden presence with a pressure change you feel in your sinuses.
He's holding Bobby against the wall by the throat, one-handed, arm extended, and the face he's wearing is Bobby's face, but it's not—it's wrong, more animal than human, the features sharpened past recognition, the jaw too wide, the teeth visible behind lips that have pulled back in a snarl that doesn't belong on any human mouth. His eyes are black. Fully black. The fissures from the fight are still visible, tiny cracks radiating from his jaw and cheekbones, leaking that colourless light, the mask of Bobby held together by fury and will and nothing else.
One arm hangs at an angle that isn't right. Dark, viscous blood streaks his chest, his neck, his hair. The crop top is torn. The chain is broken, hanging from one side of his throat. He looks like he walked through a war to get here, and the war isn't over; it's just been put on pause long enough for him to cross the Backrooms and find the one thing in his territory that doesn't belong.
Bobby chokes. His feet kick. His hands grab BB's wrist, but BB doesn't move, doesn't register the resistance, a marble statue with a throat in its hand.
BB leans in. Close. His face inches from Bobby's, the original and the copy, face to face at last, the man and the thing that chose his face. Bobby's eyes are wide, bulging, filled with a terror that’s different from any terror he’s ever felt because he’s looking into his own features and finding nothing human behind them.
BB bares his bloodied teeth, snarling low in his chest.
Thinking ab asking BB to chase us through the backrooms just for a little bit of fun and getting so turned on and trying to fuck but he just doesn’t understand why the fear got us so riled up
you'd suggest it like a game. playful. flirty. “chase me. if you catch me you can have me.” expecting him to tilt his head and do the confused processing thing like he usually does when it comes to weird human antics.
instead his eyes go black immediately.
not the soft black. the other black. his whole posture shifts (shoulders dropping, weight redistributing, expression sharpening, that predator gait engaging) and he says “how much of a head start do you want, baby?” in a voice you've never heard him use on you before. low. flat. patient in a way that isn't gentle or coaxing.
you wanted to play chase with an apex predator. the apex predator wants to play chase with you. these are not the same game.
because BB has been suppressing hunting instincts around you since the day you arrived. keeping them leashed, keeping the thing that pursues and catches locked behind the bobby suit and the soft eyes and the gentle hands. and you just told him he could let it out. you just gave him permission to pursue you through his own domain. the pursuit is the foreplay and the catch is the reward and every ancient predatory instinct he's been choking down for months just got a hall pass.
he gives you thirty seconds. it's more than generous. it's more than he wants to give. you run. the backrooms shift around you. not to trap you, not yet, but to extend the chase, to give it room, because he's enjoying this too much to end it quickly. he wants to hear your footsteps. wants to hear your breathing get ragged for him. wants to track the sound of your heartbeat accelerating through the walls that are him.
when he catches you (and he catches you, obviously, in about four minutes, because you’re running through his bloodstream) the sound he makes is not the purr you know.
it's older. hungrier. the sound from before he learned to be soft.
you started this game thinking you'd have to explain the appeal. but you’re pinned against a wall being kissed like he’s slowly devouring you, realising BB never needed it explained.
he's an apex predator and you’re his favourite thing to eat.
he was always going to love the chase. he was just waiting for you to ask.
during head, would aerion be into finishing on ls’ face/chest or he aint wasting any of it? And how about valarr….
Aerion: not wasting a drop.
He's not coming on you, he's coming in you. Mouth, cunt, doesn't matter, but in.
This is a man who grew up with not enough of everything (not enough money, not enough patience extended to him, not enough soft landings, just not enough) and the part of him that's pure scarcity-brain treats every part of you and him together like there's not a single particle to spare. Finishing on your skin would feel, to him, like throwing it away. Like leaving food on the plate.
There's something almost offended in him at the suggestion.
But it's deeper than scarcity. With Aerion the obsession is inside. He wants to be in you, claiming from the inside out, in a place no one else gets to be. Finishing on your chest is performative. It's for the look of it, it's for a photograph, it's for an audience that doesn't exist in his bed.
He doesn't need the look of marking you. He needs the fact of it. The knowledge that he's right there, deep, and you're going to be carrying him with you for hours after, soaked in him whether anyone can see it or not. He likes secret claiming. Internal. Bone-deep. His cum a mark no one but you knows is there.
So during head specifically: he holds your head down on him and groans through his teeth, hand fisted in your hair, hips stuttering up, and he finishes down your throat and watches you swallow him with an expression that's somewhere between reverent and feral.
And then he drags two fingers across your bottom lip after, checking. Catches the pearly bead at the corner of your mouth and pushes it back in. Don't waste it, princess. He licks your lower lip clean himself. Mean, possessive, weirdly tender. You took every drop of him and he watched.
(If he ever does pull out and finish on you, it's because you asked. Even then he scoops some up on his fingers and pushes them into your mouth after. Waste not.)
Valarr: oh god, on you. On you, on you, on you.
Completely opposite drive and for completely opposite reasons.
Valarr's obsession is the look of it. This is a man whose entire mode of loving you is visual. The cataloguing, the immortalising gaze, the long quiet stretches where he just looks at you because looking is half the love. So the idea of pulling back at the last second and finishing across your skin, watching it land on your chest, your throat, the swell of your breast, your face if you'll let him.... that's not crude to him. That's a composition. That's an image he gets to carry around in his head forever.
And it's the only kind of marking he allows himself. Valarr would never bruise you with his hands (unless you really wanted him to). He'd never bite you somewhere visible. He's not the man who claims with violence. That's not his register, and that's part of what the slap awakening was about, finding the other gears.
But this? This is claim he can give himself permission for. Beautiful, temporary, deliberate. He gets to put himself on you, see it gleam in low light, see his cum on your skin, run his thumb through it slow and watch your face when he does.
And then he gets to clean you up afterward with the same careful reverence he does everything else. Warm cloth. A bath. Sweet girl. Look at you. Look what you let me do.
There's something almost worshipful about it for him. Offering, in a way. The most carefully governed man in any room comes apart and what spills out lands on you, visible proof he was there, that he lost it, that you made him.
He'd ask the first time. He'd ask every time after, too, because asking is the tic, but you'd both know the answer. Can I, sweet girl? On you? And the second you nod his hand goes faster on himself, near feverish, and his eyes go almost black and he's so gone for the sight of it.
