Can we ever get a glimpse of Real Bobby x reader relationship before the backrooms...
"Just go talk to her, man."
Terrence says it like it's so simple.
Like it's a thing Bobby can just do. Walk across the hallway, open his mouth, form words in the correct order, and deliver them to your face without his hands doing that thing. That stupid, traitorous, un-Bobby thing where they shake. Just slightly.
Just enough that he has to shove them in his pockets or grip the camera strap or cross his arms or do anything that isn't standing there with his fingers trembling like an idiot who's never spoken to a girl before.
He has spoken to girls before. He's good at it. Bobby Franklin is good at it. The lean, the grin, the chain catching the light at the right angle, the way he can make his voice do that low, easy thing that makes people look at him twice.
He's been told he's charming. He's been told he's an asshole.
Both are true and both have worked for him and neither one is working now because you are not just people. You are a specific, particular, singular problem that Bobby has had no solution for since you transferred here halfway through junior year.
Hands full with a box of books and a schedule that put you in his fourth-period English, and a face that made his brain go loud and quiet and stupid in a way he's still not equipped to handle.
"I talk to her every day," Bobby shoots back. He's leaning against the lockers outside the science wing. One foot up, camera hanging from his neck, watching the hallway with the practiced disinterest of a man pretending he isn't looking for someone. "We're friends."
"Yeah, that's the problem." Terrence adjusts his backpack strap. Gives Bobby the look he's been giving him for months. The one that says I've watched you be an idiot about this for a year and a half and my patience is a finite resource. "You've been friends for like a year. You walk her to class. You drive her home. You filmed her reading a book for twenty minutes last week,you creep."
"The light was good."
"The light. Bobby. Brother. The light is never that good. You filmed a girl reading and you looked at the footage like it wasโI don't know, man, like it was the Sistine Chapel or something. You're gone. You are gone for this girl. Just ask her out already."
Bobby doesn't say anything. He adjusts the lens cap on his camera. Fidgets with the chain at his neck.
Terrence is right and Bobby knows Terrence is right but the knowing sits in his chest like a coal. Warm and constant and completely unhelpful. Because knowing he should do something has never been Bobby's problem. Bobby's problem is the gap between knowing and doing, the six-inch canyon between I should tell her and but what if sheโ
What if she doesn't.
That's the thing. That's the whole thing.
Bobby Franklin, who has never once in his seventeen years of life been afraid of a single goddamn thing, is afraid of this.
Because every other girl has been fun, a performance, something he could walk away from if it went sideways with his hands in his pockets and his dignity intact.
You are not a game.
You're the girl who sits next to him in English and argues about symbolism with her whole body, leaning forward, gesturing, getting that crease between your eyebrows when she thinks he's wrong.
He's usually wrong. He knows less about books than you do and more about cameras, but he argues back because the crease is the best thing he's ever seen and the arguing makes your eyes do something electric and Bobby would rather be wrong in your vicinity than right anywhere else.
You're the girl who laughed at his stupid joke in the parking lot three weeks after you transferred. Most do the polite laugh. You didn't. Not the social laugh, but the real one, the caught-off-guard one that made you cover your mouth with your hand and look at him with wide surprised eyes like you didn't expect to find something funny here.
Bobby felt the ground shift under his feet at that sound. Just slightly. Just enough.
You're the girl who, last Tuesday, fell asleep on his shoulder in his car in the parking lot after school because you'd been up late studying and he was supposed to drive you home and you passed out before he made it out of the lot.
Bobby sat there for forty-five minutes with the engine off, not moving, barely breathing, because your weight against his arm was the best thing that had ever happened to him and he would rather have died than woken you up.
He didn't tell Terrence about that. He didn't tell anyone. Some things are too big to say out loud without them changing shape.
"She probably doesn't even like me like that," Bobby says casually.
The verbal equivalent of a shrug. But his thumbnail is picking at the edge of the lens cap and Terrence knows him well enough to know what that means.
"Bobby. She waits for you after fourth period. She made you a mixtape."
"That's justโ"
Terrence's eyes narrow. "She drew a little heart on the label, you idiot."
"That's how girls write," Bobby shoots back "They put hearts on everything."
Terrence stares at him. The stare communicates several things simultaneously, including you're the dumbest smart person I know and I can't help you if you won't help yourself and I'm begging you to stop being a coward about the one thing in your life that actually matters.
"Go," Terrence says flatly. Final. He points down the hall. "She's at her locker. Go. Right now. Before you talk yourself out of it again, you chickenshit."
Bobby pushes off the wall. Adjusts the camera at his chest. Runs his tongue along the inside of his teeth, a nervous habit he's never been able to break, and starts walking.
The hallway is that particular kind of after-school empty. Half the lights already off, the last few students filtering out in clumps, the janitor's cart parked outside the gym already. Bobby's sneakers squeak on the linoleum. The camera bumps against his ribs with each step, and his heart is doing an unnecessary loud thumping sound inside his chest that he would very much like it to stop.
He sees you before you see him.
You're at your locker. Door open, half-hidden behind it, pulling books out and stacking them in that particular order you have. Heaviest on the bottom, paperbacks on top, the system you explained to him once and he pretended to listen to while actually just watching the way your hands moved.
You've got a pen behind your ear. Your hair falls across your face and you keep pushing it back. It keeps falling and you keep pushing it and Bobby has wanted to brush it back for you approximately nine hundred times but has never once done it. Because that would require crossing a line he's been toeing for a year and a half and he isn't sure the other side is safe.
He lifts the camera. Force of habit, security blanket, the viewfinder a barrier between himself and anything too real. He frames you in the shotโyour profile, the locker, the late-afternoon light slanting through the hall windows and catching the edge of your jawโand you must hear the click of the shutter release or feel the weight of being watched because your head turns and your eyes find the lens.
Your expression does two things in rapid succession.
First: the glare. That specific look you give him when you catch him filming. The narrowed eyes, the set jaw, the Bobby, I swear to god that you don't even need to say out loud anymore because he's seen it enough times to read it off your face like subtitles.
You don't like being filmed without warning. You've told him this. He's not listened. This is an ongoing negotiation between the two of you that neither of you is actually trying to resolve because the argument itself has become a language. His way of saying I can't stop looking at you and your way of saying I see you looking.
Second: the smile. The one that comes right after the glare, the one that undoes it completely, the one that breaks across your face like dawn.
Your eyes warm. The corners of your mouth pull up. And there it is.
That thing, that specific thing that Bobby has never been able to name, the thing your face does when you see him, like something in you loosens whenever you see him.
You push the hair out of your face and this time it stays and you look at him and you're smiling. Bobby's hands are shaking and he lowers the camera because for once in his life the viewfinder isn't enough. For once, he needs to see this with his actual eyes.
"Are you filming me getting my books?" you demand but it's playful, light.
"Documenting," Bobby shoots back. "There's a difference, actually."
"Uhu-uhu. Sure."
"Cinematically speakingโ"
"Bobby."
"โthe mundane rituals of daily life, when captured through a lensโ"
"Bobby."
"โbecome elevated to a kind of visual poetry thatโ"
"If you say visual poetry one more time I'm putting that camera in my locker and you're not getting it back for a week."
He grins. Can't help it. The grin is the one thing Bobby can't control around you. Everything else he can manage. The posture, the voice, the practiced cool, but the grin just happens. Wide and crooked and too honest. The grin of a boy and not the smirk of the person Bobby pretends to be, and every time it shows up he feels exposed and every time it shows up you smile wider like it's your favourite thing ever, and Bobby doesn't know what to do with that information except keep grinning like an idiot.
He ambles over. Leans against the locker next to yours. Close enough that his shoulder almost touches the open door, that the space between your bodies is a decision rather than an accident.
He crosses his arms over the camera, which presses it flat against his chest, and his chin tilts down slightly so he's looking at you through his lashes. A move that is, on other days and with other people, a calculated thing, a weapon in Bobby's considerable arsenal. Right now it's just the only angle at which he can look at you without you seeing how hard his heart is beating.
"So," he says. Smooth. Easy. The voice working the way it's supposed to.
"So," you say back.
Your books are stacked in your arms. You're holding them against your chest like a shield. Your chin tilts up. You're looking at him and there's something in your faceโamusement, warmth, that particular intelligence you carryโand Bobby is suddenly, viscerally aware that you know exactly what he's doing.
You always know. You've known since the first week.
Since the first time he walked you to class and you looked at him sideways and said you don't have to do this, your class is on the other side of the building and he said I like the exercise and you said you hate exercise and he said I'm turning over a new leaf and you said you're turning a pretty specific shade of red for a guy who just likes walking and Bobby had wanted to die and also to kiss you and also to never stop talking to you for the rest of his life. All at once, all in the same breath.
You know. You've always known. And you've been waiting.
"Heard a rumour," Bobby says.
Your face reveals nothing. "About what?"
"About you."
"What kind of rumour?"
"The kind whereโ" He stops. Recalibrates. The smooth line he had preparedโsomething clever, and deflecting, something with an escape hatch built into it so he could retreat if your face did the wrong thingโevaporates.
You're looking at him. Just looking, with your books against your chest and the pen behind your ear. The hallway light makes your eyes do that thing again. The warm thing he's spent a year and a half filming because he can't say your eyes make me feel like I'm going to die without sounding moderately insane.
"You know what, never mind the rumour. Forget the rumour. There's no rumour." He shifts against the locker. The cool metal bites through his shirt. "I was justโI wanted to ask you something."
Your eyebrow goes up. Just one. You do that, too. The single-eyebrow raise, the one that says I'm listening and I'm going to enjoy watching you struggle with this. Bobby loves it and hates it in equal measure because it makes him feel seen in a way that's thrilling and terrifying at the same time.
He opens his mouth. The words are right there. They're lined up and ready and all he has to do is push them through his teeth and into the air between your bodies and let them land.
"Do you want toโI just wanted to ask, I mean you lookโ"
Oh my fucking god, a meteor should just strike him down where he standsโ
"Robert Bobby Franklin." Your voice is different. Still warm but there's a new quality to it now. A steadiness, a weight, like you're planting your feet. Your smile hasn't changed but your eyes have gone sharper, more focused, the way they get in English class when you've figured out the thesis before the rest of the room. "Are you trying to flirt with me?"
Bobby's brain empties like a glass knocked off a counter by Mr Whiskers.
He should say something smooth. Should say I'm always flirting with you, haven't you noticed? Deploy the grin and the lean and the voice and make it a bit, make it a joke. Turn it into something he can retract if your face shifts. He should do any of the things that Bobby Franklin would normally do in a situation where his chest is cracking open.
What he does instead is hold up his hand. Thumb and forefinger. Pinched together. A tiny gap between themโhalf an inch, less, barely daylight between the pads of his fingers.
"Little bit," he admits. His voice is not smooth. It's husky, caught in some throaty register he can't control. It's the voice of a boy standing on the edge of the highest dive peering down. "Yeah, you caught me. Little bit."
The hallway is too quiet. Somewhere down by the gym the janitor's cart squeaks across the floor. Bobby is holding his fingers an inch from your face like an idiot, showing you the exact width of his courage, which is half an inch and shrinking rapidly.
You look at his fingers. Then look at his face. Your mouth doesn't smile, not exactly, but curves into something softer and more complicated than that. A curve that lives in the space between amusement and tenderness and makes Bobby's pulse trip over itself.
You don't say anything. You just... look at him. For what feels like a long time. For what feels like the exact amount of time it takes for Bobby to understand that he's not going to die from this afterall.
That the expression on your face is not rejection, that the reason you're not answering is not because you're figuring out how to let him down gently but because you're letting the moment be what it is.
Because you, unlike Bobby, are not afraid of moments.
Bobby feels his shoulders drop. The tension he didn't know he was holdingโin his jaw, his neck, the hand gripping the camera strap so tight his knuckles have gone whiteโreleases. Not all at once. Slowly. Like a fist unclenching.
He takes a step closer. Not a big one. An inch. Two. Enough that the space between you contracts into something deliberate, a tension that has a name, something that both of you are actively choosing.
His arms are still crossed but looser now, the camera a barrier he's not hiding behind anymore so much as resting against. He can smell your shampoo. He can see the curve of your bottom lip that he filmed once, in close-up, from the passenger seat while you were driving his car and yelling at him to put the camera away with a laugh.
"Go out with me," he says. Not a question. An offering, a dare, a door held open with both hands.
Your chin tilts. Your eyebrows lift. You shift your books to one arm and the pen behind your ear slides and you catch it without looking, a move so smooth and so you that Bobby's chest does the cracking thing again, that seismic shift he's been trying to film his way around for eighteen months.
"Are you trying to ask me to be your girlfriend, Robert?"
The full name. Not Franklin, not Bobby, just Robert. The name you use when you're being serious underneath the teasing, and the sound of it in your voice makes him want to say yes.
Just yes. Just the word, no armour, no escape hatch, no joke to retreat behind. Just a boy telling a girl the truth.
Bobby grins. The real one, the crooked one, the one he can't control. He unfolds his arms. Lets the camera hang. Tips his head to the side, just slightly, and his earring catches the light and he looks at youโreally looks, bare-eyed, no viewfinder, no glassโand says:
"We'll see how the date goes first, baby."
Baby. The word lands between you like a dropped coin and Bobby hears it come out of his mouth and feels his face heat because he didn't plan that, it just....came out, natural as breathing.
As if his mouth has been holding that word in reserve for a year and a half and finally found the opening. Baby. Like it was always yours. Like he was always going to end up right here, leaning against a locker with his heart in his throat, calling you something soft because he finally ran out of ways to be hard and dismissive.
Your expression shifts, lips parting, just slightly. Your eyes go wide for half a second and Bobby sees it: the surprise, the genuine surprise, like you weren't expecting that, either. Like for all your certainty and your sharp eyes and ability to read him like a book, you didn't predict the word baby and it landed somewhere tender.
Bobby watches you hear it. Watches the surprise dissolve into warmth. It starts at your eyes and moves to your mouth and settles into the whole shape of your face.
You're smiling. Not the mock-exasperated smile. Or the caught-you-filming smile. Something new. He hasn't seen this one before, or maybe he's seen it a hundred times and is only now letting himself look at it without the camera in the way.
He crosses his arms again. Looks at you for a beat. The grin fades. Softening, the cockiness draining out of it until what's left is just Bobby. Just the boy under the performance.
His jaw relaxes and his eyes go quiet. And the expression on his face is the one he's been hiding for eighteen months, the one the camera was supposed to protect him from. Open, unguarded, wanting so much it's almost visible, a want that makes his hands shake and his voice drop and his whole body lean toward you like gravity.
"Yeah," he says. Softer. Almost shy, which is a word that has never applied to Bobby Franklin in his entire life and applies now, here, in this hallway, with you. "I'm asking, okay? Seriously. I'm asking."
The space between you is small enough to step across and neither of you steps. But neither of you steps back and the moment holds, suspended, full, the kind of perfect that Bobby will one day try to capture on tape. Because he doesn't know yet that this is the moment he should have put the camera down forever and just lived inside of with his bare, stupid, brave hands.
But that's later.
Right now, Bobby is seventeen and his hands are shaking and you're smiling at him and the whole world is the width of a hallway and for the first time ever, he's not afraid.
"Yes."
๐น better bobby series masterlist.
an: initially wanted to do this as a warm up before I get stuck into part 4 but then my ass got carried away (what's new?). i'm so glad someone asked for this one though. now I shall disappear once more into my writing cave, toodles~
Ohhhh but this is sooo BB cuddled up in the blanket fort letting Companion trace his features from that tooth ask
๐น better bobby series masterlist.
you're in the nest after a long day of exploring.
and it's warm. far warmer than level 0 should allow, and by now you know that's him. that bb's doing something to the air or the walls or whatever the backrooms are made of to make this corner soft for you.
he's lying there looking up at you and doing the slow blink. the one that's almost human. the one that takes just a beat too long on the close and a beat too long on the open, like the mechanism behind his eyelids runs on slightly different rhythm.
and then you start tracing.
you don't decide to. your hand just moves. fingertips along his brow bone first. the ridge of it, slightly too pronounced, sharper than bobby's was in a way you wouldn't notice unless you were this close. and he goes still. that predator stillness. but not the dangerous kind. you've seen that kind before. this is the one where he's holding himself so carefully because he doesn't want to do anything that might make this stop.
you trace down. the bridge of his nose. not quite bobby's nose, you think, there's a straightness to it that bobby's didn't have. bobby broke his in eighth grade and it healed with a bump and this nose doesn't have that slight bump. this nose is the version bobby's face would have been if nothing had ever hurt it. across his cheekbone (higher than last week, you note, the architecture underneath pressing closer to the surface again) and he makes a sound.
low. a vibration that starts in his chest and travels up through his jaw and you feel it in your fingertips where they rest against his skin. it's involuntary. you can tell because his eyes widen slightly after he makes it, like he didn't know that was in him.
you trace his lower lip. the full swell of it. exactly bobby's mouth but the temperature is wrong. too cool. and the texture is just slightly off in a way you've stopped being able to articulate because your baseline for "normal" eroded somewhere around week three (or what you think was week three).
and the sound comes again, longer this time. a low, pleased rumble like something resonating in a space too large for his chest.
and that's when it hits you.
he's never felt this before.
not never felt your touch. never felt any touch that wasn't violence.
you think about what you know about him. what the backrooms have taught you. what you've inferred from the way he moves through this place. the things you've read in his body language when he comes back from whatever he does in the dark hallways with black fluid on his hands.
his entire existence has been pain. fear. darkness. the long stretches of nothing that make up the backrooms' silence. hunger, if he feels hunger. if what drives him to kill is something as simple as that.
loneliness so vast and so old that he built an entire personality out of a stolen face just to have someone to wear toward another person. and rage, maybe. whatever it was that made his eyes go black when jerry touched your mind. whatever lives underneath the bobby suit that is ancient and cold, full of teeth.
that is the complete catalogue of what Better Bobby knows about being alive. pain, fear, darkness, loneliness, hunger, rage.
and here you are. in a blanket nest, tracing his lip with your thumb.
teaching him a new one.
you lean closer. his eyes track you as you do. the pupils doing that too-fast dilation, the one that isn't human. one that means every particle of whatever he is made of is paying attention. you kiss the tip of his nose.
the sound he makes is not a sound a person makes.
it's a vibration. a rasp. something between a frequency and a breath, pulled from somewhere so deep in his chest that you feel it in your own sternum.
his whole body shudders once. a full-body response, involuntary, like every part of him is trying to process a sensation it has no category for. his hands come up and hover at your sides, not touching, not grabbing, just... there. open. shaking. like he wants to hold on to something but doesn't know the protocol for this.
more.
he doesn't say it. bb's mouth doesn't move. but everything else does. his chin tilts up. his eyes go half-lidded. his body angles toward you the way a plant angles toward light. this total, unconscious orientation, and you understand with sudden, devastating clarity that he's asking without knowing how to ask because nobody has ever given him a framework for wanting something gently. this is a human thing, a human softness, and hes unfamiliar with it.
so you kiss his cheek. just lightly. barely there. and the rumble deepens.
the other cheek. his eyes close all the way.
his forehead. the sharp ridge of his brow bone. the corner of his jaw where the bone meets the soft skin underneath. each one a small specific point of contact, your lips against the wrong temperature of his skin, and with each one the sound in his chest grows. layers over itself. becomes something textured and continuous. so low it's almost subsonic. you feel it in your teeth, on your skin. you feel it in the blankets. you feel it in the floor.
the level is vibrating.
not dangerously. not the way the walls did when he snarled at jerry. softly. a hum in the infrastructure. like the walls are resonating with whatever is happening in his chest because he IS the walls, or the walls are him, or the distinction stopped mattering a long time ago. and whatever he's feeling right now is big enough that the walls can't contain it.
you pull back just far enough to look at him.
bb's eyes are open. barely. the blue is so bright it's almost white at the centre. backlit. vast and warm and absolutely not human. his lips are parted. his face is... completely open. no mask. no performance. this is the thing underneath, the real thing, the entity behind the entity, and it is looking at you with an expression that doesn't have a name because nothing has ever felt this before. there is no word for this in any language because this is the first time it has ever existed.
you wrap your arms around him. his arms close around you at once (finally, finally) and you feel the strength in them. the same strength that tore hounds apart, held perfectly perfectly in check. he curls around you in the blanket nest, knees drawn up, face pressed into your hair, and the sound in his chest settles into constant and rhythmic sound.
he's purring.
an ancient terror that has killed countless entities and even humans, that makes the architecture of reality rearrange itself is purring. in a blanket fort. because you kissed his nose.
Thoughts being thunk about companion tracing BBโs canines, just slightly too sharp, too long, forcing him to hold his mouth open obediently whilst she evaluates his slight deviations from real Bobby. Stick some fingers in that entityโs MOUTH!!!
you're in the blanket nest.
that's what you've started calling it in your head. the corner of level 0 where bb has arranged every scavenged textile in the backrooms into something that makes a surprisingly comfortable bed.
your head is on his thigh. his fingers are on your hair, stroking rhythmically, and he's humming that tuneless song that doesn't exist anywhere outside of him.
your eyes are half closed. his fingers brush over your brow gently. the humming is low and constant in your ears. you can feel it in his thigh under your cheek, this faint vibration, and it's almostโalmostโ
he goes still.
one second his fingers are moving and the next they're not. the humming cuts off like a switch flipped. bb's whole body locks into that predator stillness. every muscle from the hand on your hair to the leg under your head becomes stone.
you see his lips twitch. the mouth pulling back, almost peeling, the way an animal's does right beforeโ
"what's wrong?"
you start to sit up. his hand tightens on your head. not painfully. just keeping you where you are.
"it's fine," he answers.
it's not fine. you can hear it in his voice. the edges are wrong. the vowels are too flat. whatever's happening is pressing up through the bobby suit and you can hear the seams straining.
"bobby."
"stay, baby. it's handled."
you stay.
but you tilt your head on his thigh and look up at him and your breath catches because the face looking down at you is... shifted.
still bobby. still recognisably him. but the cheekbones are higher, sharper, more angular than bobby's face ever was. the bone structure is pressing outward like something underneath is leaning against the skin. his eyes are flat black. no blue. no iris. just that depthless dark that was here before everything.
and his mouth... his lips are parted slightly and you can see the canines and they are longer than they were this morning. you're certain of this. you've been mapping this face for weeks and those teeth are not what they were.
there's a flutter of nerves. old and familiar. the flinch reflex testing its leash. because this is what he is, underneath, and right now the underneath is closer to the surface than you've ever seen it while he was this close to you.
you sit up. his hand slides from your hair and he lets you go, and you can see the way his jaw tightens. he's bracing for you to pull away, to stand, to run, the way humans do.
you put your hand on his face.
his skin is cool under your palm. you angle his jaw toward you, turning his head, and he lets you. goes pliant. one of the most dangerous things in existence and he lets you move him like you're adjusting a lamp. the black eyes track your face and there's something in them that is trying very hard to be still.
"open your mouth."
he opens his mouth.
you lean close. closer than you should be to teeth that could open you from throat to navel.
you can feel the cool absence of breath. you trace the pad of your index finger along one canine (too long, too sharp, the point of it pressing into your fingertip just shy of breaking skin) and he makes a sound. low, rumbling. not quite a word. a vibration that you feel in his jaw under your hand.
his eyes flutter half-closed and he leans into your touch, tilting his head further into your palm. you feel his quiet pleasure like heat from a banked fire. this thing that could tear you apart between one heartbeat and the next is letting you run your fingers along the parts of him that aren't human, and he's savouring it. holding so still because he doesn't want you to stop.
you trace the other canine. tap the point gently. run your thumb along the sharpened ridge of his cheekbone (new, that's new, that wasn't there a week ago) and tuck it quietly alongside all the other ways he's changing. becoming less bobby. becoming more whatever he actually is.
his eyes open. still black. the pleased-feline expression. head cocked into your palm.
you pull your hand back. his face follows your touch for just a fraction of a second before he catches himself.
he leans forward. languid. deliberate. until his nose is touching yours. cool skin against warm. the black eyes filling your entire field of vision, close enough that you can see something moving in them, something vast and endlessly attentive.
like looking into deep water and realising the water is staring back.
"better?" he asks. barely a whisper. his mouth an inch from yours.
"yes," you say.
and you mean his teeth and his cheekbones and the thing underneath that's slowly pressing through.
Iโm so so curious as to what BB actually looks like. Is it a void with teeth? Or is it like freaky looking, claws and all. Either or thatโs our baby right there
Been noticing how Better Bobby is shortened to BB by a lot of people, and I keep reading it as Baby in my head. Lead me to wonder if, unconsciously, at some point, the companion would have started calling it BB in her head and accidentally going โHey, Baby, come here for a second?โ The way BBโs head would crack from how fast it whipped around LMAO
bb has been called a lot of things. entity 0. "it." a threat. a research subject. an apex predator. he's been studied, hunted, feared and classified.
but nobody has ever called him baby. nobody has ever been close enough to call him baby. nobody ever looked at this ancient, unknowable thing wearing a boy's face and thought "yeah that's my baby"
because you wouldn't even realise you'd done it. it would just slip out one day. you're fiddling with something, or checking the notebook (your own personal backrooms database you've been compiling), and you need him to come look at a hallway junction before you note it down and your brain reaches for the shorthand you've been using in your head for weeks. your mouth just goes, "hey, baby, come here for a second?" in the most casual voice imaginable.
and then the silence hits and you replay what you just said and your whole body goes cold.
but it's too late because bb's head has already whipped around so fast it did the thing. the not-quite-human thing. his head moved faster than his body and for just a fraction of a second he forgot to be human about it because whatever just happened in his processing was so immediate, so total, that the disguise lagged behind the reaction.
and he's just... looking at you.
bobby's blue eyes. completely still. but not blank. not that careful, neutral mask he does when he's trying not to want too much. you spy something startled and raw and so desperately pleased in them that it makes your chest hurt.
your tongue tangles in your mouth, "iโthat wasโi didn't meanโit's just shorter. like BB. like the letters. i wasn't calling youโ"
and he says, "say it again."
quiet. not demanding. not teasing. just... quiet. like he's asking to hear it one more time before you take it back.
and you should do exactly that. you should roll your eyes, correct him and rebuild the wall and move on. that's what you do. that's who you are. the girl who keeps one hand on the exit at all times.
but you're so tired. tired of constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.
so you hold out your hand instead. just this once.
"come here, baby."
and between one blink and the next, he's there. not fast the way a predator is fast. fast the way something inevitable is. like the space between you was a formality he'd been tolerating and you just told him he didn't have to anymore.
his fingers find yours, lacing them together slowly, purposefully, threading each one into place like he's memorising the architecture of your hand. like this is something he wants to know at a structural level.
and his face. god. his face. bobby's features arranged into expression bobby hasn't worn in a long time. quiet, pleased, dark satisfaction. eyes half-lidded. head cocked at that angle that's just slightly past human. he looks like a cat that's been let into a room it was always watching through the glass. not smug, exactly. just settled.
like something that's been restless for a very long time has finally stopped pacing inside him.
he doesn't say anything. doesn't push for more. just holds your hand with those too-cool fingers and looks at you with that heavy-lidded pleased-feline expression and the lights in the hallway are just a touch warmer than they should be (not enough to notice consciously, just enough that level 0 feel almost gentle) and you understand with a kind of quiet horror that you don't want to take your hand back.
and bb hums a little louder than usual for the rest of the day. you catch him smiling at nothing twice and the second time he catches you catching him and he doesn't stop. just smiles a little wider with bobby's mouth and something underneath bobby's mouth that is so full of whatever he has instead of joy that it's practically luminous.
What if itโs never known anything soft or gentle? ๐ฅบ like Iโm sure yeah thatโs probably a given cause of where itโs at but to think itโs never experienced anything like that makes me sad
What if there is a Better Reader in the Backrooms and once Real Reader sees her, she gets jealous and protective over Better Bobby??
ok, ok, ok, but imagine.
you've been in the backrooms with Better Bobby for... who knows how long.
time is... a carpet, buzzing light and his almost-right smile. and you shouldn't be here. you know you shouldn't be here. but bobby (real bobby, your bobby, the bobby who asked you to be his girlfriend junior year and made you feel like the only person in the room before he started making you feel like the only person in a room he'd rather not be in) real bobby stopped trying.
real bobby got comfortable. real bobby started looking through you like you were furniture, answering "yeah that's cool" without looking up, forgetting plans you made, treating your presence like background noise he'd already tuned out. and you were so lonely. you were so lonely in a relationship that technically still existed, wearing your boyfriend's letterman jacket like a costume for a role he'd stopped rehearsing, and then you heard a voice in a wall.
or maybe it was always there. that door. maybe Better Bobby just finally opened it for you.
because that's how it happened, wasn't it? no one forced you. there was just a door that shouldn't have been there and a voice on the other side that sounded like bobby (like bobby on a GOOD day, like bobby when he still looked at you like you mattered) saying "hey, come here, i want to show you something" and you followed it because you were starving.
you were emotionally starving and something that sounded like the boy you loved was offering you a meal and you walked right in.
and Better Bobby has he's been everything. he's been real bobby with the volume turned up on all the parts that made you fall in love and all the parts that faded turned back on.
he remembers things you say. he asks follow-up questions. he angles himself between you and every dark hallway and when you talk he LOOKS at you with bobby's blue eyes and actually, fully, completely pays attention. he finds you blankets. he stays awake while you sleep. he hums bobby's little tuneless songs and when you wake up from nightmares about the smiling thing in the dark and flickering lights he says "i'm here, i'm right here" and means it in a way that real bobby hasn't meant anything in months.
and you've been indulging. you know you have. you've been leaning into it the way you lean into a hot bath: knowing it's temporary, knowing the water's going to cool, but right now it's warm and you're so cold and nobody has made you feel warm in so, so long.
you let him walk close. you let him hum. let yourself pretend, in the amber wash of light, that the eyes are the right shade of blue and the hands are the right temperature and the thing sitting next to you in the hallway that smells like mildew is just a boy who loves you and not a question you can't answer.
but you maintain it in the beginning. the mild suspicion. the distance. the tension when his head tilts at that angle that necks don't do. the way you catch yourself leaning in and pull back and watch something flicker across his face (hurt? performance of hurt? does it matter when it looks the same?) you keep one hand on the wall at all times. metaphorically. ready to run. because you know what he is even if you don't know WHAT he is. because what if the warmth is borrowed and the attention is replicated?
and somewhere above this fluorescent nightmare your actual boyfriend is probably not even wondering where you went.
and then, one day, you turn a corner on level 0 and there she is.
and she looks like you.
but better. the way Better Bobby is bobby but more.
she's you with the contrast turned up. you, but rested. you, but without the dark circles and the bitten nails and the desperate grateful look you get when Better Bobby does something thoughtful. that pathetic oh-god-someone-noticed-me expression that you hate on your own face.
she's you the way you look in the mirror when the lighting is perfect and you're having the best day of your life, which, for the record, you're NOT having. because you're standing on wet carpet under buzzing lights looking at a thing that crawled out of the walls wearing your face like a sunday dress.
and she looks at Better Bobby.
and she SMILES.
not your smile. yours is still a little tight, still cautious and always halfway to flinching because the last person you loved taught you that attention is temporary and warmth gets revoked without warning.
hers is wide and warm and full and it reaches her eyes (your eyes, YOUR eyes but without the hurt behind them) and she tilts her head and says "hi, bobby" in your voice but lighter. your voice without the weight of being someone's afterthought for the better part of a year.
and here's where your brain should be going: that's an entity. that's a threat. we need to leave.
here's where your brain ACTUALLY goes: why is she looking at him like that?
because she IS. she's looking at Better Bobby with an openness you have never once allowed yourself. she's looking at him without the flinch. without the constant background calculation of is this real or is he going to get bored of me too. she's looking at him like she's never been neglected. like she's never sat on a bed waiting for someone to look up from a screen and notice she'd been waiting. like she doesn't carry the specific, learned knowledge that love has a half-life and attention decays and eventually everyone stops seeing you.
Better You doesn't doubt him.
Better You isn't waiting for him to lose interest.
Better You is what you would be if real bobby hadn't taught you that being loved is a temporary condition.
and the thing that absolutely dismantles you, the thing that sends you into a jealousy spiral so irrational it should be clinically studied, is watching Better Bobby's reaction.
because he looks at her. he looks at this perfected version of you, this you-without-the-damage, this you who would never flinch when he reaches for her, who would never pull back at the last second, would never look at his kindness with suspicion because the last boy with that face stopped being kind. she doesn't know that, she's never been un-loved, she's BETTERโ
and his head tilts. the not-quite-human angle. the one that means he's processing something new.
and you can see him considering it.
and what hits you isn't just jealousy. it's recognition. it's the pattern completing. because you've been here before, haven't you?
not in the backrooms. in your own bedroom. watching real bobby's attention slide away from you toward his camera, his friends, anything, everything. the whole world more interesting than the girl sitting right there.
you've been the person someone grows bored of. been the version that isn't enough. and now here, in the one place where something was finally paying attention to you, finally choosing you, finally making you feel like you were worth staying awake for... here comes the upgrade. here comes the 2.0. a you without the flinch or the doubt or the desperate, needy wounded thing living behind your ribs and of COURSE he's going to choose her. of course. because that's how this works. that's how this ALWAYS works.
you're hard to love and here is the proof, smiling with your mouth.
and what comes out of your mouth is not "bobby, that's an entity, we need to go." what comes out of your mouth, before your brain can catch it, in a voice that is embarrassingly, revealingly sharp, is:
"bobby."
one word. aimed at him. not at her. because you're not afraid of what Better You will do. you're afraid that the one thing in the universe that chose to love you is about to unchoose. just like the original did. you're afraid you're about to watch it happen again, in real time, wearing the same face both times.
Better Bobby looks at you.
glances at her.
looks at you.
and something shifts.
it's small. you'd miss it if you weren't watching him with the intensity of someone whose entire emotional survival depends on what happens in the next ten seconds. his expression (bobby's expression, that open curious, considering look) doesn't change. but something behind it does. like a building settling. a decision being made in a room you can't quite see.
he takes your hand.
his fingers are the wrong temperature. they're always the wrong temperature. too cool in a place that's always too warm, like touching something that exists at a slight remove from the physics of the room. you know this hand. you've memorised this hand without meaning to. the shape of bobby's fingers rebuilt in whatever Better Bobby is made of, and when they close around yours you feel the strength in them held in check. gentle. chosen.
he turns around.
Better You is still standing there. still smiling. still wearing your face without any of the cracks in it. and Better Bobby looks at her (at it) and something happens to his eyes.
the blue goes out.
not like a light switching off. a light being swallowed. bobby's blue, that specific clear blue you fell in love with in a hallway between second and third period, drains out of his irises and what's behind it is black. not dark brown. not deep blue. pure black.
the kind of black that doesn't reflect light because it's older than light. the kind of black that was here before the backrooms were here, a black that's been watching from inside bobby's blue eyes this entire time, patient and ancient. so fundamentally other that your hand tightens in his involuntarily because your body understands something your brain is still processing: you are holding hands with something that existed before the concept of hands.
and he says, in bobby's voice but emptied of everything warm:
"don't follow. or i'll rip you apart."
flat. cold. the way you'd state a law of physics. a description. a factual account of what will happen, delivered with the same casual certainty as "water is wet" or "sky is blue." his voice doesn't do the bobby crack. there is nothing human in it at all. this is the thing under the bobby. the thing that BUILT the bobby, speaking from behind the mask without bothering to move the mouth right. it's older and colder and more vast than anything that's ever said your name softly in the dark while you were trying to sleep.
Better You stops smiling.
the black blinks out. the blue comes back. bobby's blue. warm, familiar, slightly wrong in the way you've gotten used to. the wrongness you've started to find almost-comforting because at least it's consistent. at least it's YOUR wrongness, the wrongness you know. chose.
he looks at you. bobby's face. bobby's almost-smile. the one that crinkles the corners of his eyes and makes you forget, for a moment, about the black.
"coming, baby?" he says, like nothing happened. like he didn't just flash the void behind his face. like his hand in yours isn't a claim, a territory marker, a line drawn in wet carpet.
and you realise three things simultaneously:
one. he chose you. not better you. not the version without the damage. you. the flinching, doubting, suspicious, wounded, difficult, real you. whatever his reasons are (love, obsession, malfunction, possession, something without a human name) he chose the hard one.
two. he will kill for it. the thing in the hallway wearing your face is an entity that could probably survive most of what the backrooms throw at it. he looked at it with ancient black nothing-eyes and said i will unmake you and meant it.
three. you don't know if being chosen by something like that is salvation or the most beautiful trap ever built.
and you hold his hand (wrong temperature, wrong pressure, wrong wrong wrong) and you keep walking.
I love the idea of everything with better bobby being so intense and almost dreamlike, trippy from the beginning. Like being high (lmao) and fading in and out of a meaningful conversation that youre struggling to focus on as you sink into the couch. Meaning to dust a kiss on what you think is your unusually clingy bfโs cheekbone and between one moment and the next, what started as an innocent cheek kiss has resulted in you sliding against the wall until youre sat on that yellow floor, lap full of him as he essentially tries to stick as much of his tongue as he can down your throat. Hands confusedly going to his shoulders and heโs curled around and over you like a python, nosing your pulse with quick, shivery breaths, hand on our nape, and waist, reeling you to him as he pins you to the wall. Him getting the hint of a kiss and taking that to mean he can finally just.. do what he wants. Itโs permission, right? You love him too? You must, you initiated contact. And now he can touch and touch and mouth and smell and nose and be the needy, raw animal crawling under a false skin that wants you so so sosososososososososososoossobad so bad so bad
หณ หณ BETTER BOBBY SERIES.
Reality itself has a different consistency down here.
Time is soft. The edges blur. The hum does something to your brain you can't explain. There's this ambient frequency in this place and it does to your cognition what warm water does to muscle tension. Loosens it. Softens the borders between one moment and the next. Until everything has this gauzy, slow-motion, underwater quality where you can't quite tell where a thought ends and a feeling begins.
You're lying on the blankets and Better Bobby is beside you and he's been clingy today. Clingier than usual anyway. Which is saying something, because his baseline is already I need to be touching you at all times or I will simply cease to exist.
His head is on your chest and his arm is across your waist, his fingers drawing patterns on your hip through your shirt. You're talking. Having a conversation. A real one. But you can't quite hold the thread.
You keep meaning to finish your sentence but the hum is so warm and his weight is so warm... and his fingers are doing that thing where the warmth-that-reads-you is bleeding through the contact.
Not deliberately, just passively. The way a radiator bleeds heat, and your thoughts keep drifting.
"โand I was trying to tell Clark that the shelving unit wasโ"
Better Bobby shifts. His nose pushes into the curve of your neck between one blink and next. A slow, animal press. Not a kiss. Just... contact. Scent. You feel him inhale.
"โwas, umโthe brackets were wrong, and heโ"
His mouth opens against your throat. Not a kiss. Just his lips. Parted. Resting there. You can feel his breath on your pulse point. Damp. Quick.
"โhe wouldn't listen, he neverโ"
What were you saying? The sentence is gone. It was right there and now it's dissolving the way everything dissolves down here, like sugar in warm water,.
Better Bobby's fingers have stopped drawing patterns and are just pressing now. Five points of heat on your hip. The hum is in your teeth and behind your eyes and you thinkโvaguely, dreamily, from too far awayโthat you should probably finish your thought about Clark's shelving unit.
You turn your head. He's right there. His face inches from yours, those pale eyes half-lidded, watching you with that patient, hungry, endlessly attentive focus.
And you think idly I'll just kiss his cheek. That's all. Just a small thing. A punctuation mark. The kind of casual intimacy you used to have with real Bobby, back when touch was easy, back when you could press your lips to his cheekbone in passing and it meant I'm here and nothing more.
You lean in. Your mouth brushes his cheekbone.
And the world tilts.
Between one heartbeat and the next, between the moment your lips touch his skin and the moment you mean to pull back, there's a shift.
The surroundings stay the same. The change is in him. You feel it through the contact point. Through your mouth on his cheek, a full-body shudder that runs through Better Bobby like a current. His hand moves from your hip to your waist and grips and his head turns, fast, faster than a human head should turn, finding your mouth.
It's not the careful learning kisses from before, when he asked you to teach him how to kiss you properly.
This is... this is the thing that lives underneath Better Bobby.
The thing he keeps leashed and gentle and civilised for you. The thing that unravelled the Smiler in the dark to keep you safe. Except there's no threat now. That intensity is pointed at you.
And it's not trying to hurt you. It's trying to consume you. To crawl inside the kiss and live there. His tongue is in your mouth, his hand settling on the back of your neck and he's pulling you into him with a strength that isn't human. He's not pretending to be right now, and you make a startled sound against his lips and he swallows it. Takes it. Wants more.
You're moving. You don't decide to move. Momentum moves you. He moves you.
Your back hits the wall and you slide down it, the yellow wallpaper rough against your shoulder blades, and then you're on the floor with your legs open and he's in your lapโno.
He's not in your lap. He's around you. Curled over and around you like something serpentine, a thing that doesn't have a skeleton the way humans have skeletons. Better Bobby's body conforms to yours at every point of contact, chest to chest, hip to hip, his thighs bracketing yours, his arms closing around you and it's not an embrace.
It's an enclosure. A perimeter. You're inside Better Bobby the way a heart is inside a chest.
Your hands go to his shoulders. Half pushing, half holding, your fingers digging into muscle that flexes and shifts under his skin in ways that aren't quite anatomically right.
He doesn't notice. Or he doesn't care. His mouth is on yours and then it's not. Then it's on your jaw, your throat, the dip of your neck. And he's not kissing so much as tasting, his lips parted and dragging and his breath coming in these quick, shivery little bursts against your skin.
Fast, animal. The breathing pattern of a creature that's been holding itself back for such a long time and has just now found what it wants.
Because that's what the cheek kiss was. You understand that now, distantly, through the gauze of the hum and the warmth and the overwhelming physicality of him everywhere. Everywhere. Around you and against you, his palm on your nape angling your head back so he can get at the full length of your throat.
The cheek kiss was permission. You touched him. You initiated. And in whatever language Better Bobby's instincts operate in, that translated to: yes. Yes, you can. Yes, I want you to. Go.
And he went.
His nose pushes into the soft space behind your ear. He inhales (deep, shaking, greedy) and makes a sound that comes from below his chest, below his lungs, from whatever furnace drives the entity underneath the skin.
The sound isn't pleasure exactly, it's relief.
The relief of a thing that's been starving and just got its mouth on something warm and tender. He noses down the tendon of your throat to your collarbone and mouths at it. Open and wet and artless.
No technique, no finesse, just contact. As much contact as he can get, and his hips press into yours and his hand on your waist hauls you closer, closer, like the laws of physics are personally inconveniencing him by not allowing you to occupy the same space.
"BobbyโBobby, slowโ"
He makes a sound against your clavicle. Not a word. A vibration. A negation. No. No slow. Had slow. Done with slow. Slow was when I was being careful and now you've kissed me and I don't have to be careful. I needโI needโI needโ
God, his hands.
They're everywhere at once.
Your waist, your ribs, your hips, the back of your neck, sliding under the hem of your shirt and pressing flat against the bare skin of your lower back.
Warmth hits you like a drug, a wave, and your head drops back against the wall with a quiet moan and the yellow ceiling swims above you. Better Bobby is nosing up the front of your throat with those quick shallow breaths, scenting you, learning you, his lips catching on your skin with every exhale.
He's not performing.
That's the thing that breaks through the haze. The one clear thought that surfaces through the gauze of strange pleasure: he's not performing.
The gentle Better Bobby, the careful one, the one who plays with your hair and says I've got you, baby. That Bobby is a construction. A deliberate presentation.
The thing that's pressed against you right now, shaking, sucking at your pulse, making that raw sub-vocal sound that vibrates in your ribsโthis is what's underneath.
This is the animal under the false skin he's stolen. This is what heard your voice through a wall and wanted and has been wanting every second since. Through every gentle hair-stroke, every patient conversation and every careful, calibrated touch.
He wanted like this. The whole time. This raw, this desperate, this artless, graceless, trembling need that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a creature that has been alone in the yellow for longer than human loneliness has a name for and has finally, finally found something warm and alive willing to stay.
The wanting is so big it doesn't fit inside the Bobby-shape. It's leaking out. Through his hands and his mouth. Through the harmonic that's gone ragged and unsteady, the hum destabilised by something it wasn't designed to contain.
He pulls back. Just enough to look at you. His eyes are fully black. No pretence now. No Bobby-blueveneer. Just the entity, vast and ancient and desperate. Looking out of a stolen face at the only person it has ever wanted.
"You kissed me," he says. His voice is wrecked. That deep register, broken open, cracking through the cockiness like light through a fracture. "Youโyou kissed me."
"I kissed your cheekโ"
"You kissed me."
Like the distinction doesn't exist. Like any contact, any voluntary touch, any moment where your mouth chose to be on his skin is the same thing. Total. Binary. You touched him or you didn't and you did and that meansโ
"You want me," he exhales.
He doesn't phrase it like a question. It's a revelation.
His hands are cradling your face now, both hands, his thumbs on your cheekbones, and he's looking at you with those black eyes and the expression on his face is... it's too much.
Too many things at once. Wonder, hunger, tenderness and that dark, possessive satisfaction and underneath all of it, at the very bottom, something so painfully vulnerable it doesn't belong on the face of something this powerful.
Hope.
The ancient thing in the walls is looking at you with hope.
"You want me," he says again. Quieter now. Testing the words. Feeling them in his mouth. "Youโnot him. Me. You reached for me."
And what are you supposed to say to that?
What are you supposed to say to a creature that has worn loneliness like a second skin for longer than your entire species has existed, that heard you through concrete and plaster and chose to build itself a body just to be close to you? That has been patient, gentle and careful for weeks because it was terrified of scaring you away and has just felt your lips on its cheek and interpreted that as the end of a famine?
You look at him. At the black eyes and the silver earring and the chain and the scar. At the trembling. The hunger.
You put your hand on the back of his neck and pull him in.
He tips towards you. Like gravity.
His mouth is on yours and the sound he makes is not a moan, it's not a growl, it's that entity-harmonic blown wide open. A resonant chord that fills the hallway and the walls. The hum itself. And he's kissing you, shaking, and his hands are everywhere and nowhere.
He's trying to be gentle and failing, trying and failing and giving up and just... taking. Mouth and hands. That impossible warmth flooding through every point of contact and the yellow walls humming around you.
His body curls around you like something that will never, never, never let you go.
โWhat are you supposed to say to a creature that has worn loneliness like a second skin for longer than your entire species has existed, that heard you through concrete and plaster and chose to build itself a body just to be close to you?โ
โโโโโโ CLASSIFIED // M.E.G. INTERNAL // CLEARANCE LEVEL 4 REQUIRED โโโโโโ
Colloquial Designation: "Better Bobby"
DOCUMENT ID: MEG-ENT-0000-DOSSIER
CLASSIFICATION: LEVEL 4 โ RESTRICTED
COMPILED BY: Dr. โโโโโโ, Entity Research Division
DATE OF COMPILATION: โโ/โโ/198โ
LAST REVISION: โโ/โโ/199โ [SEE ADDENDUM F]
REVISION STATUS: ONGOING โ FILE NEVER CLOSED
โ DISTRIBUTION WARNING โ
This dossier contains information regarding an entity classified as APEX-UNDEFINED. Unauthorised access, reproduction, or verbal dissemination of the contents herein constitutes a Class 3 security violation. Personnel found in breach will be subject to immediate reassignment to Level โโโ. This is not negotiable.
If you are reading this document and do not possess Level 4 clearance, stop immediately. Close this file. Walk away. Forget the designation. This is for your safety.
SECTION 1 โ ENTITY SUMMARY
Designation: Entity 0
Colloquial Name(s): "Better Bobby," "The First," "It" (field teams), โโโโโโโโโโโโโโ (designation rescinded, see Incident Report 0-14)
Primary Domain: Level 0 (unconfirmed territorial claim over full sublevel network)
Secondary Sightings: Levels 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 14, โโโโ, โโโโโโ, and the Poolrooms (unverified)
Threat Classification: APEX-UNDEFINED
Containment Status: UNCONTAINED โ ALL CONTAINMENT ATTEMPTS SUSPENDED INDEFINITELY
Behavioural Profile: UNPREDICTABLE / ADAPTIVE / SAPIENT (CONFIRMED)
Entity Kill Count (Est.): Unknown. See Section 5.
Human Kill Count (Conf.): โโโโโ
Human Kill Count (Est.): โโโโโโโ [DISPUTED โ SEE ADDENDUM C]
NOTE FROM DR. โโโโโโ, ENTITY RESEARCH LEAD:
It should be on record that the designation 'Entity 0' was not chosen for taxonomic reasons. It was assigned because this entity predates our cataloguing system. We did not discover it. It was already here in what we class as the Backrooms. It may have always been here . The number is not a ranking. It's an admission that we do not know where to place it.
SECTION 2 โ PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
2.1 โ Primary Manifestation
Entity 0 presents as a young Caucasian male, early-to-mid twenties, consistent with the physical appearance of one Robert "Bobby" Franklin (see Personnel File MEG-P-โโโโโโ, Status: ACTIVE/DISPLACED). The resemblance is exact in approximately 94% of documented sightings. Remaining sightings note minor deviations: incorrect eye colour under different lighting, subtle asymmetries in facial structure that do not correspond to Franklin's known features, andโin three separate reportsโa "wrongness in the joints" that observers struggled to articulate.
Franklin himself has been interviewed extensively regarding Entity 0's use of his likeness. His testimony is included in Addendum A (SEALED). He has requested, on multiple occasions, that M.E.G. โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. This request has been denied.
2.2 โ Secondary Characteristics
Entity 0 bleeds a black, viscous fluid when injured. Lab analysis of recovered samples has returned โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. A second analysis returned entirely different results. A third analysis caused the spectrometer to โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. Testing has been suspended.
Entity 0's body temperature registers approximately 4.2ยฐC below ambient room temperature at all times, regardless of environmental conditions. This remains consistent even in the Poolrooms (if sightings there are verified) and the thermally unstable zones of Level 5.
When Entity 0 believes it is unobserved, field teams have reported the following:
a) Complete cessation of respiration for periods exceeding 45 minutes.
b) Head rotation beyond normal cervical range (estimated 190ยฐ in Sighting 0-22).
c) Standing perfectly motionless in a posture that does not account for gravity. One researcher described it as "standing the way a photograph of a person stands. Not wrong. Just not alive."
d) Brief episodes of what appears to be the entity's eyes changing colourโfrom the documented blue to solid black. Duration: 1-5 seconds. No agent has been close enough to confirm โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ.
e) โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ for approximately nine hours. When Agent โโโโโโ attempted to approach, โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. Agent โโโโโโ has requested a transfer. Request granted.
2.3 โ True Form
Unknown.
We do not know what Entity 0 looks like. We know what Bobby Franklin looks like. Entity 0 has never been observed without this disguise. Whether the Franklin appearance constitutes a "disguise" or has become the entity's actual physical structure is a matter of ongoingโand increasingly heatedโdebate within the department.
Dr. โโโโโโ has proposed that Entity 0 may not have a "true form." That it may be, at a fundamental level, a thing that IS other things. This hypothesis is โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ.
SECTION 3 โ BEHAVIOURAL ANALYSIS
3.1 โ Unpredictability Index
Entity 0 has been assigned a Behavioural Unpredictability Index (BUI) of 9.7 out of 10. For context, most Backrooms entities operate between 2 and 6 on this scale. The Skin-Stealers register at 5.1. The Hounds at 3.8. A completely random number generator would score 10.0.
Entity 0 scores a 9.7 because it is not random. It is making decisions. We simply cannot determine the framework.
Documented behavioural range includes:
Allowing a wanderer to pass through Level 0 entirely unmolested, even appearing to clear a path by relocating other entities beforehand (Sighting 0-09).
Killing a wanderer. Method: โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. No apparent provocation. (Incident 0-03).
Sitting cross-legged in a hallway for an estimated 72 hours, staring at a wall. (Sighting 0-15). Purpose: unknown.
Engaging a Class 5 entity in what can only be described as combat. Entity 0 won. โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. The Class 5 entity has not been sighted since.
Humming. (Multiple sightings.) The melody does not correspond to any known song. โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ has suggested it may be original composition. This is โโโโโโ.
Laughing at nothing. (Sighting 0-19.) Duration: four minutes. Laughter matched audio profile of Robert Franklin exactly.
โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. All seven members of Exploration Team Kilo were recovered alive. None will discuss what happened.
3.2 โ Evasion Capabilities
Entity 0 does not want to be found. When it is found, it is because it has chosen to be.
M.E.G. has deployed tracking teams on fourteen separate occasions. Results were as follows:
Operation: LAMPLIGHTER
Duration: 6 days
Result: Entity evaded all contact. Team reported hallways "rearranging" around them.
Operation: NIGHTJAR
Duration: 11 days
Result: Entity sighted once. Made direct eye contact with lead tracker from end of hallway (est. 200m). Smiled. Vanished.
Operation: SILKWORM
Duration: 9 days
Result: No contact. Post-operation analysis revealed entity had been following the tracking team for the final four days.
Operation: TIDEPOOL
Duration: โโ days
Result: โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. All further tracking operations suspended by order of โโโโโโ.
3.3 โ Intelligence
Entity 0 is sapient. This is no longer debated.
It understands English. It understands Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, andโfollowing an incident with Exploration Team Foxtrotโfluent conversational Japanese, despite never having been observed in the presence of a Japanese-speaking wanderer. A comprehensive linguistic audit conducted in 198โ was abandoned after Entity 0 responded to a deliberately obscure dialectal prompt in โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. The full list of confirmed languages is maintained in Addendum B. It is not short.
It also understands tactical positioning. It understands, based on Operations NIGHTJAR and SILKWORM, the concept of irony.
What must be emphasisedโand what continues to unsettle the departmentโis how dramatically Entity 0's cognitive profile diverges from every other catalogued entity. Most Backrooms entities operate on recognisable behavioural loops. The Smilers hunt. The Skin-Stealers mimic. The โโโโโโ feed. Even the more complex entities can be understood as sophisticated biological (or pseudo-biological) systems responding to stimuli: hunger, territorial instinct, predatory drive. They do what they do because something in their construction compels them to do it.
Entity 0 does not appear to be compelled to do anything.
It does not hunt for sustenance. It does not hunt for pleasure. It does not, as far as we can determine, hunt at all. Its kills appear to be decisions, made for reasons that change depending on context and that we have failed to model despite years of behavioural data. Other entities are, for lack of a better term, animals. Complex animals. Dangerous animals. But animals still.
Entity 0 operates with what can only be described as intentionality. It makes choices. It weighs outcomes. It has, on at least two documented occasions, changed its mind mid-action, which implies an internal deliberative process that no other entity has demonstrated.
This is what makes it dangerous. Not the strengthโthough the strength is considerable. Not the evasion capabilitiesโthough those are unmatched. The danger is that Entity 0's internal workings appear to be orders of magnitude more complex than anything else in the Backrooms, and we do not understand them. A Wretch is dangerous the way a bear is dangerous: powerful, aggressive, but ultimately predictable. Entity 0 is dangerous the way a person is dangerous. It thinks. It plans, adapts, and learns. And it does all of this inside a body that can tear a Class 5 entity apart in ninety seconds.
The obvious questionโand the one this department has been circling for the better part of two years without satisfactory resolutionโis why. Why is Entity 0 so far beyond its peers? Two hypotheses currently hold majority support:
Hypothesis A (Dr. โโโโโโ): Entity 0's cognitive superiority is a function of age. It was here first. It has had longer to develop, to complexify, to evolve whatever passes for intelligence in Backrooms entities. Under this model, Entity 0 is not fundamentally different from other entities, it is simply older. The designation "Entity 0" is, in this reading, more literal than intended. It is t he first. Everything else came after. Everything else is younger, simpler, less finished.
Hypothesis B (Dr. โโโโโโโโ): Entity 0 is not smarter because it is older. It is smarter because it wanted to be. Something in its compositionโits origin, its structure, whatever animates itโpossesses a drive toward learning that other entities lack. It doesn't just react to its environment. It studies it. It chose to wear a human face. It chose to learn human language. Not one. Dozens. It chose to understand tactical positioning and irony and the specific way Robert Franklin leans against walls. Other entities absorb. Entity 0 pursues. If this hypothesis is correct, the follow-up question becomes deeply uncomfortable: what is it learning toward? What is the curriculum building to? What does an entity that has spent โโโโโโโโโโโโโโ years teaching itself to be more look like when it decides it has learned enough?
Neither hypothesis has been confirmed. Both are โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ.
Researcher's note: I have been asked, off the record, which hypothesis I find more frightening. The answer is (B). It's always (B).
SECTION 4 โ TERRITORIAL BEHAVIOUR & DOMAIN
Level 0 (otherwise known as "The Threshold") is, by consensus, Entity 0's domain.
This is not an official M.E.G. designation but a practical observation. Entity 0 moves through Level 0 with a freedom and familiarity that no other entity displays. It does not navigate the space. It inhabits it. Hallways that shift and reconfigure for wanderers appear to remain static in Entity 0's presence, or, more disturbingly, reconfigure according to its preference.
There is a growing body of evidenceโcurrently classified under Review Protocol โโโโโโโsuggesting that Level 0 may not simply be Entity 0's territory. It may be its โโโโโโโโโโโโ. This hypothesis was first proposed by Dr. โโโโโโ in 198โ and was initially dismissed. Following Incident 0-11, in which Entity 0 appeared to โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ an entire corridor, the hypothesis has been upgraded to "under active consideration."
Entity 0 has been sighted on other levels, but these incursions appear purposeful and temporary. It always returns to Level 0. One researcher described this pattern as "a predator checking its territory lines," though others have noted the behaviour more closely resembles โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ.
SECTION 5 โ INTER-ENTITY BEHAVIOUR
Entity 0 kills other entities.
This requires emphasis because it is, within the context of Backrooms ecology, abnormal. Entities compete for territory aggressively. Entities avoid each other. Entities engage in dominance displays. Sometimes they have been observed working together to hunt and kill wanderers. Entities do not, as a rule, destroy each other with the kind of systematic, almost casual efficiency that Entity 0 demonstrates.
Confirmed Entity 0 kills:
1x Class 5 Entity (undesignated). Method: โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. Duration of engagement: approx. 90 seconds.
5x Hounds. Simultaneous. Entity 0 did not appear injured afterward.
17x Skin-Stealer. Entity 0 appeared to take particular โโโโโโ with this kill. Duration: โโโโโโ. Research team observing from concealment requested psychological support afterward.
โโโโโโx โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. Circumstances: โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. See Section 6.
1x entity of unknown classification. Entity 0 was observed speaking to it before killing it. Words were inaudible. Lip-reading analysis suggested โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. Lip-reading analyst has since resigned.
Few entities engage in aggression toward Entity 0. The implication of such is clear: within the Backrooms ecosystem, Entity 0 is an apex predator. Other entities tend to avoid it. Someโincluding the Hounds, which fear nothing else in our catalogueโhave been documented actively fleeing its approach.
There are, however, notable exceptions.
The Howlers appear to be, at minimum, a genuine physical threat. They have engaged Entity 0 on at least three documented occasions. The encounters were violent and protracted in a way that Entity 0's other kills are not. During Incident 0-09, Entity 0 was observed sustaining visible damage. The first and only confirmed instance of an entity injuring it in combat. The black fluid was extensive. Entity 0 killed two Howlers, but it took โโ minutes, and afterward it remained stationary in the corridor for nearly two hours. Whether this constituted recovery, pain, or something else, we cannot say. But it did not move, and field team noted it was not humming.
More concerning is the entity's documented behaviour regarding โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ, tentatively catalogued as Entity โโโโโโ, sighted exclusively on Levels โโโโโโ and โโโโโโ. We have very little data on this entityโthree sightings total, all partial, all from significant distanceโbut what we do have is this: during Sighting 0-46, Entity 0 was transiting a hallway on Level โโโโโโ when it stopped. Abruptly. The tracking team reported that it stood perfectly still for approximately ninety seconds, head tilted, and then turned around and walked the other way.
Entity 0 has never, in our observational history, retreated from anything.
What Entity 0 is protecting, or hunting, or maintaining through this behaviour remains unknown.
SECTION 6 โ THE COMPANION
โ CLASSIFICATION: LEVEL 4 EYES ONLY โ SUBSECTION RESTRICTED TO SENIOR RESEARCH PERSONNEL โ
6.1 โ Initial Sighting
During Operation SILKWORM, tracking team reported an anomalous observation that did not pertain to the primary mission objective. Entity 0 was sighted in a hallway junction on Level 0, sublevel โโโโโโ. It was not alone.
A human female was observed walking alongside Entity 0.
Estimated age: โโโ. Physical description: โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. She was wearing โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ and appeared to be in good physical health. She was not restrained, and was not visibly distressed. She was, by all observable measures, walking with Entity 0 voluntarily.
Entity 0 was walking between the female and the nearest dark hallway.
The tracking team leader noted this detail three times in her field report, underlining it twice. I am including it here because the behavioural implication is significant: Entity 0 was positioning itself as a barrier between the female and potential threats. This is protective behaviour. This is not something Entity 0 has ever displayed toward any other human in our records.
6.2 โ Subsequent Sightings
Ref: S-31
Level: 0
Observation: Entity 0 and Companion seated against wall. Entity 0 appeared to be keeping watch while Companion slept. Entity 0 was humming.
Ref: S-34
Level: 2
Observation: Companion observed navigating. Entity 0 following. Unusual. Entity 0 does not typically follow. It leads or it โโโโโโ.
Ref: S-37
Level: 0
Observation: Entity 0 observed retrieving โโโโโโ and presenting them to Companion. Companion laughed. Entity 0 displayed what appeared to be satisfaction.
Ref: S-41
Level: 3
Observation: Two Hounds approached Companion's position. Entity 0 intercepted. โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. Companion did not appear surprised by the violence. She waited. When Entity 0 returned, she handed it โโโโโโ and they continued walking.
Ref: S-44
Level: โโโโโโ
Observation: โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. Observation team was withdrawn immediately. Dr. โโโโโโโโโโ has classified this sighting at Level 5. I have not been told why.
6.3 โ Identity of the Companion
The Companion has been tentatively identified as โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ, a civilian reported missing on โโโโโโโโโโ. Missing persons report was filed by Robert Franklin. Notably, โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ was in a relationship with Robert Franklin at the time of disappearance.
The implications of this connectionโthat Entity 0 selected a companion who was romantically involved with the individual whose appearance it wearsโare not lost on this department. Theories range from predatory luring strategy (see Dr. โโโโโโ's analysis, Addendum D) to โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ to something far more โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ that several senior researchers have declined to put in writing.
6.3.1 โ Anomaly: Erasure of Civilian Records
During routine cross-referencing with surface-level contacts, research staff discovered that the Companion's missing persons file had been closed. Not resolved. Closed. Reason listed: โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. The filing officer has no memory of processing the closure.
Subsequent investigation revealed a broader pattern. The Companion's lease has been reassigned. Her workplace has no record of employment. Her university transcript exists but is flagged as a clerical duplicate with no corresponding student ID. Photographs in which she appears have not been removed: she is simply no longer in them. The physical prints are unaltered. The space where she stood is just empty. As though no one was there to begin with.
This is not normal. Wanderers who enter the Backrooms leave gaps. Families search. Records persist. Missing persons cases go cold but they do not evaporate. In โโโโโโ years of documented Backrooms disappearances, we have never seen evidence of a wanderer being actively erased from the surface world.
Something is removing her. Not killing her. She is alive and accounted for in the Backrooms. Removing the idea of her. The evidence that she existed at all.
The obvious question is whether Entity 0 is capable of exerting influence beyond the Backrooms. The less obvious and considerably more unsettling question is why it would want to. If Entity 0 is erasing the Companion's surface existence, the implication is not destruction. It is permanence. You do not erase someone's way back unless you intend for them to stay.
This has been flagged as a Priority 1 concern. Dr. โโโโโโ has requested that Robert Franklin be monitored for signs of โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. Request granted.
6.4 โ Behavioural Implications
Entity 0, in the presence of the Companion, behaves differently than in any other documented context. Specifically:
a) Aggression toward other entities increases by an estimated 300%. Entity 0's territory, already dangerous, becomes functionally impassable when the Companion is present.
b) Unpredictability decreases. Entity 0''s movements become more structured, more purposeful, more oriented around the Companion's location. For the first time in our observational history, Entity 0 is behaving in a way that can be partially predicted.
c) The entity has been observed performing behaviours with no survival utility: adjusting the Companion's blanket, standing in specific positions to block fluorescent light while she sleeps, โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. These behaviours have no precedent in our entity catalogue.
d) Entity 0 has not killed a human since the Companion was first sighted. Correlation is not causation. But the correlation is โโโโโโ.
SECTION 7 โ RESEARCH & CONTAINMENT PROPOSALS
7.1 โ Proposal: Use the Companion to Study Entity 0
STATUS: UNDER REVIEW
The Companion represents an unprecedented opportunity. Entity 0, which has evaded every tracking operation, every surveillance deployment, and every research team we have sent into Level 0, has voluntarily anchored itself to a single human being. Its movements are, for the first time ever, partially predictable. Its behaviour, for the first time, has an identifiable variable: her.
Proposal 7.1-A (Dr. โโโโโโโโโโ): Establish covert observation posts along confirmed Companion travel routes. Do nott engage. Do not approach. Observe only. Use the Companion's presence to map Entity 0's behavioural patterns, territorial boundaries, and, if possible, communication methods.
Proposal 7.1-B (Dr. โโโโโโ): Make contact with the Companion. Offer extraction. If she accepts, observe Entity 0's response. If she declinesโand this is the part of the proposal that generated significant debate in committeeโask her to serve as a voluntary research asset. She has closer access to Entity 0 than any M.E.G. (or outside) operative has ever achieved. She is, in effect, already conducting the field study we have failed to execute fourteen times.
Proposal 7.1-C: โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. This proposal was submitted anonymously. It has been rejected. The author is encouraged to identify themselves to their supervisor immediately.
7.2 โ Proposal: Use the Companion to Contain Entity 0
STATUS: REJECTED (SEE BELOW)
If Entity 0 will not leave the Companion, then controlling the Companion's location is, theoretically, controlling Entity 0's location.
This proposal was rejected for the following reasons:
We do not know whether Entity 0's attachment to the Companion represents affection, possession, predation, or something outside human behavioural pattern. Assuming it is exploitable is assuming we understand it. We do not.
If Entity 0 perceives the Companion's removal as a threat, its response is unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. Given its documented combat capabilitiesโincluding the destruction of a Class 5 entity in under two minutesโthe risk to extraction personnel is classified as โโโโโโ.
The Companion may not be a hostage. She may be there voluntarily. If so, forcible extraction raises ethical concerns that this department is not equipped to adjudicate.
โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. If this turns out to be accurate, containment is not merely inadvisable. It is โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ.
NOTE FROM OPERATIONS DIRECTOR โโโโโโ:
I'm going to be blunt. We have spent years and โโโโโโ operatives trying to understand Entity 0. We've tried to catalogue its kills, map its territory and even document its evasion capabilities. And in all that time, the single greatest advance in our understanding of this entity has come from a civilian girl who, as far as we can tell, wandered in through a door that shouldn't exist and started treating an apex predator like a stray cat.
She has learned more about Entity 0 by being near it than we have learned in fourteen operations. I'm not comfortable with what that implies about our methodology. I'm even less comfortable with what it implies about Entity 0's capacity for selective trust.
Recommendation (to be forwarded to every agency looking into this Entity): observe. Do not intervene. Do not extract. Do not, under any circumstances, threaten the Companion's safety within Entity 0's perceptual range.
I've seen what it does to things that threaten what belongs to it.
I don't want to see what it would do to us.
SECTION 8 โ OPEN QUESTIONS
The following questions remain unanswered. They are listed in order of departmental priority. Personnel with relevant information are instructed to report to Dr. โโโโโโ immediately.
What is Entity 0? Not what does it look like. Not how does it behave. What IS it?
What does it want with the Companion? Protection implies investment. What is the return?
What is the entity's relationship to Level 0 itself? Is it an inhabitant, a guardian, a โโโโโโ, or something we do not have terminology for?
Why Bobby Franklin? Of all possible appearances, why this specific individual? Is is merely due to Companion's prior history with Franklin or โโโโโโโโโโโโโ?
The Companion has been in the Backrooms for an estimated โโโโโโ. Standard survival expectancy for an unaffiliated civilian without supplies is 1-3 days. She is alive and healthy. How? And more importantly, why?
During Sighting S-44, observation team reported โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ. If this is accurate, does Entity 0 possess โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ? And if so, has the Companion been โโโโโโ?
Is Entity 0 capable of love? (This question was submitted by Junior Researcher โโโโโโ and was initially struck from the record. It has been reinstated by order of Dr. โโโโโโ, who noted, and I quote: "It's the only question that actually matters.")
END OF DOSSIER
File Status: OPEN โ NEVER CLOSED Next Mandatory Review: โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ
"We have been studying Entity 0 for years. I am no longer certain it has not been studying us for longer."
โ Dr. โโโโโโ, final departmental memo before โโโโโโโโโโโโโโโโ
โโโโโโ UNAUTHORIZED REPRODUCTION OF THIS DOCUMENT OR DISTRIBUTION IS GROUNDS FOR IMMEDIATE TERMINATION OF M.E.G. MEMBERSHIP โโโโโโ
BUT IS IT FROM THE BACKROOMS OR IS IT FROM THE REAL WORLD??? IF BB IS SO STRONG WITH HH DOESNT IT LEAVE? WHAT IF WE LEAVE AND IT FOLLOWS ๐ WHY DOES IT STAY IN LEVEL 0
lowkey need to see how real!bobby handles his girl's disappearance ๐ฌ..delicious
pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby
contents/warnings: bobby's pov, emotional neglect in a relationship, heavy grief and loss, angsty in general, emotional volatility/verbal cruelty, alcohol abuse (clark), existential/cosmic horror (erasure from reality), self-loathing and guilt (told you he'll be going through it!)
notes: we're giving this twink a character as promised! got carried away but surprisingly?? really like how it came out?? hope y'all enjoy, and excited to see if the tide changes on the Real Bobby hate lol.
๐นbetter bobby series masterlist.
Real Bobby notices on a Tuesday.
Not right away. Thatโs the single most damning thing. The part thatโll eat at him later, thatโll sit in his chest like a hot coal for months, perhaps the rest of his goddamn life if heโs being honest.
He doesn't notice right away.
The first night, he figures you're pulling a double at the store. It's happened before. He eats cereal standing over the sink, leaves his bowl on the counter, sleeps diagonally. Doesn't think about it.
The second night, he's annoyed. You could've called. He almost picks up the apartment phone but gets distracted by something on TV, and the receiver stays in the cradle, your number undialed, and he falls asleep with the light on.
The third morning, he reaches for you.
It's not conscious, really. It's that old reflex in him. The one from the early days. Something he thought he trained out of himself because tenderness was starting to feel like a liability, so he resorted to laziness instead. His hand slid across the mattress toward the warm dip where you normally sleep. But his fingers find only cold sheets. Flat, undisturbed. No impression of a body. And something in Bobbyโs chest pinches, just slightly, like a hand closing around a tender nerve.
He sits up. Looks at your side of the bed. The pillow still has the shape of your head from three nights ago. Nothing's been moved.
He checks the answering machine. The red light is steady. No messages. The last thing you said to himโactually said, out loud, in personโwas I'm closing tonight, don't wait up. He'd grunted. Hadn't looked up from the TV. He remembers that now.
You stood in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your jacket half-on, and you looked at him. He realises now that you looked at him, really looked, like you were waiting for something, and he grunted.
He calls the store. Clark picks up, says you didn't show for your shift last night. Or the night before. Didn't call in either. Clark sounds worried, but not in a panicked way. Just the clipped, pragmatic worry of a man already calculating how to cover the hours.ย
Bobby tries to sound like he already knew, like he's been handling it. He's the kind of boyfriend who would obviously know that his girlfriend's been missing for three days.
He hangs up, stands in the kitchen and looks at the apartment.
Your coffee mug is still on the drying rack. Your jacket's on the hook by the door. Your shoesโthe white ones, the ones you wear everywhere, the ones he's made fun of a hundred timesโare sitting by the mat. You didn't leave, didn't pack anything. You didn't take your shoes or anything at all.
Bobby files a missing persons report that afternoon.ย
The cops tell him to come in the following morning.
The detective's name is Moreno. He's got a desk in the back of the precinct, a cup of coffee that's been sitting there long enough to develop a skin, and an expression that Bobby doesn't like. Thereโs no hostility. Itโs the other thing, the worse one. Interest.ย
โSo,โ Moreno begins, flipping open a notebook. โThree days.โ
โYeah.โ
โAnd you noticed this morning?โ
Bobby's jaw tightens. โI thought she was working doubles.โ
Moreno lifts his eyes briefly. โFor three days.โ
โIt's happened before,โ Bobby says a little defensively.ย
โHas it?โ Moreno writes something down. Slow, purposeful, the pen moving like he wants Bobby to watch it, to feel the weight of each letter being recorded. โWalk me through the timeline, Bobby. When's the last time you actually saw her?โ
Bobby tells him. The doorway. The jacket. The don't wait up. The grunt.
Moreno nods. Writes. โAnd after that? What'd you do that night?โ
โWatched TV. Went to bed.โ
โAlone?โ
Bobby stares at him. Jesus Christ. โYeah. Alone.โ
โOkay.โ Moreno takes a sip of his dead coffee. Sets it down. โWe talked to your neighbours, Bobby. Just routine. The couple in 4B, the Nguyens, mentioned hearing arguments. Through the walls. More than once, over the past few months.โ He looks up from the notebook. โYou want to tell me about that?โ
Bobby's chest goes tight. โCouples argue.โ
โSure they do. What were you arguing about?โ
โI don'tโstuff. Normal stuff. Dishes. Schedules.โ
โThey said it sounded pretty heated sometimes,โ Moreno remarks. โMrs Nguyen used the word volatile.โ
Bobby feels something cold move through his stomach. โI never touched her. If that's what you'reโโ
โNobody said that,โ Moreno's voice is easy, perfectly calm. The practised calm of a man who's done this before. โBut I've got a missing woman who was last seen by her boyfriend, who didn't notice she was gone for three days, whose neighbours describe an argumentative relationship. You can see why I need to be thorough.โ
Bobby can see alright. Bobby can see exactly what this looks like from the outside, and the cold thing in his stomach turns to ice because it looks bad. It looks like exactly what it isn't, and there's no way to explain the difference between I was a shitty, negligent boyfriend who took her for granted and I hurt her without sounding like he's making excuses for both or covering his ass.
โWe'd like to take a look at your camera equipment,โ Moreno says. โYour footage. You're a camera guy, right? Clark at the store mentioned you're always filming.โ
Bobby nods. Numbly.
They take the camera. They take the tapes, too.ย
Bobby sits on the couch in the apartment and stares at the empty shelf where the equipment used to be, and feels naked in a way that has nothing to do with clothes. The camera was the last layer between himself and the world. They've taken it, and now there's just Bobby, sitting in an apartment full of evidence of his own failures, waiting for strangers to watch his footage and decide what kind of man he is.
They call him back in four days later. Moreno's got a different look on his face now. Still interested, but muddied, thoughtful. Like he's found something he wasn't expecting.
โWe reviewed the tapes, Bobby,โ Moreno says.
Bobby waits.
โThere's a lot of footage of her,โ Moreno says carefully. Neutral. Watching Bobby's face the way you'd watch a surface for ripples. โA lot. Some of it she doesn't seem to know about. You filming her while she's sleeping. While she's cooking. While she's reading.โ
โThe light was good,โ Bobby says automatically, the old excuse, and it sounds hollow even to him.
Moreno lets the silence sit. Then, โBobby. I've got a missing woman. Her boyfriend has hours of footage of her, some of it taken without her apparent knowledge. Her neighbours describe fights. The boyfriend didn't notice she was gone for seventy-two hours.โ He leans forward, knotting his fingers on the table. โYou see the picture I'm looking at, right? It doesnโt look good. If you want to tell me anything, I can help youโโ
โThat's notโI never hurt her. I wasโโ
โWhat were you?โ
And Bobby opens his mouth to snap back with something defensive, sharp. Bobby, who uses his tongue like a blade when he feels cornered, rears up to go, and what comes out instead is:
โI love her.โ
Not loved. Thereโs no past tense here. This isnโt careful distancing of a man constructing an alibi. Present tense, raw, graceless, blurted out like a cough. Like something expelled from deep in his lungs against his will. His voice breaks on her, and Bobbyโs eyes burn.ย
Moreno is staring at him, and Bobby is sitting in a police precinct with his chain tangled and his crop top wrinkled, his earring catching the overhead fluorescent light. And he looks, in that moment, exactly like what he is: a twenty-something-year-old asshole who didn't know what he had until the world seemingly swallowed it whole.
โI love her,โ he repeats, quieter now. Like now that the word is out, he can't stop saying it, like the dam has cracked and the only thing behind it was this. โI love her, and I wasโI wasn't good to her, I know that, okay? I know what it looks like, but I didn'tโI would neverโโ
Moreno watches him for a long time. The precinct hums in the background. Phones, footsteps, murmur of voices.
They let him go. No evidence. No body. They're able to confirm his alibi, and ten again.
Thereโs no proof of anything except the fact that Robert Franklin is a man who films the woman he loves while she sleeps because he can't bring himself to tell her she's beautiful while she's awake.
He goes to the store that night.
Not because he thinks he'll find anything. The cops already searched it. Half-heartedly, briefly, the way you search a place when you've already decided the boyfriend did it, and the crime scene is somewhere else.ย
They walked through the showroom and poked around the loading dock. Went down to the storage level, shone flashlights between the flatpack bookshelves and the plastic-wrapped headboards, and found nothing. Because there's nothing to find.ย
Bobby just knows that this is the last place you were.ย
That your hands touched the furniture down here. The inventory sheets, the shelving units, the boxes of cabinet hardware and drawer pulls you organised on the night shifts he couldn't be bothered to stay for. Your fingerprints are on everything. The ghost of your routine is embedded in the layout of this room. The way the boxes are stacked, the system you developed for sorting shipments by vendor, and the little handwritten labels in your writing on the bins.ย
Bobby stands in the middle of it, and he can feel you. He can feel you the way you feel someone in a room they just leftโthe displaced air, the warmth fading from a surface, the sense that if he turned around fast enough, he'd catch the edge of you disappearing around a corner.
He sits down on the concrete floor. Puts his back against the wall. The far one, behind the shelving unit full of cabinet hardware, the one that feels different from the others in a way he can't articulate. Cooler. Thinner somehow.ย
He doesn't plan to talk. But at one point, the silence gets too much, and it justโฆ comes out.ย
โHey, baby. It's Bobby.โ
His voice sounds strange in the empty room. Too loud, too small. Bouncing off the concrete and the flatpacks and coming back to him slightly changed, echoed.
โI don't know if you can hear me. I don'tโthis is stupid. This is really fucking stupid. Obviously, you canโt hear me because youโre not here. But I justโโ He stops. Presses the back of his head against the wall. Stares at the ceiling. โThe cops think I did something to you. They looked at me likeโโ He swallows. โI don't care about that. I don't care what they think. I just need you to know I'm looking. Okay? I'm looking, baby. I'm not gonna stop.โ
The draft brushes against his palm. Cool. Steady. Like a pulse.ย
He comes back the next night. And the next. And the next.
It becomes the only thing that makes sense. The apartment is a museum of his failures. Every unwashed dish, every unanswered question, every space where your things are slowly being buried under his carelessness.ย
But the store is different. The store is where you were. The last place your body occupied space. Sitting in it feels like sitting in the shallow end of your absence rather than drowning in the deep. He can think down here. He can talk. He can say the things he should've said when you were standing in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your heart in your eyes, and he was looking at the TV.
Hey baby. It's me. Found one of your socks behind the dryer today. The fuzzy ones. I put it on the dresser. Just in case.
I keep thinking about Thanksgiving. When you burned the rolls, and I said, "guess we're going to my mom's next year", and you laughed, but you weren't really laughing. You were hurt. I knew, and I didn't fix it.
I'm sorry about the rolls. They were good. They were a little burnt, but they were good. You made them, and I should've eaten every single one.
Bobby pauses. Picks at the concrete with his thumbnail. The storage level smells like particleboard and cardboard. Somewhere deep in the room, he can feel that draft again. That impossible nowhere-breeze he still hasnโt found a source of.
I was thinking about that morning. In the kitchen. You were making breakfast, and you turned around with a spatula and asked if I wanted toast, and the light was behind you, and IโI felt this thing. This huge thing. Like my chest was going to crack open. And I said, "sure." I said SURE. You were standing there in my kitchen looking like that, and I felt the biggest thing I've ever felt, and I said sure and loaded film into my camera like it was nothing.
It wasn't nothing. It was everything. I just didn't know how toโI couldn'tโ
Bobby stops. Presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.
I was so scared you'd see how much I needed you and you'd leave. So I made you leave by not letting you see. That's the dumbest shits anyone's ever done. Baby. I'm so stupid.
He comes back every night. Even when there are no words. Even when he just sits with his hand on the wall and his eyes closed, breathing in the sawdust and the nothing-draft, feeling the concrete thrum against his palm like a second heartbeat.
No leads. No calls. No breaks in the case because there's no sightings, no signs of a break in, nothing. Eyes follow him around town, full of questions and suspicion. There's those who genuinely believe he did something to you. It's stupid, so fucking stupid. He's many thins, but he would neverโ
Except he did. He did hurt you. Just not in the way these people think.
So Bobby keeps coming because this room is the last place you were. And as long as he keeps sitting in it, as long as he keeps talking to the walls, you're not gone.ย
You're just somewhere he hasnโt found you yet.
Month two.
The news spreads the way news does in a place like Santa Clara.
A slow seep through the neighbourhood, through the strip mall. The regulars who used to come to Clark's store for dining sets and bed frames and the occasional impulse-buy end table. A girl went missing. She worked there. The police questioned her boyfriend. No arrests, but you know.
People stop coming.
Not all at once. But the thin trickle becomes a drought.ย
The regulars find reasons not to visit. Other stores, other errands, a sudden preference for the furniture place on Stevens Creek that doesn't have a missing-person case attached to it.
The showroom gets quieter. The displays gather a fine layer of dust that Clark used to wipe down every morning, and now he only gets to it every other day, then every third day, then whenever he remembers. Which is less and less because Clark is a man watching his business die and his marriage fracture.ย
He can feel both things slipping through his fingers at the same speed, and the bourbon is the only thing that makes the slippage feel like someone else's problem.
So Clark hires Kat.ย
Not because he needs a full-time replacement. Frankly, customer traffic no longer justifies it, but the showroom needs a body in it. A presence. Someone to make the store look like a place where things are still happening. Kat is bright and cheap, and she doesn't ask about the missing girl, at least not at first, and Clark is grateful for that.
Bobby notices her the first time he comes in for his nightly visit to the basement.ย
She's behind the register, leaning against the counter with a pen behind her ear, doing something with a stack of delivery receipts. Radio plays something tuneful from a boombox she's brought from home. Dark hair. Quick smile. She looks up when the door chimes and gives him that particular once-over that Bobby used to live for. The slow sweep, the lingering, the way women's eyes always catch on the chain, the earring, the slice of toned stomach under the crop top.ย
She says, โWe're closed.โ
โI know. I'm not shopping.โ
She watches him walk past the display couches and the dining sets, then down the stairs, all with undisguised curiosity. Bobby doesn't turn around.
The second time, she asks.
โYou're the boyfriend, right? Of the girl whoโโ She catches herself. Has the decency to look uncomfortable. โSorry. Clark mentioned it.โ
โYeah.โ
โI'm Kat,โ she says. โI'm covering her shifts.โ
โI know.โ
Bobby keeps walking. Past the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lamps, down the stairs, into the storage level where the real furniture waits in boxes. He sits on the floor. Presses his palm to the wall.
Hey baby. It's me again.
That night, back in the apartment, Bobby can't sleep. He lies on his side of the bed with his hand on your side and stares at the ceiling. The silence is so complete it has a texture, thick and too heavy. He gets up. Goes to the living room. Stands in front of the shelf where the cops put the tapes back, lined up in a neat row they were never in before.
He picks one up. Turns it over in his hands. The label is in his handwriting. A date, nothing else.
He tells himself he's looking for clues. That's the reason he gives himself as he threads the tape into the camera, plugs it into the TV, and sits on the floor with the remote in his hand.
The apartment is dark except for the blue wash of the screen. He's going to watch the footage with detective's eyes, with Moreno's eyes, looking for something everyone missed: a person in the background, a car that didn't belong, a moment where your face changed because you knew something was coming. He's going to be useful. He's going to be the kind of boyfriend who solves this.
And there you are. In the kitchen. In the morning light. Turning around with a spatula in your hand, your hair messy from sleep, one of his t-shirts hanging off your shoulder. You're saying somethingโhe can't hear it over the lump in his throat, but he can read your lips, do you want toastโand the light is behind you, exactly the way he remembered.ย
You're so beautiful, so real and so present on this tape that for a second Bobby forgets. For one perfect, idiot second, his body forgets you're gone and his hand almost lifts to touch the screen.ย
Then the moment passes and you're still in the TV and he's still on the floor and the distance between those two things is the rest of his life.
He watches everything. All of it. Hours. The sleeping footage that made Moreno look at him like that. Bobby sees it now, sees what it looks like from the outside, and he also sees what it actually was: a man so stunned by the existence of this person in his bed that he needed the camera between them to survive it.ย
You in the kitchen. You reading on the couch with your feet tucked under you, turning pages with one hand, the other hand resting on Bobby's thigh without thinking about it. He filmed that too, the hand, just the hand. Five minutes of your fingers against his jeans because he couldn't say you touching me is the best thing in my life, so Bobby recorded it instead. You at the store, sorting inventory, your lips moving along to the radio, and you catch the camera, and your face does that thingโthe mock-exasperated smile, the Bobby, stop that you never really meantโand your eyes are warm.ย
Your eyes are so fucking warm. Alive.
He watches until the tapes run out, and then Bobby rewinds them and watches again. He can't help it. The apartment fills with the sound of you. Your voice, your laugh, the particular way you said his name, Bobby, half-scolding and half-tender. For a few hours, the silence has a crack in it and something warm leaks through.
He starts watching them every night. Before the store, after the store, sometimes both. It becomes a ritual. Some sick twin devotions, the basement and the tapes, the wall and the screen, one hand pressed to concrete and the other pressing play.
Month three.
Kat starts leaving coffee on the counter for him.ย
It's hot, and it's there every night when he walks in, balanced on the edge of the register next to a ceramic lamp that's been on display since before you vanished.ย
She doesn't make a thing of it. Doesn't say I made this for you, or I thought you might want. It's just there. An object in his path. Bobby takes it because refusing would require a conversation he doesn't have the energy for.
She starts sitting on the stairs when he's in the basement. Not coming all the way down, just perching on the third step, legs crossed, chin in her hand, talking to him through the open stairwell.ย
She tells him about her day. About the customers, mainly. The couple who spent three hours testing every sofa in the showroom and then bought a lamp, the woman who wanted to return a bed frame she'd clearly had for two years, and some guy who asked if they sold waterbeds. Clark apparently almost threw him out. She's funny, in a way that's different from you. Louder, broader, more direct.ย
You were a scalpel. Kat's a blunt instrument, and right now Bobby is so hollowed out that even blunt force registers as contact.
He doesn't laugh. He doesn't encourage her. But he stops telling her to go away, and Kat reads that correctly as the only invitation Bobby knows how to extend right now.
It's the tapes that start to bother him first.
Not anything he can really name at first. It's more like a feeling. Particular unease of looking at something familiar and sensing, at the periphery, that it's shifted. He's watching the kitchen footageโthe toast morning, his favourite, the one he's rewound so many times the tracking wobbles at the edgesโand something feels off. Bobby stops the tape. Rewinds. Watches again.
You turn around with the spatula. The light is behind you. You say do you want toast. Everything is exactly the same.
Except your face.
Bobby leans closer to the screen. Squints. Your face isโฆ fine. It's your face. Your eyes, your mouth, the way your hair falls. It's you. But there'sโฆ something. Some flicker of wrongness so faint it's less than a shadow. Like the difference between a photograph and a photocopy of a photograph. The information is all there. It's just one generation removed from real.
He tells himself it's the tape. Old footage, cheap equipment, the kind of VHS degradation that happens when you rewind the same section a hundred times. He tells himself it's his eyes, his exhaustion, the fact that he's watching the same clips at two in the morning in a dark apartment obsessively.ย
His brain is doing what brains do when they're tired and desperate: finding patterns in the static.
He believes it. For a while. He presses play.
One night, Kat is quiet for longer than usual. Bobby can feel her watching him from the stairs, her chin on her knees, the stairwell light behind her making her silhouette sharp.
โYou loved her a lot, huh,โ she says. Soft. Not a question.
Bobby goes rigid. His hand is flat on the wall. The draft tickles against his palm.
He turns his head. Looks at her. And whatever's on his face, he knows itโs not warm. It's the Bobby that bites, the one who gets mean, and Kat sees it happen, feels the temperature drop. The wall goes up behind his expression like a bulkhead slamming shut.
โI still love her,โ he says, cold and flat. Corrective. Present tense.
He turns back to the wall. Kat is quiet for a long time. Then she gets up and goes back upstairs, and Bobby hears her footsteps cross the showroom floor above him. He closes his eyes, pressing his forehead to the concrete. He hates himself for being cruel to one more person who didn't deserve it or ask him but did you do it?
But he can'tโย
He can't let her use the past tense. He can't let anyone use the past tense. Because that means it's over, and it's not over. It's not. You're somewhere, he can feel it.ย
Bobby is a man sitting on a concrete floor talking to nobody, and the only woman who ever mattered to him is gone, and the last thing he gave her was a fucking grunt.
He can't live in that version. He won't.
Month four.
Bobby starts going through the inventory records.ย
Your handwriting is everywhere. The logs, the labels on the bins, the sticky notes on the shelving units, reminding Clark which shipments need to go out first. He sits in the storage level with the binder in his lap and traces your letters with his fingertip. He can hear your voice in the loops and slants. The way you wrote like you talked, quick and slightly messy, always abbreviating things so he had to ask you to translate.
The tapes are getting worse.
He can't deny it anymore. The wrongness he felt at month three has deepened into something visible, a decay he doesn't need to squint to see.ย
Your face has lost something in the kitchen footage. Nothing he could point to, nothing a stranger who'd never met you would notice. But Bobby has watched this clip a thousand times, and he knows the terrain of your face the way a sailor knows coastline.
Something has shifted.ย
Your eyes are the right colour, but the light behind them is dimmer, muted, like watching a candle through frosted glass. Your mouth moves and the words come out (do you want toast), but there's a fraction-of-a-second delay. The audio arriving just a breath after the lips, and it gives your voice a quality that makes the hair on Bobby's arms stand up. A dubbing. A sense that someone else is speaking through you, almost perfectly synchronised but not quite.ย
He goes through the other tapes. One by one. Methodical. The sleeping footage first. And you're there, you're sleeping, but the quality of your stillness is wrong. Too still. A person breathing doesn't look like that, doesn't have that uncanny smoothness, that mannequin-serenity.ย
The footage of you at the store next. Sorting inventory, lips moving to the radio is the worst affected so far. Your hands look right, but they move in a way that's almost, almost correct. The way a marionette's hands move when the puppeteer is very good. Bobby watches your fingers sort through drawer pulls and cabinet hardware, and he knows that those are not the hands that touched him.
He doesn't tell anyone. Who the hell would he even tell? Moreno? Hey, detective, the girl on my tapes is turning into something else? Yeah, same one that went missing and everyone thinks I secretly killed! His mom? Terrence? They already think he's losing it. Or, worse, they would think heโs high again.
They already use that voice with him now. The careful tone people use when they're managing a dangerous animal. This would be the thing that tips it, the thing that sends Bobby from grieving boyfriend to guy who cracked.
He starts making a list of his failures instead.ย
An erosion in reverse. Every day, some new memory surfaces, a moment he discarded when it happened and now can't stop replaying. Each one is worse than the last because each one is a place where he had a choice and chose wrong and didn't even realise it. Or maybe he did. And thatโs worse.
The night you came home excited about somethingโa movie, a book, something a friend said, he can't even remember what it was, and that fact alone makes him want to put his fist through drywallโand you'd been lit up, talking fast, gesturing, and he'd been reviewing footage on the couch.
He'd said uh-huh without looking up. Not even once. Not once during your entire story did he lift his eyes from the viewfinder. You trailed off mid-sentence and went quiet, and Bobby hadn't looked up then either.
He tries to find that moment on tape. He knows he was filming that night. The camera was always running, always capturing, the viewfinder his permanent excuse for not being present. He scrubs through the footage looking for it. Looking for your face lit up. Looking for the moment you dimmed.
He finds the timestamp. And what Bobby sees makes his stomach drop.
You're sitting on the couch. He can tell it's you by the posture, the clothes, the way you're tucked into the corner cushion with your legs folded. But your face. Your face isโฆ smeared. Like a thumbprint pressed across wet paint. The features are there, technically. But only technically. Eyes, mouth, nose. But they've lost their arrangement, their specificity.
The uniqueness that makes a face your face instead of just a face.ย
Bobby is looking at you, and he canโt tell what you look like. Heโs lived with you, slept beside you, fucked you in every spot in your shared apartment, filmed you obsessively for months, and yet heโs looking at a tape from four months ago, and he canโt reconstruct you.
The audio is worse. Your voiceโthe one he knows better than his own, the one that said his name like a bell, half-scolding and half-tenderโis distorted.
Vowels flattened, consonants dissolved. That familiar melody of your speech now reduced to a low warbling tone that doesn't sound like language anymore. It sounds like a recording of a recording of a recording. Each new generation losing fidelity, losing you, until what's left is just the shape of where a voice used to be.
Bobby ejects the tape. His hands are shaking so hard he almost drops it. He puts it back on the shelf and sits on the couch in the dark and doesn't move for an hour.
He sits with the inventory binder the next night and reads your handwriting and says to the wall:
Something's happening to you, baby. I can'tโI don't know how to explain it. But something's happening to the tapes, and I think it means something's happening to you. I need you to hold on. Okay? I need you to hold on because I'm still here, and I'm not leaving. I need you to still be you when I find you.
I think I got scared of how much I needed you. So I stopped letting myself need you. And that's not an excuse. I know that's not an excuse.
The truth is, I wanted to be there so much that it was destroying me. I wanted you so much it made me fucking mean. I loved you in a way I couldn't control, and I've always been an idiot who quits everything. Who gives up when things get too big and scary. You were the one thing that made my hands shake, and I hated it, and I needed it. I needed you because you saw me. I didn't know how to need something without resenting it.
So I resented you. For making me believe in myself. For making me need something other than the weed. And I showed it by turning away and turning away and turning away until you thought I didn't feel anything at all, when the reality is I felt everything. I felt too much. I've always felt too much, and I've never once known what to do about it except hide behind the camera and make a dumb joke and let the moment pass.
He pauses. Slams the binder shut. Runs his hand over the cover where your coffee ring stains the cardboard.
I should've told you about the toast morning. The spatula. The light behind you. I should've put the camera down and told you right then.
I should've told you every morning.
Baby. I can still see your handwriting. I need toโI need that to mean you're still somewhere. That this is just the tapes. That the tapes are old and I'm tired and you're fine, wherever you are, you're fine and you look like you and you sound like you and when I find you I'll know your face.
Month five.
Kat touches his arm.
It happens on a Wednesday. She's handing him the coffee, and her fingers brush his wrist and stay there. A half-second too long. Warm. Intentional.
Bobby stares at her hand. Looks at her. She doesn't look away.
โYou know,โ she says cautiously, โyou don't have to sit down there alone every night. You could stay up here. Sit on one of the display couches. They're actually pretty comfortable for fake living rooms.โ She smiles. Not the interested once-over from the first night. Softer now, more careful.
Bobby takes the coffee. Goes downstairs.
His pager buzzes against his hip later that night. He unclips it, tilts it toward the light. Kat's number. She must've pulled it from the staff contact sheet Clark keeps.
He looks at the little green screen for a long time. Clips the pager back to his belt. Presses his forehead to the wall.
That night, at home, he puts in the toast tape. It's become a test now, a compulsion. He checks the way you'd check a wound, needing to see if it's gotten worse, even though looking makes it worse too. He sits on the floor in front of the TV and watches the kitchen footage load.
The spatula is there. The counter. The window with the morning light. The t-shirt hanging off one shoulder. Everything in the frame is crisp, real, and correctly rendered.
Except there's no one holding the spatula.
Bobby's breath hitches. He leans forward, hands shaking. Rewinds. Plays it again.
The spatula lifts. Turns. The t-shirt shifts on a shoulder that isn't there. Or is there, maybe, but wrong. A smudge of colour where a body should be, a heat-shimmer distortion where your outline used to sit. The light comes through the window and falls on the kitchen counter and on the empty space where you stood, and there is something in that space.
Not nothing, or blank tape, but a presence that has no edges, no features, no face. A blur. A smear. The visual equivalent of a word on the tip of your tongue that won't come.
The audio says โ โ toast โ and then dissolves into a sound that Bobby can only describe as the noise a voice makes when it's being pulled apart from the inside. Each syllable stretches thinner and thinner until it snaps, and what's left is a low, sustained hum that sounds like buzzing lights in an empty hallway.
Bobby presses stop. Ejects the tape.
He goes to the shelf. Pulls another. The one where you're reading on the couch, your hand on his thigh. He puts it in.
Your hand is gone. His thigh is there. Bobby can see his own jeans, the denim folded at the knee. That specific wear pattern on the left leg. But the hand that used to rest on it has dissolved into a faded wash, a blurry disturbance on the surface of the image, like someone pressed their palm to a fogged window and then the fog closed over the print.
He puts in another. The store footage. You sorting inventory.
The bins are being sorted by no one. Cabinet hardware moves through the air. Drawer pulls lift and settle into containers by themselves, organised by a system invented by a person the tape can no longer render. The radio plays in the recording. Bobby can hear the music. Unchanged. But the voice that used to sing along to it is gone. Replaced by a low, pulsing tone that rises and falls in a pattern that almost, almost resembles the melody you used to hum, if he listens hard enough, if Bobby presses his ear to the speaker and closes his eyes and believesโ
He can't. He can't believe it hard enough. The tape runs, and the inventory sorts itself. The radio plays somewhere underneath it all in a frequency that used to be your voice.
Bobby puts every tape in, one by one. Every single one. And on every single one, youโre fading. The early tapesโthe oldest ones, the ones from before the store, from the first monthsโare the worst.ย
On those, youโre gone entirely. The frame exists, as does the light. But the space you occupied is smooth and empty, the image healing the wound of your absence like skin closing over a wound.
Reality itself seems to be deciding you were never there and quietly, methodically, is editing you out.
On the very last tape he checks, the most recent, he can still see you. Barely. A silhouette that won't resolve. A shape in the doorway that could be a person or could be a trick of the light. He pauses the tape and stares at the shape, and it looks like you the way a cloud looks like a face. If you want it to, if you squint hard enough and ignore the parts that don't match.
Bobby sits on the floor, holding the remote, staring at the paused frame. He understands, with a certainty that bypasses logic and settles directly into his bones, that youโre being erased. Not just from his life. Not just from the apartment, the store, or the neighbourhood that forgot you. From reality. From any evidence that you existed at all.
The tapes were his proof. Not for Moreno, or the cops, but for himself. Proof that you were real. That the toast morning happened. That your hand rested on his thigh. Love, in all its messy, imperfect shape between you, was real. That you sang along to the radio and burned rolls at Thanksgiving. That you stood in doorways waiting for him to look up. For once in his life, to just look up and see you.ย
He filmed you because he couldn't tell you he loved you, and thought the films would be enough. They were going to be the evidence he'd have forever, the record of what he felt even when he couldn't say it aloud.
And now even thatโs being taken.
He doesn't go to the store that night. He goes straight to the basement and puts his whole body against the wall. Not just his hand. His whole body, chest, cheek and palms flat against the concrete. Maybe heโs going insane, finally, properly insane, but he talks until his voice gives out.
Don't go. Whatever's happening, whatever this isโplease. Don't go. I know I didn't earn you. I know I don't get to ask you to stay when I didn't give you a reason to stay. But Iโm asking. I'm begging. Please.
I can barely remember your face, baby.
I looked at the tapes, and you're notโyou're going away. You're going away, and I can't stop it. The last version of your face I have in my head is from the doorway, the night you left, and I didn't even LOOK at it. I fucking grunted. You were looking at me, and I was looking at the TV. Now your face is disappearing from my own tapes, and the last real look I had at you I wasted on a GRUNT.
Baby. Please don't make me forget what you look like.
The wall breathes against him. The draft. The nowhere-breeze, cooler than the room, steady, almost rhythmic. Like breathing. Like something on the other side pressing back, watching him.
Bobby lifts his head but he's alone down here.
He stays until morning anyway.
Month six.
The apartment is starting to forget you.
Your shampoo ran out first. Bobby couldn't bring himself to buy more, so the shower shelf has a gap now.
Your magazines are buried under his mail, his camera equipment that's migrated back to every flat surface because there's nobody to complain about it. The coffee mugโyour mug, the one on the drying rackโhe put it in the cabinet. High shelf. Behind his. He can't see it when he opens the door, but he knows it's there.ย
The tapes are blank.
Completely blank. Clean, smooth, unrecorded type of blank. As if the camera was never pointed at anything, as if the record button was never pressed. Hours and hours of footage simply un-happened.ย
Bobby put in the toast tape last week, and what played was thirty minutes of soft grey nothing. The gentle hiss of virgin magnetic tape, the sound of a medium that has never held information. He put it in the camera, connected it to the TV, and watched nothing. Rewound it. Watched nothing again, ejected it, held it in his hands, turned it over and read his own handwriting on the label.ย
The date, just the date. The label is the only proof left that something was once on this tape, because the tape itself has forgotten.
All of them. Every single one. He checked them all, one after another, on a Saturday afternoon with the curtains drawn. By the time Bobby reached the last one, he wasn't even surprised. Just hollow. The shelves are full of labelled cassettes that now contain nothing.
A library of blanks. An archive of absence.
He has no pictures of you.ย
He realises this with a physical lurch, sitting on the floor surrounded by dead tapes. He has no pictures of you.ย
Bobby the camera guy, Bobby who filmed everything, Bobby who pointed the lens at you while you slept because he couldn't survive the sight of you without a barrier, and somehow, he has no proof you exist. The tapes are blank. He never took photographs because the camera was always rolling. And the only image of your face he has left is the one in his head, and that one is fading too.ย
Just the ordinary human erosion. The way memory smooths out detail over time. Six months of absence turns a face into an impression, an atmosphere, a feeling-where-a-face-used-to-be.
He remembers your eyes. He thinks. He remembers warmth, colour, the way they changed in kitchen light, and the blue wash of the TV at midnight. But he doesn't remember their exact shape. Doesn't remember if the left one was slightly different from the right.ย
The details are blurry; the tapes can't tell him anymore, and no one else can, either. Youโre being unmadeโfrom the record, from the world, from his own goddamn memoryโand Bobby is the man who was supposed to preserve you, who pointed a camera at you for years, and he couldn't even do that right.
He still goes to the store. Every night. Without fail.ย
Even when it rains, or when he's sick, or when his hands shake on the steering wheel, driving down at eleven PM. He sits on the floor, and he talks. Sometimes he brings the coffee, your order, and a paper cup from the place on El Camino that makes it the way you like best.
Bobby sets it on the concrete beside him like a place setting at a table for two, and it goes cold while he talks. Eventually, he pours it out in the utility sink by the loading dock, rinses the cup and drives home.
It's getting harder to believe.
He can feel it.ย
Faith eroding the way your shampoo scent eroded from the pillow, the way you eroded from the tapes, gradually, then suddenly. Six months. People don't come back after six months. The cops have functionally closed the case.ย
Bobby's mom called and talked around the subject for forty minutes before finally saying honey, maybe it's time toโ and Bobby hung up on her. His buddy Terrence sat him down at a bar and said, awkwardly, carefully, the way everyone talks to Bobby now, man, I know you don't want to hear this, butโ and Bobby walked out before he could finish the sentence.
He knows what they're going to say. He knows because he's been saying it to himself at three in the morning, lying on his side of the bed with his hand on the cold spot you should be, a thought looping in his brain: she's not coming back. She's not coming back.
But Bobby goes to the store. And he sits on the floor. He puts his hand on the wall. The draft is still thereโthat impossible nowhere-breeze, cool against his palmโand it feels like breathing. Bobby presses his whole body against the concrete.
This space is the last thing that still holds you. The tapes gave you up. The apartment gave you up. The neighbourhood, the cops, his friends, his mother, everyone has let go. Bobby presses himself against the wall every night because this is the one place in the world that still has you in it. The last surface that carries your imprint, and heโll not leave it.ย
He will not let the last proof of you go.
Bobby thinks about who he was seven months ago, and the contempt is so total it's almost cleansing.ย
A twenty-something-year-old asshole in a crop top who thought he was too cool to say I love you, who hid behind a camera lens because looking at things through glass was easier than looking at them with his bare, stupid, cowardly eyes.
He had a girl who made him breakfast and stayed up waiting for him. Who asked do you even want to be here anymore and answered her with don't be dramatic because the truth was too enormous and too terrifying to fit through his teeth.
The camera was supposed to be the thing that kept you. The proof, the record, the insurance policy against loss. He filmed you because he couldn't hold you, and now the film is empty. His arms are empty too, and the only thing left is a dusty basement with a strange wall and a man who doesn't deserve the comfort of it.
Robert Franklin, who quit everything, who let every good thing in his life rot through neglect and cowardiceโRobert Franklin refuses to quit this.ย
This is the one thing he will hold onto with both hands. Because if he lets go, he has to look at who he is without it, and that person has nothing. That someone is an idiot with a camera and a crop top sitting in an empty apartment full of blank tapes, where he ground something beautiful down to dust because he was too chickenshit to be soft.
So he goes. Every night. He goes.
Month seven.
Clark is drunk.
Bobby can tell before he's through the door.ย
The showroom lights are on, but the sign is flipped to CLOSED, and the radio's playing louder than usual from somewhere in the back. When Bobby makes his way past the dining displays, he finds Clark sitting in the leather recliner. The expensive floor model, the one that's been here since the store opened, with a bottle of Jim Beam wedged between his thigh and that look on his face.ย
The one Bobby sees in the mirror. The look of a man whose life is falling apart.
โBobby.โ Flat. Not unfriendly. Voice of a man who's been drinking past sloppy and into something cold and brittle on the other side. โRight on time.โ
โClark.โ Bobby eyes the bottle. โWhere's Kat?โ
โSent her home early.โ Clark takes a long, gulping drink. He's still wearing his work shirt, that same button-down he always wears, but it's untucked and the collar's stained. He looks like he's been in that recliner for a while. โSit down.โ
โI'm going downstairs.โ
โNo.โ Another wet gulp. His eyes are red but steady. โYou're not. That's what I need to talk to you about.โ
Bobby stops.
โLinda kicked me out,โ Clark says conversationally. The way he'd talk about lumber prices or a late shipment. He gestures around the showroom with the bottle. โSo I'll be staying here. Back office. Maybe downstairs, if I can clear space between the Scandinavian imports.โ The joke almost lands. Almost. โWhich means I need the room, Bobby. All of it.โ
โYou'reโwhat?โ
โI'm saying you can't come here anymore.โ
The words land like a slap. Bobby's hand tightens on the strap of his camera bag.
โClarkโโ
โSeven months.โย
And there it is. That thing that happens when Clark drinks, when the bourbon strips away the politeness and the it's not my place and the careful middle-aged-man diplomacy, and what's left is just the raw compressed anger of a man who's been swallowing his own resentment for months.
Clark is a man who holds everything down until the whiskey lifts the lid and whatever's underneath comes out scalding.
โSeven months of you in my basement. Seven months ofโdo you know what's happened to this place since your girlfriend disappeared? Do you? Because I do. I watch it every day. I watch the customers not come in. I watch the phone not ring. I watch the neighbourhood look at my store like it's a goddamn crime scene and take their money to Stevens Creek because nobody wants to buy a dining set from the place where a girl vanished.โ Clark's voice is rising, a deep rumbling anger spilling outwards. โI built this store. And now I'm sleeping in it because my ungrateful wife thinks I'm a failure and my customers think I'm cursed and the only person who walks through my door every night is you, Bobby, sitting on my floor, talking to my wallโโ
โThat's not my fault โโ
โShe's not down there.โ Clark slams the bottle on the end table. It cracks the mahogany finish, and he doesn't notice or doesn't care. โShe's not in the walls, or the ceiling or the goddamn floor, son. She's not inside a goddamn flatpack bookshelf.โ
Bobby sucks in a breath. โYou don't know that. Nobody does.โ
โYeah, I do.โย
Clark leans forward. Red-eyed. Steady. And the thing he's been holding between his teeth for months comes out. The ugly thing that isn't about Bobby at all, it's about Clark, about a store that was failing before you ever disappeared and a marriage that was cracking before the customers stopped coming.
A man who needs someone to blame because the alternative is looking in the mirror and seeing his own fingerprints on everything that's broken. And right now, tonight, drunk and newly homeless and sitting in a recliner in a showroom full of furniture nobody's buying, Clark has found his someone.
โShe's either dead,โ Clark says, and the word just hangs there, settling on Bobby's skin like hot oil spilling overโ โor she left you. And either way, son. Either way. You need to stop. Because I can't have you down there anymore. I can't have thisโthis hauntingโattached to my store. I'm trying to save what's left, and you sitting in my basement every night isโโ
He stops himself. A crack appears in Clarkโs anger, a fissure where the sober Clark underneath can see what the drunk Clark is doing. Using Bobby's grief to deflect from his own failure. Blaming a missing girl for a business that was haemorrhaging money long before she vanished, for a wife who kicked him out because Clark worked sixty-hour weeks and never once asked how her day was.
Clark knows. Underneath the bourbon, he knows. And the knowing makes his face twist with both sadness and fury.
โBobby.โ His voice changes. Drops. The anger drains out of it like water from a cracked glass, leaving only the exhaustion underneath. Clark rubs his eyes with one hand, and suddenly, he looks old. Older than he is, tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. โI didn'tโthat came out wrong. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said it like that.โ
Bobby doesn't hear him.
Because Bobby is already moving. Past the display couches and the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lives. He shoulder clips the corner of a dining table hard enough to shift it on the showroom floor, and the door chimes behind him when he rips it open.
The night air hits him, and he's in the parking lot, his hands are on his knees, and he's breathing in short, ragged, tearing bursts that feel like they're coming from somewhere below his lungs.ย
Somewhere that's been sealed shut for seven months and has just been cracked open with the words she's either dead or she left you.
Dead or she left you.
Dead.
Or she left you.
He can't fucking breathe. He can'tโthe air is right there. Santa Clara night air, warm and full of eucalyptus and car exhaust, but he can't get it into his lungs. Because Clark said dead, and that word is a door Bobby has refused to open for seven months, and now it's open, it's wide fucking open.ย
And behind it is a version of reality where youโre in the ground somewhere and the last thing he ever said to you was a grunt and your last memory of him is the back of his head and the blue light of the television and the sound of a man who couldn't be bothered to look up.
And the tapes are blank. And your face is gone. And there is no record anywhere in the world that you existed except the label on a cassette in Bobby's handwriting and in a basement he's just been locked out of.
โBobby. Bobby, waitโโ
Kat. Coming around the side of the building, car keys in her hand. She didn't go home. She was sitting in her car, headlights off, engine off, just sitting there, and she's been doing that, he knows she's been doing that, waiting for him, watching the door. And he's never said anything because acknowledging it would mean acknowledging everything it implies.
โBobby, hey, stop, are you okay? I heard him through the door, what did heโโ
Bobby straightens up. Pivots toward her. And he knowsโsomewhere in the functioning part of his brain, in the part that isn't currently on fireโthat she doesn't deserve whatโs coming. She's been nothing but kind.
Coffee on counters, stairs and parking lots and pager numbers he never called back. She never once asked for anything in return. Sheโs a good person standing in a parking lot trying to help a man whoโs bleeding out from a wound she didn't inflict.
But the thing inside Bobby right now is not rational. It's not kind. It's the wounded animal, the cornered dog, the part of Robert Franklin that has always turned his pain into teeth and aimed them at whoever's closest because the alternative is feeling it. And heโฆ
He can't feel it; if he feels it right now, heโll come apart on this asphalt, and he doesn't know if he'll come back together again.
โDon't do that. Don't chase me. Don't wait in the parking lot. Don't leave me coffee. Don'tโโ His voice cracks, and he hates it. Hates the sound of himself breaking in front of her. Another woman who's being kind to him, and he's going to ruin it with his inability to do anything with tenderness except flinch from it. โI'm not going to fuck you, Kat. Alright? Is that what you need to hear? My girl is missing. The girl I love is fucking missing, and I don't know where she is, and I can'tโI can't do this. Whatever you think this is going to become. I can't.โ
He presses the heel of his hand into his eye. Hard. Grinding the tears back because Bobby doesn't cry in front of people. Even though he's been doing it alone on concrete for seven months, even though the ironyโBobby Franklin pushing away the person trying to be there for him while grieving the person he pushed away by not being thereโis so perfect and so cruel it feels engineered. Like the universe is holding up a mirror and saying see? You're doing it again. You learned nothing, idiot.
He knows. He knows he's doing it again. He can't stop doing it.
โI can't,โ he rasps. Quiet, broken. โI'm sorry.โ
Kat stands still. Her keys dangle from one finger, catching the orange glow of the streetlight. She doesn't step back. Doesn't cry or get angry or tell him to go fuck himself, though she definitely should. Bobby almost wishes she would because it would give him someone to push against.
The tapes are blank, and your face is a smear. Reality is closing over the hole you left like water closing over a stone, and soon thereโll be no evidence you were ever here at all except a man in a parking lot who can't stop saying your name in the present tense.
Kat shifts her keys to her other hand. Takes one step closer. Not touching. Just closer.
She looks at him, and she says, quietly, softly, โI don't need you to love me, Bobby.โ
Quiet. Simple. Like she's telling him the time.
Bobby's mouth opens. Closes. His hand drops from his face. The parking lot is quiet. Only the buzzing streetlight fills the silence.ย
He looks at her, and he looks wrecked, he knows. Absolutely wrecked, hollowed out and scraped clean from last seven months, standing in a place where the only options are forward into something he's not ready for or backwards into a basement he's just been locked out of, and he doesn't say yes.
But he doesn't walk away, either.
an: ohoho, i'm so excited to hear what ya'll think after that lmao. we're picking up with BB and you next time. stay tunedddd~
Damn heโs going through it. Honestly that is crazy how BB can just whipe us from Bobbyโs life like that. LIKE WHAT KIND OF ENTITY IS BETTER BOBBY AND DAMN IS IT STRONG. BB has seeped into the real world that itโs able to make changes and is it actually from the back rooms or did it gets stuck there???? ๐๐๐ I have questions and thoughts and do you think eventually when they find out how to get in, will BB know right away? Will it try to stop them from coming in? Or will it be to distracted by us to notice until it feels somethingโs off and will it try to kill Bobby and them or try to lead them to something else that would do it instead???
YOUR 'BETTER BOBBY' FIC WAS SO GOOD! if you ever felt inspired would LOVE to read more about them. maybe another entity attacks them and they get separated? and alone and lost, reader can't help but miss the real Bobby ahhh. anyway, love you, thank you for writing!
I'm so glad you're all loving this idea, because inspiration hit me so hard I wrote this in one sitting. Continuation to this. Def let me know if you wanna see more ๐
warnings: horror (finally got to write my true love), and some gore (nothing explicit/implied)
series masterlist.
You've been here long enough that you've stopped counting the hallways.
That, in hindsight, should probably scare you the most. The fact that it doesn't scare you anymore.
The yellow used to make your skin crawl, that specific shade of institutional sick. Now it's just... the colour of home. Better Bobby's taught you that. Through sheer repetition of safety.
Every time he pulls you into a new room and checks the corners before letting you sit down. Every time he angles his body between you and a doorway without thinking about it. Or when he hands you something to eat. You've stopped asking where the food comes from. That's another question that goes in circles every time you try it. He watches you until you take a bite, satisfied, like feeding you is the only task on a list he takes very seriously.
You have a room now. Your room. He found it for you three (days? rotations? sleeps?) ago, deeper in Level 0 than you'd been before, tucked behind a series of turns that he walked so confidently you wondered if he'd planned the route in advance.
It's quieter than the others. The carpet is thicker, the hum lower, and there's a warm patch on the floor near the far wall where some buried pipe must be running. Better Bobby dragged every blanket he'd scavenged into a pile on that warm spot and when you'd looked at him he'd shrugged, one shoulder, earring catching the fluorescent light.
"What? You get cold."
Real Bobby used to steal the covers.
You try not to make the comparison. You try so hard. But Better Bobby makes it impossible because he's everything real Bobby was on your best days. Distilled and concentrated, with all the carelessness burned off.
He touches you constantly. Not sexually, just contact. His hand on the back of your neck when you walk. His chin on your shoulder when you're sitting together. His fingers finding yours in the dark when the lights flicker, which they do sometimes. And in those brief, stuttering seconds of blackness you can hear things moving in the walls and Better Bobby's grip tightens. He says I'm here like it's a fact of physics. Like his presence beside you is as fundamental and non-negotiable as gravity.
It's a Thursday, you think, or what you've decided is Thursdayโyou've started naming the days by feeling, which probably means you're losing itโwhen everything goes wrong.
You're walking. Better Bobby's slightly ahead of you, one hand trailing the wall, talking about something. He talks to you the way real Bobby used to, a constant low-level narration.
Except Better Bobby's commentary is about the architecture of this place, which hallways are safe, which ones echo differently than they should. The way the carpet changes texture near certain thresholds you should know about. You're half-listening, comfortable in the drone of his familiar voice, when he stops abruptly.
You almost walk into his back.
"Bobby?"
He doesn't answer. His head tilts slightly, the way a dog would listen toa distant sound. His whole body goes rigid in a way you've never seen before. Better Bobby doesn't tense up. Better Bobby is languid and easy and always, always calm.
"Bobby, whatโ"
"Don't move."
His voice is different. Stripped of the warmth, the lazy drawl, all the honeyed softness he pours over you. What's left is flat and hard. Something in your hindbrain fires that hasn't fired since you got here because Better Bobby has kept you so safe that you forgot what fear tasted like.
You taste it now. Bright and metallic at the back of your throat.
The lights flicker abovehead. Not the usual gentle stutter or dimming it does at random intervals. This is violent, a seizure of light, and in the strobe of it you spot something at the end of the hallway.
You can't process it. Your brain tries and slides off the shape the way water slides off wax. It's too tall, and wrong. So wrong. It takes up too much space for its size, like it's pressing against the dimensions of the hallway from the inside, and it's looking at you with something that isn't a face.
Better Bobby shoves you behind him. Both hands this time. Hard.
"Go."
"I'm not leaving youโ"
"Go. Left, left, straight, third door. I'll find you." He looks over his shoulder at you and his eyes are dark and flat. Ancient in a way that makes your stomach drop because for just a secondโjust a flicker, shorter than the lightsโthe thing looking out from behind Bobby's face isn't Bobby, either. "Baby. Run."
You run.
Left, left, straight, except there's no third door. There's no door at all.
The hallway stretches and bends and the carpet under your feet changes from rough to damp to something that feels horribly organic so abruptly you almost skid. You're running and the fluorescent yellow is shifting with you, deepening in increments, and the walls are getting narrower.
The ceiling goes lower suddenly and you realise, with a lurch of animal terror, that you're not on Level 0 anymore.
You don't know when it changed. There was no door, no threshold, no moment. The hallways just... became somewhere else. Like you walked through an edit. A jump cut in reality.
You stagger to a stop. Your breathing is so loud it fills the quiet corridor.
It's dark here. Not quite pitch black, mercifully. There's light, but it's coming from somewhere wrong. Faintly blue, sourceless, the colour of television static.
The walls aren't yellow anymore. They're concrete instead. Industrial. Stained with something you refuse to look at closely. The ceiling is a mess of exposed pipes and dead wiring, and water (you hope desperately it's water) drips in a strange pattern that sets your teeth on edge
It's cold here. You're shaking, you realise a moment too late.
You press your back against the concrete wall and slide down to the floor, pulling your knees to your chest and try to make yourself small. Try to make yourself invisible. Because Better Bobby isn't here and without him you're nothing in this place.
Just soft, warm, alive thing in a place that is none of those things.
That's when you see it. From the corner of your eye.
It assembles itself in pieces in the dark, the way a photograph develops, the way something reveals itself to you only once it's already too close.
Teeth first.
A grin. Too wide and white, wrong, hanging in the blue-black dark about thirty feet down the corridor. Human teeth in a human smile except there are too many of them and the smile is too wide. It's not attached to anything you can see, either. Just the grin, suspended, luminous. The way a Cheshire cat would look if the Cheshire cat wanted to kill you.
It doesn't move. You don't breathe.
Then it's twenty feet away.
You didn't see it move. You didn't blink. Not once. It was thirty feet and now it's twenty and the grin hasn't changed, not even slightly. The same frozen rictus of delight, and you understand with a sick, cold certainty that it's not walking toward you. It's just... closer. Like the distance between you is a thing it can edit. A number it can change at will.
Fifteen feet. The grin widens. You didn't think it could widen.
You can see more of it now, or rather you can see the shape of more of it. The suggestion of a body behind the smile, darker than the dark around it, a silhouette that doesn't quite hold its edges. And the sound. There's a sound now, low and wet, like someone trying to laugh through a mouthful of something thick. A gurgling, hitching, delighted sound.
It's happy to see you. Whatever this thing is, it's so, so happy that you're here.
Ten feet. You can feel the cold coming off it. Not temperature, exactly, something else. An absence. A pulling. Like it's drawing the warmth out of the air between you one degree at a time and feeding the grin with it.
You open your mouth to scream and nothing comes out.
"Close your eyes."
The voice comes from directly behind you.
You didn't hear him arrive. You didn't hear footsteps or breathing or the rustle of fabric. He's just there, the way he's always just there. His hand closes over your eyes from behind, firm, warm, his palm flush against your face, fingers curving over your brow.
"Close them. Keep them closed. Don't open them until I tell you to."
Better Bobby's voice is calm. Completely, impossibly calm. The same tone he uses when he's telling you to go back to sleep after the lights flicker. But underneath itโdeep underneath, in a register you feel more than hearโthere's something else now. An edge that doesn't sound like Bobby at all.
His hand lifts off your eyes. You keep them shut. You squeeze them so tight you see colours behind your lids. Bright, bursting phosphenes, and you press your face into your knees and you hear him move away from you. Toward it.
Then the sounds start.
You can't categorise them. You won't.
There's a tearing sound. Not fabric, or paper; something denser, wetter, something with resistance. A sound like a dog shaking water from its fur except heavier and it ends in a crack that reverberates through the concrete floor and up through your spine.
The gurgling laughter changes pitch. Goes higher. Then higher still. Then it's not laughter anymore, it's something between a shriek and a frequency. A sound that vibrates in the roots of your teeth, and underneath all of it is a low rumbling that you realise is coming from Better Bobby. A sound no human throat should make, a sound like tectonic plates grinding in the dark.
There's a splash. Something hisses, like water on a hot pan. The shrieking cuts outโnot fades, cuts, abruptly, like someone hit a switchโand then there's a long, wet, dragging sound that moves away from you down the corridor and fades into the pipes and the dark.
Silence.
There's a ringing in your ears. Your fingers feel numb, heavy. You're biting the inside of your cheek so hard you can taste blood in your mouth.
Footsteps. Normal ones. The soft pad of sneakers on concrete.
"Okay, baby. You can open your eyes now."
You do. Better Bobby is standing in front of you, looking down at you with that soft, tilted expression. Same white tee. Same denim shorts. Trusty camera over his shoulder. Not a drop of anything on him. Not a wrinkle. His hair isn't even mussed any more than usual. His earring catches the faint blue light and throws a tiny star onto the concrete wall and he's smiling at you, gently, like you just had a bad dream and he's here to tell you it's morning.
There's nothing in the hallway behind him. Nothing on the floor. No sign that anything was ever there at all, except a faint smell. Ozone, copper and deeper beneath that, an almost rotten stench. You try to examine it but it's already fading.
You don't ask. You can't ask.
Your body moves before your brain does. You launch yourself off the floor and into him so hard he actually rocks back a step. Better Bobby, who's never been moved by anything in your presence, who stands in front of horrors like a wall moves this time. Your arms lock around his neck and you bury your face in his chest.
You're shaking. So violently that it's almost convulsive, these full-body tremors that you can't control, and the sound coming out of you isn't crying exactly. It's more animal than that, a high keening thing that you'd be embarrassed about if you had any room left for embarrassment but you don't, you used it all up being terrified.
Better Bobby catches you. He doesn't stumble again. His arms come around you and they're solid and warm. He holds you so tight that the shaking has nowhere to go, like he's absorbing it into himself, and one hand cradles the back of your head, pressing your ear against his chest. His heartbeat is steady, steady, so steady, and how is he so steady, how is he always so steadyโ
"Shhh. I got you. I'm here. It's gone."
You can't stop. You're gripping his shirt in both fists, knuckles blanching, and you're gasping against his collarbone and he just...
He holds you. Doesn't rush it. Or tell you you're okay or that it wasn't that bad or any of the things real Bobby would say in later months to make you feel silly for being scared. He just holds on and rocks you, the smallest movement, his cheek resting on top of your head.
Your voice comes out cracked and ruined. "Whatโwhat was that, what did youโ how did youโ"
He hums gently. "Don't worry about it."
"Bobby, that thing, it wasโits face, it was smiling, it wasโ"
"I know." He pulls back just enough to look at you. Tips your chin up with his knuckle. That lazy smile, easy and warm and so perfectly Bobby it makes your chest splinter. "I know what it was. It's gone now. Don't worry about it."
"How did you get rid of it?" you rasp.
His thumb strokes your jawline. "Does it matter?"
"Yes."
He looks at you. For a moment something flickers behind his eyes. Something vast and patient and very, very old. Then it's gone, and he's just Bobby again, warm-eyed and soft-mouthed, tucking your hair behind your ear.
"I told you, baby. Nothing gets past me." He kisses your forehead. Slow. Gentle. His lips are warm and the concrete corridor is freezing around you. You lean into him like he's the last source of heat in the world. "Come on. Let's go home."
He takes your hand.
You let him lead you.
He leads you back through the concrete and the pipes and the blue-dark, his thumb rubbing circles on your knuckles, and you don't look behind you.
Not even once. Because whatever he did in that corridor is something you have decided you don't need to see the aftermath of, and also because some part of youโthe part that still thinks clearly, the part that Better Bobby hasn't quite reached yetโunderstands that there is no aftermath.
That whatever Better Bobby does to the things in the dark, he does it completely. He doesn't leave evidence. He doesn't leave remains. He unmakes them, and he does it wearing Bobby's crooked smile, Bobby's silver earring and Bobby's cut-off shorts like a costume. Like a skin, like a love letter written in someone else's handwriting.
The concrete gives way to carpet. Just as abruptly. The blue darkens to yellow again. The cold lifts. The hum returns, and for the first time ever you're grateful for it. The way you'd be grateful for the sound of traffic outside your apartment window because it means you're back in the world, or at least, back in the only world you have left.
Your room. The warm patch. The blankets.
Better Bobby guides you down, wrapping the blankets snug around you. He tucks himself behind you and you press back into his chest, his arm winding around your waist. You're still shaking faintly, these little aftershock tremors, and he absorbs every single one.
"Sleep, baby. I'm right here."
And you close your eyes and you think about real Bobby.
You think about the apartment in Santa Clara. The kitchen counter where he used to roll joints with the window open because you didn't like the smell building up inside. The way his camera equipment colonised every flat surface, cables and lenses and that one light diffuser he was so particular about. You used to complain it and he used to say babe, genius needs room to breathe and you'd throw a dish towel at his head while smothering a grin.
You think about the night you fell in love with him. Not the day you realised it (you'd known for a while by then) but the night it actually happened.
You sitting on the hood of his car in a parking lot off El Camino Real, sharing a joint, and he'd turned to you with the camera for once not in his hands and said, so disarmingly, you're the most wonderful girl I've ever met, and his face looked stripped of its usual cockiness. Bare. Scared. Young.
He was so young. You both were.
You wonder if he's sitting in that apartment right now with the TV on and the lights off, not really watching, just existing in the space you used to fill.
You wonder if he's looked at your toothbrush in the holder next to his. If he's opened the fridge and seen the leftovers you made two nights before you vanished (was it two nights? you're losing track of the real timeline, it's blurring at the edges, and that scares you more than the grin in the dark) and whether he ate them or whether they're still sitting there. Slowly going bad, a small decomposition that mirrors something larger in your life.
You wonder if he's picked up his pager. Scrolled to your name. Stared at it.
You wonder if his thumb hovered over the button the way it used to hover over the shutter releaseโthat perfect hesitation, that half-second of do I or don't Iโand whether he pressed it or whether he set the pager down and rolled over. Told himself he'd deal with it tomorrow the way he's been telling himself he'd deal with you tomorrow for months now.
You wonder if somewhere under the indifference and the exhaustion and the slow-growing cruelty there is still a version of Bobby who filmed you sleeping because the light was good. Who cut a Metallica shirt into a crop top with kitchen scissors and held it up like a trophy. Who said hold still, the light's doing something crazy on you and meant I love you, you're beautiful and couldn't say it any other way.
You wonder if that Bobby still misses you.
You wonder if he'd ever come looking.
Better Bobby pulls you closer. His mouth finds the spot behind your ear. The one real Bobby discovered during your second date together. The one that makes everything go quiet inside your skull.
"You're thinking again," he murmurs.
"I know."
"About him."
You don't answer. You don't have to.
Better Bobby is quiet for a long time. His breathing is slow and even against your back. The lights hum their tuneless hymn in your ears. Somewhere deep in the walls, something moves again, and you tense at the scraping sound.
Better Bobby's arm tightens around you. A reflex, instant, protective, the one thing about him that never feels performed.
"He's not coming, baby," he says softly. He doesn't say it meanly this time, either. Not triumphant. More so sad. Almost like he wishes it weren't true, for your sake. Because even this thing that wears Bobby's face and unmakes grinning horrors in the dark doesn't want to watch you grieve. "You know that."
The โmaybe thatโs why you stayโ got me. Fuck that line is too relatable. The loneliness of it all and BB being the only thing that we can cling too out of comfort.
OKAY WAIT YOURE THE RIGHT PERSON I HAVE TO TELL THIS TO: Coraline AU x Backrooms AU for Bobby Franklin x reader
Okay so Bobby and reader are together but heโs grown brasher, ruder and arrogant these past few months. Long story short, heโs grown tired of you and he treats you like shit. But he hasnโt really broken it off yet. He canโt bring himself to. Heโs grown used to you and he doesnโt wanna go through the whole process of breaking up and moving out and whatever whatever. And you love him too much to do anything, so you just deal with it. Hoping that one day heโll be how he used to when you first got together.
So one night at the store when youโre pulling a night shift alone, (Bobby had left early, he wasnโt gonna stay and do night shift with you asshole) you hear thumps coming from the lower level. Youโre scared but you grab a hardware knife and keep it close as you quietly go down to explore the noise.
Once you reach the extra storage level, you hear it: Bobbyโs voice calling from inside the wall. At first youโre convinced that youโve gone crazy. But no, itโs him. And heโs gently luring you in, โbabe, I can see you. gosh you look so cute with that scared look on your face. come here.โ You look around in confusion, but a tiny thump from behind the wall grabs your attention. โYes. Here. Cโmere babe.โ
You stop in front of the wall. And when you lean in close to press your ear against the wall, poof you stumble into the room and fall on your ass. Your head spins as you blink awake, and immediately youโre hit with ugly neon yellow wallpaper. You look around the room before your gaze locks on โฆ Bobby?
You freeze in surprise. There he is, same white shirt and denim shorts, same camera dangled over his shoulder, and a sickeningly charming smile on his face that you havenโt seen since the beginning of your relationship. Something isnโt right. He doesnโt smile at you like that anymore.
But before you can say anything, heโs walking closer to you until heโs gently cupping your face in his hands. โHello babe, missed you. You are NOT going to believe this place!โ Slowly, with an arm draped over your shoulders, heโs guiding you further and further away from that spot on the wall that you came in here from. You look around. Something makes your stomach churn with unease. Itโs yellow everywhere, hallways everywhere. Yet โBobbyโ seems to know this place like the back of his hand.
When you finally snap and ask him who he is, he simply smiles that sickening smile again before cupping your cheeks and pressing a tender kiss on your lips. โItโs me, Bobby. Better Bobby.โ
Now he just has to convince you to never leave him again. To never go back the โother Bobbyโ. To a dull life where โother Bobbyโ canโt love you as best as he can. That heโll never neglect you like โother Bobbyโ that he can be better. That the only condition is that you stay in here with him forever.
[part 2]
The thing that makes Better Bobby so dangerous is that he's not a bad time at all.
He's not some obvious monster wearing Bobby's face wrong. He doesn't glitch. He doesn't flicker. He's warm. He's present in a way real Bobby hasn't been in months. Maybe longer, if you're honest with yourself, and Better Bobby makes you honest because he makes you feel safe enough to be.
The first few daysโhours? time is slippery here, the fluorescent lights don't change and there are no windows and Better Bobby just shrugs when you ask how long you've been here, says does it matter, baby? and the worst part is you can't think of a good reason why it does.
The first stretch of time is almost easy. Dangerously, seductively easy.
He finds rooms for you. Not just any rooms, the good ones. Quiet ones, with carpet instead of that damp yellow tile, where the humming of the lights isn't quite so loud.
He sets up a little nest of blankets he found god-knows-where and pulls you into his chest and plays with your hair and talks to you in that low, lazy voice. The one real Bobby used to use on Sunday mornings when neither of you had anywhere to be. He asks you questions about your day. Your day. When's the last time real Bobby did that? When's the last time real Bobby looked at you while you were talking instead of at his pager or through the viewfinder or at literally anything else?
Better Bobby looks at you like you're the only thing in the room. Which, technically, you are. But still.
And he keeps you safe. That's the part that really gets its hooks in.
Because the Backrooms aren't empty. You learn that fast. There are sounds in the deeper hallways, wet dragging things, clicking, something that might be breathing if breathing sounded like it was coming from a throat that was never designed for air.
The first time you hear it (really hear it, close, too close) you freeze, and Better Bobby is already moving. He steps in front of you. Puts his body between you and the sound without hesitation, without even breaking his sentence, one arm reaching back to keep you behind him. His hand finds your wrist and holds it. Firm. Certain.
"Stay behind me, baby. I got you."
And he does. He always does.
He knows which hallways to avoid, which doors not to open, what corners to take wide. He navigates this place like it's his, and maybe it is, and you try not to think about what that means.
When something skitters in the walls at night (at what passes for night, when he dims the lights in whatever room he's chosen and curls around you like a barricade) he doesn't flinch. Just pulls you closer, mouth against your temple, murmuring you're okay, I'm here, nothing's getting past me. And nothing does.
Real Bobby wouldn't even stay for a night shift.
That thought makes your chest hurt every time. You try to push it away but Better Bobby's already noticed the expression on your face. He notices everything, because he's always watching you with that soft, focused attention that reminds you of how real Bobby used to be behind the camera. Seeing things before they happen. Anticipating you.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"Liar." But he says it gently. Kisses your forehead. Doesn't push.
And you start asking questions. Carefully at first, then less so.
How did you get here?
"Same way you did, baby. Found a way in."
But when? How long have you been here?
"Long enough to know how to keep you safe. Isn't that what matters?"
That's not an answer.
"Sure it is." That smile. The one that used to make your chest ache when real Bobby aimed it at you across a room. "You're just not hearing what you want to hear. Ask me something else."
What are you?
"Bobby."
You're not Bobby.
"I'm Better Bobby." He says it like it's obvious, like you're being a little slow, and there's even a flash of that real-Bobby sharpness in it, that dry teasing edge, and it's so perfectly him that it makes your throat close. "I'm the one who stays, baby. That's all you need to know."
But where did you come from?
"Where did you come from? Where does anyone come from?" He tilts his head at you the way real Bobby does (did) when you said something he found cute. "You're going in circles, you know that?"
And you are. That's the thing. Every question leads back to the same place: I'm here, I love you, stay. It's a closed loop. A hallway that turns and turns yet looks different at every corner but deposits you right back where you started, standing in front of Better Bobby while he smiles at you like you're the whole world.
The architecture of this place and the architecture of his answers are the same. Endless. Repeating. Warm enough that you stop noticing you're already lost.
Because he does love you. Or whatever he does, it's close enough that it feels the same in the dark when he's holding you and the things in the walls are quiet, his heartbeat steady under your ear. It feels like love. It fits in all the spaces where love used to be. And he never gets tired of you. Never rolls over with his back to you. Never sighs when you walk into the room like your presence is a weight he didn't ask to carry.
He carries you willingly. Happily. Endlessly.
And somewhere above you, somewhere beyond the yellow and the hum, real Bobby is probably just now noticing your side of the bed is cold. Probably just now checking his pager. Probably frowning, not out of worry but out of inconvenience. Because your absence is a disruption to his routine and not a hole in his chest. Or is it?
Better Bobby presses his lips to your hair. "You're thinking about him again."
You don't answer.
"He's not coming for you." It's not cruel, the way he says it. It's gentle. It's the gentlest thing anyone's said to you in months. "You know that, right? Baby, look at him. You know he's not coming."
And the worst part (the part that keeps you here, that makes you curl into Better Bobby's chest and close your eyes and let the yellow blur behind your eyelids) is that he might be right.
Bobby's been a shit boyfriend for months. When you disappear through a wall in the basement of Clark's furniture store, you wake up in the Backrooms, where a better version of Bobby is waiting. One who actually shows up, one who loves you, one who never, ever wants to let you go.
โฝ part one / concept.
โฝ part two.
โฝ part three.
โธ interlude: entity 0
extras:
แชเญง making out w/ better bobby.
แชเญง better you!
แชเญง "baby."
แชเญง "open your mouth."
แชเญง pillow fort.
แชเญง in the beginning.
แชเญง my, what long tongue you have.
in which you discover that bb has... an unusually long tongue.
His mouth tastes like nothing.
You noticed that early on. Not like absence of taste, not like water. Like nothing, a perfect void where flavour should be, and somehow that's become the taste you crave most in any world.
Your back finds the wall, or what passes for a wall here, that faintly warm surface that breathes if you press your palm flat long enough. BB's other hand slides to your hip, fingers curling into the denim, and the sound he makes is low and human, pulling at a tether behind your navel.
You open for him. BB licks into your mouth, careful, so careful, and you feel the soft drag of his tongue against yoursโ
And it's good. It's so good. He's come from that first time when he said "teach me how to kiss you properly". His thumb traces your hipbone through your shirt and you're arching into him and the kiss deepens, turns slick and urgent, and you stop thinking.
Which is maybe why it takes you a few seconds to register it.
The texture shifts first. That smooth, wet give slowly becoming something denser, something with grip. Almost velvety, almost ridged, like the pad of a finger where a tongue should be. And then the length. BB's tongue curls past where a tongue should end. It slides along the underside of yours, keeps going, keeps going. A slow, sinuous coil that wraps once around the muscle of your tongue and tightens.
Your breath catches.
You pull back.
His mouth is still open. His eyes snap to yours and you watch it happen. The full-body freeze, every single micro-movement ceasing at once in a way that is deeply, fundamentally not human. No one goes that still. No thing goes that still except something that has learned, through meticulous and painstaking practice, how to move in the first place.
The tongueโ
It retracts so fast you almost don't track it, pulled back behind his teeth like a flinch, and his jaw clicks shut.
BB doesn't step back. He doesn't breathe. The bright blue of his eyes goes flat and cautious.
"Sorry, baby." His voice is perfect. Bobby's voice is always perfect. The pitch, the drawl, the way the vowels open warm and lazy. But the word comes out clipped. Bitten off at the root. "That wasโI wasn'tโ "
He's afraid.
The recognition hits you somewhere below your ribs and spreads.
Not afraid of you. Afraid of what your face is doing right now, afraid of whatever you're about to say. That this is the seam you'll hook your fingers into and pull until the whole beautiful lie peels apart and you see whatever's underneath. That you'll scream or you run or you look at him like he's a thing to be hated and feared.
"Hey." Your voice comes out steadier than you feel. "Hey. Come here."
You bring your hands up. Cup his jaw. His skin is warmer than usual. You wonder if it's the kissing or if he thermoregulated to a point of contact that your nervous system reads as safe.
You feel the rigid clench of the muscle beneath.
He won't look at you. He's looking at the wall behind your head with an expression so perfectly, carefully neutral it makes your chest ache.
You run your thumb across his cheekbone. "BB. Show me."
The stillness fractures. There's movement behind his eyes. Not the black, not yet, but something vast and uncertain, something that doesn't fit inside the geometry of a human face.
"You don'tโ"
"Show me. Please."
You lean in. Press your mouth to his, soft, no demand in it. Just heat, just contact, just here, here, I'm here.
He makes a sound against your lips. Low, resonant, tectonic. You feel it in your teeth, in the juncture of your jaw, a vibration that no human throat could produce and that your body interprets as the auditory equivalent of being held. It rumbles through the wall at your back. The fluorescent lights above you flicker, once.
Your tongue finds his.
BB hesitates. You feel it. The moment of restraint, the tension of something held deliberately in check. You press closer, flush against him now, fingers sliding into his sandy blonde hair, and lick along the seam of his lower lip.
And you wait.
Slowlyโso slowlyโit unfurls.
The velvety texture meets yours first, denser than before, slick-soft and fever-warm and alive in a way that makes the hinge of your jaw prickle. It slides along your tongue with a deliberateness that is almost shy, tasting you in a way that feels less like a kiss and more like a question, and then (gently, gently) it coils.
Once around yours. A slow, sinuous wrap, delicate, barely any pressure. The ridged texture drags against your taste buds in a rolling wave that lights up nerve endings you didn't know a mouth had.
Your breath stutters. Heat drops through you like a stone into dark water, pooling low and heavy in your belly. Heat tightens behind your navel, and your fingers curl hard in his hair and you hear yourself make a sound, a small wrecked thing, muffled between your mouths.
BB goes rigid against you.
Then the rumble comes againโdeeper, shattered open with raw and desperate and relieved undertoneโand the coil tightens, just barely. You feel the tip of it trace the roof of your mouth in a slow electric drag and your hips roll forward into his without your permission, your whole body clenching.
He shudders. Full-body. Not a human shudder. Too fluid, too thorough, like he's settling into his own skin for the first time.
BB's hand on your hip tightens to the edge of bruising and the wall behind you pulses warm, buzzing of the lights shifting pitch. They drop into something almost harmonic, almost musical, and you realise distantly that the hallway around you is responding to him. To this, to whatever is flooding through whatever he uses for a nervous system right now.
BB pulls back just far enough to breathe against your mouth (he doesn't need to, you know he doesn't need oxygen, he's overwhelmed, he'sโ).
His lips are wet from you, glistening in the warm light. His eyes are searching your face with a frantic, ravenous attention that has nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the way a creature that has taught itself love, painstakingly, from the outside in, needs to checkโneeds to knowโ
You press your forehead to his, cupping one side of his face.
"Again," you whisper, breathless.
The sound he makes isn't a word in any language. But you feel it everywhere.
every year around late may, without fail, this post starts getting notes again . and my little wet raw chicken breast of a brain gets puzzled. because i forget that summer is , in fact. a yearly event
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