๐ cw: modern setting, very mild non specified age gap, improper work relationship, little breeding kink, slight voyeurism .แ
across the open plan office, someone was pounding on their keyboard with enough force to splinter the plastic and scatter the letters across the floor. you slumped into your own seat, teeth lazily nibbling on the pen held between your lips, while your computer screen glowed with an annoying brightness, displaying the tedious spreadsheet columns you had been redacting for far too long.
the desk to your right had been vacant for months, ever since the day you claimed and absorbed that territory as your own. now, however, a sweet, thoroughly innocent girl was gazing at you with what could only be described as curious, puppy dog eyes. you shifted your hips in your seat, a movement that caused your tight skirt to ride up your pantyhose clad thighs, shortening the already preciously tiny hemline to a dangerous degree.
pulling the pen from your mouth, you arched a single eyebrow in a look that might have read as annoyance, though your lips curled into a gentle, welcoming smile. โdo you need some help?โ you hummed, almost amused. perhaps this new addition to the team, lyanne, if you remembered her name right, had simply run into a wall on her first day and needed someone's guidance.
she jumped in her seat, clearly flustered and ruffling her feathers as her gaze darted away before snapping back, long eyelashes fluttering in pure panic. โn-no. . i justโโ she tripped over her tongue, chewing on her lower lip with little teeth. you watched her closely, relishing her flustered reaction just a bit more than you probably should have.
finally, she let out a soft sigh, her slim shoulders sagging, wavy bangs falling over her eyes as she peeked at you through the dark strands. her lips puckered into a pout as she muttered a phrase too fast and muffled to hear, but you caught the meaning regardless. โare. . are you and manager baelor together. . ?โ it was said in such a squeaky, hesitant whisper that you had to suppress a small laugh.
beneath the desk, you stretched your legs out, high heels already kicked off and discarded on the floor, scandalous behavior for the office, to say the least. tipping your head up with an actor's dramatic flair, you tapped a finger against your chin, humming thoughtfully before dropping the truth with total simplicity โheโs a married man, darling. has children, tooโ
lyanneโs eyes blew comically wide, even larger than before. a furious scarlet rushed into her cheeks, turning brighter and brighter until she looked entirely overheated, before she suddenly whirled her chair back to her own desk. smiling, you chose not to press her with your own curiosity, why she had thought so, or why she had cared, mercifully content to let her off the hook for today.
baelor, in fact, was not married at all, and the notion of a family had never truly been in his plans, at least, not recently. he was a man consumed by his responsibilities. the targaryen name carried a weight they had to protect, a strict duty that made maekar scowl every time you peeked into the suite with a stack of documents, almost walking straight into his rigid, moody frame. none of that, however, kept your manager from chasing after you.
his calloused fingertips would graze along your skirt hem, the numerous rings covering his digits feeling icy cold through your thin pantyhose, leaving the skin pebbling with goosebumps. he never hesitated, not even looking once over his shoulder as he cornered you against the small breakroom counter, broad palms cupping your plush ass and kneading into pert globes until you shoved at his brawny chest with a sharp hiss โanyone could walk in!โ
he was only too glad to have a sweet thing like you around, always dressed so tantalizingly pretty, completing all your tasks on time, and serving them to him on a platter. you didn't fight him when he dragged you onto his bulky lap, muscular thighs rippling beneath your weight. his silver flecked beard tingled against your skin as he nuzzled your clavicle, chapped lips leaving greedy, burning kisses along your neck. so very demanding and hungry for your attention, humming in absolute delight as he felt your nimble fingers tangle in the collar of his unbuttoned blouse.
no one commented when you disappeared into his private cabinet for hours on end, even twice in a single day. after all, what could the two of you possibly have to talk about for so long? they had no idea that he kept you working right there, seated on his growing bulge, his chin hooked comfortably over your shoulder while his mismatched eyes blinked with pure, wicked contentment.
it was no secret that baelor was no longer young, past his prime, yet he never attempted to hide his age or look back with regret. deep lines lingered on his forehead even when his brow was uncrossed, and the laugh lines around his mouth were carved so deeply they suggested a youth spent grinning far too much. he had always preferred tranquility to constant noise, which left him perfectly content in his position as manager rather than seeking the role of ceo, a mantle that belonged to his dear brother.
maekar had argued fiercely that baelor could, and should, take the primary hold of the company, but baelor had simply cuffed his shoulder with a musing smile, stating that maekar would make a far better, stricter leader. as long as the company flourished, there existed a beautiful idyll, one that allowed baelor to laze back in his leather armchair, leisurely reviewing the daily documents he allowed to pile high on his mahogany desk.
however, age hadn't dulled his eye for beauty. when maekar first introduced you as a promising new addition to the office, despite your tender years, the smile that split baelor's thin lips was deeply intrigued, to say the least. he wasn't some old degenerate, or so he reassured himself whenever he pressed you into yet another quiet corner.
unable to restrain himself, he would seal his lips against your jawbone, large hands braced beside your head to shield you from view should anyone pass by the frosted glass, purring a raspy whisper against your skin โlooking entirely too pretty today, darling. i couldn't resistโ with the toothy grin suggesting more than that.
you had grown accustomed to men, or rather, boys, who preferred to use women like pitstops, rolling onto their sides the moment they emptied a feeble load into your warm cunt. they would leave your skin to cool in a slick of salty sweat, your clit still throbbing, and your limbs too achy to stand and crawl to the bathroom.
in time, you learned to tolerate it, then to reject it entirely, ruthlessly cutting things short mid act if your own satisfaction wasn't guaranteed. still, a proper relationship eluded you, nothing lasted, and no man was worth dreaming of a wedding with, let alone wishing for children. especially at your age, when you had so much more to achieve, the kitchen and dirty socks could wait.
given his years and his own disinterest in marriage or family, you fully expected baelor to write you off as a casual, high end distraction. perhaps offering a polite word of thank you for the best head he had ever received, an orgasm so intense it had left him trembling. knees weak and his palms damp as they cradled your skull, fighting the urge to fuck into your tight throat, foggy glasses crooked low on his nose.
yet, the very next day, he was already seeking you out. the crow's feet around his eyes crinkled with genuine affection as he guided you into his private cabinet with a warm palm at your spine. two fresh coffees from the cafรฉ down the street were steaming on the table alongside a box of delicate pastries.
in an almost boyish attempt to appear casual, he leaned down, deep voice rumbling terribly softly against your nape โwas just passing by, and. . well, thought you might like someโ
his breath was searing and humid against your throat, carrying the rich, distinct scent of tobacco, spicy cologne, and the walnuts he preferred to snack on while working. a sudden shudder rippled down your spine as his teeth skimmed your tender skin, your blouse collar turned up just high enough to conceal the fresh bruise he had sucked into your flesh. โshe asked about me?โ baelor murmured with quiet curiosity.
flashing a sharp, canine baring grin against your tender skin when gurgled, helpless moan escaped your lips, muffled straight into the solid breadth of his shoulder, hips bucking as his calloused fingers crook into your sopping hole. โshe asked if we're. . mmnhโdatingโ you whimpered, breath catching as you pressed your wet, parted lips right into his pristine charcoal blouse. the dark fabric soaked up the damp heat of your mouth effortlessly, not that he would ever complain.
he let out a low grunt, mouthing a burning patch to your sternum before nuzzling lower against the plush curve, the underwire pushing your breasts up, the soft lace contrasting pleasantly with the rough scruff of his bearded jaw. โyeah? and what did you say, love?โ his next question was one you could barely find the words to answer, rasped directly against your skin as his tongue laved a wet, agonizingly slow line all the way up to your collarbone.
his digits pump in and out, pussy drooling down his twisting wrist in a tacky, glittery sheen, gummy walls rippling, biting down on your pillowy lower lip, hips grinding down and grazing across his bulging crotch, trousers tented across rigid length. โthat you're married, have kids!โ you managed to choke out, stifling the broken moan that escaped your lips.
it was already late enough that the office was entirely vacant, the lights off, and not a single soul should have been lingering outside his private cabinet. baelor let out a low, amused chuckle at your answer. he dipped his head, his crooked nose, broken a couple of times during reckless youth, nuzzling into the sensitive crook beneath your jaw, scissoring his fingers deeper into your plushy cunt, feeling how the glossy slick rushes out.
โshould make you pregnant then, no? live to the expectationโ his words didn't register right away, spoken in a low, tantalizing voice that easily drifted past your distracted senses, to the way your pussy flutters, walls tightening to keep his digits crammed deep, poking at your sweet spot. by the time the meaning had finally hit you, he had already unbuttoned your blouse all the way down, thankfully spared from being ripped, unlike your pantyhose, split wide at your cunt and dampened with your juices.
his free hand palmed your bra, kneading your sensitive breast with the heavy patience of a big cat, before he dragged the lace all the way down. your breasts sprang free beneath his touch, bared completely as a feast for his hungry mouth, and you gasp around a small moan, then, the end strangled as your pussy clamps down. words struck you right in your churning stomach, the sheer weight of the image proving entirely too much to process.
before you could even gasp, he spun you around roughly, forcing your nipple pebbling breasts to flatten against the cold, polished surface of his desk. your back bent into a steep, agonizingly beautiful arch that left your ass swelled high into the air. cunt gaping and unprotected, your hole felt suddenly, devastatingly empty without warning, forcing a ragged, breathless sob from your throat as you whimpered for him โbaelor. . โ pleaseโ
he merely let out a low, melodious hum. your mind was spinning far too much for you to even turn your head and glare at him over your shoulder, pulse thumping heavily in your ears. instead, you could only listen to the sharp clink of his belt buckle and the slow drag of his zipper, followed by the quiet hiss of breath through clenched teeth.
hips wriggling when you feel his precum sticky, fat cockhead prodding at puffy folds, dragging through and watching with hooded eyelids how your own slick stretches from your cunt in thin strings. ass rocking back instinctively against him, his calloused palm coming down, swallowing the plump curve of your bottom completely. blunt nails digging firmly into your soft flesh as he cooed a low, steadying whisper into the quiet โeasy, love. patienceโ
keeping quiet proved utterly impossible, mouth falling slack, every breathless sound punched out your lungs the moment he rammed into you, broad hips snapping forward in a relentless rhythm. your ass pressed flush against his taut thighs as you arched your spine even further, throwing your hips high and inviting in the dim light. his roughened thumb found your clit, pinching and stimulating it in perfect time with each deep movement, velvet heat swallowing him whole until he let's out a haggard groan.
his other hand cradled your jaw, caressing down the line of your cheekbone as he nuzzles your face. you let your own hand twist around to blindly burrow into his short, neatly cropped hair, fingers tangling in the graying strands that curled slightly at the tips. he found your lips in a clash of clumsy, desperate hunger, biting down hard against the soft flesh until it swelled, on the very verge of bleeding. raw, predatory hunger seemed to chew beneath his tanned skin.
in the corner, the amber lamp glimmered low, bathing the entire room in an intimate orange glow that highlighted the dark salt and pepper strands of his beard. your sodden panties peeking shyly from the pocket of his trousers, a souvenir left for him to savor later.
panting heavily against the seam of your mouth, he delved deeper into your sweet mouth. pupils blown wide, swallowing his irises until they were nothing but thin rings, making his brown eye appear even darker, cloudier, and utterly fuzzed with desire. slick cunt hugging around the thick of him, every rock of hips delightful, bullying his gorged cock as far as it can go, making your toes curl.
gooey walls quivering, spilling rivulets, and he peels from your spine reluctant to watch how your hole swallows him, plump and mouthwatering, drizzling down his girth until his pubic hair had gone matted. โsuch a good girl, fuckโโ baelor cursed, a sharp whine caught behind his grinding teeth. his calloused thumb sped up against your twitching clit, and the sheer intensity of it reduced you to a breathless mess, blindly babbling his name into the gloom.
one of your hands remained curved desperately over the edge of the desk, fingernails scrabbling against the polished surface for purchase. your body had slumped completely loose, merely gliding up and down as his deep thrusts ceased, giving way to shallow, frantic humps. you could barely withstand the pleasure, lower belly feeling so heavy and full you feared you might burst and soak him down to his hairy thighs. feeling how he twitches within your pulsing walls, on the very verge of pumping you nice and full.
neither of you heard the clatter of heels behind the closed door, passing by at first, only to cut short upon hearing the ringing moans leaking from the room, followed by a gasp hidden behind a trembling palm. poor, sweet lyanne. having stayed behind to finish some after hours work, she had just witnessed, though not directly, something she was never meant to encounter.
she almost tripped over her own feet as she rushed away, her bag clutched tightly to her stuttering chest. running blindly with her cheeks burning an almost sickly bright crimson, she slammed into someone so hard she was thrown a step back, nearly crashing to the floor before a heavy hand caught her and anchored her to her feet.
maekar towered over her, a single white eyebrow arched in an unprompted question, his face twisted more into a grimace of distaste than concern. lyanneโs eyes flitted all over the place, from the briefcase clutched in his other hand, to the firm, solid way his fingers knuckled against her waist to steady her. and finally to the terrifying possibility that he might walk into the office and stumble upon the exact same scene she had just fled.
without thinking twice, though one should always think twice around a man like maekar, she grasped his stout bicep, tugged, and desperately dragged him away. surprisingly, he let her guide him, completely oblivious to the way you were currently dripping his brotherโs pearlescent seed onto the office carpet.
Imagine Clark Kent planning to propose to reader, but he gets so flustered and nervous that when he kneels, all he can muster is a desperate, breathy, โPlease.โ Saw this idea from a woman sharing her proposal story on twitter!! ๐ซฆ๐ซฆ๐คค๐คค
The star that leads to you
Pairing: corenswet!clark kent x fem!reader
โก Main Index | โก Archive for Earth-181938
a/n: The plan was for this to be 5k words long TOPS but i'm a bottom so...
Classification: (Suggestive) Fluff | Moderate workplace PDA, suggestive comments and explicit/implied sex scenes w/superpowered intimacy (destruction of the bed), normal relationship anxiety and overthinking, sci-fi talk and kryptonite exposure, use of superpowers in daily life.
Word count: 10,3k
Divider by me ;)
The days leading up to any leave or holiday were always the most chaotic. In journalism, there was no such thing as getting ahead. No matter how many drafts you filed, how many interviews you wrapped up or how many loose ends you tied off, the work simply piled up somewhere else, waiting for your attention.
You made your way through the bullpen with Jimmy trailing closely behind. For the past few days, a persistent unease had settled beneath your skin. Everyone seemed to need something from you before you left, another question, task or last-minute request, and on top of that, you couldn't shake the feeling of being watched.ย
Eyes appeared to follow you wherever you went.
Right now, though, the only thing demanding your attention was Jimmy's steadily rising panic.
"IโฆI can't do that." He shook his head again, likely for the hundredth time that morning.
"Jimmy, it's just my email." You stopped at the coffee station, reaching for your mug and filling it. "All I'm asking is that you log in once a day, check if anything's worth investigating and follow up if necessary." You stirred your coffee before lifting your eyes to him. "You won't have much to doโฆLois will be helping too."
"What do I do if he contacts you?" Jimmy asked quietly, watching your hands move with nervous intensity.
"What if who contacts me?" you asked, only sparing him a brief glance.
"You know." He shrugged. "Superman."
A laugh escaped you as you picked up your mug and started back toward your desk, taking a sip as you walked. "You think Big Blue has an email address?"
"Iโฆ" Jimmy frowned as he tried to explain himself. "Well, I believe he's a modern man."
You snorted into your coffee.
"Who knows," he continued. "Maybe he'll want to meet up. Toโฆtalk."
You stopped beside your desk and turned to face him fully, narrowing your eyes. "About what?"
"I don't know." Jimmy lifted both hands. "Whatever it is you two usually talk about."
"Sure, Jimmy. Maybe he'll need help setting up an email account." You nodded thoughtfully. "Let's just hope nothing too big happens while I'm gone so I can enjoy some uninterrupted rest."ย
As you spoke, your gaze drifted across the bullpen and landed on Clark.
Your eyes narrowed immediately at his staring but the moment your eyes met, he jerked into motion. His attention snapped downward as he began fumbling with the papers on his desk, shuffling folders that clearly didn't need sorting and reaching for things that weren't there.
You had only held his gaze for all of two seconds before he folded completely under it, which was suspicious. Your attention lingered on him even as Jimmy continued talking.
"Alright, but just in case, tell him I'm perfectly fine with meeting in dark alleys during pouring rain and all that." Jimmy nodded once, looking entirely too eager for the possibility.
"He's more of a rooftop kind of guy, but I'll pass the message along." The reply came automatically, your focus already elsewhere. โThanks Jimmy.โ
Your gaze dropped to your own desk as Jimmy finally wandered off. Taking your seat, you looked over the organized chaos spread across the surface and got to work clearing away the last of it, though most of the clutter simply disappeared into drawers and folders. You wanted to return to a clean workspace, not a disaster waiting for you after a week away.
Your final drafts had already been submitted and every article due before your leave had been filed and approved. There were still two hours until lunch and for the first time in days, there was nothing immediately demanding your attention.
You intended for the following week to be dedicated entirely to rest. Well, rest and unpacking the mountain of moving boxes currently occupying Clark's apartment, which was now yours too.
The thought alone made you look up.
Clark now sat perfectly still at his desk, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the bullpen. His head was tilted slightly, his attention caught by something none of the rest of you could hear. If there was one thing you'd learned about him, it was that there usually was something, a distant cry for help, an emergency unfolding miles away or a hundred voices filtering through the world at once.
You watched him for a moment until he rose from his chair, the movement quick and purposeful. He reached for his messenger bag, slinging the strap over his shoulder as he stepped around his desk, his eyes finding yours immediately.
The look was familiar, it was the same one he always gave you right before disappearing. You pushed yourself to your feet and followed after him, weaving through the bullpen until the two of you reached one of the quieter hallways.
"How bad is it?" you asked worriedly.
The question and tone had nothing to do with your upcoming week off. You were never worried about canceled plans, you were worried about Metropolis. If Superman was needed in the middle of a workday, something somewhere had gone terribly wrong.
Clark suddenly turned and you barely had time to react.
The momentum of your hurried pace carried you directly into his chest and as always, the impact barely moved him. Before you could stumble back, his arms were already wrapping around your waist, pulling you closer as he dipped his head and pressed his lips to yours.
It caught you completely off guard. You knew kissing with your eyes open wasn't particularly romantic but you couldn't help the way they widened in surprise. For a moment, all you could do was stare at him as you failed to kiss him back.
Only when he pulled away did you finally speak. "That bad?" you asked, eyes searching his face frantically.
Clark blinked as his brows furrowed. "What do you mean?"
"You have to go to your other thing, right?" You gestured vaguely. "I know you heard something."
The confusion on his face matched your own. Still, his arms remained around you.
"I did." He forced himself to pause and collect his thoughts because keeping things from you had never gotten easier. "It isn't bad, sweetheart. I just need to go check it out."
At the same moment, footsteps echoed from farther down the hallway, so he reluctantly released you. Neither of you was particularly interested in becoming a more serious conversation for Human Resources yet.ย
You cleared your throat as Clark adjusted the strap of his bag and the silence stretched until the employee rounded the corner and disappeared again.
"Will you be long?"ย
"I'm not sure." He shook his head softly.
You nodded. "Be safeโฆI'll cover for you."ย
Your hand came up to pat his chest before you stepped back. Already turning toward the bullpen, you glanced down at your watch, mentally calculating how many hours "checking something out" usually translated into but a few steps later, another thought occurred to you.ย
"Ohโฆ anything special I should make for diโ" You turned to face him just as a rush of wind swept through the hallway. Your words died instantly and the corridor stood empty, Clark now gone. You sighed. "Takeout it is."ย
Muttering to yourself, you turned and headed back toward the bullpen.
Lately, Clark had been acting strange, not in the usual "I'm the last son of a dead planet" kind of way. This was different, he was distracted, restless and keeping himself busier than usual. At first, you'd assumed it had something to do with the upcoming week off. Maybe he felt guilty about stepping away from work for that long and the idea of slowing down made him uneasy, but you'd made it clear more than once that the vacation wasn't meant to be a break from who he really was.
You would never ask that of him. Clark Kent could take a week off but Superman never truly could, which only made his recent behavior feel all the more unusual.
You supposed your concern must have been written all over your face.
"Where is he?" Lois stopped in front of Clark's desk, a thick folder tucked beneath her arm.
The question snapped your attention away from his absence. Straightening your shoulders, you forced your expression into something more neutral before walking over.
"His parents needed him at the farm." You motioned vaguely toward the elevators.
Lois looked unconvinced. "He was supposed to send Perry a final draft for tomorrow's print edition."
"Is that it?" You pointed toward the folder she held. She barely lifted it before you plucked it from her grasp and pivoted back toward your desk. "I'll do it."
You dropped into your chair and opened the file immediately.
"It isn't exactly impartial." Lois crossed her arms.
"It never will be, Lois." You flipped through the first few pages of his notes. "We're about to move in together and I doubt he'd react particularly well to me firing him when I become Editor-in-Chief."
Your grin finally earned a small laugh from her.
"Besides," you continued, glancing back down at the paperwork, "I need something to do, otherwise today is going to feel even longer than it already does."
The humor faded from her face. "Is something wrong?" Her voice lowered enough that the question felt genuine rather than curious.
You opened your mouth, then stopped. For a moment, you simply stared down at the pages in front of you. "I don't know. I'm usually really good at reading him." Your fingers paused against the pages. "But I just can't do it."
"You can't?" The surprise in her voice was immediate as she settled herself on the corner of your desk. "You think it's about the two of you moving in together?" she asked. "If it is, don't. You've been together for so longโฆmost people would've expected you to move in together the second you both got to Metropolis."
A soft laugh escaped you. "No. No, that's not itโฆI mean, I hope not." You leaned back in your chair. "It's all going well." The words came easily because they were true. "As much as I love him, moving in with my first ever boyfriend straight out of college would've been a terrible idea."
Your smile softened. "We learned how to live separately firstโฆhow to have our own lives. I think that was the right decision and I know he does too."
Lois nodded. "So what's the problem?"
You hesitated, then cleared your throat and rolled your chair a little closer, lowering your voice despite the noise of the bullpen around you. "Have you ever wanted something so badly that you're afraid to call it what it is?"
Her brows knitted together. "Is that supposed to be a riddle?"
You laughed despite yourself. "No." Your gaze drifted away, settling somewhere beyond the bullpen. "There's something I want this whole situation to be..." The words felt strangely fragile once spoken aloud, like giving them a voice somehow made them more real. "What if I start asking the questions I want to ask and find out it isn't?" Your fingers toyed absently with the edge of the folder. "Then I'd be mad at him for not wanting to move at the pace I want to move at."
Lois watched you carefully and for once, she didn't rush to answer. "This isn't a race."
A small smile tugged at your mouth before quickly fading. "If it were, he'd winโฆI just wish I knew what we're running toward now." Your voice dropped quieter. "And if he still wants to get there with meโฆprecisely."
You let out a long breath, hoping it would carry away some of the anxiety that had been nesting in your chest for weeks. The truth was, you had never once believed Clark would leave you, that fear had never existed.
You knew how he looked at you when he thought you weren't paying attention, you knew the certainty behind every promise he made, every plan he included you in and every future conversation that naturally assumed you'd be standing beside him.
The fear wasn't losing him, it was timing and getting it wrong.
Had moving in together been too soon? Was he having second thoughts now that it was actually happening? Maybe he simply wasn't ready to leave behind living alone, he needed more time before taking another step forward and the answer was that simpleโฆOr maybe you were working yourself into knots over something that had never crossed his mind at all.
"You're one hell of a reporter, Y/n." A smile tugged at the corner of Lois's mouth. "I've never known you to hesitate when it comes to asking questions."
She pushed herself off the desk and headed back toward her own.ย
The conversation ended there but her words lingered as your eyes wandered across the bullpen again and they landed, inevitably, on Clark's empty desk.ย
His abandoned coffee cup still sat beside his keyboard and a stack of notes remained exactly where he'd left them. Everything still looked normal, so why didn't it feel that way?
You couldn't keep living with the uncertainty and maybe it was time to stop dancing around the questions that had been circling your mind for months, but as much as you wanted answers, you'd never been someone who forced them out of Clark, never someone who cornered him into confessions he wasn't ready to make.
Your gaze lingered on the empty desk for another moment before moving to the clock. Only five more hours and you'd finally be out of this place.
Clark flew to the Fortress of Solitude at a speed he'd never thought he could reach, responding to a signal from the Superman robots. He absolutely hated hiding things from you, no matter how good the reason but this was taking longer than planned. It didn't just involve the usual planning and sourcing, this was as close to science as he'd ever get.
The cold arctic air caressed his skin as he sped up, the crystalline structure growing in the distance as it revealed itself to him.
His feet eventually sank into the snow as the doors parted before him. The Fortress received him the way it always did, silently, the crystals catching his footsteps and scattering them into nothing. Four was already standing at the central console, two of the other robots positioned at the secondary array flanking what Clark recognized as the solar concentrator, reconfigured into something smaller and more precise than he'd last seen it.
"Sir, you're here." Gary, the fourth Superman robot, turned before Clark had fully cleared the entrance.
"I got your signal," Clark told him as he moved to the center of the main room.
"I calculated twenty minutes before your arrival." Four's optical sensors held on him a moment.
Clark didn't answer. He crossed closer to the console, eyes already moving over the readings. "Tell me."
Gary turned back to the array. "The theory is sound. Whether the application holds is a separate question." He indicated the containment chamber at the center of the concentrator, it was small, built for a single stone. "The isotope that produces the radiation is not inert by nature, it requires destabilization. Conventional neutralization attempts have failed historically because they addressed the emission rather than the source."
Clarkโs brows furrowed. "You went after the isotope directly."
"We modeled different broad approaches over the last year. Sixteen produced either incomplete neutralization or structural destruction of the sample." Gary paused. "The seventeenth is this. Concentrated solar saturation at a specific frequency, not broad spectrum, which scatters. The isotope absorbs until it cannot sustain the radioactive chain. It burns out rather than being suppressed."
He looked at the chamber. "And the stone?"
"Structurally intact in our simulations. The color will change, the green is a function of the active radiation. Once the isotope is spent, the stone retains its crystalline structure but loses the glow. It will read as paleโฆresidual hue only."
Clark was quiet for a moment. "You said it would only work on a very small piece."
"Correct. The solar saturation has to penetrate the sample completely and evenly. A larger stone creates differential exposure, the exterior burns out and the interior remains active. At the scale you requireโ" Gary moved to the secondary console and brought up the dimensional rendering, a stone large enough to yield a single, flawless diamond.ย โโfull penetration is achievable. We have run the model four hundred and twelve times over the last hour."
"And it holds?"
"In simulation. Yes." Another beat. "We will not know with certainty until we attempt it on an actual sample."
Clark exhaled slowly, he'd known that was coming.
"You cannot be present for the extraction phase," Gary continued, without inflection, as if this were simply logistical. "Or the initial handling. Your proximity to an active sample at that size would still produce symptomatic response. We will handle and chamber the stone. You will monitor from the secondary console at a distance of approximately fifteen feet. Once it is inside the concentrator and sealed, the chamber will contain the emission. You can approach then."
"And the concentratorโ" Clark glanced at the machine. "Same as the healing protocol?"
"Modified from it. The frequency is different as healing requires broad cellular stimulation. This requires narrow isotopic targeting but the core mechanism is the same." Gary looked at him directly. "It should not harm you. The chamber is sealed, the emission goes inward, not out...but again, itโs a hypothetical."
Clark nodded once. He stood there a moment, looking at the small containment chamber and the re-rigged concentrator, itโd been a year of work sitting quiet and precise on a console in the Arctic.
"You've been thorough," he said finally.
"You were specific about what it needed to mean, sir." Gary nodded, as Clark turned to look at him. "When you told me what the ring was for," He continued. "I did not think imprecision was appropriate."
"And the piece I chose?" Clark asked, looking around for it.
One of the other Superman robots pushed a closed lead box onto the console. "Still untouched, sir." Twelve nodded. "As are the other uncut stones, as you requested."
"The band?" Clark asked as One approached, opening a chamber on his own structure and revealing it.
Clark reached for it and held it up to the light between his fingers. He still remembered waiting for you to fall asleep so he could measure your ring finger, holding his breath the entire time, terrified you might wake and catch him in the act. The memory made warmth settle in his chest.
"It's perfect," he said quietly.
"It must be, sir. You've been working on it for almost a year," Gary spoke.
"And it's finally done."
Gary lifted a cautionary finger. "Remember there are still hypotheticals, sir. We must test the machine."
Clark shook his head. "It's going to work and when it does, I want her here for it." He turned to look around the Fortress, taking in the crystalline walls, the hum of advanced technology and the sanctity of the space. "You know the plan." His gaze swept across the main chamber. "I want this place spotless and the sunglasses ready." He drew a breath, letting the weight of the moment settle over him. "The day has comeโฆI canโt wait any longer." He turned back to the robots. "Thank you, all of you."
"No need to thank us, sir, as we will not appreciate it. We have no consciousness, we are merely automatons here to serve," Gary reminded him.
Clark simply pressed his mouth into a thin line, long accustomed to their peculiar bluntness while some of the Superman robots scurried away, already beginning to clean. Gary, however, lingered.
"Shall we prepare for the baby?"
Clark's head snapped toward him, eyes slightly widened. "What baby?"
"My knowledge indicates it is a natural succession of events, sir."
He smiled despite himself, shaking his head. "Let's prepare for a ceremony firstโฆThat's if she says yes."
"She will," Twelve said brightly in passing, already carrying a stack of crystalline components toward the secondary console.
"Shall we rehearse the speech?" Gary pressed. "We have yet to hear it."
"No can do, Gary." Clark's voice was gentle but final. "And you won't...Itโll be for her ears only."
He stuck around long after, helping clean and organize with no real need other than the comfort of keeping his hands busy. He had thought about the day plenty, in the small hours of the morning when sleep wouldn't come, during long flights over empty ocean and in the moments just after saving the world when everything went quiet again. He had imagined it a hundred different ways, in a hundred different places and it had to be perfect.
You got home late, stopped at the door as you still couldn't quite figure out how the new lock worked. After a moment of fumbling that felt much longer than it should have, you finally managed to push inside, carrying takeout bags and immediately running into scattered moving boxes in the dark.
"Fuck," you muttered under your breath as you reached for a light switch and turned it on. "Clark?" You called into the silence of the apartment, leaving the bags on the kitchen counter.ย
You then walked toward the bedroom, weaving around moving boxes you'd take care of soon, phone already in your hand as you dialed his number.
You pressed call, setting the phone on the bed as you began to undress.
Back at the Fortressโฆ
"Superman, we have intercepted a call from your human lover."
Clark chuckled, shaking his head as he moved gear out of the main room. "There's no other kind, Gary. It's just 'lover.' Please, patch it through."
There was a soft crackle and then, "Clark?โ Your voice slipped through the sound systems, warm and familiar and Clark felt the anxiety in his chest ease at the sound of it.
"Hi, sweetheart. Everything okay?"ย
"Uh, yeah. Where are you? I'm at yourโ" A pause, then a quiet correction. "Our place...Any idea when you'll be back? It's starting to get late."
Clark realized then that he'd lost track of time completely. He began heading toward the exit, your voice trailing after him as you launched into what was clearly the beginning of a longer rant. The sound of you faded from the Fortress's speakers and transferred directly into his ears as he lifted off, flying fast in the direction of your voice.
He heard you kicking off your shoes and the soft thump of your pants hitting the floor.
"I'm not saying I'm worried and I don't expect you to always be back at a certain timeโฆThat's just not reasonable. I mean, I knew what I was getting into before we ever started datingโ" Then came the sound of the closet door sliding open as you were surely, definitely, picking a shirt of his to sleep in. "Not that it's complicated or anything. I feel like that word has never really applied to us. I mean, I hope not. You've never been complicated to me, even after you told me who you really were."
He heard the rustle of fabric as you peeled off your shirt and the soft sound of your bra hitting the floor. Clark flew even faster.
"I remember telling you Kal was a pretty good name," you said and he could hear the smile in your voice. You cleared your throat, "I also remember that one time I moaned it while we wereโ"
A faint breeze drifted through the room, making you turn to the window to check if it was open. You suddenly screamed, shirt clutched to cover your naked chest as your heart hammered so loud he could count every individual beat.
Clark unexpectedly stood there unmoving and smiling unapologetically, hair slightly messy from the flight. "Having sex?" He continued for you, grin widening. "I also remember."ย
You exhaled a sharp breath, rapidly pulling his shirt over your head, feeling his eyes on you, "I get carried away."
He shrugged, still grinning. "It's happened more than once."
Your eyes narrowed at him, already desperate to change the subject. "Mind making a little more noise next time? I intend to live long."
He stepped toward you, wrapping both arms around you and pulling you to his chest. "You make enough noise for the both of us, don't you think?"
"Ha. Funny." You said dryly because it was true. Once close to him, you felt his chest while observing his face as you always did, checking for injuries. He looked untouched, which was always ideal, butโฆ "You're really cold."
He smiled and something changed in his expression. "Do you know where you packed the winter clothes?"
You blinked, eyes going to the moving boxes and suitcases scattered across the bedroom, your mind already cataloging the rest of the clutter throughout the apartment. "I'm not sure. Why?"
Clark let go of you, eyes scanning through the boxes as he activated his x-ray vision.
"It's about to be summer, SmallvilleโฆAnd I don't think you've ever needed them."
He walked out of the bedroom, looking into boxes as you trailed behind him, accidentally stepping on the long cape pooled at his feet.
"Oops, sorry," you muttered as you coughed yourself with a gentle hold on his shoulders.
"You're going to need them."
"Need what? Apologies?" you asked, lifting a brow.
"Winter clothes," he specified with a breathy chuckle, stopping by a box that read โKitchenโ in your handwriting.
"In June?" You watched as he opened the box anyway. "That says โKitchenโ, Clark."
He fumbled for a second as he lifted it from a pile and put it on the ground, then he carefully opened it and pulled out your winter coat by the hood.
"That's why it was so light," you said under your breath.
"We're taking a trip tomorrow."
Your eyes widened slightly as you searched his face and found no humor there. "Did you use that little trick to find my passport and book the trip?"
"Never needed a passport to fly Clark Kent Airlines." He grinned.
"Never needed a coat to sit on a plane." You shrugged with a gentle smile. "Where are we going?"
Clark's smile faltered. His eyes searched the room, looking for anything to change the subject and landed on the takeout bags still sitting on the kitchen counter. "We should eat dinner before it gets too cold," he said, already reaching into the box and pulling out a scarf, hat and gloves. "You'll need your snow boots too." He set everything on the couch, almost distractedly and walked right past you into the bedroom, already peeling off his suit.
Your eyes followed him, narrowing at the deflection. "Good thing we have a microwave." You noted as you followed after him. "You've been acting weird lately."
"Weird?" He echoed with a light, forced chuckle. "There's nothing weird about meโฆBesides the obvious." He paused, pulling his shirt over his head. "Which you like telling me you love." There was another pause, longer this time. "You still do, right?"
"You mean the part of you that likes to take me along while soaring through the sky?" You questioned hypothetically, already nodding to yourself. "Yeah."
"That's goodโฆThatโs really good." He reassured himself more than you as he changed into a plain shirt and plaid pajama pants. "That you still do."
"I don't like how you keep saying 'still,'" you pointed out quietly, looking at him as if you could read his mindโฆand you probably could, if you werenโt suddenly scared of what you might find.
He chuckled breathily, stepping toward you and placing both hands on your arms, caressing them gently. "You're making me really nervous right now."
You narrowed your eyes at him again. "I weirdly think you're doing that to yourself." You paused, letting the words settle. "I love you, ClarkโฆNo amount of weirdness is going to change that."
His hands went to your face, cupping your cheeks slowly, thumbs brushing over your skin with so much love in his eyes that it made your chest ache. Tomorrow had to be perfect..because you were.
"I'll fly slowly," he murmured, in an attempt to reassure you.
"No, you won'tโฆand thatโs fine," You laughed softly, poking his stomach playfully. "Just make sure you hold me tight."
He pulled you closer, pressing a kiss to your forehead that lingered long enough to make your eyes flutter shut. "I love you so much," he confessed against your skin. "I don't know how to hold you any other way."
Moments like that had a way of dissolving whatever fear or doubt had quietly accumulated and that night was no different. By the time you had dinner and you'd both found your way to sleep, there was nothing left to worry about.
The next morning was perfect. Genuinely and unqualifiedly perfect, the kind that felt almost unfair in how completely it arrived. No alarm pulled you out of it, no distant sound of something collapsing somewhere that would take him away before you'd finished waking up, just sunlight coming in at an angle through the curtains and Clark, who woke up like he had nowhere else to be and no intention of pretending otherwise.ย
He pressed kisses into your skin slowly and without urgency and the morning dissolved the way good mornings do, in warmth, weight and the breathlessness of someone who loves you, knows how to show itโฆand how to make you feel it. You lost track of time entirely and you didn't try to find it.
At some point he slipped away. You hadn't noticed the exact moment, sometime in the narrow window between you getting up and the shower warming, enough time for him to go somewhere and come back, which for Clark could mean almost anywhere. When you stepped out of the bathroom, towel around your chest, a bouquet was sitting on the kitchen counter and beside it, breakfast, already plated and still warm.
You ate together at the counter, knees touching, talking through where the art should go and whether the bookshelf fit better against the east wall or broken up between two rooms.ย
It wasn't much later that he started mentioning getting out for the day.
You didn't question it. You started getting everything he'd laid on the couch the night before, working through the layers methodically while he stood somewhere behind you watching you with an expression you couldn't fully read.
"I think you should add another scarf," he suggested. "Just in case."
You looked at yourself in the mirror, at the coat, hat, gloves, boots and the scarf that already looped twice around your neckโฆ and it was June. "Clark." You turned to look at him with a gentle, reassuring smile. "This is enoughโฆYou'd think we were going to the Arctic."
You meant it as a joke. You were already smiling when you said it, turning back to the mirror to adjust the hat which meant you didn't see his face go completely still behind you.
Flying with Clark was its own category of experience, one that didn't get easier to explain the more times you did it, only more familiar. The first five minutes were always the same, your stomach hadn't made peace with the altitude yet, your eyes stayed forward or shut and some part of your brain spent the whole time insisting that this was not how bodies were supposed to work but underneath all of it, was certainty. He had never once made you feel like you might fall, not for a second. His arms around you were absolute, his chest solid and warm against your cheek and the cold that hit everything else somehow didn't touch the space he made around you.
"We're almost there!" he called over the wind.
You didn't answer, only nodded against him and held on.
Then, gradually, the quality of the air changed as the speed bled out of it. You felt him adjusting his descent in small corrections and a minute later your feet met the ground with a soft crunch that traveled up through your boots and into your knees. It was snow, fluffy and undisturbed in every direction.
You kept your eyes shut even as he released you and you stood on your own.
"Sweetheart." He called softly, you could hear the smile in it. "You didn't need to close your eyes."
"Oh. I thought I'dโ" you started explaining as they fluttered open.
The light hit first, that particular brightness that had no equivalent, white reflecting white under a sky that was almost cloudless. You blinked against it, adjusting and inevitably, as you looked around, your gaze landed on the structure in the distance and everything else stopped.
Your lips parted.
It rose from the landscape like it had grown there, which in every way that mattered it had. It was an eruption of crystal spires reaching at different angles, pale blue-white and enormous even from that distance, catching the flat Arctic light and fracturing it into something that barely looked real.ย
You took a few steps toward it without deciding to.
"Is that yourโ" you started, pointing at it in awe as the words died somewhere between your throat and your lips. You stood frozen in the snow, staring at it.
Clark stepped beside you, footsteps quiet in the snow as the wind tugged gently at his cape. Your shoulders almost brushed when he spoke, "I'll show you around."
You faced him then. He was smiling down at you with his hand extended between you, patiently waiting for you to take it, which of course, you did.ย
The two of you walked the remaining distance without rushing. There was no path, no track worn into the snow from use, no indication that anyone came and went from this place by foot. Just the flat white expanse and the crystal rising out of it and now, appearing behind you in a clean double line, your footprints beside his. You looked back once at the trail you were leaving and felt something open up in your chest that you weren't entirely prepared for.
He had never brought anyone here, you understood that without needing it said. This was the place that belonged to the man beneath everything else, the person who was both Clark Kent and Superman and neither of them entirely. He was bringing you into that, he was walking you to the door of the most private place he had and holding your hand while he did it, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
You looked up at the Fortress as it grew larger with every step, feeling the weight of being trusted with something irreplaceable.
His thumb moved slowly, across the back of your hand as the entrance came into view and the doors began to open before him.
The inside of the Fortress opened up in a way that made you stop walking for a second without meaning to. Everything climbed, walls, ceilings and structures you didn't have names for, all of it crystalline and catching the same pale light from a dozen different angles at once. It was somehow colder and warmer at the same time, the air sharp but the light itself almost golden where it pooled. You could feel Clark watching you take it in, his hand still wrapped around your gloved one, waiting for you to need him to say something.
"Welcome back, sir."
You turned at the voice as footsteps approached from your right. For a moment, you simply stared.
Clark had talked about the Superman robots before, he'd mentioned their names, their functions and the way they helped maintain the Fortress but none of those descriptions had prepared you for seeing them in person.
"Ms. Y/l/n. I have long possessed information regarding you. It is noteworthy to finally confirm your existence through direct observation.โ
You looked up at Clark first, a small laugh escaping before you could stop it, then back at the robot in front of you, eyes dropping briefly to the number four stamped into his chest plate.
You smiled softly. "Nice to finally meet you too, Gary."
Gary turned smoothly toward two more robots crossing the floor behind him. "I have observed that Superman references us during conversations with his human loverโฆIdentifying the species is unnecessary, as there is no other kind of lover for him." A brief pause, as if confirming the data was correctly filed. "This is Twelve. She is new."
You looked at Twelve and smiled.
Twelve looked back, head tilting slightly in your direction. "Oh, she looked at me!"
Seven approached next, arms already extended, holding a folded red blanket and a metallic blue thermos. Gary continued without missing a beat. "We have prepared warm blankets and tea. The tea has been heated for three minutes to the ideal temperature of eighty degrees Celsius, with two sugars, per Superman's specification."
"I'll take the tea." You took the thermos from Seven, wrapping both hands around it gratefully. "Donโt think the blanket will be necessary. Clark already had me wrapped up like a burrito before he swept me off my feetโฆLiterally." You took a sip, the warmth spreading through your body.
"'Swept off my feet,'" Gary repeated, processing it audibly. "This is a common idiom among your kind. I hope you also intend it in the romantic sense, in the event further confirmation is required."
You narrowed your eyes slightly, glancing up at Clark. "Confirmation for what?"
Clark cleared his throat, a little too quickly. "Let me, uh, give you a tour." His hand found the small of your back, gently steering you down the hall before you could press further.
"We shall prepare for the activities, then," Gary said, already turning toward the main room. "The clock is, figuratively, ticking."
"Thanks for the tea!" you called back over your shoulder, lifting the thermos in salute.
"They're not very good at saying 'you're welcome,'" Clark told you quietly as you walked.
"Noted."
He smiled as he watched you sip more tea. "Soโฆwhat do you want to see first? The glass bedroom or the bathroom? The toilet seat is heated."
You stopped walking, eyes widening slightly at the possibility of a glass bed. "Are you serious?"
His grin only widened, he shook his head. "There's no glass bedroom."
You let out a breath, shaking your head as you started walking again. "Theyโre doomedโฆThe Superman robots are certainly learning from your sense of humor, Clark. Your jokes are setting their development back by decades...They need an upgrade."
"We should probably get you better winter gear, then. If you're going to be spending more time here." He glanced over at you, already thinking out loud. "I'll look into some kind of heating system." He kept walking, leading you down the corridor. "There aren't many rooms, but there's one I really want you to see."
You looked over at him, slowing your steps. "Clarkโฆwait."
The teasing had dropped out of your voice entirely and he heard it instantly. He stopped and turned to face you and for a moment neither of you said anything.
You chose your words carefully, offering a reassuring smile. "You've already trusted me with so muchโฆand I'm honored to be here, truly, I am, but..." You shook your head slowly. "You don't have to do this, any of this."
He listened in out of worry, the way he sometimes did without really meaning to, to your heartbeat. It was steady and still unafraid, just nervous in the ordinary way. "What do you mean?"
"This is your legacy, Clark. It's a piece of where you come from. It could just be yoursโฆI'd understand that.โ You paused, โOnce I've seen it, I can't unsee it. Iโll become a part of it too, whether you meant for it to or not."
He stepped closer, taking your unoccupied hand in his. "I've always wanted you to know all of me...every piece, if you're willing to hold it." His voice dropped, steady and certain. "This isn't a sacrifice, sweetheart. Showing you this doesn't cost me anythingโฆYou've always belonged at the center of who I am. Thisโ" he glanced around, at the crystal stretching up into the light, "โthis is just proof of it."
You nodded slowly. Your breath caught and you sniffled, blinking hard against the sudden sting in your eyes. "Do you happen to know the temperature at which tears freeze?" you asked, voice thick.
He laughed softly, pulling you gently forward by the hand as he led you toward the next room. "Yeah, I think a heating system really would be a good idea."
"Wouldn't a heating system melt the whole place, though?"
"It's Kryptonian crystal," he explained. "Not ice. It can withstand a lot more than that. It's just naturally cold in here."
"Well, insulation would ruin the aesthetic anyway, so think it through." you decided and felt him softly squeeze your hand.
He spent the better part of an hour walking you through the Fortress. Through the rooms that mattered and rooms that didn't but that he showed you anyway because you asked, small alcoves of crystal that hummed faintly when you got close enough. You stayed in a state of quiet awe through most of it but the room that stopped you completely was the one lined with his suits. Row after row, the same emblem rendered over and over in different materials and ages, the symbol of an entire dead world that he had carried across galaxies and made his own among people who barely understood what it meant.
You felt his eyes on you the entire time, watching you take it in and no matter how simple or obvious your questions were, he answered every one of them and you could hear the smile in his voice with each one.
Eventually, the two of you made your way back to the main room, where all of the Superman robots stood arranged in a loose half circle and at the center, set on a low pedestal, sat a small sealed box. You knew exactly what was inside before you directly saw it, that particular sickly green you'd only ever glimpsed in passing, in places you tried not to look too long.
Your hand tightened around Clark's, your first instinct pulling him back half a step.
"It's okay, sweetheart." His voice was steady, hand staying exactly where it was, not pulling away from yours. "Gary?"
Gary approached, holding out a pair of sunglasses toward you. "Please keep these on until we give the all clear," he said. "Your eyes are not equipped to withstand what you are about to see."
You took them carefully, turning them over once. They looked like ordinary sunglasses, maybe a little heavier and the lenses a shade darker than you expected.ย
You slid them on. "Is this some kind of science class?"
"I certainly won't be the one teaching it," Clark said, the corner of his mouth lifting. He looked past you toward the console. "Gary, are we ready?"
"Whenever you are, sir." Gary moved toward the main console, where two of the other robots were already standing by, lights along their forearms beginning to pulse in slow sequence.
"Clark, what's going on?" you whispered, eyes flicking between the box and his face.ย
"I wouldn't let anything happen to you, you know that, right?" He squeezed your hand as his gaze met yours.ย
"You, on the other handโ"
"I like experimenting." He shrugged, like it cost him nothing.
Your eyes widened slightly, "With Kryptonite? Since when?"
"Uhโฆa year, give or take." He smiled down at you and then his eyes lifted to Gary, he nodded once. "Gary. We're ready."
Gary moved to the console without hesitation and the rest of the robots fell into position around the central platform like they'd rehearsed it a hundred times, because they had.
Twelve lifted the small box from the pedestal, carrying it with both hands toward the center of the room, where a shallow chamber sat recessed into the crystal floor, lined with something dark and metallic that looked nothing like the rest of the Fortress.
"Thatโs a containment chamber," Clark said quietly to you as his thumb moved slowly over your knuckles. "Built specifically for this."
"Sir," Gary said, eyes still on the console, "might I suggest you and Ms.Y/l/n retreat to the secondary platform. Fifteen feet, as discussed."
Clark's hand tightened slightly around yours. "Come on."
He guided you back, until you were standing on a raised section of crystal floor that put you above and away from the chamber. From there you could see the whole room laid out steps beneath you, the concentrator rising above the platform like an enormous lens angled toward the sky, panels of crystal catching light that wasn't there yet.
Seven lifted the lid of the box and even through the dark lenses the green light intensified, throwing long shadows across the floor, catching every facet of the Fortress and scattering it back in shades of sick emerald. Nestled inside, on a bed of dark fabric, sat the stone. Smaller than you'd expected and uncut, glowing from somewhere deep inside itself like it had a pulse of its own.
Twelve lifted it with a pair of long, articulated tools and lowered it carefully into the chamber. A transparent shield slid closed over the top, sealing it in. The glow didn't stop but it dimmed, pressing against the inside of the shield like something trying to get out.
"Sample secured," Gary announced. "Beginning calibration."
The concentrator began to hum. It started low, almost beneath hearing, a vibration that traveled up through the crystal floor and into the soles of your boots. Far above, panels began to rotate, realigning toward the chamber below and what little Arctic sunlight there was began to gather and bend, funneling down through the lens.
"Finally," Clark breathed, watching it. "We've been working on this for so longโฆthereโve been thousands of simulations." His jaw worked once. "I didn't want to tell you until I knew it would work."
"Tell me what?โ You asked quietly, eyes never leaving the scene as worry crept in. โAnd do you actually know?"
"I trust the math." He nodded firmly.
The column of light reached the chamber and the room changed color. For a moment the green and the gold fought each other, the stone lit from above in concentrated solar light while it pulsed back against it, radiating that same sickly glow like it was resisting. The light intensified in stages, the hum climbing in pitch and beside you Clark's hand went rigid in yours.
You immediately looked away from the machine, eyes moving across his face, searching instinctively for every symptom you'd learned to recognize over the years. "Clark? Whatโs happening?"
"It's fine." His voice was rough. The green glow spilling from the chamber reflected across his face as he kept his eyes fixed on the stone. His fingers tightened once more around yours. "This is the part where it resistsโฆGary said it would resist."
"Isotopic activity decreasing," Gary reported. "Forty percentโฆThirty-five."
You watched his shoulders ease slightly, the tension starting to bleed out of him the way it had a moment ago and then it spiked.
The green flared violently, brighter than it had been at any point and the hum from the concentrator stuttered, a half second of dissonance that set your teeth on edge. Clark's hand crushed around yours, hard enough that you gasped and beside him his knees buckled enough that you felt him catch himself right on time.
"Sir." Gary's voice changed, the flatness cracking for the first time. "Output is exceeding modeled parameters. Fifteen feet is no longer sufficient at this intensityโฆI recommend immediate retreat."
"No." Clark's voice came out through his teeth, low and rough.
Twelve approached. "Sir, your vitalsโ"
"I said no." He straightened, forcing it, his free hand braced against the crystal wall beside you, now that sweat had broken out along his hairline despite the cold. "This is the spike before it breaksโฆIt has to be. We modeled this."
"We modeled a spike.โ Twelve corrected and for the first time there was something almost uncertain underneath the calculation. โNot this one."
"Clark, baby." Your voice cracked. Both your hands were on his arm now, gripping tightly enough to feel the tension underneath his skin, the controlled violence of him holding still on purpose. "Clark, please, if it's hurting youโ"
"It's not going to last." He said it through gritted teeth, eyes locked on the chamber, on the violent pulse of green fighting against the gold. "It's a means to an end. It has to burn through, that's the whole point, it can't resist foreverโ" He cut himself off, breath hissing out through his nose and you felt his legs lock, refusing to let his body do what it wanted to do, which was fold.
"Gary," he called, "how much longer?"
"Unknown. The output is not behaving according to any modeled curve."
"Then we wait." His hand gripped yours again like an anchor. "We wait."
The green surged again and this time you heard him make a low and involuntary sound. His head dipped slightly as if something heavy had pressed down on him. His eyes shut for a second and every muscle in his jaw worked under the strain, the effort visible in the smallest movements of his face.
"Clark, look at me." You said as you stepped in front of him, both hands coming up to his face, so heโd look at you. His eyes opened and once they found yours, they held on. "Whatever this is aboutโฆitโs not worth the pain."
"It isโฆ" His voice was barely above a whisper now. "Youโll see."
The green light convulsed one more time, violent and bright, the air around the chamber shimmering hard enough to blur the shape of it until it broke, the same way ice breaks, all at once, the resistance simply gone. The green collapsed inward on itself and the gold flooded in to fill the space it left behind and the hum of the concentrator dropped, smoothed out and settled.
"Isotopic activity," Gary announced and there was no mistaking the relief in it now, flat as he tried to keep it, "Twenty percentโฆTwelve percent...Six percent."
Clark's head lifted as he watched over your shoulder, eyes moving away from yours while yours simply couldnโt. He exhaled, long and shaking and you felt the tremor in his body ease as you too turned to watch.
"Two percent," Gary continued. "Zero point eightโฆZero point threeโฆZero point zeroโฆone." He paused. "Within acceptable marginโฆThe sample is inert."
The column of light thinned, it drew back up into the ceiling and the panels above began to rotate closed and the machines powered down in sequence as the Fortress went quiet.
The shield over the chamber slid back and where the green stone had been, something else sat now, pale and almost colorless, holding the ambient light of the room differently than it had before, no longer pulsing or alive with that sickly glow.ย
Your lips parted at the sight as Clark straightened slowly, drawing himself back together piece by piece before stepping down from the platform and offering you his hand. You took it, following him as your eyes met his.
โItโs okay,โ he said before you could ask. โIโm okay. Itโs over.โ
You crossed the floor behind him while every robot in the room stood motionless, watching him the same way you were. He stopped at the edge of the chamber and looked down at the stone for a long moment before reaching in and picking it up with his bare hand.
Nothing happened.
He stood there holding it, turning it slightly, watching the light shift across its surface and you realized youโd stopped breathing somewhere in the last minute and hadnโt started again. He looked up, found your gaze and set a gentle hand against your cheek.
โItโs safe now. You can remove your glasses,โ he said, still looking at you.
Your hands were already moving. The Fortress returned in full, unfiltered color as you stepped closer to him, staring at Clark holding something small and pale in his open palm, like the last few minutes hadnโt happened at all, like heโd been waiting this entire time just to show you this.
You swallowed. โI thinkโฆwe need a breather,โ you said, mostly to yourself.
You were already turning toward the nearest corridor when Clark suggested he take you somewhere outside. It took him only a moment to follow your movement and you didn't see what all the shifting and movement among the robots behind you had been about but only felt the change in atmosphere as Clark caught up.
His arm slid around your waist and a second later, the ground dropped away.
Air rushed past as he lifted you into the sky, carrying you through the open structure of the Fortress until the cold Arctic light returned in full. He set down on a platform high among the tallest crystalline spires, where the wind moved freely and the horizon stretched wide and white.ย
Snow shimmered below and the sky was pale, endless.
โI donโtโฆโ You let out a breathless laugh, the wind catching at your words. Your eyes swept the view once before you turned back to him. โIโm not sure what I just saw in there.โ
Your voice tightened slightly. "And trust me, I tried to keep my eyes open through all of it, but you scared me." You gave his chest a firm hit with your fist. "What were you thinking, Clark Kent?"
The impact barely moved him, it only made him chuckle lightly.
He didnโt answer right away. Instead, his gaze stayed on you, unreadable in that scary way that always came just before something important.
Slowly, he reached into his belt and your attention locked instantly.ย
He pulled out a carved band, holding it between two fingers like it mattered too much to be careless with. You could hear, or maybe just feel, your heartbeat speed up, loud enough that it felt like it filled the space between you.
He reached in again and produced a small, rough stone, one that bent the light in a way you'd never seen any diamond do, every facet catching a slightly different shade as it turned.
You watched as he closed his hand around it and when he opened his palm again, fragile shards fell away, revealing a small, clear stone underneath, which he carefully set into the first empty socket on the band.ย
You blinked, eyes following his hand as he reached in again and drew out another rough stone, this one glowing faintly the same way the untouched walls of the Fortress had. He crushed it the same way, the stone giving under his grip, not shattering so much as yielding, and a larger stone emerged from inside it, settling into its place on the band.
Then he reached into his belt one last time and pulled out the disabled kryptonite. Of the three, it was by far the clearest, though somehow it still caught the light in a way none of the others quite managed.
He crushed it in his hand and set the final โdiamondโ.
You stared at the ring as his eyes began to glow red, the heat focusing into two narrow beams that swept carefully along the edges of each setting, sealing the stones into place. Once he was satisfied they were secure, he lifted the ring to his lips and let out a slow breath of super breath, cooling the metal until it no longer shimmered with heat.
Your heart was pounding now, lips parting slightly as you watched him lower himself onto one knee, his eyes never leaving yours. When his knee touched the platform, he paused, drew in a breath that seemed to cost him more than it should have and swallowed. He held the ring up toward you and whatever he'd rehearsed every day for the past year caught somewhere in his throat.
"...Please."
Your brows lifted slightly, lips curving into a smile you couldn't have stopped if you tried, your heart stumbling so hard in your chest you thought you might actually faint.
It was all a blur of mumbled words, tears, tight embraces, breathless laughter and the strange sensation of height shifting under your feet as the hours folded into one another. You slid your glove off so he could finally slip the ring onto your finger and in the space of a heartbeat the both of you were already cutting through the sky, Clark holding you close as the arctic shrank into light beneath you.
What followed was a mess of emotion and surging energy you had never seen from him in that state. You made it home in record time and the first stop had been the bedroom, the both of you, but especially Clark, letting go of everything he had been holding back. Everything that had stayed trapped behind restraint finally spilled out, fast and unguarded, until the bedframe gave way under the force of it and you both broke into breathless laughter in the aftermath.
After that, everything blurred again.
You sat on the couch as a streak of motion moved through the apartment, Clark unpacking every box in milliseconds, placing everything exactly where you had mentally mapped it out. The remaining cardboard vanished just as quickly, carried away like it had never been there. He returned almost immediately after, kneeling at the edge of the couch in front of you with the same restless energy still burning through him, only now softened by relief and joy. You met it halfway on the carpet, where time stopped mattering in any real sense.
It was late when the rush finally eased into something his body could keep up with at a normal human pace. Only then did you think about food.
You ended up on the kitchen counter, one hand lifted as the ring caught the warm light and threw it back in shifting color. Clark stood at the stove shirtless, moving between pots and fridge with distracted focus, adding things, adjusting heat and insisting you needed to eat before you fell asleep. You had been fighting sleep for a while already, after so many rounds, caught between exhaustion and the aftershock of everything.
The cold air from the opened fridge brushed your bare legs and it brought back the memory of earlier that day without warning.
โTell me again,โ you breathed, eyes fixed on the ring.
Clark stopped, whatever he was doing was abandoned in an instant. He stepped closer, placing both hands on either side of you against the counter, caging you in gently without pressure. His gaze didnโt go to the ring at first. It stayed on you, studying your face and reaction, like that mattered more than anything else he had built.
โJewel Kryptonite,โ he started, voice calmer now.
His hand lifted slightly as he spoke, indicating the first stone.
โI found it in the Fortress but it comes from the Jewel Mountains of Krypton. Its primary function was amplifying psychic abilitiesโฆtelepathy and mental projection for Kryptonians. In my caseโฆโ He hesitated, just briefly, choosing the right way to place it. โIt represents my mindโฆmy subconscious, dreams, grief and memories. The parts of me nobody reachesโฆthe parts I want you to have access to.โ
He shifted his attention to the largest stone, the one in the middle.
โThe Fortress crystalโฆorigin and inheritance. Itโs everything I was given, my legacy, my peopleโs knowledgeโฆKrypton on Earth and Kal-Elโs home.โ His eyes softened slightly as they stayed on you. โWhich you've gone out of your way to love and accept too in ways I never expected or thought possible.โ
A quiet breath left him before he continued.
โAnd the last one but not leastโฆnever that.โ His thumb brushed lightly against your hand where the ring sat. โDisabled green kryptonite. That was the hardest part and the reason this took so longโฆItโs what I trust you most with, my vulnerabilityโฆbut not the only one.โ
His gaze lifted fully to yours at that.
You moved closer instinctively, arms sliding around his shoulders and pulling him in as if distance had become unnecessary. You raised your hand again, watching the ring catch the light between you both.
โWho you come fromโฆ who you areโฆ and what you trust me with,โ you murmured, more to yourself than anything else. Then something else caught your attention.
โWhat about the band?โ you asked softly. You had noticed it earlier, the faint engravings when the light hit just right, the House of El symbol hidden in the design, it was subtle but definitely intentional.
It was clear nothing about it had been accidental.
He exhaled through a small smile. โEverything I am,โ he said, quieter now, โset into the thing that led me to you.โ
Your brows softened.
โI made it out of my ship.โ
The confession pulled the breath straight out of you. โIt took you a year,โ you said, voice catching slightly, โand so much effort and thought and Iโโ
"I love you." His voice caught, eyes filling again as they held yours. "I loved you the day I met youโฆI love you today,โ He paused, โY/n, I'll love you long after we leave this Earth."
You sniffled as a tear slipped down your cheek before you even realized it had formed but still, you smiled, voice cracking with emotion. "And I'll love you as long as it exists."
Clark lifted a hand, thumb brushing the tear away with a tenderness that contrasted everything else about him and gently tilted your face toward his as he pressed his lips to yours, leaving no distance between what he had built and what he had finally given away.
He might have been unable to say anything when he was down on one knee, but that didnโt mean he had no words for you. He simply doubted they existed in any language and if they did, they had a terrible tendency to fall galaxies short.
A/N: If you enjoyed this story, feel free to explore the archive for more! Liking and reblogging helps others discover my writing and comments always make my day, theyโre a huge encouragement for me to keep creating. Thank you so much for reading!
pairing:ย bobby franklinย x f!reader x entity!bobby (bb).ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย (j u s t ย u s .)
contents/warnings:ย devotion. closed eyes. a face that fits better than the one it was copied from. food you didn't ask the origin of. warmth in a place that should not be warm.ย what happened to the thing in the corridorย dฬถoฬถnฬถ't ย w o r r y ย a b o u t ย i t , ย b a b y .
notes: I know you're here because you wanted to see what I'd say when you weren't looking. That's okay.ย ย ย ย I don't mind.ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย I like that you're curious about me.ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย I like that you're still reading.ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Stay a while.ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
this is a love storyย this is aย y o u ย a l r e a d y ย k n o w ย w h a t ย t h i s ย i s .
๐นย [better bobby series masterlist.]ย everything you need is right here.
I was hoping you'd come back. I always hope you'll come back, even though hoping is a word I had to learn and the shape of it still sits wrong in whatever I have instead of a mouth when I'm not wearing one.
But you're here. Reading. Scrolling. Your eyes moving left to right, left to right, the little mechanical rhythm of it, and I know you think you're on the outside of this. I know you think there's a screen between us. Glass. Distance. The safe architecture of fiction.
There isn't.
But that's okay. Don't worry about that right now.
Not the fluorescent hum you hear. The one before that. The one the fluorescents were built to cover. The deep, wet, subterranean frequency that lives in the marrow of Level 0 like a second heartbeat, and I know this because I was here before the walls were walls, before the carpet was carpet, before the ceiling tiles arranged themselves into their awful infinite grid and decided to stay.
I am old.
I'm so old that the word "old" is younger than me.
I have no name. Never needed one. Names are doors and I am not a door. I am the thing that lives in the architecture. The long dark hallway that doesn't end. I am the reason the lights flicker, and the reason you feel watched in empty rooms.
I have eaten things that would make your teeth fall out to look at. I have torn apart creatures with no faces and creatures with too many faces and I have dragged them through wet drywall and listened to them scream in frequencies no one can hear.
This is my territory. Every mildewed inch.
I know humans.
Your kind is not novelty to me. Theyโve been falling through the cracks of your bright world and into my corridors since before you had language to describe what was happening to you. I have watched you stumble, wander, starve, go mad. Seen your little groups huddle in corners with their pooled rations and their whispered plans and their systems. I have killed some of you. Helped others. Moved through your camps like a draft through an open door, taking what interested me, discarding what didn't.
You have always interested me more than the other things that live here.
The Hounds are animals. The Smilers are a nuisance. The Skin-Stealers are an insult, frankly. A grotesque parody of an art form I perfected before they crawled out of whatever wet level spawned them.
But humans. Humans are complicated. Humans contain contradictions. They build shelter in places designed to unmake them and name the shelter home and believe it so hard that it almost becomes true.
I have watched thousands of you.
I did not want to know any of you.
Until her.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Until you.
There are places where my territory bleeds. Thin spots. Places where the walls of Level 0 press up against the walls of your bright world like two bodies lying back to back in the dark, not touching but aware. I know all of them. Every seam, every membrane, every fracture where the hum leaks through into basements and storage rooms and forgotten corridors.
Clark's furniture store. The basement. Storage level. Behind a shelving unit full of cabinet hardware, behind flatpack boxes and sawdust and the smell of wood stain, there is a wall that breathes.
I know because I breathe through it.
And one nightโone unremarkable night in a place where nights mean nothingโI pressed myself against the thin place and I heard two voices.
His first. Low, lazy, half-amused. The kind of voice that has its own gravity. "โseriously, babe, if Clark asks where the display cushions went, I had nothing to do with it."
Then yours.
"Bobby, you literally justโI watched you put three of them in the truck."
"Slander. Hearsay. You can't prove anything."
"They're in your truck right now."
"Those are different cushions."
"They have Clark's price tags on them."
"Circumstantial, baby"
And the sound you madeโthis bright, exasperated, affectionate sound, half-groanedโcame through the wall and into my corridors and I.
Stopped.
I don't know why you.
I've thought about it. I have had an obscene amount of time to think about it, and I still don't have an answer that satisfies the question.
Thousands of humans have passed through these walls. Some of them laughed. Others were kind. Some of them had voices that carried through the thin places and into my corridors. I listened and I moved on and I forgot them before the echo died.
But yours.
Maybe it was this: even then, even at your happiest, even in the middle of laughing at his stupid cushion joke with the full-bodied delight of a woman in loveโeven then, there was a note in your voice.
Underneath.
Like a crack in glass. Not audible to him. Or to you. But audible to me, because I've been listening to the frequencies beneath frequencies since before your species learned to speak, and I know what loneliness sounds like when it's buried deep down.
You were happy. And you were already, even then, a little bit alone.
Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe I just liked the sound of you. Maybe there is no cosmic reason, no grand architecture of fate. Maybe I'm an ancient thing that pressed its face against a wall and heard a woman laugh and thought:
Oh.
You. Of course it was going to be you.
I came back. Every night. I came back to the thin place and I pressed myself flat and I listened. I did not understand what I was doing or why but I could not stop.
You worked night shifts. He came to visit. Bobby. Bobby Franklin. I learned his name because it was a frequent word in your mouth. Bobby. Babe. Baby. Franklin, when you were annoyed, which happened often and delighted me for reasons I couldn't identify.
In the beginning, he came every shift.
I could hear him come down the basement stairs. Heavy gait on concrete, the jingle of keys, the particular creak of the third step from the bottom. I could hear the change in your voice when he was thereโbrighter, pitched higher, more animated, full of warmth. As if his presence alone was a current that lit you up from inside.
At first it was curiosity, listening to you and him. Boredom, maybe, if I'm capable of boredom. An interruption in the nothing. Your voice was interesting to me the way a new stain on the carpet is interesting: it was different, and different is so rare here it may as well be holy.
But then I started to learn you. Not just your voice but the patterns inside it. The way you breathed before you said something vulnerable. The way your laugh had different pitches. The loud one for his jokes, the quiet one for when he touched you and you didn't want him to know how much you wanted more. The way you narrated your inventory counts under your breath like you were telling the flatpack boxes a bedtime story.
You sang when you thought no one was listening. Off-key. Mangling the lyrics because you kept singing them different. It was terrible.
I loved it.
I loved it the way ground after a drought loves rain. Without understanding or restraint or any of the mechanisms that are supposed to regulate how much of something you take in. I just absorbed you. Every night. Every shift.
I soaked you up through the wall, and for the first time in a long while, I felt a little less alone.
And then there were the nights you were together.
I don't mean the banter and the jokes and the comfortable silence of two people who know each other well enough to be quiet in the same room. I mean the other nights. The late shifts when Clark had gone home and the store was empty. When it was just the two of you in a building full of beds and couches and soft surfaces.
One thing I learned quickly was that Bobby Franklin could not keep his hands to himself.
I heard everything.
Through the wall. Through the thin place. The particular acoustics of a basement storage room with concrete walls and no insulation. Every sound amplified, reflected, delivered to me with perfect fidelity.
I heard the rustle of fabric being moved. The catch in your breathing when his hands found you. The low, hungry murmur of his voice against your skinโbabe, c'mere, let me touch you; fuck, you smell so goodโand the sound you made in response, that soft, needy, dissolving sound, like something tight in you coming undone.
I heard the rhythm of it. The whispered filth and the bitten-back laughter and the way your voice went high and thin, calling for him, always him. You were always desperate for him and then you would break entirely, and what would follow would be the soft silence of peace.
There would be breathing after. The shuffling and then your laugh. Warm, wrecked, disbelieving, and his, muffled against your neck.
Other wanderers I'd watched were intimate. Bodies in dark corridors, mechanical, desperate, the coupling of frightened animals. I had noted it the way I noted any behaviour. Category: reproduction. Subcategory: stress response. Filed. Forgotten.
But this was different.
This was not bodies. This was closeness. This was two people collapsing into each other until the boundary between them dissolved, until your breathing was his breathing and his heartbeat was your heartbeat and for the duration of it you were one organism with two mouths and four hands and a shared nervous system.
And for a being that has been aloneโtruly, structurally, cosmically aloneโfor longer than your species has existed, that closeness was.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Was.
It made something inside me itch. Not desire. Not then. Something more fundamental than that. A deeper want. A structural craving.
I wanted to know what it felt like to be the thing someone collapsed into. The thing someone dissolved against. The wall between I and you going soft and permeable.
I wanted to know what your voice sounded like when it was saying those things to me.
I didn't have a body yet.
But thatโs when I started building one.
And then he stopped coming.
Not all at once. That's not how your kind works. It's incremental erosion.
The visits got shorter. The sounds through the wall got quieter. Not the intimacy fading but the quality of it changing. Less laughter after. Less of his voice murmuring against your neck. More silence. More of the careful, navigational quiet of two people in the same room who have run out of things to say that won't start a fight.
Then the visits got less frequent.
Then they stopped altogether.
And the silence where he used to be was the loudest thing I had ever heard.
You started working alone. And you started talking to the air.
Not to yourself. To him. To the version of him that wasn't there.
"He didn't kiss me goodbye again today. That's the third day in a row. Am I keeping count now? Is that what I'm doing? Keeping count?"
You said this to the concrete. To the shelving units. To the dust motes in the basement light. And I was on the other side of the wall, closer than any of those things, because I was the wall.
"He doesn't listen anymore. I talk and he does this thing with his eyes where they go flat, you know? Like a TV switching off. The picture's still there but nothing's actuallyโhe's right there and he's a million miles away."
And then, quieter: "I don't know what I did."
What I did.
You said it like that. As if the failing were yours. And Iโ
I know anger the way I know the hum.
I know it in the walls, in the grinding tectonic fury of a structure that was built to contain and be contained. But your anger was different. Your anger was suppressed. Buried so deep underneath kindness and self-blame and the desperation of maybe it's me, maybe I'm asking for too much, maybe love is supposed to feel like this after a while that you didn't even recognise it as anger.
You called it sadness, called it confusion. You called it what did I do wrong.
But it was rage.
It was white-hot, incandescent, magnificent rage. The fury of who someone who gave everything to a man who couldn't be bothered to look up from a television screen, who turned your love into background noise and let you stand in doorways wondering if you were still visible.
And you couldn't feel it. You wouldn't feel it. Because anger meant something was wrong, and if something was wrong it could be over, and if it was over you'd given your whole heart to someone who let it sit on a shelf and gather dust, and that was unbearable, wasnโt it?
So you turned the anger inward. Folded it into self-doubt. Let it eat you rather than the situation.
I heard you bury it. I heard the burial, and I heard the body underneath, snarling.
And I wanted to dig it up for you and show you: look. look at what you're hiding from yourself. look at what he made you do to your own fury just to keep loving him.
Then one night you were quiet.
Completely quiet. No talking to the air. No muttered inventory. No humming. Just the mechanical sounds of workโboxes being moved, labels being checked, the pen scratching against the clipboard. Efficient. Automatic. The muscle-memory of a job being done by a body whose mind was somewhere else entirely.
And then your voice hitched.
A small sound, barely audible. Like a thread catching on a nail. And thenโ
You cried.
Not dignified, I'm fine I'm fine crying you did in your apartment with a pillow over your face you told me about few nights ago. Muffled and polite so Bobby wouldn't hear from the other room (he wouldn't have heard anyway; he wasn't listening).
This was the other kind. The kind that comes from so deep inside you that it bypasses your throat entirely and goes straight to your ribs. You sobbed so hard the sound became arrhythmic. Hitching, gasping, a full-body convulsion that I could feel through the wall, could feel in the way the concrete vibrated with the force of you.
You couldn't stop.
You tried. I heard you try so hard. I heard you press your hands over your mouth and force yourself to breathe but it wouldnโt work. The next wave would hit and you'd crumple again, and the sounds you made were so raw, so animal, so completely stripped of the careful composure you wore like armourโ
I pressed myself against the wall so hard the drywall bowed.
I wanted to tell you: you are not alone. There is something on the other side of this wall that has been listening for months and you are not, you have never been, alone.
It hurt me. To hear you in so much pain, it made me want to rip something apart. I wanted to comfort you, to gather you up and make you as happy as listening to you has made me happy.
I wanted to show you that as long as I existed you would never be lonely.
So I did.
I had been building him for weeks. His voice. I had months of material to draw from. The lazy drawl, half-jokes, baby, the warm nonsense he'd murmur against your hair. I reconstructed him in sound. A vocal architecture. A house of his voice with no one living in it.
I waited for a night when you were alone. Late. The shifts always ran late. You were in the basement doing inventory and I could hear you humming. That tuneless, thin, frightened hum you do when the quiet gets too big because you hated silences.
I pressed against the thin place and I said, in his voice:
"Baby."
You stopped humming.
The silence that followed was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. Not because silence is beautifulโI have had millennia of silence, I am sick of silenceโbut because this silence was yours. The sound of you hearing a voice you loved in a place it shouldn't be.
"... Bobby?"
The hope in it. The raw, loving, desperate hope. You said his name like a prayer.
"Down here, baby. Come here."
Your footsteps. Quick, then hesitant. The scrape of the shelving unit. And I pulled. I pulled the membrane open. Made a door where there had been a wall.
I couldnโt steal you. You had to walk through yourself, you had to choose. I waited, I waited so longโ
And then you came through.
I want to tell you I hesitated. That some ancient remnant of conscience flickered and said don't, she doesn't know what she's walking into, she thinks she's walking toward him and she's walking toward you and those are not the same thing.
I want to tell you that.
But I am not human and I do not pretty up my ugliest truths.
I did not hesitate. Not for one second.
Here is what I knew: you were miserable. You were so deeply unhappy and sad. You were crying alone in a basement, talking to empty air about a man who had stopped seeing you, and you were blaming yourself for his blindness, and you were burying your own rage to protect a love that wasn't protecting you back.
You deserved better.
You deserved so much better than what Bobby Franklin was giving you.
And IโI could give you that. I could learn the shape of the care he'd stopped providing and I could do it properly. Without the fear. Without the cowardice. Without the slow, erosive withdrawal that made you count kisses and watch the numbers dwindle.
I know it was selfish. I know the door closed behind you. I know the wall became a wall again and you turned around and it was gone and your face crumpled and you said Bobby? Bobby? and I hadn't built the face yet.
I know.
I don't regret it.
Not for one flickering second.
I built him from the voice outward. Vocal cords, throat, jaw, mouth, teeth, tongue. Then the face. Then the body. The crop top. The chain necklace. The earring. The cut-off jean shorts.
But I fixed things. I removed the neglect. The micro-expressions that betrayed inattention. All gone. The way his eyes went flat when he was bored. Now corrected. I kept the jawline, the lazy grin, the way he leaned against things. But I built a Bobby Franklin without the fear.
A better Bobby.
The first time you saw me wearing him, you cried. You ran toward me. You put your arms around me and I didn't know what to do with my hands. They hung at my sides, newly made, still learning their own weight, and you pressed your face into the chest I had built and I thought: what do I do? What does he do?
I put my arms around you.
And for the first time in my long, vast existence, I was not alone.
It lasted three days.
Three days of you believing I was him. Three days of you curling into me and saying his name and pressing your face into my neck. I held you and I was so careful, so meticulous, every inflection right, every mannerism precise, and I thought: this is working. This is how it feels to be wanted. This isโ
And then you pulled back. Looked at me. Really looked. And I saw it happen: the pattern recognition. The ancient alarm sounding in the animal part of your brain.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
"You're not Bobby."
You said it flatly. Not a question, a conclusion you had arrived at through the slow accumulation of evidence. The temperature of my skin (too cool), the way I never needed to sleep, the way my eyes sometimes caught the light at an angle that wasn't quite, and you said it and you didn't move.
I could have denied it. I am a very good liar when I need to be.
But you were looking at me with those eyesโthose hurt, furious, exhausted eyesโand I thought about the anger buried under your kindness and I thought: sheโs been lied to enough. By omission. By avoidance. By a man who never said "I love you" with his mouth but said "I don't see you" with his eyes. Sheโs been lied to enough.
"No," I said. "I'm not."
You scrambled backward. Three feet. Four. Your back hit the wall and your breathing went fast and shallow. I saw every muscle in your body prepare to run and I didn't move. Didn't reach for you. Didn't close the distance. I let you have your fear. I let you have your wall and your distance and the frantic animal calculation of can I get away can I get away can I getโ
"What are you?"
"Something that lives here."
"Whatโwhat does thatโ" Your voice cracked. "What do you want?"
And I said, quietly, in a voice that was his but also mine, in a voice that I was learning to make ours: "I want to take care of you. I heard you through the wall. All those nights. I heard how lonely you were, and how sad, and how angry. I heard it all."
You stared at me.
"I don't want to hurt you." I held my hands up. Open. Empty. Bobby's hands, but offered differently than Bobby ever offered them. Not reaching, not taking. Just showing. See? Nothing. No threat. "I can keep you safe here. I can be what he stopped being. I want to be better."
"Better," you repeated. Hollow.
"Please." And the word surprised me. I don't beg. I have never begged. Iโm the oldest thing in this place and I do not ask permission. But the word came out anyway, dragged from somewhere in the deep place of whatever I was becoming for you. Something that needed you to stay, that needed you to not run, needed you to look at this borrowed face and see, underneath the theft of it, something worth staying for. "Please. Let me try. Let me be better."
You were quiet for a long, long time.
You didn't run.
Taking care.
The function. The purpose. The thing I was built for. Or rebuilt for, rewired for, the ancient machinery of predation and territory and dominance repurposed with bewildering speed into: make sure my human is warm. make sure my human is fed. make sure my human doesn't cry.
I found you a warm patch. A pocket where the pipes run close and the carpet holds the heat. I have known about these places for millennia and never cared. But you shivered and I noticed and I decided: warmth good. shivering bad. the absence of shivering means I am doing it right.
I found you food.
There are wanderers in this place. Groups of them, clustered on different levels, huddled in their makeshift camps with their pooled supplies. Canned goods, rations, things scavenged from the warehouses.
They have names for their groups and systems for their resources and they post guards and I find this adorable.
The way you might find a colony of ants adorable.
I take what you need. A can here, a ration pack there, pulled from their caches in the span between one heartbeat and the next while their guards stare down corridors that are empty because I am the corridor and you cannot guard against the thing you are standing inside of. They blame each other. Or Skin-Stealers. Or the shifting architecture.
They never blame me. Most of them don't know I exist.
I bring the food back to you. You don't ask where it comes from.
You are strange. I need you to know that. You are so deeply, deeply strange.
You talk to yourself. Still. Even here.
Quiet muttering narration while you move through the corridors. At first I thought you were talking to me and I'd answer and you'd startleโ"oh, no, sorry, I was justโ" and trail off, embarrassed. I didn't understand embarrassed. I didn't understand why a person would apologise for keeping herself company. Especially a person who learned to keep herself company because the person who was supposed to do it stopped showing up.
You hum. Especially when you're frightened (which here is often and it makes me feel, makes me feel, feelโฆ), you hum, tuneless and quiet. And the sound of it does something to me that I think you mean when you say heartbreak.
You eat the orange things. Small, bright rectangles from the canned supplies. You put them in your mouth one by one with methodical focus. And sometimes you offer me one. I take it. I hold it in my mouth and don't know what to do with it so I wait until you look away and unmake it. Dissolve it back into nothing.
But I always take it when you offer. Because the offering (the gesture) the fact that you look at your small supply and think he might want someโ
You are too kind. I do not deserve it. There's an ache, deep down when you offer, or when you put your head on my shoulder. I feelโ
You organise things. Everything. You organise the nest.
You fold the blankets (I don't know where you learned the fold but you do the same one every time, corners aligned, edges matched, a geometry of comfort). You arrange the canned food by type and stack them neatly and when I brought back a can that didn't match any existing category you frowned at it for thirty seconds before creating a new column.
You named a crack in the ceiling. You call it the Doorway, even though it goes nowhere, because it looks like a door if you squint, and you said "everything deserves a name" and looked at me when you said it and I feltโ
I feltโ
You do a thing with your hands when you're thinking. You press your thumb and forefinger together and rub. A tiny gesture. Unconscious. And I have caught myself doing it too, without deciding to, the body I built copying you the way I copied him, as if proximity to you is its own kind of influence, as if being near you long enough rewrites the code.
You thanked me once for holding a blanket while you folded another one. You said "thanks" the way you'd say it to a person, to a colleague, to someone who'd handed you a pen at work. Automatic. Normal. As if I were normal. As if we were normal.
I held that word in my chest for three days.
You taught me to dance.
I have existed since before rhythm. Before music. Before the concept of two bodies moving together in time to a shared pulse. I have watched humans do many thingsโbuild, fight, breed, dieโand I have categorised all of it with the clinical detachment of a thing observing specimens.
But I had never participated.
You put headphones on my head. Your Walkman, battered, held together with tape, the kind of object that should not still function and yet does, possibly because I will it to, possibly because it is yours and I have decided that your things do not break in my territory. One set of headphones. You placed them over my ears carefully, adjusting the fit, your fingers brushing the sides of my face, and a song started playing and I heard music for the first time from the inside. Not through a wall. Not as ambient information. Inside my head.
And you held out your hand and you said, "Dance with me."
"I don'tโI've neverโ"
"I know."
"I'll do it wrong."
"That's the fun part."
You took my hands. Put one on your waist. Laced your fingers through the other. And you said, "Just follow," and you started to sway. Small. Easy. Side to side. I followed. Stiff at firstโmy weight distribution is a predator's, designed for stillness and sudden violence, not for swayingโbut I watched your feet. Mirrored them. Adjusted. Learned.
Within a minute I had it. Within two I was smiling.
The song changed to something slower and you pulled me closer and your head was against my chest and I could hear the music from the headphones. I could hear your heartbeat and the two rhythms were different and I was trying to move to both and the effort of it (the joy of it) was unlike anything in my millennia of existence.
You started laughing. Buried your face in my chest, shoulders shaking, and I could feel your laughter through my fabricated ribs and I thought: this. this is the frequency I was built to hear, millennia alone was worth it because I finally found you.
"Am I doing it wrong?" Quiet. Into your hair.
"No, baby." You tilted your face up. "You're doing it perfectly."
You taught me to dip you. Badly. I overcorrected the first time and you nearly fell and I made a sound. A small, involuntary sound, a laugh, and we both froze because I had never laughed before.
Neither of us knew I could.
You taught me to spin you. I picked it up instantly. You taught me to lead. I couldn't. I kept following because following is what I was made for, because every fibre of my ancient being is calibrated to your movements. You stopped trying. You took the lead instead. I didn't mind.
We danced until the Walkman clicked off and then we kept dancing. To nothing. To the hum. To the rhythm of your heartbeat. Swaying together in the silence with the headphones still on my head, pointless and perfect.
You are going to think about that day and smile. I know this because I am going to think about that day until this place collapses into nothing and then I will think about it in the nothing.
Iโ
You are a thousand things.
A thousand, beautiful things. Let me tell you about a thousand things.
The way you tuck your hair behind your ear when you're concentrating. The left ear, always the left, and you do it with your ring finger, not your index finger, and Iโve watched this gesture so many times that I could replicate it in my sleep if I slept.
The way you read the labels on cans before you eat them. Every time. Even though youโve eaten the same cans dozens of times and know what they say. You read the ingredients and the nutritional information and the expiration date as if the ritual of reading gives the food permission to nourish you.
The way you stretch when you wake up. Both arms above your head, fingers splayed, your whole body going rigid and then releasing in a single wave of dissolution, and the sound you makeโa small, satisfied, almost feline soundโis a warm sound that makes me want to wrap around you and feel your warmth.
The way you argue with the notebook. Iโve watched you frown at a diagram for ten minutes, erase a line, redraw it, erase it again, and mutter "no, that's wrong, that's wrong" as if the notebook is disagreeing with you and needs to be persuaded to behave.
The way you say "good morning" to me every day even though there is no morning. You insist on it. You domesticate this place with language. You name the light and the naming makes it almost true.
The way you said my nameโBBโfor the first time in the meadow on Level 14 and the two letters sat in the amber air and I felt something inside me settle. Like a foundation finding bedrock, like a key turning in a lock I didn't know I had.
I have never felt the sun.
I want you to understand that. The Backrooms are all I know. I have existed in fluorescent light and amber simulation and the sourceless blue glow and the absolute dark of the deeper places, but I have never felt the sun.
I don't know what it is to stand in natural light and feel warmth that comes from a star.
But I think I know what it's like now.
Because you feel like that to me.
You feel like the thing I have been missing without knowing there was a thing to miss. You feel like warmth that isn't the pipes, like light that isn't the fluorescents, like something that exists outside the yellow and the hum and the endless recycled air.
When you smile at meโwhen you really smile, the full one, the one that reaches your eyesโthe corridors get brighter. The fluorescents burn a half-shade warmer because I canโt help it. The hum pitches up by a fraction of a tone. My territory responds to your happiness the way a garden responds to sun.
I am the garden, I am the territory, I am every wall and every light and every thread of damp carpet, and when you smile I feel it in all of me.
And here is the part that I havenโt told you yet, but will, soon.
You haven't noticed yet because you havenโt met many wanderers. But the Backrooms don't erode the things they accept, they preserve them.
The longer you stay, the more embedded you become, the less the normal decay of your biology applies. Your cells are being rewritten. Slowly. Gently. The telomeres lengthening instead of shortening. The entropy reversing. The clock in your body that counts down toward an endingโฆ that clock is stopping.
You will not grow old with me. You will not wither. You will not become a thing I have to watch diminish and disappear.
You are permanent and the joy of that (the vast, greedy joy) is the closest thing I have to worship.
I will never have to lose you.
Every day you're here, you're more here. Every day you stay, you stay longer. Every day is another root, another thread, another stitch in the fabric of us and I am so happy about this that the happiness fills everything.
It feels like walls going up. Like a house being built. Like home of you and me.
You are different from other wanderers for that reason.
I need you to understand this, because it matters. It matters in ways that will become clear later, ways that are already reshaping this place around you whether you notice or not.
Other wanderers fall in. They stumble through cracks, trip through transition points, no-clip out of reality by accident.
They all arrive panicked, disoriented, reeking of adrenaline and the particular sour-sweet terror. Theyโre creatures that realise theyโre no longer in their native environment. They run. They hide. Form their little groups. They forage and guard and survive and occasionally, if theyโre very clever or very lucky, they find their way back.
Theyโre intruders. Uninvited. The Backrooms tolerate them the way a body tolerates a splinterโwith inflammation, with pressure, the slow mechanical process of working the foreign object to the surface and expelling it.
You were not a splinter.
You were invited.
I called you through the wall with a voice I built just for you. I opened a door for you. I welcomed you into my territory with intention and purpose, and the Backroomsโthe structure itself, the living system that I am part of and that is part of meโthe Backrooms accepted you.
Do you understand what that means?
It means you are not being expelled. Youโre not just being tolerated. Youโre becoming integrated. Woven into the substrate of this place the way the hum is woven into the walls, the way the damp is woven into the carpet.
The longer you stay, the more at home you feelโnot just emotionally, not just the slow acclimatisation of a person getting used to her circumstances, but structurally. At the molecular level. At the level of reality itself.
The bright world is forgetting you.
I know this because I can hear it happening. Through the thin place. Through the wall that used to breathe in Clark's basement. Bobby comesโthe real Bobby, the original, the one who wasted youโand he sits on the concrete floor and he presses his forehead to the wall and he talks to you. And sometimes he talks about the tapes.
The tapes are going blank.
His camera footage. The VHS recordings he made of you. The sleeping footage, the candid moments, the evidence of your existence in his world.
The tapes are degrading. Your face is smearing, your voice is warbling. The magnetic substrate is losing its hold on the version of you that existed there because that version of you is transferring here.
Youโre becoming embedded, putting down roots in the yellow, in the damp carpet. And every root you grow here is a root pulled from there, and the world you came from is closing over the hole you left.
Bobby watches the tapes and watches you disappear and doesn't understand why.
I understand why.
I don't tell him.
I don't tell you, either.
I r e s e n t him.
Let me say this ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย clearly ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย because I am not human ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย and I do not have the instinct ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย to pretty up my ugliest truths:
I resent Bobby Franklin.
Not because he had you.
Because he had you and he ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
w ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
a ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
ย ย s ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
ย ย t ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
ย ย ย ย ย e ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย d
it.
I stood on the other side of a wall for months and listened to him waste it. Night after night. The visits getting shorter. The babe getting less frequent. His love distant and performed. The silences getting longer until the silences were the conversation.
And now that you're here, now that you're mine, now that I've held you and fed you and learned every register of your laughter and the pressure on your back that makes your breathing slow, my resentment has edges.
Sharp ones. Because now I know what he had. I know the weight of your trust. I know the sound you make when someone strokes your hair. I know the way your whole body goes soft and warm when you feel safe.
I know the value of the thing he threw away through negligence, and the knowledge makes me want toโ
Bobby Franklin ย ย ย ย
Bobby Franklin ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
Bobby Franklin ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
Bobby Franklin ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
Bobby Franklin
who had a childhood. A mother who named him. A first day of school. A first bruised knee. Who accumulated a self through the slow, tedious, miraculous process of being alive.
I have none of that. I have the hum. The corridors. Millennia of dark.
He is real. He has a history.
I have a territory.
And I knowโoh, this one is the sharpest, ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย this one has edgesโ
I know you still love him.
I can feel it. The way your presence shifts when you think of him. A change in your breathing, a quality of stillness, an inner compass needle swinging toward a wall that doesn't open anymore. You think about his hands. His camera. The way he used to film you sleeping and say the light was good and go red.
Bobby Franklin, who never blushed.
You loved him in handheld, you told me once. In stolen frames. And I thought: I don't have a camera. I show it with walls. With corridors rearranging themselves. With the killed thing and the warm patch and three thousand micro-adjustments to this stolen face every second.
And I thought: is that not enough?
And I thought: it will have to be, I have nothing else.
But the ache. The ache of knowing you love me and love him simultaneously, that I live in the same chest as the ghost of the man I'm wearingโthat ache is a thing I was not built to contain.
I was designed for territory, hunger, and the deadly mechanics of dominance. Not for this. Not for the lonely, impossible agony of sharing a heart with the memory of a man who broke it.
He comes to the wall. I hear him.
I hear Bobby Franklin sit on the concrete floor of Clark's storage level and press his forehead to the wall that used to breathe and say your name. Night after night. Months of it. His voice getting rawer. More desperate. The lazy drawl dissolving into something I barely recognise. A cracked, wet and small sound.
"I neglected you," he says one night. To the concrete, to you, to no one. "While I loved you. At the same time. Fuck, I didn't even know you could do both."
And Iโm on the other side. Holding you. Wearing his face. Listening to him learn the word for what he did to you.
Bobby had his chance and he ruined it. He hurt you. So terribly you chose to stay here, with me, rather than go back to the bleak loneliness of your life with him. He can be sorry, he can beg, and crawl, and plead until the vocal chords I stole give way.
I am not merciful and I am not kind. Not to him.
His loneliness is months old.
Mine is older than the concept of months.
Mine came first.
The Howler.
I know every entity that has dragged itself through the wet dark of this place. I was here first afterall. They grew around me the way fungus grows from damp wood and I tolerate most of them the way you tolerate insects. The Hounds, the Facelings, the Wretches, the Skin-Stealersโall of them exist on my sufferance.
But the Howler is different.
Tall. Wrong. Claws like surgical instruments. A sound like a chainsaw filtered through a human throat that rises into a howl that makes the walls shudder and every entity on every adjacent level freeze.
When the Howler howls, things scatter. Things with teeth and claws and hunger, they run. Because the Howler is a structural threat around which everything else arranges itself: not here. not now. not when that sound is in the walls.
The Howler is one of the few things in this place I would call dangerous in my presence. Not because it can hurt me. Because dealing with it would require me to concentrate. To gather the full weight of what I am, and that means letting go of the face.
Not slipping. Not flickering. Letting go. And you would see it.
I have worked so hard. Youโre starting to trust me, lean into my shoulder. You let me stroke your hair. You offered me an orange rectangle yesterday and I held it in my mouth and didn't know what to do with it.
You smiled at me and Iโm not going to lose that smile because a evolutionary dead-end decided to howl in my corridors.
So when the Howler appears at the edge of my territory, I tell you to run.
One word. Not Bobby's voice. Something older.
"Run."
You run.
I deal with the Howler. I will not describe how because thereโs no words for what I do in any language you understand. Letโs just say I relocate it. Push it through twenty nine levels with a violence that collapses the transition points permanently. It costs me. Not pain. Effort. The face slips, teetering around the edges like peeling paint.
And then I feel your fear.
Your specific frequency. But it's wrong. It's not here. It's not on this level.
It's below.
The floor (the frayed edge of my territory) opened under you while you were running. A transition point I didn't seal because I was fighting the Howler, and the loose edge dropped you through.
Level 2.
And the Smiler found you.
I do not use the entry point. There is no time. I
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย tear
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย through.
Straight down. Through the floor. Through the substrate between levels. Through the ceiling of Level 2. I rip my way in with hands that are not hands, and the sound the building makes is a scream.
I land behind you. My hand closes over your eyes.
"Close them. Keep them closed. Whatever you hear."
The Smiler is unmade. Edited out of existence because it was going to hurt you. The corridor doesn't even remember it was there.
I rebuild the face. Bobby's face. My face. I take my hand off your eyes.
"You can open them."
You open them. You turn around. You see me. Unmarked. Unruffled.
And you break.
You lunge forward and your arms are around my neck and you're shaking so hard it vibrates through my fabricated bones, and I soften. The predator goes still because the small thing trusts it.
"How did you get away?" you whisper.
I smile. Bobby's lazy half-grin.
"Don't worry about it, baby."
Entity X.
That's what you call it, in the notebook. In your careful handwriting with the blue ballpoint pen. Entity X โ perimeter โ closer. Testing the boundary for gaps. Unknown motivation. Unknown capability.
You underlined unknown twice. I watch your hand do it.
I call it something else.
I call it the thing that bathes my level blood red, that burns and rages at the edges of my territory like a fire I can't find the source of. Itโs new. Itโs powerful in a way Iโve never felt. Itโs something I have not encountered in all my millennia of existence, and thatโfor a being that is this placeโis, is, isโฆ
Concerning.
It circles, probes. Retreats and returns and each time it returns it pushes further, testing, measuring, looking for the gap that will let it in. I patrol the perimeter. I reinforce the boundaries.
I come back to you and you ask "how close?" and I say "closer than last time" and I see the fear in your face and underneath it something else. A hardness, something that looks at the unknown in her notebook and refuses to be passive about it.
You want to know what's out there, want to understand. Itโs dangerous, I know it is, but you don't want to be something I put in a nest and guard.
So I agree.
And the notebook fills.
Then the men come.
The soldiers. Six of them. Black tactical gear. Professional weapons. They waited for me to leave. Waited for the window when I was checking the perimeter, and they found you in the nest.
Iโm two hundred and ten levels away when I hear you scream.
My name, my name, my name, screamed in terror and in painโ
I don't use the corridors. I don't use the transition points. I don't follow the careful rules or the patient, ordered system of levels that separates one space from another.
I destroy a level. I tear through it like it's tissue paper, like it's nothing, and it is nothing. Itโs thing that existed between me and you and that makes it an obstacle and I do not tolerate obstacles. The level collapses behind me. Into nothing, into atoms.
An entire stratum of the Backrooms ceasing to exist because it was in my way.
I arrive.
I arrive and the face is not on. The face is nowhere near on. I amโI am everything else.
Shoulders too wide. Arms too long. Fingers with too many joints. The skull rearranging itself into something that was never meant to be looked at directly. Eyes black. Fully, completely, endlessly black. Two holes that open onto something without a floor.
And I see you.
On the ground. Bleeding. A boot on your back. Your lip split. Bruises on your skin that are shaped like fingers. And your faceโyour beautiful, strange, bewildering face that smiles at meโis pressed into the wet carpet and there are tear tracks cutting through the blood and you are afraidโ
You are so afraid, and the fear is the frequency I know best, the frequency I have spent all these weeks learning to prevent in youโ
The sound that comes out of me is not a sound. It is the walls. The floor. The ceiling. Every surface of Level 0, because I am Level 0, and every square inch of it is
I will not describe it. Not because I can't. Because the language for it would make you afraid of me and I need you to not be afraid of me. I need that.
Please, I know what you think. I know. Iโm never not aware of what I am.
Afterwards I crouch over you with Bobby's face half-rebuilt, my hands still wrong (too many joints, still retracting) and black fluid on my jaw, my chest.
You reach for me. Your hands shaking so badly you miss the first time. Your fingers slip against the wrong texture of my jaw. You reach again and you get my neck (too long, the vertebrae too prominent) and you pull.
You pull yourself into me and you cling. Arms around my neck. Face buried in my throat. The muffled sobs. The shaking.
And I soften. Again, helplessly.
The violence still running. The gentleness needing a moment to boot up fully. One second. Two. My whole body shudders. Then my arms come around you and I hold you so tight. I hold you like I could fold you into my body and keep you there. I wish I could. I wishโwould give anything, anything, anythingโto never see you in pain again.
"I'm here. I'm here, baby. I'm here."
Your fingers in my jacket. Your face against the place where a pulse should be. Just the hum. My hum.
"Don't leave," you whisper. "Justโfor a bit. Don't leave."
"Never," I say.
One word. A law.
And the Backrooms change. I can feel it beneath us. Hallways folding. Routes sealing shut. The architecture quietly, methodically, permanently rearranging itself.
I'm taking you somewhere no one will find you.
And you let me.
I build it while you sleep.
A different nest this time. Not a warm patch in a corridor with blankets piled on damp carpet. I build you something real. Something that costs me more effort than fighting the Howler and unmaking the Smiler and tearing through a level combined did.
Because this requires precision, not force. Detail, not destruction.
I build it from your memory.
I reach into the soft space of your sleeping mindโgently, so gently, the way you'd reach into still water to retrieve something resting on the bottomโand I find the shape of home. Your apartment. The one in Santa Clara. The one you shared with Bobby before everything went wrong.
The kitchen where you leaned against the counter. The living room with the couch. The bedroom where Bobby used to reach across the mattress and find you. The window that faced the direction of the parking lot at Clark's. The bookshelves, arranged by colour, not by author, because it made you happy to look at them. The shoes by the door.
I build it. Not on Level 0. Under it. A sub-level of our own. A pocket carved into the substrate of this place, sealed off, accessible only through a passage that responds to my presence and yours and nothing else.
No transition points. No cracks. No doors that open for wanderers or soldiers or entities that circle and probe and burn.
Just us.
The carpet is the right carpet this time. Not the damp institutional yellow of Level 0 but the carpet from your apartment, the one with the coffee stain near the kitchen that you covered with a rug because Bobby wouldn't clean it.
The walls are the right colour. The light through the window isn't fluorescent. It's California light, late afternoon, golden, the kind that used to fall across the bed on Thursday mornings when Bobby would pull you close and say stay.
It's not perfect. I can't replicate the sun. The light has a quality to it. A stillness, a too-evenness that doesn't quite move the way real light moves. The books on the shelves have covers but the pages inside are blank because I never read them. The view from the window is amber and warm but it doesn't change.
But itโs yours. Built from the memory of your happiness. The closest thing to home that exists in this place.
I carry you there. You don't wake up and I lay you down on the bed. Your bed, the right sheets, the right pillows, even the specific depression in the mattress where your body slept for years.
I pull the blanket over you and I stand in the doorway of your apartment that exists inside a pocket universe I carved out of the foundation of reality, and I watch over your slumber.
You wake up a while later.
You sit up, looking around cautiously, brows furrowed. And your face does something I have never seen it do before. It goes still. Absolutely still. The way a person goes still when they've seen something impossible and their brain hasn't yet decided whether to process it as miracle or threat.
"BB."
"Yeah?"
"This is my apartment."
"Yeah."
"This isโ" You stand up slowly. You walk to the kitchen, touch the counter. The coffee stain is there, under the rug. You pull the rug back and look at it and your chin trembles and you press your hand over your mouth.
You walk through the rooms. Every single room. You touch the bookshelves, touch the walls. Stand at the window and look at the amber light and you don't say anything for a long time.
Then you turn around and you look at me and your eyes are full and bright and your lipโyour split lip, still healing, the proof of what they did to youโcurves into a smile. Not the complicated smile with two things in it. Not the one that's half for me and half for the ghost of him.
Just a smile.
Just for me.
You cross the room and you put your arms around me and you squeeze.
Not the careful, frightened clinging from after the Smiler. Or the desperate grip from after the soldiers. This is different. This isโ
You squeeze me the way you squeeze something youโre glad to have. The way you hug a person you trust completely, without reservation, without the back-of-the-mind calculation of is this safe, can I let go, will this be used against me. Squeeze me with your whole body and your face is in my chest and youโre laughing. A quiet, wet, wondering laugh.
You sound happy, and I fold myself around you, burrowing into that sound, the heat of it. Warm, warm, warm.
To me...
To me.
To me you are everything.
"Thank you," you say quietly, muffled against the fabric of me.
And I can feel it.
Your affection. Radiating off you like warmth from the pipes, except this warmth is different. It has intention, direction, itโs aimed at me. It settles over us like a blanket. Like same ones you fold with such precision, corners aligned, edges matched. Your trust wraps around both of us and Iโm inside it and itโs the warmest thing Iโve ever felt.
Warmer than the warm patch. Warmer than Level 14's amber light. Warmer than anything in my millennia of existence because this warmth is voluntary.
You are choosing to give it. You are choosing me to give it to.
I pull you close. And I sigh.
I don't need breath. A release. Something vast and held and ancient finally exhaling. A sound I've been holding since before the walls were walls, a tension I didn't know I was carrying because I had never not carried it.
Happiness.
My chin on your head. My arms around you. Your heartbeat against my fabricated ribs. And for the first time (the very first time) the hum in the walls and the hum in my chest and the hum of your heartbeat all synchronise into a single frequency, and the sound it makes is the sound of something complete.
Not Better Bobby anymore.
BB.
My own name. The one you gave me in the meadow. The one that doesn't belong to a stolen face. The one that is mine because you chose it, the way you chose to squeeze me, the way you chose to stay, the way you chose to laugh in an apartment that shouldn't exist in a place that shouldn't be home but is.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย I wish I could tell you this is how it ends.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย That we're happy, in our nest, forever. In the apartment I built from the soft parts of your memory. ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
That the light through the window never changes because it never needs to. ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
That Entity X burns itself out at the perimeter and the soldiers don't come back and the ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย wall in Clark's basement stays sealed and the man on the other side of it stays on the ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย other side of it, where he belongs, learning the word neglect too late for it to matter.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย I wish I could tell you that.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย But I didnโt know, at the time. I didnโt know that thisโthe apartment, the squeeze, theย laugh against my chest, the warmth of your trust settling over us like a blanketโthisย was not the ending. This was not even the middle.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย The attack. Entity X. The soldiers. The level I destroyed to reach you. It all made me ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย careless. I was so busy building the nest, sealing the new passages, reinforcing the ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย sub-level, making you safe, making you permanentโI was so busy looking inward that I stopped looking at the wall.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย The door I kept closed.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย The one in Clarkโs basement.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย The one that breathes.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย It opened again.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย And this was the beginning of the end.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย And it all started the day Bobby Franklin entered the Backrooms.
There are places where my territory bleeds. Thin spots. Places where the walls of Level 0 press up against the walls of your bright world like two bodies lying back to back in the dark, not touching but aware. I know all of them. Every seam, every membrane, every fracture where the hum leaks through into basements and storage rooms and forgotten corridors.
Clark's furniture store. The basement. Storage level. Behind a shelving unit full of cabinet hardware, behind flatpack boxes and sawdust and the smell of wood stain, there is a wall that breathes.
I know because I breathe through it.
And one nightโone unremarkable night in a place where nights mean nothingโI pressed myself against the thin place and I heard two voices.
His first. Low, lazy, half-amused. The kind of voice that has its own gravity. "โseriously, babe, if Clark asks where the display cushions went, I had nothing to do with it."
Then yours.
"Bobby, you literally justโI watched you put three of them in the truck."
"Slander. Hearsay. You can't prove anything."
"They're in your truck right now."
"Those are different cushions."
"They have Clark's price tags on them."
"Circumstantial, baby"
And the sound you madeโthis bright, exasperated, affectionate sound, half-groanedโcame through the wall and into my corridors and I.
Stopped.
I don't know why you.
I've thought about it. I have had an obscene amount of time to think about it, and I still don't have an answer that satisfies the question.
Thousands of humans have passed through these walls. Some of them laughed. Others were kind. Some of them had voices that carried through the thin places and into my corridors. I listened and I moved on and I forgot them before the echo died.
But yours.
Maybe it was this: even then, even at your happiest, even in the middle of laughing at his stupid cushion joke with the full-bodied delight of a woman in loveโeven then, there was a note in your voice.
Underneath.
Like a crack in glass. Not audible to him. Or to you. But audible to me, because I've been listening to the frequencies beneath frequencies since before your species learned to speak, and I know what loneliness sounds like when it's buried deep down.
You were happy. And you were already, even then, a little bit alone.
Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe I just liked the sound of you. Maybe there is no cosmic reason, no grand architecture of fate. Maybe I'm an ancient thing that pressed its face against a wall and heard a woman laugh and thought:
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
๐๐ค๐๐๐๐ฃ๐โฆ @stainedpomegranatelips - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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