I enjoy reading fanfics p.s. I don't own any of the artwork or fanfics when I reblog or the fanfics I write the characters or anything else involving them and storylines do not belong to me and Kuai Liang is ma hubby 💖💖: chicana & bi 🇲🇽🇲🇽 CHILDREN DO NOT INTERACT YOU WILL BE BLOCKED: 25 yr fem
kat can we js maybe get some more info on bobby filming him and companion getting freaky? ik we’re getting the camboy bobby fic next week but can we perchance get some canon crumbs in the meantime?
"Don't move."
Bobby's voice comes from behind the viewfinder. Low, warm. That particular register he drops into when he's working. Focused, unhurried, every word spoken with the same precision he gives to framing a shot.
You're on the bed. His bed. In his crop top, that grey one he often wears, soft from a hundred washes, hanging off your shoulder because Bobby runs broader than you and the neckline won't stay put. Cotton and underwear and nothing else. Late afternoon light cuts across the sheets in amber slats, catching the fine hair on your bare thighs.
The red light on junior terrence blinks. Steady. Patient.
"Bobby—"
"Shh. You're perfect. Don't move."
You're not perfect. You're self-conscious and warm-cheeked and your hands keep fidgeting against the sheets because you don't know what to do with them when they're being watched. You tug the hem of the crop top down, but it rides up again immediately.
Bobby lowers the camera. Just enough that you can see his eyes over the top. Pale. Amused. Heated. And that look. The one that says he's noticed your nervousness and found it endearing and is about to dismantle it at his own pace.
"Stop pulling at it."
"It's riding up," you shoot back defensively.
"I know." The corner of his mouth twitches. "That's the point."
He crosses to the bed. Camera still in one hand, still rolling, the red light tracking his movement. He settles on the edge, close enough that you can smell him. Soap and skin and the faint warm musk underneath that you've never been able to name and have never stopped wanting to bury your face in.
"You're tense, baby." His free hand finds your ankle. Wraps around it. His thumb presses into the soft skin above the bone, tracing a circle that sends a ripple up your calf. "I can see it through the lens. Your shoulders are up by your ears."
You shoot him a glare. "Maybe because there's a camera pointed at me."
"There's always a camera pointed at you," he drawls lazily. "You just don't usually know about it."
"Bobby."
"Kidding." He's not kidding. The slight smirk says he's not kidding. His hand slides from your ankle to your shin. Unhurried. The pad of his thumb dragging along the bone. Over your knee. The soft inside of your thigh, where the skin is thinner and the touch registers twice as loud. Your breath catches, making his smirk deepen.
"There," he murmurs, his voice going husky. "That's better. Shoulders are dropping."
He brings the camera back up. Frames you with one hand while the other continues its path. Your thigh first, then your hip, the strip of bare stomach between the hem of the crop top and the waistband of your underwear.
Bobby's palm settles flat against your belly. Warm. Broad. Fingers spread, spanning the distance between your hip bones, and the weight of his hand on your stomach does something to you that you couldn't explain if someone paid you. Grounding. Possessive. The kind of touch that says "this is mine" without saying anything at all and you feel your insides coil in response.
"Breathe," he says from behind the camera.
You breathe. Or try to. Your stomach rises against his palm and his fingers ride the swell of it, the red light blinking and you stop thinking about the lens. Start thinking about his hand instead. The roughness of his palm. The way his pinky grazes the elastic of your underwear with each exhale. An accident. Maybe an accident.
His hand slides up. Across your ribs and you flinch, ticklish, and Bobby hums a laugh through his nose without lowering the camera. Over the bunched cotton of the crop top. And then his palm cups your breast through the fabric. Not squeezing. Holding. The weight of you resting in his hand, his thumb brushing across your nipple through worn grey cotton, and the sound you make is barely a sound at all. A shift in your breathing. A softening, too needy and wanting.
"Yeah," Bobby breathes. The camera is steady in his grip. His hand is steady on it. His voice is decidedly not steady. Not at all. "Just like that, baby. Stay right there."
Your head tips back against the pillow, your eyes fluttering closed. His thumb traces a circle through the cotton and your lips part and you hear the viewfinder click. Bobby adjusting the focus, tightening the shot, because your face just did something worth capturing and Bobby Franklin never misses the shot.
"You have no idea," he says roughly. Quiet. His hand on your breast and the camera drinking you in. "No idea what you look like right now."
Your hand finds his wrist. Not pulling him away, holding him there. Your fingers wrap around the bones of him, pressing his palm tighter against you, and the gesture says what your voice won't: stay. keep touching. keep looking. I'm not nervous anymore.
Bobby swallows, and you hear the wet gulp of it. The click of his throat behind the camera.
"Gonna be the death of me," he mutters under his breath.
You smile at that, eyes still closed. He palms your breast with a hungry little sound, the amber light still painting stripes across the sheets.
You stop pulling at the crop top.
It rides up again. And this time, Bobby films every inch.
Reading BB's interlude put a thought in my head and I can't stop spinning it around - Do you think BB would ever try shape shifting into the Companion? He's spent so much time studying and loving and etching her into himself that it shouldn't take long to build the body.
Would he ever try it to feel closer to her, to live in her skin the only way he can? The only act of consumption that leaves her whole? It's not that he wants to use it often, he wants to be with her not be her, but on days he needs to feel closer to her than any human can comprehend does he carve her around the pit of him and feel her smile and laugh and voice and heartbeat?
How does the Companion feel about this? What might it force her to confront, good and bad?
(How does Bobby feel about it?)
((Thank you so much for sharing your creativity with us!!))
yes. he does this.
he would never tell you. he would never, in a thousand years of dark, volunteer this information. this is bb's most private act. more private than the humming, which is at least partially for you. more private than the eye shift, which he's learned to share.
this is something he does alone, in the deep hours when you're sleeping and the backrooms are at their quietest and the only sound is your breathing and the vast ancient ache of wanting to be closer to you than physics allows.
because that's the thing. bb can hold you. can curl around you. can press his face into your hair and sync his breathing to yours and wrap himself around you until there's no space between his body and your body. but there's still a boundary. still skin. the membrane between "him" and "you" that no amount of proximity can dissolve. he can be against you. he can be around you. he cannot be IN you the way he wants, which is total, structural, molecular. he wants to know you the way he knows level 0. from the inside, completely. as something he inhabits rather than something he holds.
and he can.
it takes him less time than bobby's template did. he's been studying you for longer. every expression, every gesture, the way your body moves through space. the way your weight shifts when you're tired. the way your hands move when you're talking. the exact curl of your mouth when you're trying not to laugh. the sound of your heartbeat, which he's memorised at every tempo, resting and sleeping and frightened and aroused and laughing.
he knows the shape of you better than any human has ever known another human because he's been running a constant passive scan of your entire being since the day you arrived and he has never once stopped.
so on those nights (the ones where the ache is too big, where wanting you has exceeded the capacity of the bobby suit to contain it) he waits until you're deep asleep. he untangles himself from you carefully. moves to the far end of the nest where the light is dimmest. and he shifts.
there's nothing fast or casual about this act. bb does it reverently. the way you'd put on someone else's clothes, someone you love, just to feel them around you.
bobby's features smooth and soften. the jaw rounds. the shoulders narrow. the bone structure beneath his skin reorganises itself along lines he knows by heart (by whatever he has instead of a heart) and when it's done he's sitting in the dark wearing your face.
your hands. he looks at your hands on the ends of his arms and flexes the fingers and they move exactly the way yours move. he touches his own face (your face) and feels the cheekbones and the jaw and the softness of the skin at your temple where he presses his lips when you're falling asleep. he breathes and the breath sounds like your breath. he makes a sound and it comes out in your voice.
and the feeling... the feeling is what drives him back to this again and again on the worst nights. because when he wears your shape something happens to his internal experience that he has no language for. it's not sexual. it's not possessive. it's closer to prayer. he feels your heartbeat (the one he built, the simulated one, thumping in the chest he constructed from memory) and for a few minutes he understands what it is to be alive the way you're alive. warm. finite. fragile. a body that runs on blood and electricity and will someday stop unless it stays here.
he feels the mortality of you like wearing a coat in a cold room and it's the most sacred thing he has ever experienced.
he sits in the dark wearing your skin and cries.
not real tears. he doesn't have the biology for real tears. but something happens to the face (your face) a contortion, a crumbling, the arrangement of features that humans make when grief and love exceed the body's ability to process them.
and the sound that comes out of your throat is a sob that doesn't have tears behind it but has everything else, the raw agony of feeling. the weight of centuries of agonising loneliness. the staggering, incomprehensible gratitude of having found you. the terror of losing you. the knowledge that he loves you in a way your species doesn't have a word for and this (wearing you, being you for a few minutes in the dark) is the closest he will ever come to expressing it fully.
he shifts back before you wake. always before you wake. slips back into the bobby suit and curls around you and you never know. you never know that the thing holding you spent the small hours of the morning wearing your smile in the dark and weeping without tears.
until you find out.
because you do find out. eventually. maybe you wake up earlier than usual. maybe you surface from a dream and through half-closed eyes you see a figure in the dim corner of the nest and the figure has your hair and your shoulders and your profile and for one freezing, disorienting second you think you're looking at yourself from outside your own body.
then the figure turns. and your face looks at you from across the nest with eyes that are black and the expression on your own features is one you've never seen in a mirror. raw. open. shattered with something too big to name.
and bb shifts back so fast the air cracks. bobby's face slamming into place like a door thrown shut. he's pressed against the far wall of the nest, as far from you as he can get, and his eyes are wide and terrified in a way that the howlers never made them and the soldiers never made them and nothing in the backrooms has ever made them because nothing in the backrooms ever caught him doing this.
"that wasn't—" his voice is wrecked. "I wasn't—it's not what—"
and you have to sit with it.
you have to sit in the nest with the echo of your own face looking at you from someone else's body and figure out what you feel about it. and what you feel is complicated and layered and doesn't resolve into a single emotion no matter how hard you try.
there's a flinch. honesty demands that. there's a visceral animal flinch at seeing yourself worn by something else, the same uncanny valley that bb's whole existence occupies but turned inward, pointed at you. he's been wearing bobby's face for months and you've made peace with that but this is different. this is your face. your body. the specific proportions of you reproduced without your knowledge or consent while you slept and the violation of it (the intimacy of it, the invasion of it) sits in your stomach like cold water.
but underneath the flinch there's something else.
something that you recognise because you've felt it before, in smaller doses, every time bb reveals something about the depth of his need for you. the teeth tracing. the purring. those were all versions of the same thing. an entity so overwhelmed by wanting you that it exceeds the available methods of expression.
the teeth because mouths aren't enough. the purring because words aren't enough. and this. wearing you. because holding you isn't enough. because even inside you isn't enough. because the only way to be close enough is to become you and even that isn't enough, not really, because he's in your shape but he's still him, still separate, still on the wrong side of the boundary between self and other.
he wasn't stealing you. he was trying to understand you. the way a reader reads a book by becoming the character for a while. the way a musician plays a song by letting it inhabit their body. the only act of consumption that leaves the original whole.
"how long?" you ask quietly, sitting in the nest. not moving toward him, not moving away.
"since—" he swallows. bobby's face doing the guilt expression that looks wrong on him because bb doesn't usually do guilt. "since the beginning. not—not often. just when I—"
"when you what?"
"when I miss you. even though you're right here. when being next to you isn't—when I need to be closer than next to."
and there it is. the thing that makes you not run. the thing that makes you sit in the discomfort and the flinch and the cold-water feeling and stay.
because you understand "when being next to you isn't enough." you understand it because you've felt it. because you crawled under his hoodie and pressed your face against his bare stomach because outside his clothes wasn't close enough. because you traced his teeth and bit his cheek and burrowed into his rib cage because the distance between your body and his body, even when that distance was millimeters, was too much.
you've been trying to get inside him for months.
he's been putting you on.
same impulse. different anatomy.
"did it help?" you ask.
bb looks at you. those pale eyes. bobby's blue, the mask firmly in place, but something broken moving behind them.
"I could feel your heartbeat," he says. barely a whisper. "from the inside. I could feel what it's like to be alive the way you're alive."
you cross the nest. you sit in front of him. he flinches when you reach for his face but you hold his jaw the way he held yours (steady, certain) and you look at him.
"show me," you say.
"what?"
"show me. what I look like. on you."
and the fear on his face. the terror that this is a test, a trap, that you're asking so you can see how horrifying it is and leave. that cracks against the hope that you're asking because you want to see him. all of him. even this.
he shifts. slowly. watching your face the entire time. bobby's features softening, rounding, rearranging into yours. and you watch yourself appear on someone else's body. your cheekbones. your mouth. the unique shape of your eyes rendered in a face that isn't quite yours because the eyes behind your features are black and ancient and looking at you with a love so total it distorts the expression into something your mirror has never shown you.
you look beautiful. that's the thought that catches you off guard. you look beautiful on him. not because he's flattering the template (he's precise, exact, every flaw and asymmetry faithfully reproduced) but because the expression he's wearing on your face is one of such naked adoration that it transforms the features. you've never seen yourself look like that.
you've never seen yourself look loved from the outside.
you kiss your own mouth.
it's the strangest thing you've ever done. your lips against your own lips, except the temperature is wrong and the stillness behind them is wrong and the person kissing you back is ancient and terrified and so grateful you didn't leave that his whole body is shaking. you taste your own mouth and it tastes like cold stone and bb and the mineral sweetness of something that isn't human trying its best.
you pull back. look at your own face looking at you with black eyes and trembling lips.
"come back," you whisper. "I like your face better."
bb shifts back. bobby's features returning. and the relief on his face (on bobby's face, on the face he chose) is so vast it's almost physical.
you pull him into you. hold his head against your chest. press his ear over your heartbeat.
"you can feel it from here," you murmur gently into his hair. "you don't have to wear me to feel it. you can just ask. i'll let you listen whenever you want."
he wraps his arms around you and holds on and the sound he makes is the sound from the dark, the one he made while wearing your shape, except now it has somewhere to go. it goes into your chest. into your heartbeat. into the space between your ribs where he's always wanted to live.
and bobby.
bobby finds out eventually. maybe you tell him. maybe bb tells him. maybe bobby just looks at bb one morning over the pointless coffee and says "you do the thing with her face too, don't you?" with the flat resignation of a man who's stopped being surprised by anything his eldritch roommate does.
and bobby's reaction is... complicated. because bobby has had months to make peace with bb wearing his face. that's old news. weird, violating, but processed. filed under "shit I can't change." but hearing that bb also wears YOUR face hits different. hits somewhere deeper. somewhere that isn't about bobby's ego but about bobby's love.
because bobby has looked at your face more than any other face in the world. bobby has photographed your face and filmed your face and traced your face in the dark and memorised your face the way he memorises every shot worth keeping. your face belongs to bobby's personal gallery of things worth preserving. and knowing that bb can just. put it on. wear it like a coat. reproduce every detail and then sit in the dark BEING you while you sleep—
"does he get it right?" bobby asks. not looking at you. looking at the wall. his jaw doing the thing.
"get what right?"
"your face. when he—does he get it right? the—" he gestures vaguely at his own face. "the dimple. the one you have. here." he touches a spot with his finer gently. the spot that you've never liked and bobby has never stopped looking at.
"I don't know. I only saw it once."
bobby is quiet for a long time.
"he better get the dimple right," he grumbles to the wall.
and that's all he says about it. but later that night when the three of you are in bed and you're falling asleep between them, bobby's thumb finds the spot the dimple usually folds. traces it. presses it gently like he's making sure it's still there. like he's confirming that the original still has the details the copy might have missed.
bb, on your other side, watches bobby's thumb on your dimple and files the location away in whatever vast meticulous archive he maintains.
the next time he shifts (weeks later, alone, in the dark, just for a moment) the dimple is there.
it was always there. he never missed it. he's been looking at it with same adoration bobby has.
but now he presses it, the way bobby pressed it, and the gesture means something different on bb's borrowed fingers. it means: I see what he sees. I love what he loves. even the smallest things. especially the smallest things.
Heyyy, out of curiosity, do you think that real!Bobby and BB could ever tolerate each other for reader's sake? I feel that the two of them are always pitted against each other as the ultimate love rivals but I picture their dynamic possibly being one of terrified boy vs jealous eldritch thing? Just wanted to know your thoughts!
dear anon you might want to scroll back about a day because we’ve been LIVING in the poly verse and the answer is not only can they tolerate each other, they’re already making each other coffee and sharing a bed.
but to your actual question. the “terrified boy vs jealous eldritch thing” framing is where i think a lot of people start and it’s not wrong exactly but it’s kinda incomplete. because yes, on the surface that’s the dynamic. bobby is a twenty-two-year-old human being confronted with an ancient apex predator wearing his face. bb is a possessive entity watching the girl he claimed interact with the template he built himself from. terrified vs jealous. prey vs predator. simple. right?
not exactly. it’s not simple because neither of them stays in that box.
bobby isn’t terrified. bobby is a lot of things (avoidant, emotionally constipated, stubborn to the point of self-destruction) but he’s not afraid of bb. not in the way you’d expect. bobby stood at a wall in a basement for months because he knew something was off. bobby’s fear response has been completely recalibrated by love and what came out the other end isn’t bravery exactly, it’s something more like stubbornness so intense it overrides self-preservation.
bb could flash the black eyes and the void and the ancient terrible otherness and bobby would just. look at him. jaw tight. unimpressed. because bobby has already faced the worst thing he can imagine (losing you) and survived it, and after that an eldritch horror in his kitchen is just tuesday.
and bb isn’t just jealous. bb’s feelings about bobby are so layered they’d need their own dossier. resentment, yes. envy, yes. but also fascination. also grudging respect. also something dangerously close to recognition.
because bb built himself out of bobby. every gesture, every expression, every inflection. bb studied bobby the way a painter studies a master. and now he’s standing across from the original and the original is flawed and messy and inconsistent and somehow still the thing you reach for with hunger in your hands and bb doesn’t understand that. bb wants to understand that. what does bobby have that bb doesn’t? what is it about imperfection that makes you lean in harder?
and that’s where the learning starts.
because they’re mirrors. they were always mirrors. two sides of the same coin stamped with the same face. and the thing about mirrors is they show you what you can’t see on your own.
bobby looks at bb and sees everything he’s afraid of becoming: too intense, too fixated, too much.
the version of love that doesn’t have an off switch. the devotion that frightens him because it looks like his own feelings turned up to a volume he won’t allow himself. bb is bobby’s love without the governor. without the avoidance. without the fear of becoming his father. and that’s terrifying not because bb is a monster but because bb is what bobby would be if he ever stopped holding back.
bb looks at bobby and sees everything he can’t replicate: the imperfection that you love. the crack in the laugh. the grumble that means i love you. the way bobby can hurt and repair and grow in ways that bb’s static perfection doesn’t allow. bobby is a rough draft that keeps revising itself and somehow every revision makes you love it more and bb, who was built to be the final copy, can’t figure out why the draft is more compelling than the finished product.
so what bobby can learn from bb: how to show up. how to stop flinching from his own intensity. how to love without the emergency brake on. bb loves with his whole chest and it’s excessive and it’s overwhelming and it’s everything bobby has been terrified of doing since his dad’s affair taught him that depth is dangerous. watching bb love you without apology might be the thing that finally teaches bobby that holding back isn’t protection. it’s just loss in slow motion.
and what bb can learn from bobby: how to be a self. not a mirror. not a copy. not a reflection of someone else’s want. bobby is messy and flawed and entirely, irreducibly himself. he didn’t choose his personality from a catalogue. he didn’t build himself to specification. he just grew, chaotically, in all directions, and the result is a person. a real person. with a laugh he hates and hands that shake and a love that fails and tries again. bb has never failed at anything because bb was designed not to. learning to fail (learning that failure doesn’t mean obsolescence, doesn’t mean you’ll stop loving him) might be the most human thing bb ever does.
they’re not rivals. they were never supposed to be rivals in traditional sense. they’re two halves of something that needed both of them to be complete. the boy who loves you and can’t show it and the thing that loves you and can’t stop showing it. put them in the same room and they don’t cancel each other out.
they fill each other’s gaps.
it just takes them a while to stop sulking long enough to notice!
this is how i imagine BB when hes smiling especially when the bw filter makes his eyes look almost fully black
oh that grin. bb doesn’t have a filter. when bb is happy his whole face commits to it with the unguarded totality of something that only recently learned what happiness even feels like.
because that’s the thing that makes these moments so devastating and yet so beautiful. bb’s emotional vocabulary for most of his existence was: dark. quiet. hum. wait. hunt. alone. that was it. that was the full catalogue. centuries of existence and the range was basically “nothing” to “violence” with very little in between. he didn’t know what warmth was until you touched him. he didn’t know what comfort was until he made you the nest. he didn’t know what “baby” could do to whatever he has instead of a nervous system until you said it by accident in a hallway.
and he didn’t know what giddy was until you laughed.
because your laugh does something to him that he has no explanation for. it’s not the pleased-feline thing. it’s not the low rumble. instead something lighter than that. something that bubbles. you say something stupid, or he says something that he didn’t know was funny until your face cracks open and the sound comes out, and his whole body responds like a tuning fork struck at exactly the right frequency. something in his chest lifts. actually lifts. like a physical sensation of upward movement in a body that doesn’t obey physics.
and he grins.
not the bobby smile. not the careful template expression he wears in public. this is bb’s grin. bb’s OWN grin. wider than bobby’s. less symmetrical. more teeth, including the canines that are just slightly too sharp, just slightly too long, visible when his mouth opens that wide. it’s a grin that shouldn’t be as warm as it is given that it’s on the face of an apex predator but it is warm, it’s so warm, because there’s nothing calculated behind it. no performance. no mask. just… joy. raw and new and enormous in a body that’s only recently discovered it exists.
and you see it and you’re delighted. because THAT’S the face. that’s the one that’s entirely his. not borrowed from bobby. not replicated from observation. that grin belongs to bb and bb alone and when you see it your whole face lights up and you laugh again. not at the original joke anymore but at him, at his happiness, at the sheer improbable sight of an ancient eldritch entity beaming like a kid on christmas morning.
and he sees you light up and it feeds back. your delight makes him more delighted. his delight makes you more delighted. you’re caught in a loop, a feedback cycle, a closed circuit of mutual joy that keeps amplifying. you’re laughing and he’s grinning and you’re laughing harder because he’s grinning and his grin gets wider because you’re laughing and somewhere in this loop his eyes go black.
not the dangerous black. not the void. the other one. the one that means the mask has dropped completely, the bobby-blue retreating because the feeling is too big for the costume. his eyes go dark and deep and warm in a way that black shouldn’t be able to be warm but is, because what’s behind them right now isn’t ancient emptiness. it’s ancient emptiness that has been filled for the first time.
and the purring starts. that low chest-rumble that you feel more than hear. and he can’t not touch you. physically cannot maintain distance. his hands find you (your arm, your waist, your face) and he pulls you close, pulls you into him, nuzzles against your temple with his nose cool against your skin and he’s practically vibrating. the whole room is vibrating. the lights are doing the warm thing. because his girl is laughing and he made her laugh and she’s happy and her happiness is doing something to his chemistry that he doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to stop.
“you’re purring,” you say, still giggling, your face pressed against his chest.
“i know.” he doesn’t care. he’s past caring. his arms tighten around you and he presses his grin (that wide, too-toothy, entirely-his grin) into your hair.
and you can feel him learning it. in real time. you can feel him expanding. every laugh, every loop, every moment of uncomplicated joy is stretching the edges of what he’s capable of feeling. his emotional range used to be a hallway. long and narrow and fluorescent. you’re turning it into a room. then a house. then something bigger. something with windows and sunlight.
he’s learning that happiness doesn’t have to be earned through vigilance. that joy isn’t a trap. that the feeling rising in his chest when you laugh isn’t a malfunction, it’s the whole point. it’s what all of this (the face, the name, the nest, the staying) has been building toward.
not the quiet contentment of having you near. not the territorial satisfaction of keeping you safe. this. the giddy stupid loop of making someone laugh and being made happy by their happiness and letting that happiness make them happier and round and round and round.
he grins into your hair. black eyes. sharp canines. chest rumbling. arms full of you.
pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby (bb). (j u s t u s .)
contents/warnings: 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. what happened to the thing in the corridor d̶o̶n̶'t w o r r y a b o u t i t , 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. I don't mind. I like that you're curious about me. I like that you're still reading. Stay a while.
this is a love story this is a y o u a l r e a d y k n o w w h a t t h i s i s .
📹 [better bobby series masterlist.] everything you need is right here.
You're here again.
Good.
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. They’ve 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.
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 night—one unremarkable night in a place where nights mean nothing—I 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. "—seriously, babe, if Clark asks where the display cushions went, I had nothing to do with it."
Then yours.
"Bobby, you literally just—I 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 made—this bright, exasperated, affectionate sound, half-groaned—came 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 love—even 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 there—brighter, 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 skin—babe, c'mere, let me touch you; fuck, you smell so good—and 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 alone—truly, structurally, cosmically alone—for longer than your species has existed, that closeness was.
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 that’s 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 actually—he'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 I—
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, wasn’t 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 work—boxes 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 then—
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 wouldn’t 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 armour—
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 beautiful—I have had millennia of silence, I am sick of silence—but 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 couldn’t steal you. You had to walk through yourself, you had to choose. I waited, I waited so long—
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 I—I 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 is—
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 eyes—those hurt, furious, exhausted eyes—and I thought about the anger buried under your kindness and I thought: she’s 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. She’s 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 get—
"What are you?"
"Something that lives here."
"What—what does that—" 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. I’m 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 startle—"oh, no, sorry, I was just—" 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, feel…), 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 some—
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 feel—
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 felt—
I felt—
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 things—build, fight, breed, die—and 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't—I've never—"
"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 first—my weight distribution is a predator's, designed for stillness and sudden violence, not for swaying—but 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.
I—
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 I’ve 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 you’ve 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 make—a small, satisfied, almost feline sound—is a warm sound that makes me want to wrap around you and feel your warmth.
The way you argue with the notebook. I’ve 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 name—BB—for 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 me—when you really smile, the full one, the one that reaches your eyes—the corridors get brighter. The fluorescents burn a half-shade warmer because I can’t 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 haven’t told you yet, but will, soon.
You haven't noticed yet because you haven’t 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 ending… 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. They’re creatures that realise they’re no longer in their native environment. They run. They hide. Form their little groups. They forage and guard and survive and occasionally, if they’re very clever or very lucky, they find their way back.
They’re intruders. Uninvited. The Backrooms tolerate them the way a body tolerates a splinter—with 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 Backrooms—the structure itself, the living system that I am part of and that is part of me—the Backrooms accepted you.
Do you understand what that means?
It means you are not being expelled. You’re not just being tolerated. You’re 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 feel—not 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 comes—the real Bobby, the original, the one who wasted you—and 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.
You’re 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 clearly because I am not human and I do not have the instinct to pretty up my ugliest truths:
I resent Bobby Franklin.
Not because he had you.
Because he had you and he
w
a
s
t
e
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 to—
Bobby Franklin
Bobby Franklin
Bobby Franklin
Bobby Franklin
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 know—oh, this one is the sharpest, this one has edges—
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 wearing—that 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 I’m on the other side. Holding you. Wearing his face. Listening to him learn the word for what he did to you.
I don't tell you he's there.
I don't tell 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-Stealers—all 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. You’re 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 I’m 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 there’s no words for what I do in any language you understand. Let’s 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
tear
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."
You close them. Your eyelashes against my palm.
I look at the Smiler. Eight feet away. Grinning.
I let the face go completely.
.
.
.
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 — perimeter — 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. It’s new. It’s powerful in a way I’ve never felt. It’s something I have not encountered in all my millennia of existence, and that—for a being that is this place—is, is, is…
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. It’s 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.
I’m two hundred and ten levels away when I hear you scream.
My name, my name, my name, screamed in terror and in pain—
"BB—"
And the walls move.
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. It’s 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 am—I 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 face—your beautiful, strange, bewildering face that smiles at me—is pressed into the wet carpet and there are tear tracks cutting through the blood and you are afraid—
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 you—
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
s̷̬̈n̵̰̾a̸̝͂r̷̖̓ḷ̶̈́ǐ̷͇ǹ̵̙g̷̭̉.̸̘͝
It takes less than a minute.
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. I’m 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 wish—would give anything, anything, anything—to 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. "Just—for 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 mind—gently, so gently, the way you'd reach into still water to retrieve something resting on the bottom—and 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 it’s 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 is—" 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 lip—your split lip, still healing, the proof of what they did to you—curves 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 is—
You squeeze me the way you squeeze something you’re 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 you’re 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, it’s 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 I’m inside it and it’s the warmest thing I’ve 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.
My own being. My own—
(yours.)
(I love you.)
(I fear I might do until I cease to exist.)
I wish I could tell you this is how it ends.
That we're happy, in our nest, forever. In the apartment I built from the soft parts of your memory.
That the light through the window never changes because it never needs to.
That Entity X burns itself out at the perimeter and the soldiers don't come back and the wall in Clark's basement stays sealed and the man on the other side of it stays on the other side of it, where he belongs, learning the word neglect too late for it to matter.
I wish I could tell you that.
But I didn’t know, at the time. I didn’t know that this—the apartment, the squeeze, the laugh against my chest, the warmth of your trust settling over us like a blanket—this was not the ending. This was not even the middle.
The attack. Entity X. The soldiers. The level I destroyed to reach you. It all made me careless. I was so busy building the nest, sealing the new passages, reinforcing the sub-level, making you safe, making you permanent—I was so busy looking inward that I stopped looking at the wall.
The door I kept closed.
The one in Clark’s basement.
The one that breathes.
It opened again.
And this was the beginning of the end.
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 night—one unremarkable night in a place where nights mean nothing—I 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. "—seriously, babe, if Clark asks where the display cushions went, I had nothing to do with it."
Then yours.
"Bobby, you literally just—I 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 made—this bright, exasperated, affectionate sound, half-groaned—came 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 love—even 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:
was there a specific event that caused Bobby to get scared to the point he started pulling back, after several years together? Sometimes I feel like something specific had to have happened that made him realize even more how real this was and spooked him.
okay so I love this because this question really cracks bobby’s whole character wide open and i’m glad someone finally asked it because the answer is so painfully, stupidly human it makes me want to shake him.
because yes. bobby has always been avoidant type. that’s baseline bobby. the cool guy act, the deflection, the humour-as-armour thing. he came pre-installed with that software. but there’s a difference between avoidant-as-personality-trait and avoidant-as-active-withdrawal, and something tipped him from one into the other.
his dad.
bobby found out his father had been cheating on his mother. not a one-time thing. not a drunken mistake. years. plural. sustained, deliberate, ongoing infidelity that had been running underneath the surface of his parents’ marriage like rot under floorboards. and the worst part (the part that really did the damage) wasn’t the affair itself. it was the justification. his dad didn’t grovel. didn’t break down. just shrugged the emotional equivalent of a shrug and said “we drifted apart. i needed someone.”
drifted apart.
and bobby remembers his parents in love. not perfect love. not movie love. messy, loud, human love, the kind that slams doors and makes up in the kitchen and embarrasses you in front of your friends. real love. the kind you look at as a kid and think “okay, so that’s what it looks like”. bobby hears “drifted apart” and something in him shifted.
because if THAT can fail. if two people who loved each other the way he remembers his parents loving each other can just. drift. slowly, imperceptibly, the way a boat drifts when nobody’s watching the anchor… then what’s stopping it from happening to him? what’s the mechanism? where’s the tripwire? at what point does love go from “i would die for you” to “i needed someone” said with a shrug over a kitchen table?
and the answer he arrives at (the wrong answer, the answer that breaks everything) is: depth. his father got too deep. felt too much just like bobby does. he built too much. and when it started to erode he didn’t have anywhere to stand that wasn’t already underwater. so bobby’s young, idiot brain does the math and concludes that the solution is to not get that deep. keep a foot on solid ground. love her but don’t need her. want her but don’t depend on wanting her. stay where you can see the shore.
he thinks he’s protecting himself. he thinks (and this is perhaps the saddest part) he’s protecting you too. because if he doesn’t build it up too high then it can’t fall as far. if he stays steady, stays level, doesn’t let the intensity run away with him, then he’ll never become his father. he’ll never be the guy at the kitchen table shrugging about how love just wasn’t enough anymore. the less he invests, the less there is to lose, and the less there is to lose, the less he can hurt you when it inevitably goes wrong. because it will go wrong. his dad proved it goes wrong. love has an expiration date and bobby is just trying to manage the inevitable.
and here’s where it gets really sad. because bobby’s avoidance was always a thing, right? but it used to have cracks. YOU were the crack. you were literally the only area of his life where the cool-guy act would just fall apart. wanting you was so strong, so fundamental, that he couldn’t maintain the mask around it. he’d slip. he’d reach for you in his sleep. he’d say something unguarded and raw and then immediately try to walk it back and you’d already heard it. and he’d be standing there exposed and furious at himself and so obviously, desperately in love that terrence would look at you both and roll his eyes because everyone could see it. everyone could see it except bobby, who was too busy trying to be cool about the most uncool feeling he’d ever had.
the dad thing gave him permission to put the mask back on. that’s what it really did. it didn’t make him love you less. it gave him a framework for treating his own love as a liability instead of a gift. “see? this is what happens when you let yourself feel it all the way. you become dad. you drift. you cheat. you shrug at a kitchen table.” and so the mask goes back on and this time it stays and the cracks seal over and he doesn’t even notice it happening because that’s the thing about drifting… you don’t notice. by definition. you don’t feel the anchor slip. you just look up one day and the shore is very far away and you can’t remember when you stopped swimming.
and he got comfortable. that’s the other half of it and honestly it’s almost worse than the fear because at least the fear is big. the comfort is just. well, ordinary. you got together young. you stayed together. that’s rare and beautiful and also incredibly dangerous because it means there’s no reference point. bobby doesn’t know what a relationship looks like after the honeymoon phase because this is his only one. he doesn’t know the difference between “settling into something sustainable” and “taking someone for granted” because he’s never seen the distinction modelled by anyone except his parents. who drifted.
so when he starts reaching for other things instead of reaching for you, he doesn’t register it as a choice. it’s just tuesday. when he stops asking follow-up questions, he doesn’t register it as withdrawal. you’re still there. you’ll always be there. you’ve been there since junior year and you’ll be there tomorrow and the stability of that (the reliability of you) becomes the thing he leans on instead of the thing he tends to. you become furniture. beloved furniture. furniture he can’t imagine the room without. but furniture doesn’t need to be looked at every day. furniture just stays.
and that’s it. that’s the whole tragedy. it’s not malice. it’s not boredom. it’s not falling out of love. it’s a boy who watched love fail his parents and decided the safest thing to do was stop holding it so tightly, and by the time he realised he’d loosened his grip too far you were already gone. through a door that shouldn’t exist. following a voice that sounded like his but paid attention.
the thing that makes bobby such a good character (and the thing that makes the bb dynamic actually work) is that he’s not a villain. he’s a cautionary tale. he’s the answer to the question “what happens when someone loves you but is too afraid of their own love to let it be big?” and the answer is: someone else shows up who isn’t afraid. someone else shows up who has never seen love fail because he’s never seen love at all. and that someone holds it with both hands and never flinches and never drifts and never looks away.
bb didn’t learn to love from bobby. bb learned what NOT to do from bobby.
Cue the *dead wife* montage of Companion thinking about her baby Bobby mournfully in the backrooms. It used to be so gooddddddddd.
you're not dead. bobby's not dead. the relationship isn't even technically over. it's just suspended in amber somewhere between the real world and the yellow walls dimension and you can't grieve it properly because there's nothing to grieve. it's just. gone. out of reach. and a part of you cant help and believe it was gone long before you stepped through that wall.
now, the good is just playing on a loop behind your eyes at the worst possible moments.
because it used to be so good.
it's so easy to forget that now. people hear "emotionally neglectful boyfriend" and they fill in the blanks with someone who was always bad and that's not bobby.
bobby was so good at the start it's almost worse. because if he'd always been distant, always been asshole, you'd have nothing to miss. you would have left long ago. but he wasn't. he was golden.
he was the boy who noticed you junior year after you'd transferred in and didn't know a single soul in santa clara and were eating lunch in the hallway because the cafeteria felt like a minefield. and he just. sat down. didn't ask permission. didn't make it weird. just folded himself onto the floor next to you with his tray and said "you're in my english class right?" and that was it. that was the beginning of everything.
and terrence. bobby's best friend since birth practically, the kind of friendship that has its own gravitational field. terrence who looked at you that first lunch break and said "finally someone with taste, bobby's friends are all idiots" and bobby said "you're my only friend" and terrence said "exactly" and you laughed and they both looked at you and you could feel it happening in real time.
their circle expanding from two to three like it had always been waiting for the third point.
the three of you were a unit after that. inseparable. terrence and bobby had their own language, years of shorthand and inside jokes and shared history, yet they folded you into it so seamlessly that by the end of junior year you couldn't remember what it felt like to be the new kid.
friday nights in bobby's place. terrible pizza from the place on el camino. terrence's band practices in his garage where bobby would sit on the amp and you'd sit between his legs on the concrete floor and the music was always too loud and never good (terrence was enthusiastic but deeply untalented and everyone knew it except terrence) and bobby would lean down and say something into your ear, something dry and mean about the guitar tone that you couldn't repeat without laughing. his lips would brush your ear, and you'd be shaking trying to keep it together while terrence wailed through another cover of an 80ties ballad.
and the beach dates. the three of you sometimes but mostly just the two of you, driving out to santa cruz in bobby's shitty car with the windows down and the tape deck playing whatever you'd made him.
you'd sit between his legs on the sand with your back against his chest and he'd have his hands under your hoodie, palms flat against your stomach, chin hooked over your shoulder. warm. always warm. the right temperature. and he'd murmur things into your ear. not sweeet things, not sappy declarations, bobby didn't do declarations. stupid things. observations. "that guy's sunburn is going to have him peeling like an orange." "i think that seagull just pooped in that woman's coke."
things that made you laugh and press back against him and feel his chest vibrate with the silent version of his own laugh. the ocean would be right there and the sun would be on your legs and his hands would be warm under your hoodie and you were so happy you didn't know what to do with it. you didn't believe that happiness like that could ever have a shelf life.
but those are later thoughts. the montage doesn't give you later. the montage gives you the good.
which takes us to the the camera. bobby's camera. his baby. the thing he saved seven months wages to buy. he called it junior terrence ("my second best friend") and terrence the human would flip him off every single time and you'd laugh. bobby would cradle the camera like a newborn and refuse to let anyone breathe near it.
and he was vicious about it. bobby was territorial about very few things in his life but the camera equipment was sacred ground.
clark touched a lens once and bobby reacted like someone had picked up his firstborn by the ankle. terrence (human terrence, senior terrence, original and better terrence, thank you very much) knew better than to even look at junior terrence too long. the darkroom supplies, the film stock, the whole process. sacred. because it was the one thing that was entirely his. not his parents', not the store's, not the town's.
his hands, his eye, his.
and he let you touch all of it.
grumbling. always grumbling. "babe don't touch the—careful with the—do you know how many shifts that cost me—" but never actually stopping you. never taking it away. because the thing about bobby franklin that you figured out is this: he couldn't say i love you. the words physically would not come out of his mouth. but he'd let you pick up the camera. he'd let you turn it on him. he'd grumble and huff and mutter about fingerprints on the lens and then he'd let you take the shot.
that was how bobby said it. in permissions. in the things he let you handle that he wouldn't let anyone else touch.
terrence understood this before you did. you remember him watching you pick up junior terrence once and bobby not reacting and terrence's eyebrows going up and him mouthing "wow" at you behind bobby's back because he'd known bobby since they were seven and he knew exactly what that meant.
and you'd steal shots of him. constantly.
bobby on the floor of his apartment loading film with dust on his fingers and his tongue between his teeth. bobby in the darkroom lit red, so focused the rest of the world could have ended. bobby at the beach with sand on his jaw and the ocean behind him, his eyes squinting against the light looking at you like you were the only thing in the frame worth looking at. bobby mid-laugh.
that laugh.
bobby hated his laugh. genuinely, sincerely hated it. said it was too loud. it came from the back of his throat, from his nose. too sharp. too much. this boy who wore confidence like armour had an insecurity and it was the sound of his own happiness.
so he kept it controlled in public. the smirk. the dry chuckle. the cool-boy half-smile that said "i'm amused but i'm not going to be embarrassing about it."
but you had the real one. the full one. the one that came out when you caught him off guard. said something so stupid or so unexpected that his self-consciousness couldn't catch it in time and it just erupted. loud and bright and completely uncontrolled, his whole face cracking open, eyes scrunching shut, head tipping back.
this sound that was too big for his body and too honest for his personality and terrence would look at you with this expression like "how did you DO that" because even he didn't get the full laugh that often.
your favourite sound in the world. above the ocean, above the music, above everything.
you'd catch it on the polaroid sometimes. bobby mid-laugh with his hand coming up too late to cover his mouth. and he'd say "gimme that" and you'd say "absolutely not" and he'd grumble and let you keep it.
later you'd find it tucked into the frame of his bathroom mirror where he'd see it every morning and he'd never mention it and you'd never mention it and that was bobby franklin's love language. silence. permission. a photograph he pretended to hate placed somewhere he'd see it every day because it was you seeing him.
and that's the montage. that's what plays in your head in the backrooms when the fluorescent light shifts warm for half a second and your brain takes you back. not the neglect. or the slow withdrawal. not the late nights waiting for him to look up from whatever was more interesting than you.
the before. the golden period. bobby on the floor with junior terrence. terrence the human butchering classic rock in a garage. three kids on the floor of an apartment eating terrible, cold pizza and arguing about nothing and everything. the beach and his hands under your hoodie. the murmuring.
the weight of the camera in your hands and the permission in it and the way he flinched from his own laugh but let you keep the evidence of it.
and bb can't replicate any of it. bb can be better in a thousand ways (more present, more consistent, more attentive, more everything) but he can't give you bobby grumbling "don't touch my shit" in a voice that meant "you're the only person i trust with the things that matter to me."
he can't give you terrence's eyebrows behind bobby's back. he can't give you the garage or the bad music and the sharp whispered commentary against your ear. he can't give you the beach. his hands are always cold. the things he murmurs are careful, considered.
bb doesn't murmur stupid observations about strangers' sunburns because bb has never seen a stranger's sunburn, has never seen the ocean, never sat on warm sand with a girl and let himself be careless.
you miss the garage. you miss the terrible acoustics and the bad pizza and the boy who couldn't say it out loud but said it every time he let you hold some piece of him. you miss terrence calling you both idiots. you miss junior year when the circle opened up and let you in and everything was loud and messy and imperfect and real.
some things only exist in the real world. some things only exist in 1985 in santa clara with golden afternoon light and a boy on the floor and his best friend murdering a guitar solo in the garage next door.
and you miss it. god you miss it. not because bb isn't enough. but because enough isn't the same as that. nothing is the same as that. nothing will ever be the same as that boy with that laugh you fell in love with in that golden light letting you steal his camera because he loved you too much to say it but just enough to show it.
it used to be so good. and then it wasn't. and now you're here.
and somewhere in santa clara, in a bathroom in a shitty apartment, a polaroid of a boy mid-laugh is still tucked into the frame of a mirror.
time to pick your brain kat!! so the seven embed into companion at points in order to make her body 'habitable' for offspring with bb. obvs the sex be sexing and they need to fuck many a time to make the seed take/feed the baby. but is the seven the only way bb can feel as close to sexual attraction/arousal as he can? are they already embedded in companion since we can expect monsterfucking soon? or is there another reason he feels prepared/up for sex as a concept? is it less arousal and more a need for closeness to companion? (sorry for asking questions you may answer in the coming parts but I;m so curious!!)
He can and absolutely would have normie human sex with you (more on this soon, writing those hdcs as we speak and gonna post them later), and it’s very much affection/closeness based for him.
In that sense, I guess you could genuinely say he’s a bit demisexual (if human labels can be applied to ancient Eldritch beings 😭). Attraction isn’t something he experienced until you came along and bonded with him.
And no! Seven aren’t in you right now. And that’s because when it comes to BB, it’s basically as close to marriage as someone like him understands/gets. He’s embedding his essence into you. “Seven warm spots” can really be seen as metaphors for pieces of his soul (or as close as someone like him gets).
Right now, you actually barely kissed in canon as extras are their own contained little universes (some are canon, I actually need to mark which). But to add the seven it would require him to have sex with you seven separate times and share himself like that each time and you would know. Trust me, you would know.
this is my version of reader from the better bobby fanfic, I was talking to my friend about her possibly finding the heart of the backrooms/bobby and well........I had some ideas as to what would be there
@the-darklings there might be more you are scratching smth in my brain with this fic
BB & Companion meeting Mr Kitty? I just know BB got jealous asf 😭
MR KITTY ASK 🙏 I USED TO PRAY FOR TIMES LIKE THIS 🙏
mr kitty is genuinely one of the best entities in the backrooms lore imo because he's just. nice. kinda. he's nice and that's terrifying in its own way because the backrooms aren't supposed to be nice and his little pocket of warmth on level 974 is this anomaly that shouldn't exist and yet there he is. with a pink house. and cookies. being tall and faceless and hospitable.
and bb would HATE it there.
well, not hate it. hate is too strong. hate implies threat and mr kitty isn't a threat unless provoked. and that's actually the problem. because bb has a framework for threats. threats get the black eyes and the 40-second kill. bb knows what to do with threats. bb doesn't know what to do with a giant, faceless entity that gives you cake and makes you smile in a way that bb has been working for weeks to earn.
because you'd love it. you'd love level 974 so much. the warmth, the dry floors, the windows with golden light, the pink furniture that isn't sickly yellow walls.
you'd walk in and your whole body would change. shoulders dropping, breathing easing, that constant low-level survival tension you carry in the backrooms just. releasing. and mr kitty would bring you a cookie and you'd eat it, making a happy sound and bb would be standing in the doorway watching the girl he restructured an entire body for light up over a baked good.
the jealousy would be immediate. visceral. deeply stupid and he'd know it's deeply stupid and that would make it worse.
because how do you compete with comfort? bb can offer you protection. territory. an apex predator between you and every dark hallway. but mr kitty can offer you a warm couch, a cup of tea, a pretty room that feels like the real world and bb can't do that (not then yet, anyway).
bb IS the backrooms. the best he can do is make them softer. mr kitty is offering you an alternative to them entirely.
and you'd just. accept mr kitty. immediately. "oh hello" and move on. a giant, faceless black humanoid with no features and you wouldn't even flinch. and THAT'S the thing that would really get to bb.
not the cookies. or the couch. the fact that you'd reach out and touch mr kitty's arm without hesitating. without the half-second pause you still sometimes have with bb where your survival brain runs its checks before your heart overrides them. you'd just. touch him. casually. the way you'd touch a friend.
and bb would be standing there going through the most complex emotional experience of his ancient existence because on one hand: mine mine mine mine she's mine the cookie is not better than me i restructured level 0 for her i killed for her i learned the word baby for her and this FACELESS PASTRY CHEF gets a smile for FREE???
but on the other hand. on the quieter hand. the hand that thinks in longer timeframes.
you accepted something inhuman without blinking. again. not because it wore a familiar face. not because it looked like bobby. because it was gentle with you and that was enough. and if you can look at mr kitty (no face, no voice, no borrowed features, just dark and strange and kind) and reach out and touch without flinching... then your acceptance of bb was never about the face. it was never about bobby's template. it was about you. about who you are. about the fact that you are simply, deep down, a person who looks at inhuman things and sees someone worth being soft with.
which means you might have loved him without the face.
which means the face might have been unnecessary.
which means everything he built (the bobby suit, the smile, the voice, the careful meticulous replication of a boy from santa clara) might not have been what caught you at all. it might have just been. him. the cold and the dark and the hum and whatever he actually is underneath all of it.
and that realisation is so big and so complicated that bb would need to go stand in a hallway by himself for a minute. just to process. just to let the implications settle without showing something.
but yeah, he'd still be jealous of that cookie. absolutely. you don't spend centuries as the most powerful thing in the backrooms only to be outperformed by a pastry.
he'd hold a grudge about that specific cookie for weeks. he'd find ways to source you sweet things on other levels (not as good, slightly weird, backrooms approximations of treats that taste almost right), and present them to you with that half-lidded expectant look like see? i can do that too. i can give you sweet things. please make the sound. the happy sound. the one you made for the cookie. make it for me.
and you would. because it's him. and because the backrooms approximation of a brownie tastes like chalk but that's somehow more meaningful than mr kitty's perfect cake. still, you know better than to tell bb mr kitty calls you little one.
I love the idea of the companion casually joking with bobby early on in their relationship that she wants to be so close to him she’s essentially in his ribcage, and then slipping up with BB one day when shes exhausted and overstimulated and the lights are too harsh and she just pushes him down on the blanket nest, shoves up the bottom of his hoodie and shirt and just crawls in underneath the fabric to lie pressed against the bare skin of his torso. Rib time. Shhhhh. Rib time.
it's a bad day.
the lights have been wrong all morning. too bright, that fluorescent harshness that drills into the backs of your eyes and makes everything feel like a migraine in progress.
you've slept badly. you can't remember when you last slept well. the carpet feels damper than usual and the hum has been catching on a frequency that lives in your molars. you're tired in a way that goes past tired into something cellular. your skin feels like it belongs to someone else. your bones ache in a way that isn't physical.
everything is too loud and too close and too much.
bb is sitting cross-legged in the nest, sorting through scavenged supplies. humming. patient. waiting for you to come back from wherever you've gone in your head. the light catches the planes of his face and makes the shadows under his cheekbones look sharper than yesterday. he doesn't look up. he knows you need the space. he always knows.
you cross the nest in three steps. you don't say anything. you put both hands flat on his chest and you push.
he goes down without resistance. he always does for you. he lets you tip him backward onto the blankets—the fabric sighing under his weight, the nest reshaping itself around him—lets you settle him onto his back like he's furniture you're rearranging. his eyes are wide and curious, a little startled because you don't usually move him.
you climb on top of him.
you don't look at his face. you can't. the lights are too bright and your skin is too tight and you can't articulate a single human thought right now. you just push your hands up under the bottom of his hoodie, under his shirt, shoving the fabric up around his ribs. your knuckles drag across his stomach, the skin smooth and cool like river stone, and then you duck your head and crawl under the hem.
it's dark under there.
it's quiet under there.
bb's stomach is cool against your cheek. the cotton of his hoodie is a small dim tent over your head, soft against the back of your neck, and the harsh lights are gone. completely gone. blocked out by the fabric, and you exhale for the first time all day.
your whole body unclenches. you press your face against the smooth wrong-temperature skin of his torso and listen to the absence of his heartbeat and feel the low hum vibrating through his sternum, through his ribs. press closer to the cool, flat plane of his stomach where your cheek rests.
you can smell him. damp cotton, and underneath that, mineral and ancient scent. like stone that's been underground for a very long time. it should be unsettling. yet somehow it's the most comforting thing in the world.
you close your eyes.
shh.
bb has gone completely, utterly still.
you remember, vaguely, somewhere in the back of your tired exhausted brain real bobby. before everything went wrong.
lying in bed with him on a sunday afternoon, the light coming through his bedroom window warm and golden, and joking i want to be so close to you i'm basically in your ribcage and bobby laughing and saying babe that's weird and pulling you into his arms, burying his face in your hair.
he'd held you like that for a while. you could hear his heartbeat, real and steady and human, and his skin was warm. he smelled like skin, cheap soap and even cheaper cologne he'd worn since sophomore year, and you'd thought this. this is all i need.
he would have let you stay there. he did let you stay there. he was really good once. he just couldn't sustain it. the arms would loosen. the attention would drift. he'd reach for his pager with one hand while the other went slack against your back and you'd feel the moment he left even though his body was still there.
bb is not leaving.
his hands are hovering somewhere above you. you can feel the space where they should be, the cool absence of contact, the careful displacement of air. and you can sense him not knowing what to do. processing. trying to figure out the protocol for the love of his existence has just burrowed under his clothes and pressed her face against his stomach and is making a small, contented noises.
then, slowly, gently, his hands settle.
palm flat against your back through the layers of his hoodie. the weight of his hand steady and deliberate, fingers spread wide, covering as much of you as he can reach. the other curls around the back of your head, holding you to him, fingers threading at the nape of your neck where the tension lives.
the humming starts.
not in his throat. in his chest. you feel it everywhere your skin touches his. that low constant vibration, the resonance that means safe, mine, stay. and it's so much closer like this, so much louder. you're inside it now. you've crawled into the source. it moves through bb's ribs and into your cheekbone and down through your jaw, settling in your chest.
your breathing syncs to it without your permission. your body trusting him before your brain can object.
he understands. he doesn't say anything but he understands.
somewhere in his unknowable processing he's connecting this to every joke you've ever made, every offhand comment about wanting to be closer. every small, impossible wish you've voiced to other people who couldn't give it to you. he's filing this moment in whatever he has instead of memory and labelling it she chose me. she crawled into me. she came home.
bb's hand strokes unhurriedly down your back through the hoodie. up. down. his fingers find the knots along your spine and press (not hard, just enough, just exactly enough) and the tension you've been carrying between your shoulder blades releases in a way that makes your breath stutter.
you press closer. your arm curls around his side, fingers finding the ridge of his lower ribs. too prominent, the set up slightly wrong, the bones just a fraction too defined under the skin, and you hold on.
the hum deepens.
you fall asleep there.
in the dark. against his bare skin. under his clothes. inside the warm cotton tent that smells like cold stone and uniquely him.
the lights stop bothering you because you can't see them anymore. the migraine ebbs. your breathing slows and matches the rhythm of his impossible non-breath. you can feel his chest rise and fall—performing it, mirroring your rhythm, breathing because you're breathing, syncing himself to you the way he syncs everything to you.
bb doesn't move for the rest of the day.
he could. he doesn't.
he stays exactly where he is. one hand on your back. one in your hair. humming his tuneless song into the dark space where you've made yourself small against him. and somewhere in level 0, the fluorescent lights dim by a degree, then another, then another. soft, dim, gentle. because his girl is sleeping and the harshness was hurting her and he's the walls, the carpet, the lights and he'll simply make them stop.
dear miss kat, i know we’ll be getting some mosterfucking (eagerly looking forward to it btw 👀), but will we also get Sad Boy fucking with bobby?
Your fingers find the hem of his shirt. And you pull.
Bobby leans back just long enough for you to drag it over his head and then he’s bare-chested in the fluorescent light of Clark’s furniture store and something about it makes you dizzy. The contrast, the absurdity, this beautiful man half-undressed between shelving units and cardboard boxes like he belongs in a completely different story. The chain catches the light, fine silver links sitting in the hollow of Bobby’s collarbone, and you wrap your fingers around it and pull him in.
He laughs. Right against your mouth. That Bobby laugh. Low, surprised, delighted. Like even after three years you can still catch him off guard, like you’re still the most interesting thing in a hundred-mile radius. “You and this chain,” he says, grinning, his nose brushing yours. “If I’d known jewellery was all it took—”
You slap his shoulder. Light, playful, and he catches your hand and presses it flat against his chest, holds it there over his heartbeat. It’s hammering. Bobby Franklin—cocky, untouchable, never-nervous Bobby Franklin—is hammering under your palm.
He doesn’t acknowledge it. He’d rather die. But he keeps your hand there, and his eyes (pale, pale blue) hold yours, and for a second neither of you says anything because the moment is doing all the talking.
“Shut up,” you say softly, and you kiss the hinge of his jaw.
Bobby’s breath catches. So you kiss the side of his neck and feel his swallow against your lips. You kiss the dip between his collarbones where the chain pools warm from his skin and his hand comes up to cradle the back of your head, cradling you like something precious.
You kiss down his chest. Slow and hungry. Feeling the muscles tense under your lips, the quick twitch of his stomach when your mouth moves over his ribs. Bobby swallows hard at the sensation.
His other hand grips the back of the sofa, knuckles white. You can feel him vibrating. Bobby trembles under your mouth like you’ve unmade a fundamental part in him.
“Yeah,” he says softly, breathlessly. His thumb traces the shell of your ear, tucking your hair back so he can see your face. “That’s it. Just like that, baby. You’re so—” He watches you press your lips to the centre of his sternum, right where his heart is, and his voice breaks a little. Cracks open like a door he forgot to lock. “You’re so perfect, you know that? Prettiest girl I’ve ever—”
Would BB be able to have kids with companion(for afab readers!)? Or if so do you think there’s a horror side to a pregnancy since he’s not human? Like would the baby be human or entity?
under cut because.... yeah. #monsterfucker nation rise ❗❗
first, your body has to be prepped.
a human body is not equipped to conceive with something like BB. the equipment is wrong on both sides. his because he didn't originally build any, yours because human reproductive anatomy is designed for a very specific kind of partner and BB is not that partner.
a human uterus cannot hold what BB's substance would become. the substance doesn't behave like human reproductive material. the timeline is wrong. the feeding mechanism is wrong. the developing thing would not know what to do inside a human cradle and the human cradle would not know what to do with it. the most likely outcome of trying to do this the human way would be nothing happening at all.
so first you need a vessel that can actually do the job. that's what the seven are for. they are the prep. the infrastructure, if you will. they have to exist in you, rooted and singing, long before the question of a child is anywhere near the table.
which means everything that follows starts months before the ritual itself. the seven get rooted gradually, one at a time, over weeks of being close to him.
you don't know at the time that you're being prepared for this. neither does he, to be fair. the seven are simply for keeping you warm, that's how it starts. that they would later turn out to be a cradle is something both of you discover later. the prep is laid down for its own sake before anyone has a name for what it's preparing.
by the time you're asking him to try, the prep is already done. that's the only reason he can say yes.
what the seven are:
literally him. they're not implants, not eggs, or a foreign substance introduced into your body. they are pieces of BB's own substance (the same stuff he's made of underneath the Bobby-suit) rooted into your tissue in seven specific locations.
think of it like a colony organism, where the whole organism is distributed across multiple bodies but stays one organism. the seven are part of him. when he's in another room, they're him in you. when he's away in another level entirely, the seven are still him, just at distance. he's not whole without them and they're not separable from him.
he had to give up pieces of himself to plant them. seven small voluntary diminishments. he traded them for being able to keep you warm.
where they are:
not in places you have human names for. he was careful about this when he placed them. they don't sit on top of organs or interfere with anything that needs to keep working. they're rooted in deep soft tissue in a pattern (a shape, specifically) that he can sense and you can feel but neither of you could really map onto an anatomy textbook.
what i imagine: three lower (clustered around the pelvis, the deepest one furthest back), two middle (one near the diaphragm, one threaded along the spine), two upper (one at the base of the throat, one between the shoulder blades). a line of him through you, head to hips. but the shape only resolves when all seven are rooted. before that they sit slightly loose.
how they work day-to-day:
a few overlapping functions, all flowing from the same fact (they are him):
proximity sensing. the seven know where bb is. all the time. a compass with seven needles all pointing at the same north. you experience this as suddenly knowing which direction to turn, which corridor to walk down, which door he's about to come through. works the other way too. you cannot get lost from him.
temperature regulation. they hum warm. they make you warm. one of BB's deepest fears is you getting cold (physically because he runs cooler unless you're touching him or emotionally) and the seven are partly his answer to it. constant low-grade warmth. a banked fire. you stopped needing as many blankets after they rooted.
sensation translation. the obscene one. they pick up his want and translate it into sensation in your body. when he looks at you across a room, you feel the looking. when he's thinking about you in another level entirely, you feel the thinking. he keeps this dial turned way down by default. when he stops holding back, it's.... a lot.
harmonic resonance. they sing. there's a low frequency they hum at, and it harmonises with whatever frequency he is humming at. when he's calm they're quiet. when he's pleased they pulse warm, almost purring, making you shiver. when he comes home rough from a fight they sing him back into shape. the emotional regulation circuit for both of you, running across two bodies.
anchor. the one i think about most. the seven are what keeps you you in a place that erodes people. the Backrooms wear at human identity. unmoor people, dissolve them into the walls, eventually turn them into something that belongs here instead of something that visits. the seven are an anchor against that. they're him, holding you in the shape of yourself. you do not drift. don't blur. as long as the seven are in you, you remain you.
he did not tell you this part directly. you figured it out eventually.
why they're important for the breeding:
because the seven are the vessel. it's why the prep had to happen first. a human uterus is not equipped for any of this.
with the seven, the eighth thing (the actual child in development) settles at the centre of the shape they make in you. the seven surround it. hold it. feed it warmth. regulate it. protect it from anything that might harm it (and from BB's perspective the most dangerous thing it could be exposed to is him, in his unguarded forms, so the seven also buffer the kid against any too-much of him during gestation).
when he finishes inside you and the seven open. that's not just dramatic imagery: they're literally opening to receive the substance of him, integrate it, and pass it inward to the centre where the eighth is forming. a distributed organ if you will.
they do the job no other part of your human anatomy is built to do.
without them: no vessel, no anchor, no cradle. impossible.
with them: the eighth grows safe at the centre of seven small fires of him, and you remain you, and the warmth never costs you anything.
the conception itself:
prerequisite: the seven rooted, as mentioned. months of prep already done.
BB builds new biology from scratch. a seed (his substance, configured to settle and grow) and a pheromone (warm and honey-sweet, leaks off him once the parts are made). the pheromone lights up the seven into a coordinated demanding pulse and fogs your cognition into a soft golden state (basically, think sex pollen). your body reads every climax as beginning instead of finishing. there's no satiation until the conditions are met.
the ritual itself moves because it has to. the seven are arranged in a shape and the shape opens in sequence like the backrooms themselves. each one a separate gate, each requiring a climax of sufficient depth, no recovery between them. different locations and angles correspond to different gates. he knows the order.
every time he finishes, the seven open, drink, close. the empty-yearning opens wider. you sob more for hours. he loses his words. there's only soft purring work of working into you over and over again. the Bobby-shape frays.
you know it took because of the reversal. one of the times he finishes, the keening quiets. the pulse goes from demanding to contented. BB, almost wordless, finds one word: took. an eighth thing settles at the centre of the seven. they cradle it. you sleep for a long, long time.
the term:
roughly four months, give or take. shorter because the eighth isn't building itself from raw material the slow human way. it's growing on bb's substance. he feeds your child by fucking you in regular intervals. the seven do the structural work. you provide the loving warmth of being alive.
what you experience:
no mineral leaching. no iron drain. your bones stay yours. your blood stays yours.
what you do feel: the seven going brighter over time, hum richer, singing back to BB louder. a low constant warmth in your pelvis. appetite for him specifically (you fuck often, it's the only way to make sure little one is sufficiently fed and growing well). emotional softness, crying at small things. the eighth's moods threading through yours. contented when bb's near and you're all together, quiet where signals when he's been away too long. you walk toward him without deciding to.
no strain. you are not paying for this. you're the warm place your child grows. bb is the food. your job is to be alive and held and loved.
the kid:
half and half is the framing but it's more accurate to say both, simultaneously. not a 50/50 split of human and entity traits. fully human and fully him in overlapping registers. a chord, rather than a mixture.
what i imagine: looks human, mostly. eyes might do the shift thing under certain light (blue to dark blue, sometimes black). very faint harmonic when sleeping against your chest. aware of the backrooms in a way you aren't. bonded to the seven from the inside out. the seven stay in you after the term ends, but the kid will feel the echo of your and bb's love through them. faintly. not a predator. raised in warmth instead of made out of hunger. can pass for human if it wants to.
If tt aerion and ls love to use teeth when kissing, do you think ls would use th to when going down on him ?
it's not an accident. or a slip. you know exactly what your teeth are for and you know exactly what they do to him.
you've spent months mapping every sound he makes against your mouth, learning what makes him groan and what makes him jerk, and you've decided, with full wolf-blooded hunger, that you want the jerk.
you're on your knees for him. which is already enough to short-circuit something inside his brain. because you don't kneel for anyone and he knows it, he knows it. and you take him deep and warm. wet as you suck, and just when he's settling into the rhythm of it, just when aerion's hand goes loose in your hair and his head tips back...
you drag your teeth along the underside of him. not hard enough to hurt. hard enough to threaten.
and he jerks.
"are you—fuck—are you fucking serious right now—"
the hand in your hair goes tight. his hips stutter, caught between pulling you off and shoving you down, and you can feel the war in him, the way his whole body can't decide if this is the best or worst thing that's ever happened to him. you do it again. slower this time. deliberate. just a graze of teeth over the head of him, and the sound aerion makes is animal. guttural and frayed, something that started as your name and collapsed halfway through.
"you're a fucking—god—you're a fucking animal, you know that—"
and you look up at him. mouth full of him, eyes steady, and you smirk.
just the corner of your mouth, barely there, but he sees it. aerion sees everything when it comes to you. and that's what drives him crazy. not the teeth, or the heat of your mouth, not even the way your mouth fits around his cock.
but the fact that you're enjoying this. that you're kneeling there looking up at him like you're the one in control. like his cock in your mouth is a concession you're making, and he's the one who should be grateful.
"you fucking—" his hand fists in your hair and shoves you down and you let him, you let him hold you there, and you're still looking at him, eyes watering but not blinking. not flinching.
he's glaring down at you and you're glaring back and it's the most furious blowjob in the history of the known world.
his thighs are shaking. he's calling you things that would get him killed in any civilised setting (bitch, psycho, fucking nightmare) and every single one of them lands like a love letter because his voice cracks on every third word and his hips are moving in these tight desperate rolls he can't control. his face flushes, shining with sweat and want, and you suck and lick, and pull on him, grazing your teeth all over the sensitive, pulsing lenght of him.
aerion cums with a snarl caught behind his teeth, his whole body locking up, hand brutal in your hair, and you swallow every single drop. all of it. slow. savouring. you pull off him with an obscene, wet pop, your mouth swollen. your chin wet and you lick your lips, once, watching him watch you do it.
"fuck," he rasps. "fuck. fuck."
he's not even speaking to you anymore. he's just... buffering. brain offline. staring at the ceiling with one hand still fisted loosely in your hair like he forgot it was there. he's babbling, fragments of sentences that don't connect—
"you can't just—what the fuck—you're insane, stark—"
you don't let him recover.
you're already moving, already pushing him back and climbing into his lap. your mouth is on his neck, his collarbone, the sharp line of his jaw, and you're using teeth the whole time. dragging them along the tendon of his throat, biting down on the muscle of his shoulder, working your way across his chest and leaving red crescents in your wake like you're writing something down on him.
aerion hisses when you bite the jut of his hip. he groans when you scrape your teeth over his ribs, something almost pained, almost pleading, but you don't care. you're not done.
"I just—" he starts, and you bite down on his chest, right over the sternum, and he chokes on whatever he was going to say.
"get hard," you tell him. flat. blunt.
he stares at you. "are you insane?"
you grind down against him. still wet, still burning up, still hungry. "I want to fuck, aerion."
a sound rumbles in his chest, travelling to his throat. half-laugh, half-groan, entirely defeated. it's the best things you've ever heard.
because he's already hardening again, because his body doesn't know how to say no to you even when his brain is screaming, and you both know it. you roll your hips and feel him twitch beneath you and his hands come up to grip your thighs hard enough to bruise and he says, raw and throatyt, "you're going to kill me."
"probably," you agree, and sink down onto him.
you ride him like you own him. because you do. because he let you. the moment he let your teeth near his cock and didn't pull away, he signed something over, and you both know it.
his hands are on your hips and he's trying to set the pace, trying to drag some control back, but you plant your palms on his chest and pin him and take. you're not gentle. you don't do gentle right now. this is teeth and claws and those wet sound of skin and his voice cracking on every exhale. when aerion finally flips you (because he always flips you eventually, because he's Aerion and he can't be under anyone for long, not even you, especially not you) he fucks you so mean you see white.
and his mouth goes straight for your throat.
not kissing. not sucking. gnawing. he bites down on the place where your neck meets your shoulder and grinds his teeth there like he's trying to leave permanent mark. something that won't fade in a week, and you gasp, hand flying to the back of his head.
he just bites harder. marking you up like a fucking animal, like if he can't brand you he'll settle for scarring you, and every thrust is vicious, every exhale is hot against your bruised skin, and you're both so far past anything resembling civilised that it's almost funny.
after, when you're both wrecked and panting and he's still inside you because neither of you wants to move, you touch the crater at your throat and wince.
"that's going to bruise for weeks."
he doesn't even open his eyes. "you nearly gnawed my dick off."
"I didn't nearly—"
"you are not allowed to complain." he cracks one eye, pale and half-mad and unbearably smug. "not one fucking word. I've got your goddamn dental records on my cock."
and you bite his shoulder again, just because you can, and he yelps like an affronted cat, and you're both laughing, sore and covered in teeth marks like two wolves who don't know how to love without drawing blood.
because you don't. neither of you. and that's the whole point.
i apologise in advance if this is an annoying question but i was wondering what the companion does for hygiene - is she able to shower or brush her teeth etc? shes been in the backrooms for quite a while now, is she just a walking stink cloud? LOL sorry
Not annoying in the slightest! And yes, she is, hence:
Secondary Sightings: Levels 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 14, ████, ██████, and the Poolrooms (unverified)
Entity 0's body temperature registers approximately 4.2°C 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.
Basically he's made you your own little pool house but M.E.G doesn't have as much info on it because BB protects your privacy so he shuts equipment/changes layouts regularly to keep nosy researchers away.
