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alright, i want to add my opinion about this as well. i usually stay out of "tumblr drama" and things alike, because personally, i don't see a reason to get involved. this is not meant in a hateful way to anyone that does get involved. i just prefer not to.
this, however, has been irking me a bit as well, so i just wanna say where i stand and maybe give a bit of an insight on it generally.
this is about the whole targcest-thingy on here where a lot of people complain about or hate on authors that write targcest.
important: i want to note that i do not mean this in an offensive way whatsoever. to neither side of this whole thing.
now to get to it:
i want to start this off by saying that i personally enjoy writing and reading works that include targcest.
now, some people might ask "why the hell do you enjoy that? or write it?" and honestly, i get it. i get why that's someone's first instinct. 100%. i mean, what the fuck? it's incest. so truly, i get it.
but i think about the following things:
fiction: it's entirely fictional. very important word here. fictional. therefore, not real. it has nothing to do with reality. it's written works about incest taking place in a world - in a family - that canonically practices incest.
acceptance in reality: now, i think i speak for surely about 95% of targcest writers (only 95 because there are always the other people, it's never everyone) when i say we do not condone incest in real life. i'm still only going to speak for myself right now, but i do believe most people on here share this opinion. i do not support or condone real-life incest. i do not think it's romantic, or hot, or anything along the lines. while, sure, you cannot choose what you feel, you can choose how to act about it. and incest is and stays morally wrong. me writing about it in a fictional scenario (specifically fanfic) does not change that.
-> and now you might think "why write it then? if you don't support it?"
so calling these people and/or authors disgusting for enjoying to write/read works with targcest involved is not okay. you are totally allowed not to like it. to hate it, even. i can see why you would. i understand that it can make you feel uncomfortable. there can be a thousand reasons for it. and that's totally fine. you are allowed to be uncomfortable with it.
there the word fictional becomes important again. because it's not real. fanfiction authors (and "normal" authors) write about things like murder and cheating just the same. and use them in romanticized context. a "hot cheating trope where the main character (or reader) cheats on the shitty boyfriend with the better option." or something like that. a lot of people love to read that. but i'm pretty positive when i say a lot of those people do not think that cheating - in real life - is okay. same goes for killing people in fiction. we think it's cool when it's fictional. we think it's not when it's real. easy as that.
and now, why do i think people like it or why do i like it?
i think it might be that aspect of closeness. of that bond that is shared through blood that makes it more intense and intimate in a way. and while yes, closeness can also be portrayed in other senses, it makes sense because the targaryens have this idealogy of keeping the bloodline pure. that their blood is stronger than anything else. that intensity. i think that might be what draws people in. not the plain thought of two people who are related shagging each other.
but that doesn't make it okay to hate on other writers or readers just because they enjoy it.
i think every writer that does write about targcest should tag it correctly. i have since also added the targcest tag to my works that involve it. because blocking/filtering this tag is very easy and if you don't like it, block/filter the tag. or simply, don't read. most (i know, not all) works that involve it have it either tagged or written in the warnings. and what should you do before reading a fic? exactly, read the warnings.
so this also goes out to everyone writing anything with targcest: tag it. put it in the warnings. people can filter the tag and nobody needs to read or in that case, even see, what they don't want to. there are people who do not feel comfortable with it and we, as writers, are responsible for letting people know what sensitive subjects are involved in the fic. and incest is a pretty sensitive subject that can make a lot of people uncomfortable. so again, tag it. put it in the warnings. makes it easier for everyone.
and to all the people that are anti-targcest: take this as kindly as possible, but stop making all these "am i the only one who hates targcest?" posts and stop being so hateful about it. block the tag and go on with your day. if you stumble across a fic that doesn't have it tagged but it's in the warnings - don't read. scroll. it's that easy. and if it has neither of it and you start reading, realizing it's targcest - do one of these two things:
one; call the author out kindly. write a comment and say "hey, i noticed you've written about targcest in here but it's not in the warnings or in the tags. could you maybe add that for people that feel uncomfortable with it? thank you!"
or two; stop reading and move on.
again, i do not mean to offend anyone. simply wanted to voice my opinion on this because i believe there is absolutely no reason for this much drama about it.
pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby(bb)
wc: 16.3k 🚬
contents/warnings: emotional manipulation, emotional neglect in a past relationship, internalised self-blame, discussions of infidelity, grief and loss, emotional dependency, body horror, strong violence, psychological horror, fear of abandonment, existential/cosmic horror, angstttttt.
notes: Strap in. This one is gonna be uh... fun! (thank you so much for your ongoing support btw, love you guys lots!!!).
📹 better bobby series masterlist.
You move before the thought finishes forming.
Your arms lock around BB from behind, tight around his waist, your hands fisting in the torn fabric of his shirt. Your face presses into the space between his shoulder blades, breathing hard. His body stands rigid under your grip, every muscle locked, the whole of him vibrating with a fury so potent you can feel it sinking into your own body.
He's burning hot for once. Hotter than you've ever felt him before, the cool skin scorched away by whatever he's become in the last however-many-hours, and the heat radiates through his tattered shirt and into your cheek, your palms, and the insides of your wrists where your pulse hammers against his spine.
“Stop,” you plead into his back. Into the ruined fabric, that hum that's pouring off him like radiation. “BB, stop. Don't hurt him.”
Bobby is kicking, his feet scrabbling against the wall behind him, his sneakers leaving black marks on the plaster, hands clawing at BB's wrist with a frantic, oxygen-starved desperation.
His face is darkening now, the veins in his neck standing out like cords. The sounds coming from his throat are wet and crushed. Because they're sounds of a body being denied the thing it needs most, but BB's hand doesn't loosen. It’s a closed system, a vice with a pulse rate of zero.
“He doesn't belong here.” BB's voice is gravel and sub-bass, the human register shredded, the words coming from somewhere beneath his chest. “This is my territory. You’re my—”
“You promised me.”
Your voice breaks on the word. Cracks open, raw and wet, and you press your forehead harder into his back, feeling the vibration of him against your skull and your arms tighten around his waist further. You hold on the way you held on in the meadow, in the nest you’ve shared.
“You promised you wouldn't hurt me, BB. And this—” Your voice drops, shaking. “This would.”
BB goes still.
The fury doesn't leave. You can still feel it, coiled, massive, a thing with its own gravity sitting inside his ribcage, pressing outward against the seams of him. But the stillness settles over it like a lid over a flame. His breathing—the breathing he doesn't need, the breathing that's been coming in ragged, animal bursts—slows. His shoulders drop by a degree, and the heat recedes, fractionally, from scalding to merely unbearable.
His hand opens.
Bobby drops down.
He hits the floor hard, knees first, then hands. Then he's on all fours, gasping, dragging air into his lungs in long, shuddering, tearing inhales that sound like they're being pulled through a crushed straw. The colour rushes back into his face all at once, from white to red, the blood flooding back into tissue that was seconds from permanent damage.
Kat is on the floor beside him in an instant, her hands frantic on his shoulders, his face, checking his throat, his pulse, and she's saying his name (Bobby, Bobby, breathe, look at me, breathe) and Bobby is coughing and gasping, his eyes streaming. The red marks on his throat are already darkening into bruises that will look, by tomorrow, like a handprint painted in purple and black.
You let go of BB, stepping back.
One step. Two. Putting distance between your body and his, and BB turns to face you, his hand lifting instinctively, reaching for your face, any part of you he can touch to confirm you're whole, and you step back again.
His hand halts mid-air.
You've seen BB confused many times before. You've seen him curious, amused, predatory, ancient, tender, wrecked with wanting. But you’ve never seen BB wounded.
His hand hangs in the space between you, reaching for a face that pulled away, and his eyes—still black around the edges, the warmth fighting its way back to the surface through the damage and the fury—registering the distance you've put between your bodies. Reading the enormity of your retreat with a precision that leaves no room for misunderstanding.
You stepped back from him.
You. The person who named him. The person who leaned into his forehead kisses and fell asleep against his cool chest and taught him to dance in a kitchen he built for you. You stepped back, and the distance is a sentence he can read, and the sentence says I don't trust you right now.
His hand drops to his side.
“What the fuck.”
Bobby. On the floor. Coughing, gasping, one hand on his throat and the other braced against the floorboards, and he's staring up at BB with an expression that’s blown past fear and into something else.
Incomprehension, horror, the cognitive whiteout of a man looking at his own face on a body that just tried to kill him.
“What the actual fuck,” Bobby says again, louder this time.
The choking has left his voice shredded, hoarse, each word dragged across damaged vocal cords. He gets to his knees. Kat's hand grips his arm, trying to hold him down, but he shakes her off and gets to his feet, his legs unsteady but his eyes are locked on BB. His jaw pulses, hands fisted at his sides, and he’s staring at his own face and finding a stranger peering back.
“That's me.” Bobby's voice is climbing, ragged with disbelief. “That's—that's my face. That's my face. Why does it have my face?”
BB's jaw tightens. The ancient thing flickers behind his eyes. A flash of contempt, of possessiveness, of the territorial fury that just had Bobby pinned three feet off the ground.
He looks at Bobby the way you'd look at a counterfeit of yourself. A draft. A rough sketch someone made before the final version.
“Answer me!” Bobby surges forward even as Kat scrambles to grab his arm. He shakes her off again without looking. “What are you? What the fuck are you?”
“BB.” You say it before you can stop yourself, before the anger and the hurt and the betrayal can seal your throat. The instinct to name him, to give him the dignity of the identity he let you choose for him, is still there underneath everything else. “His name is BB.”
Bobby stares at you both. The information moves across his face in parts. Confusion first, then processing, then a slow, horrible understanding that reorganises his features into something you've never seen on him. An emotion beyond anger, beyond hurt.
“BB. That BB? What kind of name even is that?” Bobby demands.
BB’s nostrils flare. “It stands for Better Bobby.”
Suffocating silence folds over the room. Kat’s mouth pops open in your peripheral, and you suck in a breath of your own.
“Better Bobby.” The real Bobby laughs. A short, ugly sound that's closer to a bark than a laugh, the kind of noise a person makes when the absurdity of their situation has exceeded their capacity for rational response. He barks out another laugh, then, “Better Bobby. Are you kidding me?”
BB's lip curls, a flash of teeth appearing. “I didn't choose the name for your benefit.”
“No, you just chose my face. You stole my face and my—and my—”
Bobby's gaze cuts to you, then back to BB. The calculation happening behind his eyes is visible, mechanical, each variable slotting into place with an almost audible click, and you can see the exact moment the picture completes because Bobby’s expression doesn't crumble; it hardens. Sets. His jaw locks and his eyes go bright and hot, the hurt underneath the anger so vast it makes the anger look like a puddle on an ocean.
“You've been down here,” Bobby begins, his voice pitching quiet. The dangerous quiet. The one that comes right before the blade. “This whole time. Down here with that.” He points at BB accusingly without looking at him. “With some thing wearing my face. A cheap copy—”
BB snarls. Low. A sound that makes the fractured windows rattle. “I'm not a copy—”
“—while I sat in a basement for seven months talking to a fucking wall, thinking you were dead." Bobby's voice cracks open, choking. "While the cops thought I killed you. The tapes went blank, and your face disappeared, and everyone forgot you existed. I thought I was going crazy because I was the only person left who remembered what you looked like—”
He's shaking. Full body vibration.
His hands tremble at his sides, and his jaw is trembling, and the chain at his throat is shimmering with movement. He’s a man coming apart at every joint because the grief and the fury are feeding each other in a loop that's spinning too fast to control, only amplifying the hurt beneath.
Each word comes out hotter than the last, each breath shorter, and Kat is standing behind him with her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide like she’s never seen Bobby like this because Bobby doesn't do this.
Bobby deflects; he bites. Bobby is the one who turns his pain into a joke or a weapon. But Bobby doesn't break. Except he's breaking. Right now. In a pink house on Level 974, looking at his own face on a monster and the woman he loves standing between them.
“Terrence forgot you.” Bobby's voice cracks on the name. Pure pain that sinks between your ribs. “Terrence. Our best friend, remember him? The only person who believed me when the whole neighbourhood decided I was a killer. He sat with me in bars and told people to back off and drove me home when I couldn't drive, and he was the last one—the last person besides me who still said your name. And then one day I said it, and he looked at me like I was speaking a different language. Like the word didn't mean anything. Like you were—like you'd never—”
He presses the heel of his hand into his eye. The old gesture. The grinding-the-tears-back gesture, brutal and effective. “I watched him forget you. In real time. I said your name and I watched it fall out of his head and he looked at me with this—this pity, like I was talking about someone who never existed. And I wanted to grab him and shake him. Scream she was real, she was REAL, I loved her, and she was real—”
Bobby sucks in a breath so hard his whole body jerks with it.
“Eighteen months,” Bobby croaks out hoarsely, the shaking getting worse. “I nearly died waiting for you. I stopped eating, stopped sleeping. I sat in that basement until my back seized up and I couldn't stand straight, and even then I went back. I kept going back, and you're here. You've been here this whole time. Completely fine. With him. Letting him—wearing my face while he—”
Bobby can't finish the sentence. His hand comes up and covers his mouth, his eyes squeezing shut, and the sound Bobby makes behind his palm is tiny and wrecked. You shouldn't be hearing it, but you can't stop hearing it.
“Bobby—” Kat whispers, reaching for him.
“Don't touch me.” He shakes his head, opening his eyes.
And the expression on his face is the one from the doorway, the one you never saw because you were the one walking away. The expression of a man watching the person he loves leave and being unable to say the thing that would make them stay. Except now it's worse because you didn't leave. You were taken. And what took you gave you a version of him that does all the things he couldn't.
Then, in a dazed whisper, “Did you fuck him?”
The question lands like a grenade. Kat visibly flinches. BB goes rigid in your line of sight, and you feel numb shock slacken your expression.
“Bobby,” Kat says sharply. “This isn’t the time—”
“Did you fuck him?” Bobby's voice cracks, splitting, the words coming out jagged and shaky because he can't control himself. “This thing that stole my face—did you let it touch you? Did you let it—” He gestures at BB, at you, at the space between your bodies. “Were you playing Barbie and Ken down here with my—with a goddamn copy of me while everyone back home thought you were—”
He stops, pressing both hands over his face. His shoulders heave. Once. Twice. The sound he's holding back is massive, and he still won't let it out. He won't. Because he’s Bobby Franklin, and he doesn’t cry in front of people, not even now, not even here, when the girl he spent seven months talking to through concrete is standing five feet away next to the thing that kept her.
“They all thought I killed you. Our neighbours. Our friends. Clark. Strangers on the street. They'd look at me, and I could see it. He did it. The boyfriend did it.” Through his hands. Muffled, reedy, barely controlled. “Months of that. Of carrying that and going to the store every night, sitting on the floor and talking to you because it was the only thing—the only thing—that kept me—” His hands drop. His face is red and wet, ruined. “And you were here. Did you even try to go home?”
The room vibrates. The hum, the tension, the emotional charge of three people and two entities standing in a space too small for the volume of pain it generates.
You stare at Bobby's wrecked face, those bright, glassy eyes, his shaking hands. The man who loved you and couldn't say it and sat on concrete for seven months saying it to a wall instead. The man who grunted at your goodbye. The man who let you stand in a doorway feeling invisible. The man who came through the wall to find you.
“You moved on too,” you say lastly.
Quiet. Cold. The voice the Backrooms gifted to you. The flat, unmoved, survival-voice, the one that doesn't shake because it can't afford to do so.
Bobby's mouth opens. Closes. His features spasm like you’ve struck him despite the distance between you.
“You moved on too, Bobby. You're standing here with her—” you gesture at Kat, who shrinks back— “shielding her with your body, doing all the things you stopped doing for me. And I'm supposed to—what? Feel guilty? Because I survived? Because I found something down here that you couldn't be bothered to give me up there?”
“That's not—”
“You left first.” The words tear out of you before you can weigh them, before the part of you that knows this isn't entirely fair either can catch up to the part of you that’s been carrying this for months and is finally, finally letting it spill. “You left me in that apartment, Bobby. You left me standing in doorways waiting for you to look up. You left me lying next to you in bed wondering if I was still visible. And I don't know why. I've never known why. I loved you more than anything I've ever—”
Your voice fractures, words catching in your windpipe. You press your knuckle against your mouth, mouth wobbling, try your hardest to breathe through it.
“I loved you,” you repeat, steadier, lower. Your anger holding the grief upright the way a spine holds a body. “More than anything. And I didn't need to hear it. I never needed you to say the words, that’s the thing. But I used to feel it. In how you touched me and kissed me and held me. In how you looked at me in the morning. And then you stopped. You just… stopped. And it wasn't sudden. It was slow. So slow I didn't even notice it happening until I was already standing in it. This—this absence. Where you used to be. And I tried to talk to you about it, and you said don't be dramatic, and we're fine. I tried again, and you turned up the TV. I stood there in the kitchen watching the back of your head, and I thought—”
You choke on the words. Your eyes burn, but the tears won't come because the anger has dried them at the source.
“I thought maybe this is what love becomes. Maybe this is normal. Maybe I'm asking for too much. And I made myself smaller and smaller and smaller to fit inside whatever you were still willing to give me, and it was never enough. I didn't know why and you wouldn't tell me—”
“I was scared.” Bobby. Raw. Stripped to the bone. “I was so scared of how much I—”
“I don't care.” Flat. Final. Your voice hardens despite the thickness of your voice. “I don't care that you were scared. I was scared too. I was scared every single day that you were going to wake up and decide you didn't want me anymore and instead of telling me that. Instead of saying I'm terrified and I don't know how to love you without losing myself… you just stopped. You made me feel so alone. I used to talk to the walls at Clark's store because the walls were better company than you were.”
You suck in a ragged breath. It shakes on the way in, steadies on the way out. Bobby’s peering at you wide-eyed, his mouth parted, tension between you thrumming. You exhale, chuckling shakily, pained.
“And the worst part, Bobby?” you pose, not waiting for a response. “The worst part is it took me disappearing for you to care. It took me falling through a wall and vanishing from the face of the earth for you to sit down and say the things you should have said when I was standing right in front of you. You had me. I was right there. Every day. For years. And you couldn't be brave enough to tell me you loved me or hold me like you needed me. But the second I'm gone—the second you can't have me anymore—suddenly you're on a concrete floor pouring your heart out to a wall. Suddenly you remember how to feel.”
Bobby flinches. Full body, his blue eyes bright and shining. Like you've hit him again.
“And you want to know the thing that really kills me?” Your voice is shaking now, the anger fracturing, the grief bleeding through the cracks again. “I was working the late shift alone. In that basement. Alone, Bobby. Because you stopped coming. You used to come keep me company, and you stopped. I was down there by myself, sorting inventory, and that's where it happened. That's where the wall took me. And if you'd been there… if you'd just walked through that door one more time, if you'd come to the store instead of staying on that couch…”
You shake your head, glancing down. BB jerks, like he’s fighting an urge to reach for you, to comfort you somehow. “I wouldn't have been alone when it happened,” you go on, lifting your head again. “I might not have been standing in front of that wall at all. You want to know who's to blame for me being here? It's not the Backrooms. It's not BB. It's the fact that the man I loved couldn't be bothered to keep me company like he used to.”
The silence that follows is absolute. Suffocating. The hum drops to its lowest register.
Bobby stares at you. His face is open in a way you've never seen before. No armour, no grin, no deflection. Just Bobby. The raw, messy human underneath all the performance. And the expression on that face is not anger. It's devastation.
Because he’s just heard the exact truth he's been telling himself for eighteen months spoken aloud by the person he failed, confirmed, verified, stamped and sealed.
Kat stands behind him, her arms heavy at her sides, face tight with an attempt to hold her composure. She’s just learned the full dimensions of the wound she's been dressing for over a year and finally understands it goes deeper than she knew.
BB watches you with an expression you can't read. His black-edged eyes roam over your face, cataloguing the anger, the grief, the terrible release of words held back for so long. His hand twitches at his side again. The instinct—to reach, to touch, to soothe—still running underneath the barrier you imposed.
“Come with me,” BB urges, his words low. His hand lifts again, reaching for your elbow. “You don't have to stay here. Let me take you—”
“Don't touch me.”
BB's hand freezes midair.
“You're no better.”
You watch the impact of your words jolt through him. The way BB’s whole body registers it, a flinch that travels from his face through his shoulders to his hands. He absorbs it the way Entity X absorbs damage, except this doesn't regenerate. This is a cut that stays.
“You—” BB starts, his brows furrowing. His confusion is genuine, nothing performed in it. There’s no curious tilt he does when encountering new concepts, but real confusion, the bewildered processing of a being trying to understand what went wrong.
“Did you know?” you bite out.
You ask it quietly, peering at his face. Bobby's face. The face that heard you through a wall and chose to want you, that built you a kitchen and kissed your forehead and promised you things and held you while you cried.
“Did you know Bobby was out there? For months. Did you know he was looking for me? Sitting in that basement, talking through the wall. Did you hear him, BB? Did you hear him saying he loved me while you were holding me and telling me it was all his fault?”
BB's expression goes smooth.
The warmth and confusion drain, followed by wounded bewilderment. What's left is closed. Perfectly, terribly closed. The face flattening into something that's neither Bobby nor BB but something older, something that predates both of them.
You laugh. A short, bitter sound, no joy in it.
“Yeah,” you exhale. Shaking now, because anger can't hold your grief forever, the frame is buckling, and you can feel the tears starting to press against the backs of your eyes like a tide against a wall. “That's exactly what I thought.”
The room is quiet.
Bobby is on the floor with Kat's hand on his shoulder and bruises darkening on his throat. BB stands in front of you with a closed-off face and a frozen hand, the ruins of every tender moment you've shared settling around him like a ring of ash. Mr Kitty lingers in the corner, his dark shape motionless, his blank face oriented toward the centre of the room with the patient, unhurried attention.
“I need time,” you say, your voice thin. “I need… to think. I can't—I can't be in this room right now.”
You spin on your heels, walking toward the staircase, your bare feet on the floorboards. You clutch your notebook against your chest, your shoulders set in a rigid line, your chin up, and your eyes burning, but you don’t cry.
You will not cry. You’ll walk through this door and find a corner of this level that doesn't contain Bobby or BB or Kat or anyone else, and you’ll sit down and breathe.
You’ll figure out what is left of you underneath all of this wreckage.
BB moves after you. You hear it more so than see it. The shift in air pressure, the displacement, his body orienting toward yours the way it always does, the magnetic pull that has governed his movements since the first day. His footstep on the floorboard behind you.
Mr. Kitty steps into his path.
The tall dark shape moves from the corner to the centre of the room in a single fluid motion, interposing itself between BB and the door, between BB and you. Mr Kitty doesn't speak. Simply stands there. Immense, faceless, filling the doorway with the calm, absolute certainty that informs everyone, silently, that no one is getting past him.
BB snarls.
The sound fills the room, saturating it. Harsh, emotional, stripped of the controlled fury from earlier. This isn't the predator defending his territory. But something hurt and desperate, unable to reach the only thing that makes the hurt bearable, and the snarl carries all of it—the confusion, the desperation, the agony of watching you walk away from him and being told he doesn’t get to follow.
“Get out of my way.”
BB's voice is low. Vibrating. The hum in the walls responding to him, the floorboards creaking around you, the cracked windows rattling in their frames. The power coming off him is palpable. A pressure change, a density in the air, the room bending around the force of an entity that’s existed for longer than these walls have stood.
Mr. Kitty doesn't move.
The house begins to vibrate.
A deep, foundational tremor that runs through the floor and up through the walls and into the ceiling. The scones on the counter rattle. A crack appears in the plaster above the kitchen doorway. Two forces pressing against each other. BB's vast, ancient fury and Mr. Kitty's quiet, absolute sovereignty over this level, this house, this ground.
Mr. Kitty may not be as old. May not carry the same raw, limitless power that BB channels from the Backrooms itself, but Level 974 is his. The pink walls and the Hello Kitty figurines and the golden light.
His domain, his territory, his rules.
And in this space, on this ground, Mr Kitty doesn’t yield.
The vibration deepens. The figurines on the shelf chatter against each other. Bobby grabs Kat and pulls her toward the corner, away from the two entities locked in their silent standoff.
“Enough.”
Your voice. From the doorway, looking over your shoulder at the room. At BB, rigid and his mouth snarling, at Mr Kitty, immovable and calm, at the house shaking around them.
“Stop it. Both of you. Right now.”
BB's eyes are black, wild, fixed on Mr. Kitty's faceless head with a fury that has nowhere to go.
You look at BB.
It's the look that stops him. Your eyes on him, meeting his, and the expression in them—cold, hurt, closed, the warmth he's spent months earning withdrawn behind a wall he can't charm or claw his way through. You look at him the way you looked at Bobby in Santa Clara, in the doorway, in the kitchen, during all those conversations he refused to have.
“Leave me alone,” you say coldly. “I mean it, BB. Leave me alone.”
The vibration cuts out.
The house settles around you into eerie silence, the figurines stilling. The crack in the plaster stays but doesn't spread further.
BB's snarl dies in his throat, not released but swallowed, pushed down into whatever deep place he stores the things he can't process. His fury collapses inward, his features rearranging not into Bobby's easy mask but into something fragile and deeply, fundamentally lost.
Because he’s just been told by the only person who matters to him that he’s not wanted here.
Mr. Kitty steps aside.
You walk through the door, up the stairs that don’t make a single creak, and don’t look back.
BB does not follow.
The bedroom is pink.
Every surface of it. The walls, the ceiling, the bedframe, even the dresser with its rows of small ceramic figurines. All Hello Kitty, some with bows, others with tiny painted expressions of vacant, cheerful contentment that feel deeply wrong in a place where nothing should be cheerful.
The bed is covered with a pink duvet and pink pillows, a stuffed Hello Kitty the size of a small child propped against the headboard. You’re sitting on the edge of said bed in this aggressively pink room, clutching a pillow to your chest and crying so quietly your body barely moves.
You washed your face in the bathroom with shaking hands. The soap smelled like strawberries, which is either a kindness or a coincidence and in the Backrooms you've stopped trying to tell the difference. You scrubbed the tear-tracks and the grime and the black residue of Entity X's blood from your skin, and you looked at yourself in the mirror, but the face peering back at you was thinner than you remembered. Sharper. Older in a way that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with the kind of living you've been doing down here.
You looked at your own face, and you didn't recognise the expression on it, and then you did, and that was somehow worse.
You press the pillow into your chest, tears soaking into the fabric, leaving dark spots as you wipe them with the back of your hand.
A plate appears on the bedside table.
Cookies. Round, golden, slightly uneven. Arranged in a careful circle on a pink ceramic plate with a Hello Kitty border.
You didn't hear Mr. Kitty enter. You never do.
He's simply there, filling the corner of the room, his dark shape folded into a crouch that brings his smooth, featureless head level with the top of the dresser. His long arms drape over his knees. The posture is oddly casual for something that nearly went to war with a fellow ancient entity an hour ago.
You glance at the cookies. A wet, exhausted laugh escapes you. Because there's a faceless being the height of a doorframe crouched in a pink bedroom offering you baked goods, and this is your life now, apparently.
Are you feeling better, little one?
His voice settles into your skull with that warm, furred pressure, gentle and unhurried. Little one. He's been calling you that since the third time BB brought you to 974, and the tenderness of it used to make you bristle. You're not little, not a child, not something to be diminished with a pet name, but you've come to understand that little is relative.
To Mr. Kitty, everything is little. The Backrooms are little. Time is little. The enormous, life-destroying pain you're feeling right now is little. Not because it doesn't matter but because it exists within a framework so vast that even devastation is a passing thing for him.
“No,” you answer honestly. “I feel awful.”
Mr Kitty's head inclines. A slow, measured tilt that you've learned to read as acknowledgement. He doesn't offer comfort. He doesn't say it'll be okay or this too shall pass or any of the empty phrases that people deploy when they can see someone hurting and don't know what else to do.
“Have you ever experienced anything like this?” you ask, wiping your eyes with the heel of your hand. “This mess. This kind of—”
You gesture vaguely at the room, at yourself.
No.
A pause.
I'm not human.
You stare at him. His blank face gives nothing back. The delivery is so flat, so matter-of-fact, so completely devoid of inflection that it takes your exhausted brain a second to register that the seven-foot faceless entity crouched in a bedroom full of Hello Kitty memorabilia has just delivered the driest possible response to your question.
You snort wetly despite yourself, wiping your nose.
“Is everyone okay? Out there?”
The humans are safe. They've eaten. I've provided almond water. It helps with the psychological effects of prolonged exposure. The mind frays here. Theirs will fray faster than yours did. A pause. The blank head angles slightly, as if consulting a source of information you can't perceive. The older man… he was located. But he refused to come with my guidance. He's making his way back toward the entry point on Level 2. Alive, as far as I'm aware. Frightened. But alive.
“Thank you.” The words come out thin. Insufficient. You're thanking a being older than human civilisation for babysitting your kinda-boyfriend and his new girlfriend while tracking down your former employer through an interdimensional nightmare. “For all of this. For letting us—”
You're welcome in this house. You've always been welcome.
Your fingers dig into the pillow. “What about BB?”
Mr. Kitty's head tilts again. The angle is different this time, sharper, more deliberate.
The Backrooms are in disarray. An observation, not a complaint. Entity X's presence has had an unusual cascading effect. Smilers are ranging further. Skin-stealers have been reported on levels they typically avoid. Another pause. His faceless head angles toward the window, toward the levels that stretch below and above and in every impossible direction. Your boy is clearing up the mess.
Your boy. Indulgent, slightly bemused. You don’t correct him, not even now.
Entity X seems to have an unusual ability to affect other entities. Amplifying their aggression. Destabilising their territorial patterns. As if its presence is contagious. An emotional frequency that spreads through the hum, agitating everything it touches.
You think about Entity X. About the burning yellow eyes that never looked away. About the argument it played through the walls to lure you out. Why that conversation? Why your argument, specifically?
Why did it know what Bobby sounded like when he was shutting you out? The questions stack up in your head the way the entries stack in your notebook. Pattern without explanation. You can feel the shape of it, the edges pressing against the inside of your skull, but the centre won't resolve.
“Why me?” you ask, peering at Mr Kitty. “Why does it want me?”
Mr Kitty is silent for a long moment. His blank head angles toward you with that sharper tilt. As if he's reading something written on you in a frequency only he can perceive.
I have a theory. Measured. Careful. But theories without sufficient evidence are just stories. And stories can be dangerous in a place that listens and can make them a reality.
“Tell me.”
When you're ready to hear it, little one. When the answer won't do more harm than the question.
The deflection is gentle but absolute, and you know better than to push. Mr Kitty doesn't withhold out of cruelty. If he's not telling you, it's because the telling carries a weight he doesn't think you can hold right now.
You file it away. Another entry in the private section of the notebook. Another question with no answer.
“Has it—is it gone?”
Retreated. Very suddenly. For reasons I can't determine. Mr Kitty's face tilts back toward you. That concerns me more than its presence did. An entity of that power doesn't retreat without cause. It either ran into an unexpected problem, or it decided to wait for a better opportunity.
The words settle on your shoulders.
You sit for a moment longer. The pink room. The cookies. The faceless being in the corner, patient and still. The faint sound of voices from the living room floats over. Low, murmured, too indistinct to make out words. Bobby's voice. Kat's voice. Talking about you, probably. Talking about what comes next. Discussing whatever people do when the world has ended, and they're sitting in a pink house eating scones and trying to pretend their worldview hasn’t just shattered.
You reach for a cookie. Bite into it. It's good. Buttery, slightly sweet, with a texture that's almost right. The Backrooms' version of homemade, close enough that your tongue can't argue.
“I can't hide here forever,” you mumble, chewing. Your voice is scraped raw, and the cookie is doing nothing to fix that, but it's doing something for the rest of you. The simple, animal act of eating, of taking a thing and putting it in your body, of fuelling the machine. “Even though I want to.”
Mr Kitty says nothing. His blank face radiates with the particular silence that means I agree, and I'm glad you arrived there yourself.
You stand, pressing your palms against your eyes. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. In. Out. The way you breathe before entering a new level, before turning a corner in an unmapped corridor, or opening a door whose other side you can't predict.
The survival breath. The steadying edge you didn’t have back in the real world and only developed here. The willingness not to run away and hide.
You wipe your face one final time. Set the pillow down. Pick up the notebook from the bedside table where you placed it beside the cookies, pressing it against your chest. The weight of it is familiar, grounding, the only possession you have that still feels like yours.
“Thank you, Mr. Kitty.”
Eat another cookie before you go. You’ll need it.
You do as he instructs, then open the bedroom door. You walk down the short hallway of Mr. Kitty's house, past the framed Hello Kitty prints and down the stairs, stepping into the living room.
Bobby and Kat are sitting at the kitchen table.
Their heads are bowed. Close together. Kat's hand is on Bobby's forearm, and Bobby's other hand is pressed flat against the table, fingers splayed, bracing himself.
They're speaking in low voices. You catch the edge of a word. Your name, maybe. Or something that used to be your name before it became something else.
Bobby spots you first.
He stands immediately, like the sight of you alone gave him an electric shock. The chair scrapes the floor. His face is a mess of competing expressions: relief, tension, the careful, wary hope as eh drinks you in. The bruises on his throat have deepened. Dark purple against his tanned skin, four finger-marks and a thumb-mark, BB's handprint developing like a collar on his neck.
You catch the flicker across Kat's face, brief and involuntary. The subtle tightening around her eyes, the tiny pull at the corner of her mouth.
She was saying something to Bobby, and you interrupted it, and the hurt of being interrupted is tangled up with the hurt of being here at all, of sitting in a nightmare for a man who’s looking at another woman with that expression. That searching, desperate, is-she-okay expression that Kat has probably been working for months to earn, and you just walked in and collected without trying.
You see it. You look away from it.
You wrap your arms around yourself. One hand on each elbow, holding yourself together.
“You need to leave,” you tell them flatly. “Both of you. Right now. The Backrooms aren't safe for humans. They were never safe, but right now they're worse. Entity X destabilised everything. Every entity on every level is more aggressive than it should be and you don't have the training or the knowledge to survive that.”
“I'm not leavin' without you.” Bobby. Immediate. Jaw set, chin up, the Bobby-stubbornness that looks like courage and has always been, underneath, a different kind of fear. “I didn't come through a wall, walk through hell and get choked out by my own doppelganger to leave you down here alone. No way in hell.”
You level him with a flat look. The one you learned living here. A part of you wants to remind Bobby that he tore into you less than an hour ago, but he's calmer now. Past the initial, ugly shock.
Bobby surprises you by holding that look.
For a moment that stretches into two, then three. Then his jaw flutters, his gaze dropping, and you see it: the fight leaving him. Not because he agrees, or wants to, but because the woman standing in front of him is not the woman he lost.
The woman he lost was standing in a doorway with her keys and her heart in her eyes, waiting to be seen. The woman standing in front of him now has a notebook and a survival instinct, and she's not waiting for anything.
“BB,” you call out.
The air shifts. Between one breath and the next, there’s a displacement, and the pressure changes in your sinuses.
BB stands at the edge of the living room like he's been there the whole time, like he materialised from the wall, which he probably did. He's more put together than the last time you saw him. His face reset, the fissures sealed, the eyes back to Bobby's blue with only a thin ring of darkness at the outer edges. The black blood is gone. The torn shirt is the same, but he's cleaned the rest, reassembled the human costume with great care.
He looks at you and his whole body orients again. That magnetic pull, that compass-needle pivot, his weight shifting forward onto the balls of his feet, his chin lifting, his eyes searching your face with a hope so raw it makes your heart ache.
Because you called him. And the part of BB that lives underneath the fury and the ancient power and the territorial instinct—the part that learned to kiss you in a kitchen and asked am I doing it right and pressed his lips to your forehead because you taught him that tenderness—that part heard his name in your voice and came running. And he’s standing in front of you now, practically vibrating with a desperate, transparent hope that calling means forgiving.
It doesn't. He can see that too. The hope flickers. Dims. Holds, just barely, at the edges.
“I need you to take Bobby and Kat out,” you tell him calmly. The survival voice. “Back to the real world. Through the wall in Clark's basement.”
BB's expression morphs. A crease appears between his brows, a tightening at the corners of his mouth. He glances at Bobby, at Kat, and the glance carries a weight that isn't quite hostility. Closer to resignation.
“I can't,” he says.
“BB—”
“The path is gone.” He says it plainly, without the smooth, closed expression he wore when you asked if he knew Bobby was looking for you. “Entity X destroyed sections of Level 0 during the fight. The corridors between here and the adjacent entry point to the storage basement on Level 0 are collapsed. The hum no longer reaches those sections. They've been severed from the level entirely.”
You can feel everyone staring at BB as you absorb his words.
“Then find another way,” you say. “There are other exits. Other entry points. You've said—”
“The only feasible exit I can guarantee right now is the M.E.G. outpost.” BB's eyes are on you. Only you. Bobby might as well be furniture. “The one on the far side of Level 4. But the direct path from here is gone. We'll have to go through the Poolrooms, and cut across to Level 4 through the threshold at the deep end. From there it's a straight corridor to the outpost, but that corridor runs through a section of Level 4 that's been unstable since the cascade.” He pauses, weighing his words. “The Poolrooms should be passable. Level 4 is the risk. Entities might shelter there because the layout gives them cover. Under normal conditions it's manageable. Right now, with the aggression spike, it'll be hostile.”
You run the route in your head.
Level 974 to the transitional stairwell. Through the Poolrooms, warm chlorinated water and blue tile, a level you've mapped partially, three pages of the notebook dedicated to its spanning layout and the way sound carries across the surface.
You know the Poolrooms. BB took you there multiple times. You used them in the past for hygiene and a change of scenery both.
The water was warm, and the light was washed-out blue, and nothing lived in it that wanted to hurt you, at least not then.
From the deep end threshold into Level 4. The endless office complex, the one that looks like every corporate building you've ever been in hollowed out and stretched to infinity. Dark. Echoing. Full of cubicles and conference rooms and hallways that dead-end without warning.
You've only been there once, briefly, and your notes on it are thin at best.
Half a page, a rough sketch, a warning symbol in the margin.
“How far?” you ask.
“Through the Poolrooms, it's distance without danger. Level 4 is the gauntlet. Maybe an hour on foot, if the path holds without shifting and nothing's nesting in the corridor.” BB's expression goes tense, focused. “I'll clear what I can ahead of you. You navigate.”
“Wait, who's M.E.G.? What’s Poolrooms?” Kat’s voice floats over from the table, cautious but steady. “What even is that?”
“Research group,” you reply, turning to her. It's the first time you've spoken to her directly without anger in your voice, and you can feel the shift, the effort of treating her like a person instead of a scapegoat to your jealousy. “Explorers. They study this place. Map it. They've been operating down here for… I don't know how long. But they're organised. They have resources.” You pause. “I think they can be trusted. It might be the safest option.”
Kat nods, quick and decisive. The relief on her face is visible. Not at the thought of leaving you behind, or at winning some unspoken competition, but at the prospect of a plan. A structure. An exit with a name and a direction and people on the other side who might know what they're doing.
Kat is a practical woman in an impractical situation; you can tell as much, and the offer of practicality is the first solid ground she's stood on since she climbed through a wall in Clark's basement.
“Fine,” Bobby says quickly, his voice rough. “M.E.G. Great. Let's go.” He pushes off the table. “All of us.”
You inhale deeply. “Bobby.”
“I said I'm not leaving without you.” Louder. More determined. The Bobby-edge again, the blade under the casual, except there's no casual left. It's all blade now, all sharp. “I'll go with Kat. But I'm not walking through some—some exit and leaving you in this place. I'm not.”
BB's lips peel back. A flash of teeth behind the Bobby-mask, involuntary, predatory, the territorial snarl surfacing before he can catch it.
The sight of Bobby refusing to leave you, refusing to relinquish, insisting on staying close to the thing BB considers his triggers something primal in the entity underneath.
He catches it at once, swallowing over it. His lips close over his teeth, jaw clenching painfully. He doesn't speak. Just stares at Bobby with the flat, unblinking intensity that tells you he’s choosing, with considerable effort, not to put Bobby through another wall.
Bobby, to his credit, ignores him. Pointedly and aggressively, with that specific brand of human stubbornness. Bobby will not look at BB. Will not address BB. Only pretend that the thing wearing his face is not standing six feet away radiating enough barely-contained fury to crack plaster.
This is Bobby's version of control: the refused glance, the turned shoulder, the full-body declaration that you do not exist to me deployed by a man who’s terrified and is handling it the only way he knows how.
BB turns to you.
His expression changes immediately. The snarl evaporates. The territorial fury, banked. What replaces it is… you haven't seen this expression on him before. Grim. Drawn.
“The Backrooms are more dangerous than they've been in—” He pauses, choosing a unit of measurement you'll understand. “A very long time. Entity X's effect on the other entities hasn't fully dissipated. Level 4 will be a problem. The interior section between the threshold and the outpost is normally dead space. Empty offices, dead lights, nothing worth hunting in. Right now it's contested. Things are sheltering in the cubicle rows and conference rooms because the layout gives them cover, and they're angrier than they should be.” He twists his head, and you hear a crack follow the near reptile movement. “I'll move ahead. Clear what I can. You bring them through behind me. Move only when you’re certain, and stay together.”
You look at him. Really look, for the first time since earlier. Past the anger, and the betrayal, past the closed-off face and the too smooth expression and the omission that restructured everything between you. You look at BB, and you see—
He's thinner somehow.
The word isn't right, but it's the closest you have.
The Bobby-suit fits differently. Looser. The cheekbones more prominent, the jaw more defined, the chain at his rebuilt throat sitting lower against collarbones that press closer to the surface than they used to. He looks worn in a way that has nothing to do with clothing and everything to do with consumption.
And you understand, then, that the fight with Entity X and the sustained lockdown and the perimeter patrols and all the emotional turmoil earlier have been drawing from a reserve that isn't infinite.
As if even ancient things have a fuel line and his is running lower than you've ever seen it.
You choke the worry back. Push it down. Below the anger and the hurt, into a place where the things you can't afford to feel right now go to wait.
“Fine,” you say. “The M.E.G. outpost. Through the Poolrooms, across Level 4.”
You turn to Bobby and Kat. Bobby is standing by the table with his arms crossed and his jaw clenched rigid, staring at a random spot just past BB’s shoulder.
“Grab anything useful,” you instruct. “The almond water Mr. Kitty gave you if there's any left. Take that, don't spill it. Anything you can carry that isn't too heavy.” You glance at Bobby, stopping him in his tracks when he tries to approach you, his mouth open. “We're leaving right now. Not in ten minutes. Not after another argument. Now. Every second we stay is a second Entity X might come back and cause more damage.”
Bobby sucks in a breath, but the argument dies on his tongue. You watch it happen. He could spit back a thousand arguments, but you’re the one speaking and he hears the authority earned through months of exploration, notebooks, and close calls.
He doesn't trust the Backrooms. He doesn't trust BB. But somewhere underneath the hurt and the anger and a thousand unspoken things, Bobby Franklin still trusts you.
He grabs the water from the table without a word, shoving it in his jean pocket. His camera is gone—left on the floor in the junction room on Level 0, the first camera Bobby has ever abandoned—and his hands look wrong without it. Empty. Painfully exposed. Like a man missing a limb he didn't know was prosthetic until it was gone.
Kat gathers the remaining almond water, tucking what food she can into her hoodie pockets. Practical. Quick.
“Let's go,” you say.
You don't look at BB or at Bobby when you say it. You look at the door, at the path beyond it, at the route in your head that threads from 974 through the transitional stairwells to the Poolrooms and across Level 4 to the outpost, and you start walking.
They follow.
“Stay close to me at all times. Don't touch the walls and don’t trust any voices you might hear.”
Your voice rings flat. Instructional. Bobby and Kat fall into step behind you. Bobby first, Kat behind him, the formation you established at the threshold of Level 974 and haven't had to explain because the hierarchy asserted itself the moment you started walking.
You lead. They follow.
The notebook is open in your hand, a pen gripped in your other, and you're annotating as you move. Small marks in the margins, corrections, new landmarks added to half-finished maps.
The stairwell between 974 and the Poolrooms is narrower than you remember. The lights are different. Dimmer. The hum is carrying a frequency you've never heard before. A low, dissonant undertone, like a second voice buried beneath the first, and you don't like it.
Something skitters in the walls.
The sound is dry and rapid, claws or teeth or something with too many joints moving through a space between surfaces, and it tracks your group for three corridors before fading into the deeper dark.
Bobby's breathing changes behind you. Faster. Controlled, but faster. He's holding it together for now, jaw locked, hands fisted, the physical performance of calm layered over a body that is screaming at him to run.
Kat grabs the back of his shirt, her knuckles blanching from how hard she grips. He doesn't shake her off.
The stairwell descends, the air changing the lower you go. Warmer, carrying a chemical sweetness that prickles in your nose and coats the back of your throat. Chlorine.
The smell of it hits your chest like a memory: public pools in the valley, summer afternoons, the way the chemical tang used to cling to your hair for days. Except this chlorine is wrong. Too sweet, too warm. Like the Backrooms took the concept of a swimming pool and replicated it from the smell up, getting the details slightly off.
“What is that?” Kat wonders from behind Bobby, her voice raspy.
“Chlorine,” you answer. “We're close to the Poolrooms.”
“Right. The Poolrooms."
You don't answer. The stairwell opens up, and Level 37 unfolds in front of you.
Water. Everywhere. Still, warm, impossibly blue; a type of blue that doesn't exist in nature, that sits somewhere between swimming pool and bioluminescence, casting its light upward onto tiled walls and low ceilings and pillars that descend into the water at regular intervals.
The room is vast, the ceiling dipping low. The combination creates a sort of compression. Intimate and infinite at the same time, the sense of a space that goes on forever in a room you can almost touch the top of. The water is clear to the bottom. The tiles beneath it are white, clean, pristine, stretching into a distance that the blue light eventually swallows.
No sound except the dripping water. The gentlest possible lapping against tile, rhythmic, hypnotic, the sound of a surface that is barely being disturbed by something you can't see. The hum is different here. Softer, rounded, the dissonant undertone from the stairwell dissolved into sound almost musical.
The Poolrooms absorb aggression the way water absorbs heat. BB was right. Nothing agitated shelters here.
“Jesus Christ,” Bobby says quietly, staring at the water with wide-eyed awe.
You wade in first, and the water is mercifully warm. Body temperature, lapping at your ankles, then your calves, then your knees as the floor descends in a gentle gradient. Your bare feet find purchase on the tiles below.
You've been here before and know the depth map. There’s shallow sections that hug the walls, and the deeper channels between the pillars which intercut with the point near the centre. That’s where the floor drops and the water reaches your waist, the blue light intensifying until the whole room looks like the inside of a sapphire.
Bobby and Kat follow behind you. Slower, less sure.
Kat gasps when the water reaches her thighs. Bobby is silent, wading after you without a word. He scans the surface, the pillars, the low ceiling, and you can see him searching for threats the way you used to. With that raw, untrained hypervigilance you had in the beginning when you could tell something was wrong but didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what.
You navigate by the pillars. Third from the left, then straight, then angled right toward the far wall where the tiles change colour. White to grey to a faint, barely-visible green that marks the deep-end threshold.
BB showed you this path. BB walked it with you, his hand at your back, his cool skin a contrast to the warm water.
And BB's presence now is a pressure at the edges.
You can't see him. Haven't seen him since you left 974. But you can feel the evidence of his passage all the same. A corridor that should have been obstructed, clear. A sound in the distance that starts hostile and cuts out abruptly.
Then a silence that follows when something deadly, fast and ancient has moved through a space and left nothing alive behind it.
He's ahead of you, running interference, clearing the route the way he said he would. And even through the hurt, the reliability of it—the kept promise, the maintained commitment to your safety—swells a lump in your throat you can’t quite swallow over.
Behind you, Kat mumbles something, a joke maybe, chuckling weakly even when Bobby doesn’t join in. His reply is swallowed by water churning around your waist.
“How long did it take?”
You say it without turning around. Your voice carries across the water, bouncing gently off the tiled walls, and the acoustics of the Poolrooms give it a quality that sounds almost peaceful, almost conversational.
Bobby's wading pauses. A half-step. Then he catches up. “What?”
“Before you slept with her.”
Behind Bobby, Kat makes a small, indignant sound, an inhale that she catches in her throat, and then silence again. Just the three of you wading through water in a room that shouldn't exist.
You wait for the usual: the blade, the joke, the easy redirect, maybe even anger. But he surprises you again.
“Fifteen months.” The damaged vocal cords give the words a rough, scraped quality. “After you disappeared. Not after—not after the store. Not after Clark kicked me out. Months after that. She'd been...” He trails off, water sloshing around his hips. “Kat was just there. Every day. And I was—I wasn't okay. I wasn't anything close to okay, and I thought I’d never see you again. And one night I just—” He pauses, breath catching in his chest, refusing to look at you or at Kat while he speaks. “Fifteen months. It took fifteen months.”
Your stomach turns. A slow, visceral roll, nausea that has nothing to do with the chlorine and everything to do with the number.
Fifteen months of absence before the body you loved pressed itself against someone else.
Fifteen months of grief before the hands that used to find the small of your back in a crowd found someone else's waist in the dark.
You do the math. You can't help it. The inventory brain, the cataloguing brain, calculating: he thought you were dead. Everyone had forgotten you. The tapes were blank. Fifteen months is a long time when grieving. Fifteen months of believing the person you love is gone is a long time.
The math doesn't help. Not even a little bit. The pain blooming in your chest is too blinding and too scalding to lean on logic right now.
You nod. Once. Keep wading, your teeth sunk into your cheek to stop yourself from being petty, trying your hardest to understand.
“Did you?” Bobby asks. His voice is different now, quieter, stripped of the combative edge from earlier, carrying instead a fragility that doesn't suit his face. “BB. Did you—with him?”
“No.”
Bobby exhales. A breath he's been holding since Mr Kitty’s house, maybe longer, released through his nose in a long, shuddering stream. The relief on his face is naked and immediate, and you can see it from the corner of your eye even without turning to look at him.
“I taught him to kiss,” you admit, still staring straight ahead. At the pillars, at the blue, at the threshold approaching in the distance. “But it took months. He didn't… he'd never touched anyone. Never been touched. I taught him to dance first. Then the kiss.”
Bobby lets out a soft, bitten scoff. Air pushed through his teeth, his head turning away, and you brace for the quip, for Bobby's deflection mechanism deploying against the image of his own face learning to kiss from the woman he loves.
But the scoff dies without becoming a sentence. It lacks heat., and it lacks edge. It's just a sound a man makes when he's hearing something that hurts in a way his defences can't react against.
When you glance at him, Bobby's face is sad. Not angry like earlier, just sad.
The anger burned out somewhere in the Poolrooms, extinguished by the tranquil water and the washed light, and what's left is just Bobby. Heartbroken. Worn to the bone by grief and stress. Looking at you in the blue glow with his eyes full and his jaw loose, his whole face creased with emotion Bobby Franklin has spent his entire adult life refusing to let sit on his features unchecked.
He opens his mouth. His lips form the beginning of a word—your name, maybe, or something else, something that's been sitting behind his teeth for eighteen months waiting for you to be close enough to hear it—but you turn away. Keep walking.
The water parts around your waist and the threshold is ten metres ahead, and you keep walking because if you stop, if you let Bobby say whatever he's about to say with that face in this blue light, you will not be able to handle it.
You're not going to have this talk with him now, while Kat is right there.
“We're close,” you say instead. “The threshold is at the deep end. Keep your heads up.”
Level 4 is wrong.
The threshold deposits you in a corridor that looks like every office building you've ever been in.
Fluorescent-lit, drop-ceiling, grey carpet, cubicle partitions stretching into a distance that the lights don't fully reach. It should be mundane. It should be the most boring level in the Backrooms. An infinite corporate complex, all right angles and fire exits that don't actually exit and conference rooms with whiteboards still carrying the ghosts of meetings that never happened.
You've seen it before. Your notes describe it as low-threat, low-entity, dead space.
Your notes are wrong.
The lights flicker. Every third tube is dead, creating pockets of darkness between the lit sections, and the darkness is too deep. A dense, weighted thing. The cubicle rows stretch to the left and right, and the partitions are higher than you remember. Head-height, blocking sightlines, creating corridors within corridors, and the air smells like old paper and burnt plastic.
“Stay behind me,” you whisper, your heart rate picking up even as you fight to keep your tone level. “Single file. Don’t speak above a whisper.”
Your feet carry you through the cubicle rows. Past desks with dead monitors and phones with their receivers off the hook, and coffee cups with something growing in them that you don't look at closely. The carpet muffles your steps. Bobby and Kat are ghosts behind you. Silent, moving when you move, stopping when you stop, their breathing controlled, shallow, and terrified.
There’s sudden movement in the cubicle row to your left.
You freeze. Hand up, the signal you developed on Level 1 with BB, palm flat, fingers spread, stop now. Bobby and Kat stop at once.
The movement continues, a shape passing behind the partition, visible through the gap between the top of the cubicle wall and the drop ceiling. Tall. Hunched. Moving with a liquid, boneless gait that doesn't match any anatomy you've catalogued. It passes through the row parallel to yours, separated by one partition, close enough that you can hear the sound it makes. A wet, clicking respiration, each breath accompanied by a small pop, like a joint dislocating and relocating with every inhale.
It passes, the clicking fading into the background as it goes. You count to thirty before you move again.
Two more corridors follow. You pass a conference room with the door ajar, and inside you spot something that looks like skin draped over a chair. Smooth, pale, and gently rising and falling with a respiration you can see from the doorway. You steer them around it. Wide. Bobby's eyes find it through the gap, and his face goes grey while Kat presses her face into his shoulder and doesn't look.
The evidence of BB is everywhere.
A corridor that ends in a smear of black against the wall. Fresh, wet, still dripping. A fire exit door buckled inward from a force applied on the other side, the metal warped around a handprint that's too large to be human. A section of cubicles reduced to kindling, the partitions shattered, the desks overturned, and in the centre of the wreckage a shape. Crumpled and motionless, its limbs arranged at angles that suggest it was alive when it was rearranged and is not alive now.
You don't let Bobby and Kat see this one. You route them around the long way, through a break room with a vending machine that hums with a frequency that makes your ears ring.
The M.E.G. outpost is close. You can feel it.
A shift in the hum, a thinning of the air that means a threshold is near. The levels get permeable around outposts, BB told you once. The boundaries soften.
You round the corner into a wider corridor—open-plan, the cubicles giving way to a broad hallway with glass-walled offices on either side—and you see the equipment. Monitors. Cables. A mounted camera fixed to the wall at head height, its red recording light blinking steadily. Sensor arrays bolted to the ceiling tiles. Data collection equipment arranged along the corridor walls with the organised, labelled precision of people who’ve been here a long time and plan to stay.
“M.E.G.,” you say, exhaling. The relief that pangs your chest is almost physical. A loosening in your shoulders, a softening in the grip of your hand on the notebook. “We made it. This is their monitoring station. The outpost should be just ahead. We just need to—”
The hands come from behind you.
Three sets. Gloved. They grab your arms, your shoulders, the back of your neck, practised and coordinated.
You're yanked backwards off your feet, and the notebook hits the floor, your spine slamming against a body wearing tactical gear, a muffled voice barking something clipped into a radio, and the hands are everywhere. On your wrists, pinning your arms, dragging you sideways toward a section of corridor you haven't mapped.
These aren't M.E.G.
The gear is different. Same black from the first attack, not yellow. No patches, no insignia, no identification. The faces behind the balaclavas are blank and professional, and they are not studying you. They’re collecting you, the way you'd collect a sample they failed to collect the first time around.
Bobby's scream rips through the corridor.
“GET YOUR HANDS OFF HER—GET OFF—”
He's fighting. You can hear it behind you, the sounds of a man throwing himself at something larger and better-armed, the crack of a fist against body armour, the grunt of impact. Bobby's voice, raw and shredded and operating on pure adrenaline, screaming obscenities that echo off the walls while someone restrains him.
“Leave them,” one of the agents says into the radio, his voice clipped, indifferent. “The woman is the objective. Leave the other two for the others, it’ll buy us some time.”
For the others. The words register with a cold, clinical clarity. Leave Bobby and Kat in a Level 4 corridor swarming with agitated entities and walk away. Leave them to die. Leave them as discarded variables in whatever equation these people are solving, the irrelevant remainder, the human wreckage.
Your rage swells to near blinding.
A sudden, massive, tidal expansion in your chest, filling every cavity, pressing against your ribs and your throat and the backs of your eyes.
The agent's hand is on your arm, and the grip is iron and Bobby is screaming. Kat is somewhere behind you shouting, and these people are going to leave them here to die. And the anger is so total, so complete, so enormous that it bypasses your brain entirely and becomes a physical thing, a vibration, a frequency—
The hands holding you fall off.
You stumble forward. The grip just… released. You spin, expecting to see BB, expecting the displaced air and the black eyes and the sound of the hum—
The agent who was holding you is staring at his hands. What's left of them anyway. His gloves end at the wrist, and below the wrist there is nothing. Smooth and cauterised, the flesh sealed as if the hands were never there to begin with.
He hasn't started screaming yet. The shock is still travelling from his eyes to his brain to his vocal cords.
You turn.
Entity X is standing in the corridor behind you.
The fluorescent lights are red again. That deep, arterial crimson that transforms the office corridor into a living organism. Red light pulses, filling the hallway from floor to ceiling, its matte, leathery skin absorbing the crimson until it looks like the corridor itself has grown a body. The featureless face is smooth and wrong, but then the eyes peel open again at your presence, and the burning yellow fixes on you at once.
On you. Only you. As always.
You stumble backwards, your heel catching a cable on the floor. You barely keep your feet.
Entity X is three metres away, and it reaches for you—the arm extending, elongating, the joints clicking with a sound like knuckles cracking in an empty room—and its chest produces a noise.
Low. Gurgling. A wet, clicking sound that lives somewhere between a purr and the settling of bones, repetitive and rhythmic and deeply, fundamentally wrong in a way that your brain can’t place.
It's a sound without analogue. A sound that a body makes when it has no face to express what it's feeling and must channel everything through the mechanics of its torso, and the sound is fixated. Directed at you.
The audio equivalent of the eyes that never leave.
“Get away from me.” Your voice comes out harder than you expect. Sharper. The fear is there. Your heart is slamming, your palms are slick with sweat, your legs trembling beneath you, but your anger is louder. The rage that swelled in your chest hasn't receded. It's sitting right behind your teeth, and when you speak it comes out as a command, not a plea. “Leave me the fuck alone.”
Entity X cocks its head.
The motion is slow. Curious. The massive featureless head tilts to one side with an almost canine quality. It’s almost the same tilt BB does, just wrong, and for one terrible second the gesture looks interested. Like it heard you. Understood what you meant. Like your anger registered as something other than a feeble attempt at resistance, and the fury in your voice is a thing it recognises, that it wants.
The agents regroup behind you. Three of them. The handless one is on the floor, in shock. The others raise weapons. Compact and military-grade, and open fire.
Entity X doesn't look at them.
The bullets hit its torso and sink into the matte skin like stones into mud, and Entity X's arm sweeps sideways, casual and unhurried, the way you'd brush a fly, and the agent closest to it comes apart.
Messily. The one behind him fares worse. The sounds are wet, almost mechanical and over very quickly, leaving nothing but puddles of gore on the floor.
Entity X does all of it without moving its eyes from you once. Bored. Performing violence with the same disinterested efficiency that a human swats insects. The agents are not a threat, not an obstacle, not even a distraction.
Entity X silences them and returns its full focus on you, and the clicking sound continues in its chest, steady, rhythmic, almost gentle.
BB arrives like a thunder crack.
The air splits around you, the pressure wave alone knocking you sideways. Kat hits the floor rolling, and Bobby staggers into the glass wall of an office.
BB hits Entity X at full force, and the two of them crash through the corridor wall and into the space beyond. Cubicles disintegrate around them, ceiling tiles raining down, and the fluorescent tubes shatter in cascading waves as two things too large for this hallway tear it apart around each other.
BB's hand finds your shoulder. Between one collision and the next, between heartbeats. He's there, beside you, in front of you, his black eyes wild and his damaged face cracking, his grip on your shoulder bruising.
“The outpost. Go. Now.”
You run, reaching for Bobby blindly.
Bobby is already moving, Kat's hand in his, pulling her along, his legs unsteady but functional, his face a mask of focused terror.
You grab the notebook from the floor as you pass it, scrambling on your hands and knees. The three of you sprint down the corridor toward the monitoring equipment, toward the thinning in the air that means exit.
You spot them in the distance first.
Yellow suits and masks on. Four of them, clustered at the far end of the corridor around a section of wall that looks slightly different. Smoother, carrying a faint shimmer that you recognise as the visual signature of a no-clip point.
M.E.G. operatives. Real ones, in their trademark gear, and they're waving at you, frantic, urgent, beckoning you forward with the full-body gestures as the fight behind you intensifies.
Bobby's hand closes around your wrist, pulling you forward, and you're running together, his callused fingers locked on your pulse point.
For about three seconds, it's the parking lot at Clark's store, it's the apartment doorway, it's every moment he should have reached for you and didn't. Except now he's reaching, his hand is on you, now he's pulling you toward safety with a bruising grip that says I’m not letting go—
Entity X's hand closes around Bobby's torso.
The grab is sudden and massive, an arm extending from the wreckage of the corridor behind you, reaching over your head, the joints clicking in rapid succession as it unfolds to its full, telescoping length.
The clawed fingers close around Bobby's ribcage and lift. His hand tears from your wrist. His feet leave the ground. His body rises—up, up, Entity X hoisting him like he weighs nothing, his legs kicking, arms flailing, his face contorted with a terror so complete it erases everything else.
Entity X holds Bobby in the air and looks at you.
The burning yellow eyes, fixed. The clicking purr in its chest, steady. Holding Bobby in one hand the way you'd hold up a lantern, displaying him, presenting him, showing you the man in its grip and watching your face to see what you'll do.
“Let him go!” You slam your fists against Entity X's arm—the matte skin fever-hot and yielding and horrifyingly close to organic—and the contact sends a jolt through your system that feels like recognition, like touching a live wire, like something in Entity X's body responding to something in yours. “Let him go, put him down—”
Entity X peers down at you, his head tilting. Curious. Reading. The same interested quality from before. Your hands are on its arm, and it's letting you hit it, absorbing the blows with the patient stillness of a thing that wants to see how far the anger goes.
It throws Bobby.
A casual, underhanded toss, its wrist flicking, the arm releasing, Bobby's body sailing through the air of the corridor and hitting the wall near the no-clip point with a sound that empties your lungs. He crumples. Slides down the wall. You lurch towards him, but Entity X’s clawed hand closes over your throat, yanking you back toward it.
Kat's scream is a bright, piercing thing that cuts through the red light and the clicking, and the M.E.G. operatives move. Two of them grab Bobby under the arms, a third seizing Kat, who was running toward him, dragging them toward the shimmer in the wall.
Bobby is dazed.
His head rolls to one side, his eyes unfocused, blood from a gash above his eyebrow streaming down the side of his face. But he's fighting.
Even concussed, even barely conscious, his hands are grabbing at the M.E.G. operative's jacket, his body lurching back toward the corridor, back toward you, and his mouth is forming your name.
You can see it, can read it on his lips, the shape of the word you taught him to say in a hallway in high school in your junior year, and his eyes find yours through the blood and the chaos and the red light and for one second the corridor contracts to the width of that gaze.
You and Bobby. Looking at each other across a distance that is about to become permanent.
The M.E.G. operatives haul him through. Bobby's reaching hand—the same hand that dropped a camera for you, that grabbed your wrist, that used to find the small of your back in a crowd and cup your face before he kissed you—disappears through the shimmer, still reaching. Kat follows, and the wall smooths over again. The no-clip point seals.
They're gone.
Entity X stands behind you. The clicking sound in its chest shifts, lowering, a frequency that almost sounds satisfied. It adjusts its grip on you.
BB's fist connects with the side of Entity X's torso.
The impact sends the massive red body sideways, slamming into the corridor wall with enough force to buckle the drywall and shatter every remaining light tube within a fifty-foot radius.
The red light dies, plunging the space into darkness lit only by Entity X's yellow eyes and the faint, colourless glow leaking through the cracks in BB's ruined face.
BB's hand finds your shoulder.
The world folds.
The displacement dumps you onto the grass of Level 14, and the impact is soft, yielding, the earth absorbing you the way the Poolrooms absorb sound.
You land on your hands and knees, and the grass is cool and damp against your palms, and you gasp. Pull air in through your teeth. Your lungs are burning. Your ribs ache from the displacement, from the running, from the screaming, from the hours or minutes or however long it's been since you ate a cookie in the pink bedroom and walked into the worst day of your life.
BB is beside you. On his knees. His hands on your arms, your shoulders, running over you with that focused, diagnostic urgency. He’s checking for injuries, for broken things he can fix with his hands, because the broken things he can't fix are piling up faster than he can count.
His fingers press against your ribs. Your wrists. His eyes search your face with a desperation that’s stripped away the last of the Bobby-mask. What's looking at you is BB, just BB, the cracks in his face leaking that pale light, his jaw pulsing, his mouth pressed into a tight line.
“You're not hurt,” he says. Half-statement, half-question, his hands lingering on your shoulders. “Tell me you're not hurt.”
You shake your head because you can't speak yet.
The breath is still caught somewhere between your diaphragm and your throat, snagged on the adrenaline. On the afterimage of Bobby's reaching hand disappearing through the wall, and the sound of Entity X's clicking purr.
You fall back onto the grass, press your palms over your eyes, and breathe. In. Out. In. Out. The stream somewhere behind you moves over its stones with the gentle, trickling sound while golden light drips over your shaking hands.
It takes minutes. Several.
The shaking subsides in stages. Hands first, then arms, then the deep tremor in your core that's been running since since the red light, since the first time you heard Entity X's clicking in the corridor and knew, with a certainty that bypassed logic, that it was coming for you.
The shaking stops, your breathing evening out. Your hands drop from your face, and the meadow is still there. All of it. The tall grass, the fallen log, the amber sky that never changes. BB sits across from you with his knees drawn up and his forearms resting on them and his face wearing the careful, watchful expression.
You rub your face. Drag your fingers across your eyes, your cheekbones, the tight muscles at your jaw. Working off the edge. Pressing the panic down into the place where it can be stored and processed later, when BB isn't watching, when the aftershocks have enough room to shake without an audience.
“Entity X is gone,” BB says quietly after another moment, testing. His voice is low and rough, stripped of its usual easy warmth. “They retreated. Again. Whatever he wanted—” He looks troubled, genuinely so. “Bobby and Kat are through. The M.E.G. have them. They're out of the Backrooms.”
You nod, staring blankly at the grass between your knees.
“You did it.” Softer now. Almost gentle. The voice from the kitchen, from the dance, from the mornings he'd say hey, baby and the world would shrink to the width of his full mouth. “You got them through. They're safe because of you. And I can—I'll rebuild. The apartment. The sublevel. I'll find Entity X and after I've dealt with it, we can—”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
BB falls silent.
A bird, the same small brown bird, or one just like it, lands on the branch above the fallen log and tips its head and watches you with one bright black eye.
“About Bobby.” Your voice is calm. Scraped clean of anger, clean of accusation. Just the question, unadorned, sitting in the air between you. “You heard him. Through the wall, same as me. For months. You heard him looking for me. You knew he loved me. You knew he was sitting three inches away from the entry point, saying the things I needed to hear.” You look at BB. His face, Bobby's face, the face you touched and kissed and studied in firelight and fluorescent light and the blue glow of the Poolrooms. “Why didn't you tell me, BB?”
BB is quiet for a long time. The bird chirps a few times in the tree above. The amber light paints his cracked and healing face, and the tense silence between you fills with the full weight of every answer he could give and the inadequacy of all of them.
“I heard how lonely you were.” Picking through the words the way you'd pick through wreckage, testing each one before putting weight on it. “Before you came through. When you were alone in the basement, on the late shifts. I heard what loneliness sounded like in your voice. And when you were here—when you cried, when you talked about him, when you said he stopped seeing me—I thought—” He falters, shifting in such an shy, human way you almost soften. “I thought we were the same. That our loneliness was the same. Mine and yours. And that I could—”
“That's not what I asked,” you intone coolly.
BB flinches. His fingers curl against his forearms, pressing into the fabric of his ruined shirt as he ducks his head lower.
“BB. Tell me the truth.”
BB's face visibly contorts with pain, his features rearranging around an admission he's been carrying for months the way you carried your anger. Not smoothing over. Not closing off. Just hurting.
“I knew you still loved him,” he admits, barely above a whisper. His eyes fix on the grass, unable to look at you. “I could hear it. Every time you said his name. Every time you cried about him. Every time you talked about the apartment, the mornings you shared, the way he used to look at you. You never stopped loving him. And I—” His voice thins, fraying. “I thought if you knew he was looking, if you knew he was right there, you'd leave. You'd go back through the wall and I'd—”
He stops, swallowing thickly. The sound is audible. The borrowed mechanism of a throat that doesn't need to swallow performing the gesture anyway because the emotion behind it is real even if the body isn't.
“I know it was selfish,” he adds in a hushed whisper.
You gaze at him blankly for what feels like a small eternity.
“You didn't just withhold it.” Your voice is steady, but your hands are shaking again. Anger and grief coiling together so tightly you can't separate them, can't feel where one ends and the other begins. “You used my loneliness. You heard me at my lowest, and you leaned into it. You built a life around my isolation because as long as I was isolated, as long as I didn't know there was something to go back to, I'd stay. With you. That's not love, BB. That's keeping.”
BB's head snaps up. His eyes are bright and wounded, but the expression on his face is gutted. Sheer hollowed-out devastation of hearing the worst possible interpretation of the best thing he ever did and recognising, with a clarity that makes his whole face crumble, that the interpretation isn't wrong.
“But it's what you did.” Quiet. Final. “Regardless of what you meant. Regardless of how well you meant it. That is exactly what you did. You heard a woman crying about being invisible, and instead of telling her she was being looked for, you made yourself the only thing she could see.”
The amber light falls on his struck face, and the cracks in it have stopped leaking, the damage from the fight slowly closing, and the face that's left is Bobby's, wearing an expression he never wore.
Raw and open, and so deeply, completely sorry that the air around it seems to bend.
“You were happy,” he says quietly. Almost to himself. Like he's testing the memory against the accusation, holding them up side by side to see if they can coexist. “You started smiling again. Laughing. When we walked through the Poolrooms the first time, you laughed at something I said and the sound—” His voice catches. “The sound was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard. I thought—I thought I was fixing it. The loneliness. The pain. I thought if I could just—keep you safe, keep you close, give you everything he didn't—you wouldn't need to go back. You wouldn't want to. And that would be enough.”
Your eyes burn, tears pressing forward, hot and insistent, and you clench your jaw against them.
Because you can hear his sincerity. The genuine, unperformed, unhuman sincerity. He heard you cry through concrete and decided, with the full weight of its ancient and limited understanding, that the solution to your pain was its presence.
BB didn't think he was trapping you. BB thought he was saving you.
The distinction doesn't make it okay. The distinction makes it worse because it means the thing that hurt you was trying, with every tool it had, to love you well. And its best tool was deception.
“You should have told me.” Tears are falling now, and you don't wipe them. “You should have given me the information. All of it. And then you should have let me choose. Even if the choice was leaving. Even if the choice was him. You should have let it be my choice, BB. That's what love does. It doesn't decide for the other person. It doesn't curate the options to guarantee the outcome you want. It gives them everything, and it lets them choose, and it survives the choosing, even if the choice breaks it.”
BB says nothing. His eyes fix on yours, and his expression is accepting. Terrible, slow, grinding acceptance. The kind that arrives not all at once but in layers, each one heavier than the last, pressing down on whatever passes for his heart.
“I didn't want to lose you,” he whispers, his voice catching. “I'm sorry. I—I didn't want to lose you.”
You sit across from the being who built you a kitchen and taught itself to kiss and pressed its mouth to your forehead every morning so it could lie to you with every tender gesture because the truth would have set you free and freedom was the one thing it couldn't give.
You breathe in, glancing up at the sky. At those breathtaking gradients of gold and amber, laced with violet at the edges. The sky that never changes, the eternal late afternoon of a level called Paradise that exists inside a place that shouldn't exist at all.
You look back at BB.
“Do you know why I stayed?” you ask softly. “In the beginning. When I found out you weren't actually Bobby. Do you know why I didn't run?”
BB's face tightens, and the pain that crosses it is visible, bright hot.
“Because of the face,” he says, low and pained. The words dragged out of him like splinters from beneath the skin. “Because I look like him. Because you love him. Because you wanted him—always him, always Bobby—and I was close enough.”
Your eyes fill. The tears spill over fresh, tracking down your cheeks, and you stand. Cross the distance between you. Close it. Three feet. Two. One. Until you're standing in front of him and he's looking up at you from the grass with Bobby's blue eyes and BB's anguish and the meadow light on both of you.
You touch his face.
Your fingertips on his cheekbone. The line of his jaw. The scar from the cabinet door that happened to someone else's body. Your thumb traces the corner of his mouth. That corner where the grin starts, the lopsided one, the one that's his and not Bobby's.
BB makes a sound. Low. Wounded.
A vibration that starts in his chest and comes through his throat as something between a sigh and a moan. His eyes close and his head turns into your palm, nuzzling closer. Desperate, pressing his face into your hand the way he did the first time you touched him. The sound he's making is continuous, a keening that he can't seem to stop, and his hand comes up and covers yours on his cheek and holds it there, feeling him shake.
“It was never about the face,” you choke out, your voice breaking. The tears fall freely now, and you let them. “It was you. Just you, BB. The way you listened. The way you learned me. The way you held me like I was the first thing you'd ever wanted to hold. The way you asked am I doing it right after kissing me, and the answer was always yes. It was always just you.”
BB's eyes crack open. Wet. Bobby's blue, glassy with a moisture that shouldn't be there, that his body doesn't produce, that has no biological mechanism to explain it… and yet. His lashes are dark and clumped, his eyes full and the expression in them is so devastated, so completely and utterly undone, that you have to look away.
You pull your hand back.
BB makes another sound. Louder. A moan that cracks open midway through and becomes something raw and guttural, a noise that comes from the place beneath the face, beneath the voice, from whatever vast and ancient thing lives at the core of him and is now experiencing, for the first time in its incomprehensible existence, the human agony of being left by the person it loves.
“No,” he breathes. “Please. No, no.”
You lower your head. “Take me to the M.E.G. outpost.”
“Please.” His hand reaches for yours but catches only air. You've stepped back and his fingers close on nothing and his face—Bobby's face, BB's face, the face that learned to smile because you smiled first—contorts. “Don't. Don't leave. You can't—I'll fix it. I'll tell you everything, I'll never keep anything from you again, I'll—”
“BB.”
“—the apartment, I'll make it better. I'll find Entity X and end it, and you'll be safe. You'll be safe forever, I can keep you safe, please, I can—”
You can barely speak. “BB. Stop.”
He stops, his mouth trembling. The word he was forming dies on his tongue. His eyes rest on you, wide and wet, terrified.
“All that's waiting out there is a life that hurt you,” he blurts out, desperate. The words tumble, tripping over each other. BB, who is rarely inarticulate, is now struggling to assemble sentences fast enough to change the outcome. “Illness and old age and people who forgot you and—and a man who didn't see you until you were gone. That's what's on the other side of the wall. You’ll d-die. I… no. Please, no. Not you, not you.”
Your heart is ripping apart. A physical sensation of something in your chest being torn in two directions at once, the fibres separating, the tissue rending.
He's right. He's right about all of it. The world on the other side of the wall is the one that hurt you. The one that made you invisible. The one that let you stand in doorways waiting to be loved and answered with grunts and cold sheets and blank tapes that erased your face. There is nothing on the other side of the wall that is gentle the way BB is gentle, nothing that listens the way he listens, nothing that will press its mouth to your forehead every morning and hold you through the night and learn your name syllable by syllable.
But it's your life. The miserable, broken, painful, mortal thing. Yours.
“If you love me,” you say in a quiet rasp, each word costing a piece of your heart you can feel being subtracted from the centre of your chest. “If you love me the way you say you do. If that promise you made me meant anything at all, or the name I gave you meant anything... then you'll let me leave.”
BB stares at you. The tears—his tears, not Bobby's, the moisture that has no biological origin and exists only because the grief demanded a vessel—tracking down his cheeks, and where they fall the skin glows. Faint. Luminescent. A soft, shimmering iridescence that blooms along the tracks of the tears like bioluminescence, like foxfire, a visible signature of an inhuman emotion marking inhuman skin.
His agony written on his face in light.
BB reaches for your shoulder slowly. His hand is gentle, his touch almost absent.
The meadow folds around you, your stomach lurching. The golden light compresses, narrows, and when the world straightens again, you're standing in the corridor on Level 4.
The monitoring equipment. The cameras. The wall with the shimmer. The remains from operatives are mostly gone. Absorbed by the Backrooms, consumed by the level itself, the corridor healing over the evidence of violence the way skin heals over a wound. A few remain. Dark shapes at the periphery that you don't look at.
The no-clip wall is there. The shimmer and behind it the real world. A place where it rains, and people eat hotdogs and phone calls go unanswered. Where love atrophies through neglect and everyone you've ever known has forgotten your face.
And BB's hand rests on your shoulder, trembling openly. A hand that was built to hold on, that heard you, chose you, kept you, loved you and lied to you, and is now standing in a corridor doing the one thing it has never done.
Letting go.
His hand lifts from your shoulder.
You feel the absence instantly. The place where his palm was goes cold, the last physical connection between your bodies dissolving into air.
“Please,” he rasps behind you, low and shaking, stripped of everything. The charm, the cockiness, the ancient resonance, the hum's harmonic, all of it gone, the voice of a thing that has been reduced to its simplest possible setting: a being, in a hallway, begging. “Please stay. Please don't leave me alone again. Please.”
You turn, walking toward the wall. Your notebook tight against your chest.
“Please.” Louder, more frantic, the word cracking. “I'll be better. I'll tell you everything. I'll never lie to you again. I'll—I can change. I can learn. You taught me how to dance and how to kiss. How to hold you. Teach me this too, teach me how to let you be angry and still stay, teach me how to—”
You keep walking. The shimmer is close now. Five metres. Four.
“Please don't go.” His voice is climbing. Not in volume, in pitch. In frequency. The human register giving way to something else, something that vibrates in the walls and the floor, fillings in your teeth. “Please. I can't—I'll be alone. I'll be alone again. I was alone for so long, and then you were there, and I heard you. You were the first voice in—in—”
The sound fractures. Becomes a keening. A high, sustained, inhuman wail that has no words left in it, just the raw frequency of loss, a being older than language grieving in the only language it has left. Sound itself, vibration itself, the hum turned inside out and made to carry a weight it was never designed to hold.
You stop.
Your composure breaks. Silent tears pour down your face, and your mouth contorts, your chest heaving and you press the notebook against your sternum until it hurts. The keening behind you is the worst sound you’ve ever heard. Worse than the Smiler, worse than Entity X, worse than Bobby's voice saying baby? in a yellow corridor, because this sound has your name in it.
This sound is the noise a heart makes when it's too old and too vast and too full to survive what's happening to it.
You turn and look behind you.
The corridor is empty.
The shimmer on the wall pulses gently, waiting. And the space where BB stood—three metres back, in the corridor, where his voice was—is vacant. Just the flat, beige, infinite emptiness of a level that's been suddenly abandoned.
He's gone.
For all his power. For all the corridors he owns and the entities he's unmade and the levels he moves through like blood through a vein. For all the ancient, vast, immeasurable force that lives inside the Bobby-suit and behind the borrowed eyes and underneath the face he chose because he heard a woman crying and wanted to be the thing that made her stop.
The one thing BB couldn't do was watch you leave him.
You press your hands over your face, and you sob. Hard. A sound that comes from the bottom of your gut and fills the corridor and bounces off the walls and comes back to you changed, louder.
You scrub your face. The heels of your hands grinding against your eyes until white spots swim in your vision. You breathe wetly, straightening, and look toward the wall. The shimmering exit.
You step through.
an: in which everyone has a no good, very bad day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
i have been enjoying this series pretty much in silence thus far but holy fuck i need someone to talk about this with. or rather i just need to get aaaall of this off my chest.
i thought part 5 already killed me but this? oh. oh.
don't get me wrong, now that we had bobby in the backrooms and we had that really emotional little reunion i was all like yeah, leave with bobby. i'm sure you two can figure it out. you'll be fine, you'll be happy, something like that. he was suffering so much just be together again, please.
and then those fuckass (i mean this in the most positive and gutwrenching way possible) rambles from bb. the pleading, the begging. it destroyed me.
i switched from yeah, go with bobby to hell no, don't leave this sad boy? he's right about all of it. stay here and you both can be happy. how dare you leave him? look at him! he's crying! what are you doing? stop hurting him! stop hurting yourself!
holy shit i'm so conflicted and so damn curious about what else is going to happen.
yeah. absolute emotional rollercoaster. i am dead after this, seriously (and i cannot wait to read more).
oh and mr. kitty? this guy's officially my favourite now. he's nice, provides snacks and his house is cute. what more do we need?
(also putting this under my #recs tag because if you haven't read this? do it. now.)
I know I've been really inactive lately - I hope that's gonna change soon, I've been working on some stuff and hope to get it out soon. I've just not been that motivated lately and I don't wanna write unmotivated cause it won't turn out well, which both you guys and I are not gonna like.
But anyway, since I've been reading more than writing lately (and because I'm a pretty silent reader - I know, shame on me), I wanted to show my appreciation for the other writers in the AKOTSK fandom this time, cause seriously, y'all are amazing. So many masterpieces, I swear. Even if you're not on this post, consider yourself highly appreciated.
So yeah, these are just some of my personal favourites <3 And some of them have not so little rambles from me, be warned.
General.
Anything by @the-darklings
The way she writes is incredible. If you haven't already, go through her entire LS (Lady Stark) verse. The way she writes the characters and the unique dynamics of each pairing is insane (meant entirely positively). Like many others, I'm a complete sucker for her trailer-trash!Aerion. The dynamic is so good. But I'm also always here for some #icespring and #winterhall (and the others)
Welcome To The Family by @padmespetal (6 parts)
Generally a platonic little series centered around Egg and Reader. So amazing. But with some undertones with other characters that can be viewed as romantic/attraction. Just absolutely amazing. Absolute emotional rollercoaster and so wholesome. I love it. And the two extra fics for Daeron and Maekar where it turns into more? *Chef's kiss* as well.
She's My Wife by @cosmictheo (5 parts)
A series where our dear Duncan mistakes the wives of several characers as their child/sister/whatever. Very wholesome. I love it.
Aerion Targaryen.
Behind Closed Doors & Always You by @targaryenstar
My Only Peace Was You by @da2019
also heavily featues Valarr.
To Tame A Dragon by @/iydiamartinx
!Not on Tumblr!
It's an x OC (Aerion's twin, Aerea), and I know that's not everyone's thing but I swear, this has to be one of the most amazing things I've ever read in my entire life. Well written, great characterizations (Daeron is hilarious, Valarr's a sly little piece of shit, I love them both), insanely amazing dynamics. Just wow. Aerea's just as fucked up as Aerion and it works so well. Tragic and hot at the same time. If you don't mind some x OC then read this. Trust me. And read the warnings; as I said, they're both fucked up. but again, we love it.
Conflragated by @/alyssatrgryen on Wattpad
@alyssatrgryen (just only now found out this lovely author is on tumblr as well, so i wanted to tag)
Daeron Targaryen.
Drowning You In My Sleep by @novaursa (2 parts)
Just chef's kiss. So beautiful.
Sleepless Nights by @thought-you-knew
This rearranged by brain chemistry. I love Daeron.
Can't Two People Reconnect? by @redwinelewis
Valarr Targaryen.
Anything by @lalalovelyly
Her works are incredible. So well written, amazing ideas. I love it. A lot of Valarr content for those starving for it (like me). And the newest Aerion pieces are absolutely great as well.
Vow Of Love by @magneticwritings
Hard Headed Woman by @sansaorgana
All Creatures Great And Small by @/thought-you-knew
Don't get me wrong, I'm terrified of spiders, but this is adorable. I really relate to Valarr in this one. He's really like "burn it. get it away from me." and honestly? same.
Forbidden Fruit by @teavocationmagic
my bisexual ass loves some girl on girl action as well.
The Goodswood Escape by @targlove
Baelor Targaryen.
What Duty Asks Of... by @fluttervoid
Well-Bred by @gutsby
Don't even ask. This changed something in me. I- wow.
The Dragon And The Stag by @lovebugism
also heavily features Lyonel.
Born Of Fire And Flame (Blood Calls To Blood) by @frankels
Maekar Targaryen.
I'd Give My All by @feral4youu (4 parts, as of now)
Amazing. The tragedy of them? Heartwrenching. They love each other so much. Be aware, Dyanna's a bit of the bad guy here, but it works really well with the story, although I have nothing against her (in canon). Excited to read more!
The Spoiled Wife Of Prince Maekar by @lostrealityr (4 parts)
A Full Bed by @maekarsmistress
So wholesome, I love it. Maekar, his wife and all the Maekarlings united.
Doubt Your Man by @escapic-mezzanine
Lyonel Baratheon.
this by @myladyship
It's not a fic, just a little idea, you could say. But I just loved it too much not to include it. Lyonel brings me so much comfort for some reason. been hooked on this man from second one.
My Difficult Woman by @entitled-fangirl
I love their dynamic so much. The way he calls her "my dragon"? Mwah.
The Helm Stays On! by @pearlessance
Storms And Dragons by @iydiamartinx
Most likely my favourite Lyonel fic. I just love their energy so much.
Hey! Are you still planning on writing ‘just can’t let her go?’ The teaser had me GRIPPED.
Hello!
Thank you so much for your ask!
It always makes me happy to know when someone is excited for something I'm writing :)
Anyway, to answer your question with complete honesty: I don't know.
I have a draft, part of it is written, but I'm currently so not motivated to finish it, which I am incredibly sorry about to everyone that has been waiting for this.
If I get the motivation to continue it, I definitely will, but right now I can unfortunately not tell you if or when that will happen.
I have contemplated taking the teaser down exactly for that reason, so no one has to be disappointed to find this old of a teaser without a written fic already posted.
So yeah, I'm sorry that I can't give you a specific answer as of now.
But thank you so much for reaching out to me and asking about it. That means a lot to me!
Something about this image always resonates with me in an oddly safe way. Something about time passing, or maybe it’s acceptance. Cliff stands back, looking onward towards the other three as if he knows something. Proud of something he’s shared onto other people.
He knows they’ll be okay. Just in case.
The other three, however, they’re unaware. They think Cliff is beside them. They’re busy with the crowd, the energy, the attention. They’re in a wall of black and white, unmovable colors. The crowd shines a yellow, warmth and embrace.
Cliff stays behind a faint hue of blue. He knows they’ll be okay.
this is so beautiful yet sad at the same time. the symbolism this picture can be viewed with now, looking back on it, is incredible.
Even though none of them could have possibly known or suspected anything at that time it really looks like "yeah, those boys are gonna be just fine. they're gonna make it."
he looks like he's so proud of them. and i'm sure he is, wherever he is.
(totally not basically crying my eyes out at 1am, no of course not...)
hihi!!! I saw that you said you're open to any suggestions for haymitch, so here I am!!
okayyy so I'm thinking they're both 12 victors, and obviously that already comes with some relationship, and they're on their way home after one of their first parties/mentoring/whatever, and they're are so extremely exhausted and all they want to do go to bed. something or another happens, maybe their family does something weird, and they're just super snappy and exhausted. Haymitch gets everything together for them, and pretty much gets them ready for bed. He COMPLETELY takes over for them, simply because he's a gentleman. He is also totally not a fan of caring for someone like this.
thank you!!! I love your fics hehe
Hello Lovely!
You've sent this in so long ago, I'm so sorry <3 I was pretty inactive and needed to get myself back into Haymitch writing mood, but here I am now :)
Here's F-F-F-Falling
I really hope you still get around to reading it and hopefully you enjoy it, thank you so much for requesting <3 If you had anything else in mind, please feel free to send me another ask, no harm done.
content warnings/contains: spoilers for sunrise on the reaping!, fluff, angst, talks of the hunger games and the arena, talks of death and violence, the capitol and snow are their own warning - as always, i think i kept it neutral - if i slipped somewhere feel free to tell me, more fluff than angst hopefully, tense family relationships, can be read as established relationship or not, not proofread, grammatical errors - probably
requested: yes
a/n: so, i'm currently working on finishing all the requests i already started and just haven't finished because i literally disappeared for a few months. this has been requested ages ago, i hope the dear requester might come across this by chance and still find to enjoy it <3
link to masterlist
The past few days had been anything but enjoyable.
No one from the Districts really associated the Capitol with anything positive at all. Despite the humongous amount of propaganda they shared, advertising it as something so great and glorious, only they themselves were actually dense enough to believe it. Everyone else was glad to stay as far away from it as they possibly could.
A lot of people would rather live in poverty, wondering every day if they’d go to bed hungry or not, than even step foot into the Capitol. Countless people did. Snow and his team had been brainwashing the entirety of Panem for decades. With some, it worked. With some, it didn’t. Surprisingly enough, it seemed to be more effective in the lower districts, the ones closer to the Capitol. The ones that were already quite rich themselves.
Alright, maybe it wasn’t that surprising.
Unfortunately, there were times where going to the Capitol was inevitable.
The worst of them all was getting reaped for the annual Hunger Games. And even worse, if you happened to be the lucky person to return back home, it wouldn’t be the only time you’d ever stepped foot in the Capitol. Though lucky might not have been the right word.
The peace and quiet that was promised to the victors of the Hunger Games never truly comes. Year by year, they need to return to the Capitol, stepping in as mentor for two more unlucky kids that would most likely need to lay their life down way too early. Or to attend the parties and galas President Snow loved to host.
And despite masking these events as peaceful get-togethers, to let the Capitolites and the victors connect, they knew it was punishment wrapped in silk and riches. There was no backing out of the Capitol events. If Snow called, you answered. And if you didn’t, he’d make you feel it. Regret it.
Returning from these type of trips always left you hollow, a shell of who you once were. That small part of yourself that the arena hadn’t been able to erase, to steal from you, it always dimmed and flickered each time Snow called for your presence. The talking to the journalists, having to relive the worst moments of your games all over again. It wrecked you. Each and every single time.
And by seeing the silent smugness and satisfaction on Snow’s face at these galas, you knew he revelled in the suffering of his precious victors. He thrived in it.
How you wanted to drive an axe through his head.
Despite everything, you called yourself lucky. As lucky as you could be, in a world like this. With a fate like yours. Said luck came in the form of two words. One person.
Haymitch Abernathy.
He had won the Hunger Games two years prior to you. And arguably, he’d had a fate worse than yours. The 50th Hunger Games. The second Quarter Quell. Twice as many tributes. Only one victor.
You could remember watching his games, watching one of the boys you’d seen around the district countless times, fighting for his life, losing people that he considered friends and family. Having to become a murderer for the sake of survival.
He’d won, barely alive by the time the last cannon had fired, announcing the end of the games.
And as soon as he’d returned home, his suffering only worsened. His house burned down, his mother and little brother right with it. It was adamant that it certainly wasn’t an accident.
Snow must have had a personal vendetta against him. And after having returned from your own victory tour with him, he’d explained to you that he’d tried to destroy the arena. End the Hunger Games. That they’d manipulated the footage to make it seem like nothing happened.
That explained Snow’s actions. Explained, not justified. Because this type of cruelty could simply not be justified.
It had been four years since the 50th Hunger Games. Two since the day you’d miraculously made it out of that hellhole alive.
And now that boy had become your pillar. The reason you hadn’t completely lost yourself to the grasps of insanity that tried to wring their hands around your neck and squeeze every last ounce of your soul out of your being until nothing but a hollow shell remained.
And you’d be as bold as to say that you were the same for him.
Despite having two different houses in the victor’s village, most of your time was spent together in one of the two estates. Mostly his. Because as tragic as it was that he was forced to live alone, no family left to keep him company, you needed exactly that from time to time. Only him, no one else.
Your family, bless them, felt overbearing a lot of the time. They treated you as if the arena never happened. Which, technically, was a good thing. You didn’t want to be coddled or hovered around. You just wanted to be yourself. But that was the problem. “Yourself” had changed after the Hunger Games. The person you were before the Games did not exist anymore. Not in the same way.
And that was something your family struggled to accept. They just wanted their child back. Which you understood. More than you let on. You wanted nothing more than to be who you were before your name was called on that day. Before you were forced to endure and watch unimaginable horrors and survive them.
So, whenever you reacted to something not with the same enthusiasm you would have several years ago, when everything was still much simpler, your parents struggled. They didn’t know what to do with you. Sometimes, they got all quiet and tense, avoiding eye contact as they barely recognized who sat in front of them. You knew that feeling, better than anyone, every time you looked in the mirror.
Other times, they got angry. Mostly your mother. It was mostly because she was hurting, you knew. You knew she just wanted you to return to who you were before. When you were happier, more carefree. But you couldn’t. As much as you wanted to. Because being reminded of what happened each night when you closed your eyes made it difficult to let go.
Being forced to return to that wretched place every year made it impossible.
Tonight has been one of those nights.
Your mother had cooked dinner, something she came to enjoy greatly in the high quality kitchen from your house in the Victor’s Village.
She had cooked your favourite. What you could have eaten every single day as a child and never grown bored of it.
You hadn’t had the energy to eat one bite of it.
You’d just returned from the Capitol that morning, forced to attend one of Snow’s Galas. So eating was the last thing on your agenda. It made you nauseous to even think about. You felt sorry for your mother. She thought she could cheer you up with it. But you weren’t in a state to be cheered up.
You know she hadn’t meant any harm, that it was only her own frustration bubbling up as well, but when she had snapped at you, called you ungrateful as you didn’t even try and touch the food on your plate, you needed to get out. Get away from them.
Without a word, you had pushed back the chair, making a beeline for the door.
You walked a straight line across the street and up the front porch steps. You didn’t bother to knock. You pushed the door open and walked inside.
“Haymitch?” you called out, feeling your voice trembling in the slightest. You hated it.
When no answer came, you wandered further into the house, until you reached the living area. There he was, sprawled on one of the couches, head hung low. A glass of whatever liquor rested in his hands, still half full.
You sighed, lowering yourself onto the couch next to him. He startled as he felt the couch dip, his head turning to face you. “Oh, hey.”
“Hey.” you returned quietly, leaning back into the pillows.
You nodded towards his glass. “How many?”
“First one. I know, unbelievable.” he muttered, taking another sip.
You squinted, sceptical. For you, it was highly unlikely that this was only his first glass. You took in his face, his eyes, and found that indeed, he didn’t look drunk. At all.
“Why’re you here?” he asked then, his expression twisting into something almost concerned.
“My mother.” you responded, averting your gaze slightly.
“She cooked my favourite. Couldn’t even get one bite down. And she got angry.” you explained further.
“How fucking useless can I be?” you exclaimed, the frustration and all the suppressed emotions from the past few days coming back.
“My mother cooks me a meal. My favourite. And I don’t even eat it?”
You could hear how Haymitch sighed in response, setting the glass on the coffee table.
“It’s okay. Doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful or some shit. You’re just exhausted. Don’t break your head over it.” he tried to reassure you, soothe you slightly.
But by the way your breathing stayed as shallow, by the way your eyes stayed glassy, he knew it wasn’t working.
Another sigh.
“Okay, come on.” he said, standing up. “You’re staying here tonight.”
He held a hand out to you. When you only blankly stared at it and didn’t take it, he beckoned with his fingers impatiently. “I don’t got all night, so up with you.”
A small groan escaped him. “I’m trying to help you here. So just indulge me, hm?”
When, finally, you placed your hand in his, he pulled you to your feet and over to the stairs. He led you up and into the nearest bathroom. He sat you down on the edge of the bathtub.
“Alright, wait here.” he gave you a look before vanishing from the bathroom. Barely two minutes later, he came back with some of his clothes. A shirt and some pants. He held them out to you.
“Here. These should fit you. Get changed. Shout when you’re ready.”
It seemed your brain and your body had trouble catching up with everything he was currently doing for you. Your mother’s anger had left you rattled, so Haymitch caring for you felt completely absurd to you right now. Even if he often did. Subtly, you would have pay attention to notice it. But he always did.
He placed the clothes in your lap when you didn’t take them. “Get changed.” he repeated, before leaving the bathroom and pulling the door closed behind him.
With slow and almost sluggish movements, you slowly got changed. Pulled his shirt over your head, the black and soft fabric nice against your skin. Pulled the pants to your waist, securing them with the string.
Not being able to muster up the energy to call out for him, you simply reached for the doorhandle and opened the door, seeing him waiting, leaning against the opposite wall. He came back in, reaching for a spare toothbrush. He wet it under the running water, put some toothpaste on and once more, held it out to you.
“Think you can manage that?” he asked.
He sounded disgruntled. Every thing he said left him with a tone that suggested this was a burden to him. And in your state, it should have unsettled you further, should have made you shrink into yourself even more. But it didn’t. Because this was just… Haymitch.
He pretended like this was some great obstacle for him. Like nothing annoyed him more than caring for you. But you both knew he didn’t. Not enough to send you away. If he truly didn’t want to help you, take care of you, he would have told you to get out.
But even if he didn’t admit it. Didn’t have the courage to, after everything that happened to everyone he loved, he cared for you. More than he let on. And that is why he was doing this.
Why he was practically offering you to even brush your teeth for you. Why he asked if you could do it on your own, instead of just thrusting the toothbrush into your hands and telling you to get it done with.
You managed a nod, reaching to take the toothbrush from him.
He retrieved his own, and got to brushing his own teeth. The eye contact through the mirror, his attentive eyes on you the whole time, it calmed you. Like his presence always did. His a little bit grumpy behaviour, as if all of this was torture for him – even if you knew it wasn’t, not entirely, at least – it made you lean on him even more. Just as he did on you.
After brushing your teeth, he took your hand once more, leading you to his bedroom. He switched the bedside lamp on, casting a dim and warm light over the room. Nothing overwhelming, nothing too bright. Neither of you could handle it right now.
“Lie down.” he said it like it was an order. And in some way, it was. But not one with severe consequences, would you not obey. Not like it was with Snow. Or the Capitol. Where you would lose everything precious to you if you didn’t listen.
You moved to sit on the mattress, and Haymitch assisted you to get comfortable under the thick sheets.
“Good?” he asked. You nodded.
“Alright. I’ll be in the guest room. Shout if you need me.”
He was just about to turn and leave when your hand shot out, fingers curling around his wrist. He looked at you with a mixture of shock and curiosity. You had slept in his house more than once. A lot of times, actually. He had accompanied you until here before. But never had you done this. Reach for him before he could leave.
“Stay?” you simply whispered, almost as if you were afraid to ask.
The look in his eyes softened remarkably at that, part of his façade slipping.
“Stay? You sure?” he asked, moving his hand so that your fingers weren’t around his wrist but rather encased by his.
You nodded. “Yeah, please.” you whispered. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“Okay.” he whispered back. He moved then, walking around the bed and getting under the sheets on the other side. He turned to face you, his blond hair sprawling across the pillow below him.
“Better?” he asked, reaching for the hand he’d been holding before, intertwining your fingers once more.
“Better.” you whispered, the touch of his hand soothing, grounding. It tethered you to the moment, rather than letting you stray to that dark place that existed in your head. It kept the demons at bay, letting you focus on his touch, his presence, rather than anything else.
And unbeknownst to you, it did the same to him. When you were with him, everything felt a bit lighter. Not easy, not entirely gone. But it stayed away for the meantime, lingering somewhere in the shadows but not coming closer. It felt manageable, controllable. It didn’t feel like a wild whirlwind of emotions that came crashing in like a giant wave and dragged him under. It felt like quiet sea. Where he could step in and it wouldn’t drown him.
And so he kept your hand in his, the both of you tethered to each other’s grounding presence and keeping the memories and terrors of the Capitol exactly there. In the Capitol. Not here, in District 12. At least for a few hours.
Daeron fluff is definitely more than welcome. That man needs some cuddles ;)
same anon from before xo
Hello!
Dear god, I know I completely left you hanging after this, I'm so sorry. I hope you can forgive me <3
As you might (or might not, wouldn't blame you to be fair, hahah) remember, you originally asked "Finally someone who wants to write for my love Daeron!!!! Could I ask you something with a sister!reader pairing? Maybe about their first time together?"
So, what I wrote has exactly those elements. It's just the fluffy aftermath of their first time.
Here's Dark Thoughts
I hope you might still find this and get around to reading it at some point. And also enjoy it <3
Thank you so much for your patience and once again, I am so sorry you had to wait this long.
i need my boy to get a hug from his wife. targcest optional but very welcome, leaving it up to you.
Hello!
I know it's been ages since you sent this in, I am so deeply sorry for that <3. But I am back and I hope to deliver.
Back then, you sent in another ask just right after this one. Quoting it here: "also, because even in my horniness for him, i feel the need to hold him, any chance for giving Daeron aftercare?"
I hope you do not mind that I combined these two, as I thought they fit together quite well and I did not want to write two too similar works for you. I had a similar request for first time with Daeron, so this all matched really well :) (I will therefore just answer this ask of yours, hope that is okay) The others of your asks are in the works as well, I promise! I haven't forgotten about you and your great ideas
Anyway, here is Dark Thoughts
Again, I am so sorry you had to wait this long and I hope you still get around to reading it sometime. I'd love to know what you thought. If it wasn't what you had in mind, feel free to let me know and I'm sure I can muster up something for you :)
content warnings/contains: targcest (siblings), fluff, barely any angst, mentions of canon-typical violence, suggestive, allusions to/talks of sex, aftercare, daeron gets some much needed cuddles and comfort, reader is described to have hair - i think that's it, talks of his dragon dreams, daeron being sober for once in his life, grammatical errors, not proofread, written in present tense for a change - i deemed it fitting, it is not stated if reader was a virgin before this or not - so you can choose whatever you want, i think that's it?
requested: yes (combined these 2/3 requests, as it made sense: one, two)
a/n: two fics in one day, i feel insane (and happy) i combined these three requests because they are really centered around giving daeron comfort and i do not think i would have been able to come up with three full-fledged scenarios for them. these were requested by two seperate people. i hope you guys like it! i'd love to know what you thought <3
link to masterlist
Both his and your breathing slowly start to even out as a comfortable silence settles between the two of you. You breathe almost in sync with him, both your chests raising and falling in the same rhythm. It is grounding, you find, the way his breath matches yours. The way he has not moved a single inch from where he is currently positioned on top of you.
You lie on the linens of his mattress, partially covered by the silken sheets. The fabric is comfortable against your skin, albeit slightly damp from the thin sheen of sweat which has formed on both your skins.
He still hovers over you, careful not to press too much of his weight on you. His forearms rest on either side of your head, one of his hands intertwined with yours on the plush pillow. His fingers are tight around yours, as if afraid you’d disappear, should he dare to let go.
His blond hair, which usually falls just to the ends of his neck, is not spared by gravity as the ends tickle over your cheeks where his face remains just inches from yours. His lips are almost close enough to brush yours. His eyes, the dark purple of them almost appearing black in the dim light, are sharp, attentive. Normally, a thin glaze lies over them, like a fogged up mirror, caused by the endless amount of wine he pours into his system. As if he could literally drown out his misery – wash it out of him with the wine.
But now, they are firmly locked onto yours with a focus, an intensity, which you have rarely ever seen in them. He has not drunken anything all day. A rare occurrence, as you cannot even recall the last time he ever went an entire day without it.
You notice how he trembles faintly, little tremors wracking through him. To the naked eye, it would almost be imperceptible. But you have been able to read your brother his entire life. You see things no one else does. Certain flicks of his eyes, certain twitches of his fingers. Every little movement that no one else would pay attention to helps you to figure out exactly what he is feeling, what he is thinking about, what he currently needs.
And the way his eyes now slowly start to avert from yours more and more, as you both come down from the highs of your pleasure, tells you that all the dark thoughts he had finally been able to put aside in your arms come creeping back. Infiltrating his mind and wrapping themselves around his neck like a vice, suffocating him.
Your hand, which had been resting on his shoulder – fingers curled tightly into the skin just mere minutes ago as you had clung to him in the heights of your desire – moves to the side of his face, gently resting over his skin. With the least amount of pressure you can muster, you tilt his head to face you directly once more.
Again, the minimal bit his head had moved away from yours would have gone unnoticed by anyone else. But not by you.
“Daeron.” you whisper, your tone gentle and barely audible, just enough for him to hear you, to ground him to your presence – if not anything else. “Open your eyes, love.”
Daeron had not even noticed at first that his eyes had fallen closed as he tries to fight against the demons taking root in his head. The past hour spent in your embrace, spent tangled with you in the sheets – it had let him escape from every single other thought he had.
During that time, there was only you. The way your lips felt on his, the way they trailed over his neck and shoulders. The way your hands roamed over his entire being, exploring every inch of him you could reach. He is pretty sure you had reached into his chest and laid bare his soul.
The way your little sounds had reached his ears as he brought you and himself pleasure, as he moved on top of you with slow and gentle shifts of his hips. Enough to take you both apart – not enough to entirely overwhelm. Not physically, at least. Mentally, spiritually, he feels absolutely destroyed, exposed. In the best way he has ever felt exposed in his life.
And now, as the last remnants of your shared pleasure had waned, leaving only the aftermath of it behind, the thoughts come creeping back. He feels them everywhere. From his toes to the top of his head. Everything feels like it is going to be consumed once more. And this time not by you, but by the darkness of his mind.
And he dreads it, fears it. The two of you had never done this before. But tonight, the terrors plaguing his sleeping mind had grown too much. Too cruel for even him to handle. Him, who has been cursed by these dreams all his life.
And you, his angel of a sister, must have a sixth sense just for him, he thinks. Because in the dead of night, barely minutes after he had woken up soaked in cold sweat, the doors to his chambers had creeped open and you had stepped through. You had made a beeline for him, crawling over the deserted side of his bed to where he sat with trembling fingers and wet eyes.
You had taken his hands in one of yours, willing them to stop trembling. You had cupped his face with the other, wiping at the lone tear which had escaped without his permission. You had pressed your forehead against his in the darkness of his chambers, only faint moonlight shining in through the windows, and you had leaned forward and pressed a chaste, lingering kiss against his lips.
No movement, no fervour. Just a gentle press, lips resting upon each other in the means to tether him to your presence, your comfort. Your warmth. One of his hands had left your grip and wandered to the side of your neck, needing to touch you, feel you.
For the first several minutes, it was the same as every night you came into his chambers with the intention to comfort him from his dreams, from the dark thoughts rooted so deep in him he feared they would never leave him and drag him down with them.
You had pulled away after a few minutes, your eyes locked onto his. Second after second passed, the eye contact never broken once. His thumb, almost subconsciously, had then moved to brush over your lower lip, eyes dropping to observe his own movement.
Your eyes had stayed on him, not oblivious to that certain glint which flashed through his eyes. That desperate need for escape. To forget. Even if only for a few moments.
The two of you had never crossed that boundary. Not yet. But in this moment, with Daeron completely sober and in obvious despair in front of you, that hint of need in his eyes, it only felt right.
You had leaned back in, your lips connecting to his once more. But that time, it was less gentle, less chaste. You mirrored his need, his want, feeling it welling up inside you once more.
And the both of you had given in. For the first time.
And now he still hovers on top of you, eyes remaining closed despite you gently prompting him to open them. Your thumb softly runs over his closed eye-lid with a barely there touch.
“Daeron, look at me.” you order tenderly. He finally does, his dark lilac eyes fluttering open and meeting yours, causing a little breath of relief to tumble past your slightly parted lips. As long as he looks at you, you can reach him.
“Breathe for me, my love.”
Your hand which is still tangled with his lifts from the pillow. You keep his hand in yours as you bring it to your exposed chest, right where your heart beats steady beneath the skin.
“Feel me. Just breathe. The thoughts and dreams cannot harm you here. Not while I am here. They cannot touch you.”
His breaths, which had turned ragged again, slowly evened again as he followed the way you breathe in and out. Deeply, slowly, carefully. In and out. In and out.
“Good, just keep breathing.”
Daeron insists in that moment you must be the only good thing the gods have blessed him with. Too good to be true. Because with your skin against his, with your voice in his ears, he feels how the horrors slowly fade away. They return to whatever place they had escaped to when you had first kissed him earlier that night.
He wants them to stay there forever and never come back. But he knows it is wishful thinking. Still, he wills himself not to think of it now.
The two of you had just shared something you had never shared with each other. He wants to enjoy it. Revel in the aftermath of it.
“Are you alright?” he asks, his voice still trembling slightly, still breathy as his gaze turns concerned for your own wellbeing. The hand which still rests on the pillow on the other side of your head brushes softly over the strands of hair which sprawl beneath you on the fabric.
You feel a soft smile break out onto your face as the first thing he says after several minutes of panicked and tormented silence is to inform himself about your wellbeing. You nod.
“I am more than alright. Do not worry for me.”
You nudge him slightly. “Come on, lay down. Let me take care of you.” you prompt him gently, helping him get comfortable on the mattress next to you as his weight finally leaves you, albeit reluctantly.
He keeps his eyes firmly trained on you as your brush the hair out of his face.
With almost sluggish movements, your limbs still weighted by the pleasure from before, you reach for the cup of water on the table by his bedside. You turn back to him, bringing the rim of the cup to his now dried lips.
“Drink.” you whisper, tilting the cup once his lips part just enough. He drinks down several swigs of the water, the cold liquid a soothing balm against the dryness of his throat. When he has had enough, you remove the cup from his mouth, taking a few sips of your own before placing it back on the table.
“Are you alright?” you ask him then, returning his earlier question.
He nods, faint, as the corner of his mouth twitches up in the slightest.
“Yes. I am now. Thank you, my angel.” he replies, his tone laced in loving softness as he looks at you with nothing but affection and admiration in his eyes.
To him, you are his angel, his darling sister. The only thing that can fight off the darkness in his head, his heart. Cast it out just with one brush of your lips, one word tumbling from your mouth.
He just hopes the gods will never be as cruel as to take you from him. For he would follow you instantly.
When you have convinced yourself he is being truthful, that he really is alright as of now, you lower yourself back onto the mattress next to him, gesturing for him to lay on you.
He scoots down just slightly, partially leaning on you as his head comes to rest just above your chest, face nuzzled into the crook of your neck. One of his arms lays across your midsection, keeping you close to him. As close as he can.
Your hand comes to thread through his hair in soothing gestures, and you feel the way the last bit of tension in him slowly melts away. He completely relaxes against you.
“I love you.” he murmurs, already half-asleep, into your neck.
Your lips twitch upwards again as your eyes drop to look at him in your own adoration.
blood witch blackfyre x aerion targaryen. manipulates the hell out of him but for caring reasons ;) lowk he disappeared for a while then one day came back with her as his wife and everyone is very confused and concerned.
Hi Lovely!
First, thank you for your request. Second, I know it took a long time to get it done, I'm very sorry - I hope you still remember it and sometime get around to reading it <3 And that you like it, of course!
Here's Black Soul.
I admit, I struggled with it at first as I was not very familiar with all the Blackfyre stuff. But I think I made it work.
I'd love to know what you thought and if it was along the lines of what you hoped for. If not, always feel free to send me another ask. I promise I usually try not to take this long with requests :)
content warnings/contains: spoilers for akotsk (kinda?), canon-divergence & certain inaccuracies, canon typical violence, aerion is a warning himself as always, distant targcest (blackfyre x targaryen), very suggestive & talks of/allusions to sex, no smut, reader is witchy, inaccuracy on blood magic - i just came up with stuff, no physical description of reader, use of y/n, they were both seperately exiled to lys at around the same time, reader's parentage is not stated, curse words, valyrian wedding (basically copied the Rhaenyra x Daemon scene), reader indulges his delusions & he worships her for it okay? (the worship/obession is kinda mutual), you can basically choose if she does it only to manipulate him or if she genuinely loves him - i don't think i specified that much, grammatical errors, not proofread, italics - flashbacks, bold - spoken in high valyrian
requested: yes
a/n: i know i disappeared off the face of the earth for a moment there, sorry about that... anyway, i'm back! (for longer than a week, hopefully) and i'm actually quite proud of this one. i started this over like 5 times until it went into a direction that satisfied me. i'm not used to writing more freaky stuff, but i tried my hand this time. i hope it turned out well. to the requester, sorry you had to wait so long and i hope you like it <3
link to masterlist
Several years ago, you’d been exiled to the city of Lys by your father. Back then, in the midst of your rage at being sent away from everything you’ve ever known, you never would have been able to comprehend just in what direction your life were to go once you reached the east.
Lys brought a lot of advantages with itself. Advantages you had not wanted to acknowledge when you’d first arrived, alone, angry and hurt. You’d been granted your own small residence. Carrying Targaryen blood – even if not technically seen as legitimate in the eyes of the Faith – had its perks, after all. You’d barely left it at first, still furious at the audacity of your father to send you to a place practically littered with whores.
But when the lack of food forced you to wander out into the markets, when the first places in the city began to attract your attention – you came to see just how much of a blessing it was that your father had sent you here, of all places. He’d done it as punishment, as a means to make you see reason, cure you from the poison which had taken root in your blood and mind – as he claimed.
How stupid he’d been to even think that a place such as this would help you better yourself. In Lys, you were free to do as you pleased. You could eat, drink and fuck as much as you desired – no one would bat an eye. The loose clothes made of silk felt like a gift from the gods, in comparison to the suffocating gowns and corsets you were made to wear back in Westeros. The weather was always warm and sunny, a stark contrast to the storms and winds from the west.
And no one hindered you in the practice of your magic. By the hearth in your house, you’d carefully positioned fourteen candles, just as you had back home. And this time, when you spoke the High Valyrian words beneath your breath, when you let droplets of blood trickle into the flames, no one barged into your room and dragged you out kicking and screaming. No one banished you from your home. Here, you were free to do whatever you wished.
The most interesting thing you would encounter in Lys, however, arrived mere moons after you. Aerion Brightflame.
A Targaryen prince, sent to the east to reflect on his actions, turn into a better man, after causing almost his entire family to fall apart at a tourney held for the nameday of a minor Lord’s daughter.
In Lys, most possessed Valyrian features. The silver hair, the bright eyes - either amethyst or blue – the pale skin. You’d sensed him different from the start. You had not seen him arrive by boat. You only knew that you had never seen him before when you laid eyes on him for the first time. But you knew instantly that this was not a simple Lyseni man. The short and almost spiky hair – nearly looking like scales – paired with the pride he carried within himself and the unmistakable lilac eyes. He practically radiated that royal stench that came naturally with Targaryens – a name you were raised to despise. But alas, those who raised you had turned you into an outcast as well.
You watched him, kept your eyes on him as he began to get accustomed to his new surroundings – and the freedom that came with it. One day, you decided you would not stay away any longer. You’d approached him while he lounged in one of the plush chairs outside a tavern, sheltered from the sun by the shade of the building as he sipped on a cup of some fruity wine from the free cities.
You slide your fingers over the back of his chaise as you round it, gaining his attention instantly. His sharp eyes follow your every movement. You do not falter, coming to a stop on front of him.
“A Targaryen prince in Lys.” you drawl, eyes roaming over his rather exposed body, as he had now also taken to dressing in Lyseni fabrics, rather than thick, red and black doublets or chainmail. You could see several angry scars littering across the visible parts of his upper body, no doubt from wounds healed not long ago. The kind of scars that would fade with time, yet never disappear entirely.
“Tell me, your grace.” you go on, the title laced with thin mockery. “This vacation of yours, is it voluntary, or no?”
His eyes never stop following you, tracing every movement. Be it a twitch of your hand, or a quirk of your lips. He is assessing you, trying to categorize you.
“Which one of the princelings are you?” you continue when he still does not say anything. “You surely do not look like one of Breakspear’s brood. Too little… dornish.” you pause, eyes raking over him once more. His pale skin – slowly beginning to tan in the heat of Lys – has a reddish tint to it, making apparent that his body is not accustomed to this type of heat. The words were meant to tease, to provoke, and by the way his fingers curl just a tad bit tighter around the armrest of the chair, you can tell it’s working. By the way something hot and flaring flashes through those eyes of his at even the mere suggestion that he could come from the seed of Baelor Targaryen.
“One of the Anvil’s offspring, then?” you hum thoughtfully. “You have too much control over your cup to be the drunken one. One’s at the citadel, that could not possibly be you. Well, unless you’ve suddenly decided you had enough of the maesters and celibacy, which would make this a wonderful place to break free from those chains. The others are too young. No, you are the one they whisper about. The one they fear…” A pause. “Brightflame, is it?”
You can tell you have him in your clutches by the way an entirely different glint shines in his eyes at the mention of others fearing him. A certain satisfaction. You watch as his lips curl upwards in the slightest, finally giving you a reaction.
“And who are you, to be making such a bold advance on a prince of dragon blood?” he returns, the taunting in his tone matching yours perfectly.
“Y/N. Blackfyre.”
You cannot quite tell if your name causes his amusement to rise or vanish, as his expression turns almost unreadable.
“Blackfyre?” he repeats, humming shortly. His eyes assess you once more, roaming over your entire being before settling on yours again. “Awfully confident for someone whose family constantly loses against mine, are we?”
That coaxes as slight laugh from your lips, not at all deterred by what he surely means as an insult to you.
“Awfully big talk for someone who has not once fought in those rebellions, don’t you think?” you retort smoothly.
By the way his finger twitch, you assume he is torn between lashing at you like a feral dragon – something you’ve come to realize he reminds you of quite a lot – or joining your amusement.
He brings the cup of wine to his lips, eyes never once leaving yours as he takes a sip, tongue flicking out to taste what little liquid had caught in the far corner of his mouth. Ultimately, he settles on the latter, the sharp smirk from before creeping back onto his features.
“So, Brightflame. What was your name again?” you ask then, head tilting in the slightest. He likes the attention, you can tell.
“Aerion.” comes his reply, short and firm.
“Aerion.” you repeat after him, tasting the name on your tongue. You expect it to taste bitter. Like hatred and distain. You find it does not. It tastes dangerous, yet in a concerningly alluring way.
“And what exactly brings you to Lys, Aerion?” you ask then, all the while lowering yourself into the thickly cushioned chair next to his. Your body is angled in his direction just enough for it to appear intended.
“In the eyes of my father, it seems I am at fault for the events that led to my uncle’s death.” The reply comes smoothly, almost trivial, as if he were talking about the weather. As if he were completely indifferent to the fact that his uncle has passed.
Your heart stutters for a few seconds at his words, the meaning of them, the weight, settling in your mind. It takes a few moments for you to gather your senses and to manage a reply.
“Your uncle? You mean to tell me Baelor ‘The Hammer’ Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne, is dead?” you ask in thinly veiled shock.
Aerion only hums in response, nodding once.
You exhale a breath. “Well, I’ll be damned.” A whirlwind of emotions arises inside of you. Happiness, relief, pride, uneasiness. It seems your conscious refuses to settle on one.
You snap out of the depths of your mind when Aerion speaks up this time. “And you? For what reason does a Blackfyre get sent to Lys?” he asks, unable to conceal his own curiosity. His gaze is filled with intrigue and suspicion, still unsure whether to trust you or not.
“Blood magic.” You reply and find that, hypocritically, you’ve said the two words with the same lack of weight to them as he had done when informing you about his uncle’s death.
Your eyes are locked onto his own as you say it. And to the day you die, you’d swear you’ve never seen someone’s stare of suspicion and hesitation turn into fascination and something dangerously close to devotion so fast.
****
As your time in Lys progressed, it seemed that Aerion found it difficult to stray from your side after that first meeting. It did not bother you in the slightest. Quite the opposite, as you yourself sought out his company quite often on the days he did not come to you on his own.
You showed him more hidden corners of the city, places one would rarely wander to on their own. Not without the purpose of finding them. You let him discover his newfound freedom – viewed as punishment by his family – and watched him grow to enjoy the ability to indulge in whatever he pleased. You showed him where he could drink the finest either local or imported wines to his heart’s content. Where, depending on his tastes, the best dishes from all around Essos and Westeros were served. And because you knew that everyone had their needs, especially men, you also showed him the finest pleasure houses with the prettiest Lyseni whores. They were pricey, but he was a prince of the blood – he could afford even the most expensive courtesans. And he did.
Aerion Brightflame quickly became known among the brothels of Lys. And not only in those he frequented. The pleasure girls either anticipated a visit from him, or dreaded it. Rumour spread like wildfire that the prince enjoyed his endeavours rather rough. And not the regular roughness one could expect from a man of his standing.
They said that he revelled in the taste of blood just as much as in that of a woman’s desire. That his teeth were sharper than they appeared and that breaking skin came naturally to him – that it brought him pleasure. He liked his whores pretty and dolled up – just so he could leave them utterly and entirely ruined.
What might have surprised you the most, however, was that he was said to be a generous lover – despite being drawn to violence and pain. No woman left his clutches unsatisfied. A rareness in men such as him.
As time passed and you kept on listening to the brothel workers’ whispers – you always listened when it was about him – you could not help but desire a taste of your own. You had no doubt that the women he bedded in the pleasure houses took what he gave without protest, surrendered to him like pliant little does and let him claim them as he wished. As they were paid to do.
But you wanted to show him what it felt like when he laid with a woman who could match him. What it felt like when the person beneath him knew how to bite back. You wanted him to sink his teeth into your flesh and return the gesture with just as much ferocity. You never made any direct advances, however. The furthest you went were low whispers that could border on suggestive, inviting. Or lingering touches along his wrists, his hands, on rare occasions even the broadness of his shoulders, sometimes straying to his collarbones – a spot that made him shiver, you discovered.
Aerion was not stupid. The man was an expert at observing those around him and reading their intentions from their eyes, their movements, from their veiled words. He knew you desired him when your subtle touches began to linger longer than necessary. He’d had to refrain from dragging you against him and putting both of you out of your misery on several occasions, feeling the need in his veins burn hotter than the sun whenever you were nearby.
But it seemed you both enjoyed this dance. Your own dance of dragons. You circled each other like vultures, just waiting for the right moment to strike – to claim.
That moment came one evening after several moons of this unresolved tension between the two of you. You’d been sitting on the terrace of your home, overlooking the nearest bay – granting you a perfect view of the setting sun. If it was one too many cups of Arbor Gold or if it was one heated glance too much, you couldn’t recall. You could only recall that one second, the two of you had leisurely sipped on your cups of wine, and the next, he had all but dragged you from your chair into his lap, nails digging into the skin of your waist through the silk.
His lips ghost over the junction between your neck and the underside of your jaw, his breathing shallow – hot and uneven – against your skin. From your position, you cannot see his eyes, but the usual violet brightness in them has darkened from untamed desire.
“You madwoman.” he rasps against your jaw, lips slightly brushing against you as he speaks. His tone is low, a mixture of want, frustration and desperation. “What have you done to me? Is this one of your wretched spells?”
Your hand comes up to rest on the side of his neck, leading his head away from you, just enough to lock your eyes with his. His grip on you tightens almost instinctively as your body warmth leaves the side of his face. He looks undone, completely at your mercy yet ready to pounce all the same. Your hand rises from the side of his neck, thumb running over his cheekbone. The corner of your lips twitches upwards almost imperceptibly. He catches it anyway.
“It would be no fun if it was a spell, zaldrīzes.”
The Valyrian word slips from your tongue deliberately. Dragon.
His mouth curls into something akin to a snarl, like an animal – only living up to the name you’d given him. He has never looked more attractive to you.
“You madwoman.” he repeats. “You magnificent fucking madwoman.” he practically growls as one of his hands leave your waist, snaking up the length of your back and settling on the nape of your neck.
With one sharp pull, he drags your head down to his, connecting his lips to yours.
It’s not soft, not gentle. It’s all tongue and passion. Two unbridled flames colliding and flaring up into one big fire as he moves his lips against yours. In a matter of seconds, you’re all over each other, fingers tugging at fabric, lips wandering and teeth dragging over every new exposed inch of skin.
You rock your hips over his, feeling the desire radiating off of him. Just as he can feel yours. It is like a vicious cycle, how the need pulsing through you spurs him on, causing the same reaction in you.
The two of you ruin each other that night beyond compare. Torn silks and sheets, sweat-coated skin, scratch-marks, bruises from tight grips, unwilling to let go. Both your necks are littered with bite-marks and dried blood where your tongues hadn’t reached in the height of your pleasure. Both his and your lips are bruised and swollen, decorated with the metallic taste of blood – from both the broken skin on your necks and the sharp teeth which had sunken a bit too deep on occasion.
****
Neither of you was able to rein in the desire you felt for each other after that night. Barely a day passed where the two of you did not drag each other into the sheets, claiming one another over and over. Even when there was no inch, no crevice, left to claim, you did it all over again.
The whores at the pleasure houses suddenly became entirely uninteresting to him. After the first time, Aerion had tried. Gone to the nearest brothel to try and drown the lingering heat of your touch – a Blackfyre’s touch – in another woman. It had been a miracle that said woman was not strangled by his bare hands that day. She had lain there, took what he gave and told him exactly what he wanted to hear. No sincerity. She did not fight back, did not return his fire in the way that you had. She had no fire, he came to realize. It infuriated him. She may have carried Valyrian blood, as a lot of Lyseni people did, but there was no Targaryen blood flowing through her veins. There was not enough heat to match him.
And after one night with you, he craved that heat. Craved the fight. The feel of teeth sinking into his skin in retort to his own. The feel of nails scratching at him and laying him bare. And only you were able to give him that. Because you had that Targaryen blood, the same blood that he carried also burned through you – even if illegitimate in the eyes of many. He had been taught to despise the likes of you, but you had captured him in a way that he could not wrap his head around.
He had come crawling back to you the very same day, and you let him. Because you could not resist him either. You had never felt desire such as this – and you did not need to stray into the arms of another man to know that only Aerion could quench that thirst. That in some twisted and contorted way, the two of you had become intertwined in more ways than one that night. In ways neither of you could fully explain.
It was on a exactly such a night, almost a year into your stay in Lys, when he asked you what exactly had happened for you to be exiled here. He knew, from your very first conversation, that it had been because of the blood magic you practiced, like few of his ancestors did. But he had never asked for the full story. That night, his curiosity overcame him.
You weren’t shocked by his inquiry about the details of your exile. You were more surprised that he hadn’t asked earlier. He was curious – and ever fascinated by the tellings of your witchcraft. You could practically see the look in his eyes changing whenever you spoke of it, as he hung onto every word that slipped past your lips.
You had been lying on his exposed chest when he’d asked, both of you bare and partly covered by the silken sheets of your bed, legs entangled. Your hand rested where his heart beat steady beneath your touch, his fingers idly gliding up and down your arm in a barely-there touch, almost subconscious. The nightly breeze flowing in through the opened balcony doors, cooling down your overheating bodies.
You had tilted your head to look up at him, asking him: “Why the sudden curiosity?”
He’d only shrugged in response, and you found you could not deny him either way, so you retold the story of the night your father had caught you. At first, you considered lying, twisting the story and veiling the actual truth of it. But honesty was something that had been crucial between you and Aerion from the start. Not discussed. Not demanded. Just there. For some reason, the two of your had laid your souls bare to each other from the start. Every dark and twisted crevice of them.
So you told the truth. Every detail.
This is your chance. Your chance to bring victory to your family. If this turns out to be successful, you could be celebrated as one of the greatest Blackfyres of all time. Besides Daemon Blackfyre, maybe. You doubt they would let a woman surpass the likes of him.
The fourteen candles are carefully positioned around the hearth of your chambers, surrounding you where you kneel in front of the crackling flames of it. You light each candle, one after the other. One for each of the volcanoes in Old Valyria. Channelling the source of their magic.
With a few muttered High Valyrian words, the candles burn just a tad bit brighter, telling you that the gods of Old Valyria are listening. Just as you intended.
With careful fingers, you reach for the pitch black napkin, unfolding it slowly, until it reveals a single silver hair. Daemon Blackfyre’s. While the guarantee of success would be much higher, had you something of the right person in your possession, you’d read that it can work nonetheless – as they share blood. You would just need to be more careful, more precise in your words to make sure it takes the right man.
You set the napkin, the hair still positioned on top of it, down on the stone floor of your chambers. You unsheathe your dagger, crafted from valyrian steel. A gift you had received from your father on your thirteenth nameday.
You cut across the palm of your hand, blood welling immediately. Same as with the hair, the chosen man’s blood would make it easier, safer. Even Daemon Blackfyre’s blood would have been better. But you could not make Daemon Blackfyre bleed without being named a traitor and getting executed on the spot.
So your blood will have to do. You share blood with Daemon. It could work. It needs to.
With your uninjured hand, you pluck the hair from the napkin, laying it delicately across the wound, where blood covers it instantly. You lean forward then, turning over your hand so the soaked hair falls into the flames of the hearth, droplets of your blood following.
You begin to speak again, the words low and quiet.
“From my blood, take the sacrifice. From the hair of the Black Dragon, take the connection.”
Footsteps approaching your chambers almost make you falter. You need to finish this, fast.
“For the blood and hair may not be his, but connected to him nonetheless. The Spear shall break. Let the Hammer come to his downfall, may it be used against him.”
Just as the last few words leave your lips, eyes closed tightly as the blood continues to trickle from your hand – the candles burning bright around you – the door to your chambers opens, your father stepping through the threshold.
He halts in his tracks when he sees you, knelt in front of the hearth, palm bleeding into the fire. He looks at the candles surrounding you. He does not need to count them to know there are fourteen.
He only hears the last few words you mutter, your voice too quiet for him to make out what exactly you are saying. Yet he knows it is not the common tongue. It is the language of your ancestors.
He recognizes the scene immediately. You, his own daughter, practising blood magic. Like Visenya Targaryen, one of the Conqueror’s herself, had done. The blood magic which was rumoured to have been involved in the making of Maegor The Cruel. He knows you admire your ancestors. But he never would have guessed it to run this deep. To lead you to such poisonous acts.
He finally gathers his senses just as the last word dies on your lips. In furious outrage, he exclaims your name, taking quick strides in your direction. You startle out of your daze, head snapping around to see him advancing on you.
No. Not yet. It is too early. The ritual has not ended. The sacrifice cannot have been enough for it to work. Your thoughts are frantic as you squeeze your hand shut over the fire once, forcing more of your blood to trickle into the flames below.
Before you can do much more, two hands hook under your arms, dragging you away from the fireplace. Away from the candles, which all diminish the second your blood stops feeding the fire.
The gods are gone. You just hope it was enough.
You kick and you yell as you try to get out of your father’s hold. But his grip on you is strong, tight. He drags you out of your chambers and into the hallway, practically throwing you to the floor by the opposite wall. He pulls the door of your chambers shut, severing every last connection between you and the ritual you had built within.
“What has gotten into you!? Are you mad!?” your father exclaims, staring at you with wide eyes filled with rage.
“These- these abominable acts. How long have you been practising them?” he asks.
You don’t reply. You are not afraid – only worried that your ritual might have not worked. Because if it hasn’t, it could take the wrong person. And the consequences for you could be fatal, should the fault be traced back to you.
“Answer me, daughter!” he yells. You don’t.
Your father eventually drags you before Daemon Blackfyre himself, where the decision is made. You are to be exiled. Sent away. Far from where you can poison others with the witchery in your blood.
****
Aerion had been eerily silent once you finished telling him the reason for your banishment. His eyes did not meet yours for several minutes as he stared at the ceiling. His expression was nearly unreadable, a thousand thoughts running through his head.
He recalled your words. You had repeated to him exactly what you had spoken to the fire.
“From my blood, take the sacrifice. From the hair of the Black Dragon, take the connection.”
“For the blood and hair may not be his, but connected to him nonetheless. The Spear shall break. Let the Hammer come to his downfall, may it be used against him.”
“Let the Hammer come to his downfall, may it be used against him.”
Let the Hammer come to his downfall. The Hammer. A nickname Baelor had gained during the first Blackfyre rebellion. Just as Maekar had been titled the Anvil. May it be used against him. While not exactly accurate, Aerion remembered vividly that it was his father’s mace that had struck the back of Baelor’s helm, which had ultimately led to his uncle’s death. A mace could be considered some type of hammer, technically.
He repeated it in his head over and over again. Could it possibly be that you were at fault that Baelor Targaryen had fallen in the Trial of Seven at Ashford? Could it be, that no matter his own actions, Baelor would have fallen either way? That his exile was wholly unnecessary and the one at fault for it currently laid in his arms? That the death of Baelor Breakspear, heir to the Iron Throne, was technically a victory at the hands of the Blackfyres, caused by the hands of a young woman in their ranks. The woman he had claimed in every way possible. The woman who had claimed him for herself just as much.
One part of him wanted to shove you off him, pin you beneath him into the mattress and strangle you until the last bit of breath died on your lips. This had been your fault. His humiliation by that tall fucking Hedge Knight. His father’s fury against him. His exile to Lys. All of it had been your fault. You had made a blood sacrifice. Your own blood gifted to the gods of Old Valyria, with only the request to take Baelor Targaryen with them.
But as much as he wanted to kill you, leave you to rot on these very sheets, he could not bring himself to. Not when he felt the faint touch of your fingers over where his heart beat in his chest. Not when he felt the comfortable weight of your body partially leaning on his, completely relaxed despite what you had just told him. Not when he looked into your eyes and only felt the need to hold you tighter, kiss you, and take you all over again.
Not when you were the only one who saw him as exactly what he was.
A dragon.
You were the only one who saw it. In the way you called him ñuha zaldrīzes. My dragon. You’d told him that the sharper ends of his hair reminded you of dragon scales, when the light hit them from the right angle. You’d told him his tongue was long and thin, snake-like, as that of a dragon, when he had licked all over your neck one night.
Once, when he’d laughed at something you said, you had stilled, staring at his lips. When his mouth had closed, you reached out, pulling at his upper lip carefully. You dragged it up, revealing his teeth, with it the naturally sharpened canines he had. You’d called them his own little fangs. Like a dragon’s.
In your eyes, he was exactly what he had always known himself to be. A dragon through and through. You took him apart piece by piece, finding proof after proof of what he truly was. And you saw it too.
He could not kill you. He could not lose the only person that saw him. He needed you, craved you. Seven hells, he was pretty sure he loved you. In the only twisted way he could feel that type of emotion. Expressed in the way his eyes followed you, in the way he gripped you just a bit tighter than he was used to doing to anyone else. In the way he could sink his teeth and claws into you and brush his lips over yours in the most tender motion all the same.
You could sense the battle taking place inside his head as he connected the pieces. His fingers twitched just slightly over where they had been brushing against your arm. The fingers of his other hand, arm stretched out along the length of his body, curled and uncurled repeatedly in the silken sheets.
His breathing changed. From calm and relaxed to shallow, making it apparent that he did not know what to do with himself in that moment. You watched every emotion that flared in him, only visible in the amethyst of his eyes. Rage, murderous intent, conflict, desire, that hint of devotion that often entered his gaze when he looked at you.
“Ñuha zaldrīzes.” you had whispered tenderly, hand reaching up to brush over his temple, smoothing over the furrow of his brows.
“You are thinking too much.”
The sound of your voice, soothing him in the tongue of your blood, it had a calming effect on him. One he could not fight, even if he wished to. His breath evened slightly, though not entirely.
You could feel the way he started relaxing, the rigid tension in his muscles fading away.
“Breathe, my fire. My bright flame. I will make sure you forget all those troubling thoughts of yours. No thinking. Just feel.”
You moved, climbing over his lap. Your hands steadied yourself on the planes of his defined chest, feeling how the thumps of his heart picked up again. For an entirely different reason this time.
You smirked, leaning down to breathe into his ear. “Good. Let it take you. Far away from that torturous place your mind has led you to.”
****
The first time he’d told you that he intended to take you as his wife was in the heights of your shared pleasure, just over two years into your shared time.
He’d been sprawled across the sheets, his grip tight on your hips as he moved you over him. Your own dragon to claim, to ride.
The words had left his lips so breathlessly that they almost appeared subconscious. Yet with no less determined intent. He meant them, even if they were perhaps not said in the situation he had originally meant to.
“I am going to make you my wife. You will be mine. For all eternity.”
You had not replied, only leaned down and kissed him.
For several days after, neither of you mentioned what he had said. For a moment, you might have thought that he had entirely forgotten that he had said it. But it was Aerion. He was painfully aware of what he said and did. Nothing left his lips without intent, without purpose.
But he also did not stay silent without intention behind it. Most of his actions were done with full awareness and willingness. They were not always calculated, not always smart. Anything other than that. The decisions were often made without thinking, rash and impulsive. But he meant them nonetheless, with every fibre of his being.
The two of you had been soaking up the sun one afternoon, a week after those poisonous words had slipped past his lips. They had ingrained themselves into your mind. Playing in your head over and over again. “I am going to make you my wife. You will be mine. For all eternity.”
It was only then that he approached the subject again. A comfortable silence had settled between the both of you, broken only by his words.
“I meant it.” he says out of nowhere. Your head, which had been facing the sun, taking in the warmth, turns to meet his gaze. Only then he continues. “What I said. A week ago.” he pauses once more, one hand reaching out to brush over the skin of your temple. A barely there touch that sends a shiver through you.
“I wish to take you as my wife. No other woman could see me as I am just how you do.” His tone is almost soft, but filled with possessiveness. His eyes never once leave yours.
He is right, in what he said. And you know it. From the day the words ñuha zaldrīzes had first left your lips, loud enough for him to hear. You know that this attention is exactly what he desires, craves. For someone to view him as what he is, what he thinks he knows himself to be. And you have given him that. From the very start.
You know that, could he purr like a satisfied cat, he would, each time you call him your dragon, each time your fingertips nudge his sharpened canines in the depths of pleasure. Every time your hands run through his hair, through the jagged ends you’d told him reminded you of scales, in certain light.
You do not fear him. Do not cower in his presence. And while he revels in the fear and submission of others, the fact that you stand and meet him at eye-level undoes him completely. It makes him sink his claws into you just that much deeper, unwilling to let you slip through his fingers.
“No Septon would wed us, Aerion. Not without demanding the blessing of our parents.” you reply eventually, your hand coming up to rest over his where it still brushes against your temple in careful movements. You encase his hand with your own, turning your head to press a kiss to his fingertips.
He scoffs, lips curling into something between irritation and amusement as his eyes linger on where your lips brush over his fingers. “I do not intend to wed you in the ways of the Seven, my love. We will be united in the ways of Old Valyria. As true dragons must. And we are true dragons, are we not?”
“Of course we are, Aerion.” you reply in earnest. “And when do you wish to do it?”
“I would do it right now, had I come prepared.” he responds lowly. “But soon. Soon, I will make you mine in the eyes of our gods. As you will make me yours. We will be one. Not just by words and promises, but by blood and fire.”
The look in his eyes, possessive and bordering on a hint of madness should unsettle you. As it would unsettle anyone else. But you only feel a smile creeping onto your lips as his words.
“Your family would be enraged, should they hear that you took a Blackfyre as your wife. A blood traitor.” you retort lowly, almost teasing.
“Then they are fools.” he hisses, though the heat is not directed at you. “Valyrian blood must connect with valyrian blood. Dragons do not mate with sheep. I fear that is something my family has forgotten over the decades. Our blood is tainted, watered. We can strengthen it again. We will. And if they cannot see it, they shall wander in blindness until their sacred Stranger takes them.”
****
Aerion had spent the moons following that conversation in search of a priest who was specialized in the wedding customs of Old Valyria. You knew he’d scarcely find one, as the tradition of valyrian weddings had died out long ago.
Word said that the last such ceremony had taken place in the year 120 after Aegon’s Conquest, almost one hundred years ago at that time. The ceremony had united Rhaenyra Targaryen with her uncle, Daemon Targaryen. Two of the last dragon riders in your bloodline.
Barely any priests or septons were taught the traditions of valyrian weddings since then. So the chances of Aerion finding one were close to none.
But Aerion was not the type of man to accept defeat. He would find a person to wed the two of you. No matter what. He had set his mind to it – and when he did – nothing could bring him away from it. Not that you would have thought to try. You wished for him to find one. Marrying in the ways of your ancestors, in the way of Old Valyria, had been what you desired.
No ceremonies in the eyes of the Seven. Only fire and blood.
One night, Aerion had come to you, the delight and satisfaction clear as day in his eyes. He had found a willing priest. To this day, you do not know if the priest was willing or threatened. It would not have mattered to you either way.
He told you that while the priest was not familiar with the customs, he had agreed to read scripts of the ceremonies – and that he would wed the two of you in the traditions of your ancestors. That he would unite the two of you as you intended.
Aerion stands before you, the two of you dressed in traditionally valyrian robes. He had them fabricated especially for this ceremony, wishing to do everything right. Everything needs to be perfect, down to the last detail. If he is to marry you in the ways of Old Valyria, he is to do it right.
The priest, who had read and memorized the vows and details of the ceremony, steps forward and holds out a blade to you, made of valyrian steel. Both you and Aerion already know what you must do.
You take the blade from him, eyes moving to meet Aerion’s. You exchange a determined glance, no hint of hesitation in either of you. Your gaze drops to his mouth as you bring the blade to his lower lip. With careful movement, you drag it down the center of it. A tiny amount of blood wells beneath the steel, coating his lip red.
You raise your hand, thumb coming to brush through the liquid. You then bring your thumb to his forehead, wiping his blood over his still rather pale skin, no matter how much Lyseni sun he had soaked in.
He takes the dagger and repeats the exact same gesture with you. A clean cut down the middle of your lower lip, thumb catching the blood before bringing it to your forehead, mirroring his own.
He moves the steel across his palm then, his fingers twitching minimally from the pain. You offer your own hand, and he does the same to you. You do not falter, do not wince. You are used to cuts littering the palm of your hand. Blood sacrifices demanded exactly that – blood.
The priest steps forward, in his hands a thick and long ribbon, red with gold embroidery. You and Aerion connect your hands, palms touching and your blood joining, becoming one. While the priest wraps the fabric tightly around your hands, your mixed blood trickles out beneath it, running down your wrists and dropping onto the floor beneath you.
Neither of you really notices, eyes firmly locked onto each other’s.
The priest then reaches for a black chalice, filled partially with wine. He holds it beneath your joined palms for several moments, letting the wine mix with your shared blood. He hands it to you.
You lift the chalice to your lips, eyes not once leaving Aerion’s. You drink half of it, letting the taste fill your mouth and consume your senses. Sweet, the metallic taste not to be missed. You let it run down your throat and into your system as you hand the chalice to Aerion.
He mirrors you, drinking the second half of the liquid. Neither of you are strangers to the taste of blood, though it is watered down by the wine this time. Neither of you shy away from it, the thought of what it implies. You never have.
All the while, the priest chants High Valyrian words. The vows said to unite the two of you. To make you one.
“Blood of two. Joined as one.”
“Ghostly Flame. And song of shadows.”
“Two hearts as embers.”
“Forged in fourteen fires.”
“A future promised in glass. The stars stand witness.”
“The vow spoken through time – of darkness and light.”
When the priest comes to a stop, his words dying out into silence, Aerion lifts his free hand, setting it on the side of your face. Your hands come unbound, neither paying attention to the priest, wholly focused on one another.
His other hand, coated in his own and your blood, comes to the other side of your face. You feel the wetness of the liquid smearing over your skin, but it does not bother you.
He pulls you into him, connecting his lips to yours.
And with that, you are his. And he is yours. Two dragons, bound as one.
He loses himself in you, lips unable to part from yours except to whisper just once, with certain finality to it:
“My wife.”
You return it. But you do not call him husband. It would be logical. That is what he is. And yet, you only call him what you’ve always done. What you know he wants to hear more than anything.
“My dragon.”
****
The years that passed after the ceremony were mostly uneventful. You and your husband indulged in the relaxed and lavish life you could live here in Lys. No one to meddle in your business, no one to pressure the two of you into conceiving heirs. While the two of you intended to – one day – honour the dragon’s third head on your family’s crest, you had no reason to hurry. So you did not.
One day, Aerion came to you, a piece of parchment tightly clutched in his fingers.
“A letter. From my father.” he had said, settling on the edge of the bed next to you, where you had just taken a nap in the early hours of the afternoon. You had lifted yourself onto your elbows, glancing at the neat handwriting on the parchment,
“And what does he want?” you had asked in return.
“He demands my return. He claims that the amount of years I have spent here have been enough. That my punishment must come to an end and that I shall return to Summerhall by the end of the week. He will send his people by boat to get me.” Aerion had explained.
You could tell that he was conflicted. You knew part of him longed to return home. To the place where he was not an exiled man, but a prince of the blood. Where his words and actions held more power than they did here. And that a small, twisted part of him, longed for his family. Even if he would never admit it.
But the other part of him wished to remain here. A place with no restrictions – no demands and no expectations. The freedom he’d had here he would not find back in Westeros. The relaxed days spent lying in the sun, bathing in the sea, sipping on fruity wine would end, vanish. And they would scarcely ever return.
“Then we shall return, if your father demands it. I highly doubt he would let you stay here, even if you asked him to.” you had replied in a soft tone, your leg moving beneath the silken covers to brush your outer thigh against his back where he had sat on your bedside. The physical contact was meant to calm him, ground him, bring him back from his wandering thoughts.
“You will return with me.” he had stated.
“Of course, I am your wife. But they will not be happy with my presence.”
“I do not care. The dragon protects what is precious to him.”
“I know, ñuha zaldrīzes. I know. I do not doubt it. Do not doubt you. You are the fiercest dragon of them all.”
You had seen the way the tension in his shoulders slowly lessened at your words. As it always did.
“Then we will return. By the end of the week.”
****
Maekar Targaryen’s men had been utterly confused and dumbfounded, when in the stead of only the volatile prince they were said to escort back to Westeros, he was accompanied by you. A woman. You had known they most likely thought you a whore at first glance, still clad in Lyseni silks.
They most likely thought he had bought you free from one of the pleasure houses. That he had liked you so much he intended to bring you back home with him and keep you as his personal courtesan.
Fortunately, they had been smart enough not to comment on it, only welcoming both Aerion and you onto the ship which would bring you back to the west. Otherwise, the ship would have had no one left to lead it back home.
The journey had been much too long and tedious for your liking. Spending several days and nights upon a rocking ship through storms and windy weather irritated you to no end. You had already missed the familiar heat of the Lyseni sun. Or the slight burn in the evening when you had stayed outside just a tad bit too long.
The fresh smell of the open sea transformed into the familiar, almost long forgotten, stench of the west once the boat finally docked. The thick and dense smell of the soil, the rot of the cities, such a stark contrast to the east.
The ship had docked in the haven of Stonehelm, the closest bay to Summerhall. After that had followed another days long journey by carriage, bringing the two of you from Stonehelm to Summerhall at last.
And so, here you were, stepping out of the carriage after Aerion, his hand in yours as he led you out of the confined space. It was cloudy, a state you had last seen the sky in years ago. And now, it seemed to be its default state. You had never been in Summerhall, so the towering castle was entirely new as you took it in while stepping out into the courtyard.
Your eyes roamed over it for a few moments while Aerion led you further forward, into the direction of where his father was already waiting, posture rigid as the elder man’s violet eyes, much like Aerion’s, fell on you.
Maekar greeted his son first, even pulling the man into a short embrace. Aerion had been gone for several years, after all. He pulled back, the palm of his hand lingering on the side of Aerion’s upper arm for a few seconds longer before falling to his side.
Then his eyes, filled with suspicion, landed on you.
“Who is this, Aerion?” he asked, voice laced in confusion and already flaring anger. Maekar knew his son. He knew nothing good would leave the prince’s lips in response to his question.
“This, father, is my wife.”
The words were said dripping with pride. You were his valyrian bride. Everything he had ever desired in life. He claimed you as his, as a dragon was born to. And you had given yourself to him willingly.
Maekar’s expression blanked before it quickly contorted back into anger.
“Your wife?” he repeated, tone sharp. “And does your wife have a name, son?”
“Y/N.” you cut in then, redirecting the prince of Summerhall’s attention to you. “Blackfyre. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
You spoke your family’s name with smugness, fully aware of what chaos it would cause. What weight it carried that Aerion, a prince of house Targaryen, had married you, a Blackfyre, in secret – without the permission of his father.
“Blackfyre?” Maekar practically growled, repeating the name while his lips curled in distain.
It was comical, almost. How similar yet different father and son were all the same. It was the exact same thing Aerion had first said once you had introduced yourself to him. An echo of your name. Only that Aerion’s had been laced in curiosity, surprise almost, while Maekar’s dripped in hatred.
A small smirk crept onto your face, which did not go unnoticed by the elder man.
His eyes snapped back to his son, his entire body vibrating with fury.
“Have you taken complete leave of your senses, boy!?” he snapped, keeping his voice low enough to not attract the attention of the entire courtyard. If he could, he would keep this under the wraps for all eternity.
“I send you to Lys, to reflect, to better yourself. And you come back with the exact same arrogance you carried when you left. And not only that, but you have married a Blackfyre. A blood traitor. Without consulting me once. What in the seven fucking hells has gotten into you?”
Before either you or Aerion could get a word in, he went on.
“And you have not only wed any Blackfyre. Of course it had to be the witch. Have you gone mad? Which Septon approved of this?”
His words did not deter you. You did not feel insulted, even though you possibly should have. The word witch was no bit belittling to you. In a way, you were what could be considered a witch. It amused you, rather, the outrage of the Anvil. A man said to be so strong, composed and focused in battle, reduced to a fuming mess by the fact that his son had wed the enemy.
As Maekar insulted you, however, Aerion’s own anger began to flare. He sensed that it did not bother you, he could see it in the calmness, bordering on amusement, on your features. The lack of tension in your shoulders.
But it irritated him. How his father had the audacity to disparage you. To talk down on you, his wife. His perfect valyrian bride. The woman who saw in him what no one else did. The woman who saw the truth of him.
“You will not speak in this manner of her, father. She is my wife. I chose her and married her in the ways of Old Valyria. She is a Targaryen by marriage – and therefore she deserves your respect.” Aerion hissed, his hand coming back to clutch onto yours, the grip so tight his knuckles turned white. The pressure of the grip stung slightly, yet not enough to truly hurt.
“My respect.” Maekar scoffed sharply in return. “This whore of yours does not have my respect. She will be sent back to her family, shall they decide whether to take her back or send her away once more.”
Aerion bristled at that. “She stays here. With me. I will kill everyone that as much as thinks about taking her from me. You know I will, father.”
As Maekar saw the sheer willpower in his son’s eyes. The possessiveness with which he clung to your hand, unwilling to let go of you, made him come to realize that there was no escape to this situation. He had discovered firsthand what Aerion was capable of back in Ashford. For long years, as the boy grew up, he had tried to bury it. Had tried to blame Aerion’s cruel acts against his siblings, the staff, even animals, on teenage foolery. On not knowing any better. But the events of Ashford had destroyed that illusion.
And now, as his son stood in front of him, his Blackfyre bride next to him with an irritating glint of pride and amusement in her eyes, Maekar’s anger ebbed away into worry. He knew that he would need to let you stay. That somehow, he would need to find a solution to whatever consequences came with this union. What would happen if children were to come out of this marriage.
Because if he did not, if he tried to do anything to you, Aerion’s rage would consume them all and he would leave nothing but ashes and ruins in his wake.
****
You settled in Summerhall over the following weeks. Aerion had been granted bigger chambers, which he now shared with you. He made sure you were always tended to, also ensuring no one that could pose a threat stepped too close to you. He did not trust his father’s words of acceptance to your presence. Not yet.
The inhabitants of the castle mostly avoided you. When you passed the maids and servants in the halls, they lowered their heads, walking just a tad bit faster. They were afraid, you found. Afraid of you. You were Aerion Brightflame’s wife. A Blackfyre. In their eyes, you could only be just as vain and cruel as him.
The other Targaryens stayed clear of your path as much as they could. At breakfasts and suppers, they were forced into your proximity. Fortunately for them, you preferred conversation with your husband.
Maekar always eyed you with wary eyes, as if he was just waiting for you to snap your jaws closed around one of their necks, revealing that this was all a tryst to get the Blackfyres closer to the Iron Throne. That you did not truly feel such deep affection for Aerion as you made it appear that you did.
Daeron was too drunk to pay close attention to you most days. His eyes strayed far from yours when you were in the same room, keeping his stare mostly downcast. He wished anything but to either attract your or Aerion’s rage for as much as looking at you.
The only time he had spoken to you was on one of your first nights in the castle. You had been wandering the halls at a rather late hour, and came across Daeron in a deserted hallway. His clothes had been crumpled and creased, the collar askew. His hair tousled and messy, dark rings under his eyes and the drunkenness clear in his posture.
His eyes had met yours, and he had said one thing. Only one thing.
“It was you. You killed the dragon.”
The words had left his lips slurred, barely comprehendible. But you had heard them nonetheless. You did not know the exact history of his words, but you were aware of the what they meant. You had heard that Daeron had what they called Dragon Dreams. Quite a few of your ancestors had had them as well.
The dragon. Baelor.
In his dreams, he had seen that it was you who was at fault for Breakspear’s death.
But he never mustered up the courage to tell anyone of that dream. He kept it to himself, never spoke of it. Not even to you, except on that one night.
Kiera of Tyrosh, Daeron’s wife – formerly Valarr’s – feared you. She had heard horrible stories and tales of the Blackfyres from her late and current husband’s lips. She had heard tales of you, in particular. The blood witch. That you were exiled for tampering with witchcraft.
And that you were Aerion’s wife only heightened it. While she had not spent much time in his presence while married to either Valarr or Daeron, she had seen and heard enough to know just what kind of man he was. What he believed himself to be. A dragon in human form. And by the way the two of you interacted, she saw that you encouraged that twisted mindset of his. You seemed to share it even.
But despite everyone’s fear and distaste for you and your presence at Summerhall, Aerion let none of it touch you. He would never dare to. He had sunken his claws deep into your skin, his wings sheltering you from anything that would come too close. Baring his teeth at anyone who tried.
He was a dragon. He knew it. You knew it. You told him so every day. Always with a soft caress over the side of his face, brushing the corner of his lips. Always with a tenderly whispered ñuha zaldrīzes. My dragon.
He was your dragon. And you were his treasured wife.
And dragons protect their treasures. With fire and blood.
Hi! I know it's been a while since I last dropped in, but I wanted to make sure you were alright since I noticed you havent posted in a bit (which is 100% ok, take the time you need for yourself. Life gets rough).
If you're chillin, living your best life, good, I hope it gets better and chiller. If you're down in the dumps, that's also alright. Life sucks really bad sometimes. Please dont forget to take care of yourself, I will show up in your floorboards if you don't ෆ╹ .̮ ╹ෆ
Get good rest, eat what makes your body happy, and drink as much water as you can. You're super cool, love ya (platonically) twin, have a sunflower to brighten up your day🌻
-🐍🎀
Hello!!
It has been a while indeed - and thank you so much for checking in <3 I just couldn't resist from already answering this.
First off, I know you're still waiting for your request - and I promise I'm working on it (along with a bunch of other requests). So fear not, it will come! :)
Anyway, I just really wanted to say thank you for this absolutely sweet message. It means a lot to me and always adds to my motivation, so really, thank you (The sunflower did brighten my day, btw<3)
I promise I'm okay! Just some stuff that sucks lately, but overall I'm fine and happy.
And I can wholeheartedly just return that sentiment on being cool (& love ya too). You're an angel, truly.
Have a very nice day/night/whatever (you get it) and take care of yourself as well! Or else I'll have to show up in your floorboards. That goes both ways :)
