[violetlichen]

Changed my url!

cloudsmooch -> violetlichen

[the-darklings]

𓈒 ˳ ˳ 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐁𝐎𝐁𝐁𝐘 𓈒 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓 4.

pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby (bb) contents/warnings: graphic violence, blood, body horror, self-worth issues, internalised blame/anger suppression, mentions of past emotional neglect in relationship. notes: This part got very long so if there's crustiness I'm sorry, but this one is vvv important for overall plot and setting up future stuff. Genuinely thank you SO much for the insane amount of warmth and support on the series so far!

📹 better bobby series masterlist.

You wake up still pressed into his chest.

For a moment, you don't remember why, and then you do. All at once. The grin in the dark, the teeth, the wet, tearing sounds. Your whole body tightens. Better Bobby's hand is already on your back, moving up and down your spine, languid and unhurried, like he's been doing it for hours. Maybe he has. 

You don't know how long you were out. Sleep here isn't sleep the way you understand it. It's more like your body surrenders to exhaustion while the yellow hum rocks you under, and when you surface, it's never with the feeling of having rested. Just the feeling of having stopped.

You pull back. Slightly. Just enough to see his face.

He lets you. His hand stills on your back but doesn't lift. He watches you with those pale eyes. They’re Bobby's eyes. Exactly Bobby's, the same shade, the same lashes, the same way they catch light and hold it. His expression remains open and patient under your scrutiny, and he doesn't fill the silence. He just waits. Let's you look at him. 

You've never studied him this closely before. You've been careful not to. Because looking too hard at Better Bobby means seeing the places where the seams should be and aren't. Confronting how good the copy is, how flawless. The earring sits in his lobe at the exact same angle, and the chain drapes across his collarbone with the exact same weight. 

Even the small scar on his jaw from when real Bobby walked into a cabinet door at nineteen is right there, a perfect replica of a wound that happened to someone else's body.

You sit up. Put distance between your body and his. Not much—a foot, maybe less—but enough that the air between you becomes a boundary instead of a shared warmth, and you see him register it. The slight tension at the corner of his mouth. The way his hand hovers where your back was and then settles, open-palmed, on the blanket beside him. 

He doesn't chase you. He lets you keep your distance. 

“Are you afraid of me?” he asks.

His voice is soft. Bobby's voice is never careful, not even this version, but soft, like someone asking a question they're not sure they want the answer to.

You don't answer that. Instead, you say, “Are you going to hurt me?”

He blinks.

“The way you hurt that thing.” Your voice is steadier than you expected. Flat, almost. The flatness of a person who’s run out of room for new fear and is now operating from somewhere clinical. Survival-practical. “Whatever it was. The sounds it made. The sounds you made.”

There’s movement behind his eyes. He doesn’t flinch, but you spot a shift, a recalibration, like a camera adjusting focus. He remembers what you heard. That low rumbling from his chest that didn't belong in any throat shaped like a human's.

“No,” he says. Immediate. No hesitation, no pause to consider. The word comes out of him with absolute certainty, like a reflex. “No. Never.”

You watch him closely. He looks back at you. The fluorescent light buzzes overhead, casting that flat, shadowless yellow across everything. Better Bobby's face is open and sincere, but you don't believe him. Not completely. Not after what you heard through your closed eyelids. The shrieking and the wet dragging sound and the silence after, the horrible, total silence. The way he'd come back to you without a drop of anything on him. Like unmaking something in the dark was a minor errand.

And not after Bobby. Not after learning what it looks like when someone says I would never and means it and does it anyway. With the slow, grinding, erosive negligence of a man who might have loved you once but still started disappearing while standing right next to you. 

Bobby never hit you. Never raised his voice in a way that carried a threat. Not once. Bobby simply stopped. Stopped seeing you, stopped hearing you, stopped reaching for you in the morning, and the absence was its own kind of violence, bloodless and total.

Now you're in a yellow hallway with a thing wearing his face telling you never with the same mouth and you cannot—you cannot—take that word at face value. Not from that face. Not anymore.

And he sees it. The disbelief. He reads it on your face the way real Bobby used to read light through a viewfinder. With instinctive precision, without needing to be told what he's seeing.

Better Bobby reaches out. Tips your chin up with one knuckle. Gentle. So gentle. Guiding your face back to his when you'd started to drift, to look away, to find a spot on the yellow wall that was easier to stare at than his eyes.

“Why do you think I chose this face?”

He says this face with an edge to his voice. Not quite contempt, not quite amusement. But snide. A little sharp. The closest thing to edge you've ever heard from Better Bobby. This brief flash of awareness that the face he's wearing belongs to someone else. Someone who wasted it, and he knows it, and he wears it anyway because—

You're silent.

Better Bobby smiles. Gentle. The sharpness folds back into warmth the way a blade folds back into a handle.

“I heard you,” he says quietly.

Your breath catches.

“From the other side. Through the wall.” He says it simply, his thumb working carefully over the dip of your chin. “He used to come to the store. Bobby. In the beginning. Before you worked the night shifts alone. He'd come hang out, and you'd be downstairs together, and I could hear you. Both of you. I could hear what it sounded like when he was still—” He pauses, expression twisting. You see him choose and settle on his next words. “When he was still trying.”

The lights flicker. Once. Settle again.

“And then he stopped coming. And you were alone down there. And I could hear that too.”

Your chest goes tight.

“You used to talk,” Better Bobby goes gently, watching your face. “Not to anyone. Not on the phone. Just—out loud. To the room. To yourself. To him, even though he wasn't there. Do you remember?” His thumb traces your jawline, feather-light. “You'd say things like he doesn't listen anymore. And 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?”

Your eyes burn, blurring his familiar features. 

“And I don't think he sees me. I'm standing right in front of him, and he's looking through me like I'm furniture. Like I'm one of Clark's display pieces. Something you walk around.”

“Stop,” you whisper.

He doesn't stop, but his voice goes softer. Almost tender.

“You were so lonely.” He says it like it's the saddest thing he's ever learned, and maybe it is. Maybe loneliness sounds different from the other side of a wall. Rawer, louder, the way a voice sounds in an empty room because there's nothing else to absorb it. “And so sad. And so angry, baby—”

You flinch because you don't—you weren't angry. You were hurt. That's a smaller, quieter, more acceptable thing than anger.

Because anger would mean admitting that what Bobby did wasn't just a failure of attention but a choice. Night after night after night, a man choosing the path of least resistance over the person lying next to him, and if you let yourself be angry about that, then the whole careful belief of maybe it's me, maybe I'm asking for too much, maybe love is supposed to feel like this after a while collapses, and what's underneath it is—

“—you were so angry, and you didn't even let yourself feel it. You said it like it was your fault. Like if you could just be more interesting or prettier or less needy, he'd—”

Hot, liquid feeling surges up from your chest to your throat. “Stop.”

He stops. But his eyes don't leave yours, and in them you can see that he knows. He heard it all, you realise. Every whispered self-indictment, every quiet renegotiation of your own worth to accommodate Bobby's shrinking attention.

He heard the thing underneath it too, the thing you buried so deep you forgot it was there. 

The rage. The white-hot, screaming, incandescent fury of a woman 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. 

You buried it because anger felt like giving up. Because if you were angry, it meant something was wrong, and if something was wrong, it could be over. If it was over, then you'd given your whole heart to someone who let it sit on a shelf and gather dust, and that was unbearable. So you turned the anger inward instead, folded it into self-doubt, and let it eat you rather than the situation, because at least that way the situation could still be saved.

Better Bobby heard you bury it. He heard the burial, and he heard the body underneath it, and he's looking at you now with something that isn't pity or judgment. Isn't the performative concern that Bobby used to deploy in those final months when he bothered to notice you were hurting at all. That tight-jawed what's wrong that really meant please don't make me deal with this. 

This is something else. Recognition. The look of a thing that knows what it sounds like when someone swallows their own rage until it poisons them. Until it makes them abandon everything they once knew for a world of yellow, buzzing lights and monsters in the dark. 

“It wasn't you,” he says, his hand cupping your cheek. His palm is cool, his fingers curving, and he holds you there. There’s no force, no hard grip, he’s just holding. Cradling. The way you'd hold something you found in the dark that was shaking. “It was never you. You could've been perfect. You were perfect. And he still would've pulled away because that's what he does. That's how he's built. He gets close, and it scares him. So he retreats, and that's his malfunction, not yours.”

It’s then you start crying.

Not like earlier. After the attack. That was shock, adrenaline, your nervous system shorting out. 

This is different. This is slow and terrible, coming from somewhere so deep you didn't know the room existed. 

It's the crying you should've done months ago, in the apartment in Santa Clara, on the nights when Bobby was asleep three feet away, and you were staring at the ceiling, wondering when you became the kind of woman who measures love in absences. He didn't kiss me today. He didn't ask about my day. He didn't look up. Keeping count. Tallying the deficit. The anger you didn't let yourself feel and the grief you couldn't afford mixed with the loneliness you absorbed like radiation, quietly, invisibly, until it changed the composition of your bones.

Better Bobby pulls you in when the first sob breaks. Slow and careful, his arms folding around you, and your face presses into his chest.

He holds you while you shake apart. His hand moves on your back, but there's more uncertainty in it now. He pauses at your shoulder blade. Adjusts. Resettles his palm. Like he's figuring out the right pressure in real time. Learning the weight of comfort.

His chin rests on top of your head, and you can feel the slight furrow of his brow against your hair, the way his body is holding very still around the motion of his hand. He’s noting each shudder, each ragged breath, trying to understand the mechanics of this. What crying is. What it means. Why your body does it and what it needs from his.

“I love him,” you choke out. Waterlogged. Muffled against his chest. “I love him so much. And he just—he stopped. He just stopped, and I keep thinking if I'd done something different, if I'd been—”

“No.” Firm the way a hand on your shoulder is firm when you're about to step into traffic. “Don't do that.”

“—if I'd been less”—”

“No.”

His arms tighten around you. You feel his jaw clench against the top of your head, a brief flash of what might be anger.

At the sentence, at the shape of the thought, the idea that you would carve yourself smaller to fit inside Bobby's shrinking attention span. His hand on your back goes still and then resumes, slower, like he's reminding himself to be gentle.

“You did nothing wrong,” he says into your hair. “You loved someone. You loved them well. And they couldn't hold it. That's not a flaw in the love. That's a flaw in the hands.”

You cry until there's nothing left. Until you're just breathing, wet and ragged, against his chest. The sobs eventually thin to hiccups, then to shudders, finally settling into a deep, wrung-out stillness, the exhaustion that comes after. 

Better Bobby holds you through all of it. Doesn't shift. Doesn't pull back. Doesn't ask if you're okay, which is a kindness in itself because the answer is obviously no and being asked to say it out loud would be one more weight.

When you finally pull back, your face is swollen, and your eyes are raw. Better Bobby looks at you with an expression you've never seen on Bobby's face. Open and bewildered, creased with tenderness in a way that seems to be happening to him without his permission. Like he reached for the right emotion, grabbed something bigger than he expected.

He touches your face. Thumbs the tears off your cheekbone, one side and then the other, careful, methodical. His brow furrows. Curious. The furrow of a thing encountering a phenomenon for the first time and finding it far more complex than anticipated.

“Sad,” he murmurs. Almost to himself. Almost wonderingly.

You sit together in the yellow light for a long time. The hum fills the silence.

Then you reach out and touch his face.

Your fingertips on his cheekbone. Tracing the line of his jaw. The scar from the cabinet door. The corner of his mouth where real Bobby's grin always starts, one side before the other, that lopsided asymmetry that used to make your heart stutter.

Better Bobby goes still.

Then he hums. Low in his throat. Warm. A sound that starts in his chest and travels up through all of him like a vibration through a struck bell. His eyes close. His head tips into your palm like a cat pressing into a hand, like he's been waiting for this, this specific thing, your skin on his skin, voluntary and gentle, initiated by you.

The difference matters; it matters enormously, you can tell by the way his breath changes, goes uneven, almost delicate. 

His lips part, just slightly, lashes fluttering against your thumb.

“That feels good,” he whispers huskily. And then, quieter, with a note of genuine wonder, “How odd.”

You watch him lean into your hand, and the expression on his face is unguarded in a way that makes your chest ache. Bobby's face, but not Bobby's expression. It could never be Bobby's expression, you realise suddenly, because Bobby would've turned it into a joke by now, would've kissed your palm or made a quip or done something to break the sincerity before it got too heavy. 

Your hand stills on his cheek. He opens his eyes. Looks at you.

“I need you to make me a promise,” you say.

There’s another ripple in his expression. The tilt of his head. That almost animal curiosity, the slight cock to one side that doesn't quite track as human body language. “A promise?”

“Yes.”

He studies you. Processing. “What is a promise?”

The question is genuine. Not rhetorical, not evasive. He's looking at you the way he looked at your tears. With concentration, focus, and a desire to understand. You can almost see the gap between knowing the word and understanding the weight, and he's standing at the edge of it, waiting for you to build the bridge.

“It's—it's a commitment. Something you say that you can't take back. Something you keep even when it's hard. Even when you don't want to. Even when circumstances change.” You swallow thickly. “When you make a promise, you don't break it. That's the whole point. It's the one thing that's supposed to be unbreakable.”

Better Bobby is quiet. Considering. His eyes move across your face in that precise, reading way.

“I understand,” he says carefully, solemnly. Like he's holding the concept in his hands and turning it to see all sides. “An oath. A contract between two beings that supersedes circumstance.”

You blink. “Something like that.”

He angles his face closer, attention fixed and unblinking on you. “Then ask.”

You drag your eyes over his face. Bobby's face, Bobby's eyes, Bobby's scar. The face of a man who loved you and couldn't say it and showed it by looking away until you forgot what it felt like to be seen. The face of a thing that isn't that man and chose to wear him anyway because it heard you through a wall and wanted to be the version that stayed.

“Promise me… you won't hurt me,” you say quietly. “Not the way he did.”

The words hang in the yellow air. The hum shifts. Not louder, but denser somehow, as if the walls themselves are listening, as if the promise is being registered by something larger than the two of you.

Better Bobby's expression changes. Curiosity dissolves. What replaces it is— 

You don't have a word for it. Not solemnity, a gravity older than language. It rises from the part of him that isn't Bobby: the vast and ancient thing beneath the boy’s face. The part of him that understands what you are asking is not a small thing. That the promise you want is, for a being like him, a kind of architecture. A structure that, once built, holds.

“I promise,” he says. No hesitation, no charm, no Bobby-grin to soften the weight of it. Just the words, low and clear, carrying the same absolute certainty as his no earlier. A reflex, a law carved into whatever he is at a level deeper than the face, deeper than the voice. “I will not hurt you. Not the way he did. Not any way.”

His hand covers yours on his cheek. Presses it there. Holds it.

“I don't know how to break a promise,” he tells you, quieter now. “But I think that's the point.”

You nod, unable to speak. Your hand is on his face, cool to the touch, and his hand is on your hand. You watch each other for a long time, unwilling to move first.

He breaks the stalemate first, taking your hand into his.

“Come with me,” he urges with that restrained excitement in his eyes, barely contained behind Bobby's careful coolness. Something almost boyish in its sincerity. “Somewhere that's not yellow.”

You look at his hand, using your other to wipe the tear tracks off your face. “Is it safe?”

And then it returns. 

Not the gentle Better Bobby who strokes your hair and says I've got you. The other one. It surfaces behind his eyes like a shape moving under dark water. Vast, amused, ancient. His chin dips slightly. His mouth curves.

And for a half-second, the thing looking out at you from Bobby's face is not performing warmth or mimicking tenderness. It's something that has walked these hallways since the beginning. Something that heard you through a wall and chose to want you rather than simply take you, and the distinction between those two things is the only reason you're still breathing.

“Baby,” he drawls, and his voice is Bobby's, but the tone is deeper, older. “I am what's safe here.”

It lasts a second. Less. Then he blinks and the ancient thing submerges and Better Bobby is back, warm-eyed and easy-mouthed, holding his hand out to you in the yellow light like nothing happened.

“Come on,” he says, lighter now. Normal. That crooked half-grin back. “Trust me.”

You take his hand, and he pulls you up.

He leads you through the hallways. Different route this time. Sharper turns, narrower corridors, and Better Bobby moves through them with liquid confidence, his hand secure around yours, his pace unhurried. You pass through a section where the carpet gives way to tile, and the tile gives way to something that feels like packed earth beneath your feet. 

The walls shift from yellow to grey, and you tense, your grip tightening, and he squeezes back. Once. Reassuring.

Then the hallway opens.

You stop.

It takes your brain a moment. Several moments. Because what you're looking at doesn't belong here, can't belong here, is fundamentally incompatible with everything you've experienced in this place so far, and yet here it is: sky. Actual sky. 

Not blue exactly, but deeper and richer. The colour of late afternoon, easing toward evening, a gradient of gold and amber, close to violet at the edges. And beneath it, trees. Dense, old-growth, the kind of towering canopy you'd find in the Santa Cruz Mountains, all ferns and filtered light and the rich, complex smell of living earth. A path winds through them, beaten dirt, dappled with sun. 

You can feel it on your face. Not quite the real sun of your world, but it’s not fluorescent. 

You stand in the threshold between the hallway and the forest, and you don't breathe because if you breathe or blink, it might disappear.

“Level 14,” Better Bobby announces behind you casually, tracking your reaction. “Some people call it Paradise.”

“How—”

“Doors.” He shrugs. “Everything here has doors. Entrances and exits. You just have to know where they are.”

You step forward. Grass. Real grass, or something so close you can't tell the difference, and the sensation is so overwhelmingly normal after the carpet and concrete and yellow that your eyes fill again, and you press your hand over your mouth.

Better Bobby steps up beside you. He's watching the trees with that curious expression, head slightly tilted, but underneath it, there’s satisfaction. Quiet pride. He found this, and he brought you here because you were crying on the floor, and he didn't know what else to do except find you somewhere beautiful.

You grab his hand.

Hard, sudden, fingers lacing through his, knuckles blanching. Because there are trees and you don't trust anything that looks like the real world, because the real world abandoned you.

Better Bobby looks down at your joined hands, and his lips part. That smile appears again. The new one, the one still taking shape on features designed for smirking, learning in real time how to hold something softer. Slow. Almost shy.

He doesn't comment. Doesn't tease. Just holds your hand back and starts walking.

“It's safe here,” he tells you, feeling the tension in your grip, the coiled readiness. “This level is safe. Nothing hunts here.”

“You said the yellow—Level 0 was safe.”

“Level 0 is my territory. Things occasionally wander in.” He says my territory without emphasis, but the words land heavily anyway, carrying the weight of what you saw behind his eyes a few minutes ago, the brief flash of the creature that owns these hallways. “Here—” He gestures with his free hand. The amber light moves across his skin, and he looks different in it, softer. More like Bobby at golden hour on the fire escape back home, and the resemblance hits you like a fist. “Nothing wanders. Nothing wants to wander. It's peaceful. Even the things that live here are gentle.”

You walk. He leads you deeper, and the canopy closes overhead like a ceiling, green and gold, light falling in shafts through the leaves and landing in warm patches on the path. You hear birdsong. Birdsong. You haven't heard birdsong in… you don't know how long. The sound cracks something open in your chest that you thought had scarred over.

Your grip on his hand loosens. Slightly.

The path winds along a stream. Clear water over smooth stones, the sound of it gentle. Nothing like the dripping in the pipes on Level 2. Simply water moving over rocks because gravity says so. 

The path opens into a clearing. Tall grass. A meadow ringed by trees, the canopy breaking to reveal that impossible sky, and in the centre a fallen log covered in moss, the kind of thing you'd find on a trail in Big Basin or Castle Rock. The kind of thing you and Bobby used to perch on when you went hiking in the early days and kiss until your mouths went numb.

Better Bobby guides you to the log. You sit. He sits beside you. Hands still joined.

A bird—small, brown, ordinary—lands on a branch above you and turns its head and looks at you with one bright black eye, and you stare back at it, your chin trembling. Because it's a bird, just a bird, and you'd forgotten how much of the world you were missing.

“I didn't think this place could be beautiful,” you say quietly, looking at the amber light filtering through the canopy, the way it falls on the tall grass in warm pools. “I thought it was just… yellow. And carpet. And things with teeth.”

“Most of it is,” Better Bobby replies honestly. Not sugar-coating it.”But most of anywhere is. The trap of this place, if you can consider it one, is that you’d never want to leave. How could you? When everywhere else there’s death.”

“This is different.”

“Why?”

“Because it shouldn't exist. Because this whole place is wrong. It's not supposed to be here. None of it. And somewhere inside all that wrongness, there's this—” You gesture at the meadow, the sky, the bird, the stream. “It doesn't make sense.”

Better Bobby is quiet for a moment. Watching you the way he does—full attention, total focus, the listening that feels less like politeness and more like study.

“Maybe that’s exactly why it exists,” he says. “Maybe it was built by mistake. Or maybe it exists because nothing is ever just one thing.”

You turn to look at him. He's sitting beside you in amber light with his earring catching gold instead of fluorescent. And his face is Bobby's face, but the expression on it is something Bobby hasn’t worn in a long time, if ever. Patient, present, content with simply being here without reaching for a camera, without filtering the moment through a lens, or needing a barrier between himself and the thing he's looking at.

“I don't want to call you Bobby anymore.”

He goes still.

The uncertain one. A brief, visible tension through his shoulders, his jaw, the hand holding yours tightening by a fraction. His eyes flick to your face, and the light in them is guarded in a way you haven't seen from him before. Wary. Like you've touched something unexpectedly tender and he's bracing for what comes next.

You see the calculation, the quick processing, and you understand. He thinks this is the beginning of something else. A rejection. A pulling away. You're not Bobby, you'll never be Bobby, and I don't want the reminder. He's already building the wall behind his face, that smooth, easy mask he can slip back into, the charming nonchalance to protect himself. 

“You're not him,” you go on quickly. Before the wall finishes closing. “That's—that's the point. You're not him. You're something else. And it feels wrong to call you by another person's name when you're your own—” You fumble. Gesture at him, at the clearing, at everything. “Your own being. Your own person. Or—whatever you are. Whatever the word is. Entity?”

His jaw loosens, shoulders dropping a fraction. The wall stops building.

“What would you call me?” he asks quietly. Like the answer matters more than he wants to show.

“Maybe… BB?” You say it, and it feels right. Simple. Still him, still connected, but his. Not borrowed. Not a copy of a copy. “If that's okay?”

He's quiet for a long moment, simply gazing at you. The light shimmers on his face, and his expression shifts through layers. The careful architecture of Better Bobby rearranging itself around this new information, this small, enormous thing you've just given him. A name. His own name. Not the one he stole. The one you chose.

You lean your head against his shoulder lightly.

You can feel it through the contact between you, through the place where your temple rests against his shoulder. Something in him settles. Deepens. A satisfaction so total it's almost palpable, like a beam slotting into place.

He likes it. Being seen as separate, being known as his own being. Not the understudy, not a replacement, not the better version of someone else, but simply a version of himself. You can feel how much he likes it in the way his thumb resumes its slow circuit over your knuckles, in the way his head tips to rest on yours, in the breath he lets out that sounds like it's been held for centuries.

“BB,” he repeats, testing it. His voice comes in a low, warm rumble. Bobby's timbre with something deeper underneath, and the two letters sit in the balmy air, small and perfect.

“Yeah,” you breathe. “BB.” A beat, then, “Thank you. For hearing me.”

A hum starts low in his chest, a thrum you feel before you hear it. It travels the length of his arm to where his fingers are laced through yours. He squeezes once, and when he speaks again, the easy charm has drained out of his voice, leaving it quieter, almost reticent.

“I was lonely too,” he admits.

Your heart squeezes, quick and helpless.

You sit together for a long, long time, the light pooling thick and lazy around you. And for the first time since you fell through the wall, what settles in your chest isn't fear, isn't confusion, and not grief.

It's peace.

The walk back is different.

BB leads you through the same threshold, and the yellow returns, followed by the buzz that resettles on your skin like a coat you forgot you were wearing. But something in you has shifted. Loosened. The meadow is still sitting inside your chest, warm and quiet. You carry it back into Level 0 the way you'd carry a cupped handful of water.

And you're talking.

Actually talking. Not the halting, guarded exchanges of the past weeks. Or the questions that go in circles, the silences that stretch like hallways.

You're talking, and BB is listening. Somewhere between the threshold and the familiar territory of your room, you say something about Clark—about the time Clark tried to assemble a display bookshelf himself and got the shelves in upside down, and you'd had to redo the entire thing at midnight while Clark stood behind you insisting it looked fine—and BB laughs.

It's a good laugh. It's Bobby's laugh. Low, surprised, that huff through the nose that real Bobby does when something catches him off guard, and it makes you smile. Actually smile. Your cheeks ache with it. 

You can't remember the last time your face did that.

“He sounds like an idiot,” BB remarks, grinning. That cocky half-grin, the one that crinkles one eye.

“He's not—okay, he's a little bit of an idiot. But he means well. He’s just going through a rough patch right now. He doesn't know how to—”

“Accept help?”

“I was going to say read an instruction manual.”

BB snorts. “Same thing.” 

He bumps your shoulder with his. Easy. Playful. And you bump him back, and the normalcy of it—the sheer, stupid, ordinary normalcy of walking and talking and bumping shoulders with someone—is so sweet it makes your throat tight with a different kind of ache. An emotion closer to joy, which is worse because joy in a place like this is borrowed. 

“You know,” you begin, squinting at him, “for a—” You stop, gesturing vaguely at him. “You're not bad company.”

“Not bad company.” He puts his hand over his chest. Bobby's mock-wounded face, the one real Bobby used to pull when you beat him at cards. “I'm overcome with emotion.”

“Shut up.”

“No, no, I'm serious. I'm going to treasure this moment. Not bad company. I'm getting that tattooed.”

“Can you even get a tattoo?”

His mouth hooks into that infuriating half-smirk that unfailingly warmed your blood for years, “Baby, I can do whatever I—”

He stops.

Mid-word. Mid-stride. His body goes rigid so fast it's like watching someone get hit with a current. Every muscle locking at once, his hand tightening on yours hard enough to hurt. His head turns. Not the way a person turns their head. The way a thing turns. Too sharp, too angular, his chin cocking to one side at a degree that doesn't belong on a human neck with a faint click. His eyes go flat and dark, and the creature behind them surges to the surface, breaching deep water.

You suck in a breath, eyes snapping around you, searching. “BB?”

He doesn't answer. He's listening. Every line of his body orients toward something you can't hear, his nostrils flaring slightly, and the hum in the walls shifts tone. Barely. A semitone. Like the whole level just inhaled.

“BB, what—”

He moves.

He doesn't explain. His hand releases yours and both of his are on your shoulders, turning you, walking you. Fast, with an urgency you haven't seen from him before, not even with the strange thing in the hallway. His jaw is set, eyes scanning the corridor with a focus that's mechanical, inhuman, processing information from sources you can't perceive.

“Please talk to me—”

“Shh.”

It’s not BB's voice. But an older rumble. Something that's done calculating, moved on to acting, and doesn't have the bandwidth for warmth right now.

He takes you to your room. The warm nest. The blankets. He guides you down with one hand on the back of your head, the way you'd ease someone into a car, pulling the blankets around you, and you grab his wrist because his eyes are wrong. They're flat, black, and old.

The thing in the hallway, whatever it is, has made him become the thing he was in the dark with the Smiler, and that version of BB is a version you can't reach.

“Stay here,” he instructs sternly. His voice is low and tight, thrumming with that sub-frequency that vibrates in the walls. “Don't move. Don't make a sound.”

“What's happening? What's—”

“Stay.”

He looks at you. One second. A flash of the warmth—buried deep, almost submerged, but there, still—and then his expression closes like a door slamming. BB straightens and turns toward the hallway.

You blink, and he's gone.

Just gone. Between one blink and the next, the space where BB stood is empty. The air where his body was is settling, displaced, like water closing over the place where a stone sank. 

The hum holds its earlier shifted note. That slightly wrong semitone, tense and high, like a held breath.

You sit in the blankets with your knees pulled to your chest, heart in your throat, and stare at the empty doorway and beyond it, listening intently.

Nothing. No tearing. No shrieking. No sounds at all. Just the hum and the buzz and your own breathing and the silence so total it frightens you more. 

You wait.

The meadow is still inside you: the bird, the stream, the warm light, the way BB laughed when you told him about Clark's bookshelf. The stupid, gentle joke about the tattoo, the way his shoulder bumped yours, and you bumped him back, and for thirty seconds, you forgot where you were and what he was, and the whole impossible situation felt like a walk home from somewhere good with someone you liked.

You press your face into your knees. You wrap your arms around yourself.

You wait.

BB comes back eventually.

You don't know how long it's been. Time in the Backrooms is a broken clock. Sometimes the minutes stretch into hours; sometimes what feels like an afternoon is over before a thought can finish forming. 

You've been sitting in the blankets, knees to chest, listening to the hum slowly, slowly settle back to its normal pitch, the tension of Level 0 releasing one degree at a time. You didn't sleep. You didn't move. You just sat and breathed, holding the meadow inside you like a candle flame in cupped hands.

You hear him before you see him. Footsteps. Slow. The particular rhythm of his walk. Bobby's gait, but smoother, more intentional, the way a predator moves even when it's not hunting. Then his shape appears in the doorway.

Something's off.

He's standing the way he always stands—one shoulder against the doorframe, hip cocked, that easy lean—but the details are wrong. Slightly. His edges are too sharp. The line of his jaw looks as if it were drawn rather than grown. His skin has a quality to it, like wet paint, freshly applied. And his eyes.

BB’s eyes are settling. That's the only word for it. The flat, black depth that swallowed the warmth when he left is receding, draining away, and Bobby's eyes are rising to the surface again. You watch it happen. You watch him reassemble himself.

He was something else, you realise. Whatever he went to do, wherever he did while away, he dropped Bobby's face to do it. And what you're looking at now, standing in the doorway, is the process of putting it back on. Climbing back inside the shape of a person. Buttoning up the human suit.

“BB.”

He blinks. The last of the darkness drains from his eyes. He looks at you, and the warmth returns. In layers, like watching a photograph develop, his shoulders relaxing at the sight of you. The too-sharp lines of his face soften into the Bobby you know, and his mouth does that almost-smile, the one that says I'm here without words.

“Hey, baby.”

“What happened?”

Not a question. A demand. You say it flat and steady, holding his gaze, and you don't let him do the easy-grin deflection, the don't worry about it. You've had enough of that for one lifetime. You made him promise.

BB reads it on your face. The refusal to be contained.

He exhales through his nose—Bobby's habit, the one that means I don't want to talk about this, but I'm going to—and pushes off the doorframe and comes to sit beside you on the blankets. Close. His knee touches yours.

“There's something new,” he says after a pause. “In the Backrooms. Something I haven't encountered before.”

You stare. “An… entity?”

“Yes.” He turns the word over like he's not sure it's sufficient. “It’s been… circling. Mainly the perimeter of Level 0. Not entering. Not yet anyway. Just... moving along the edge. Testing it.” His jaw works. That muscle at the hinge, the one that flexes when Bobby's thinking, when Bobby's holding something back. “It's been doing it intermittently. Coming close, then retreating. Like it's taking measurements.”

A shiver skitters down your spine. “What does it want?”

“I don't know.” And you understand that BB doesn't say I don't know often or easily. BB is the thing that knows this place, that moves through it like blood through a vein, that owns Level 0. Admitting ignorance is not in his nature. It sits wrong on his face, like a shirt buttoned crooked. “It's different from the others. Not like the Smiler. Not like the Howlers, either. Not like anything in my experience. It's very new.” A tense pause, then, “And very, very powerful.”

The way he says powerful makes the hum in the walls dip. Just for a second. A brief, almost subliminal drop in frequency, as if Level 0 itself heard the word and flinched.

You stare at him, your heart thrumming in your chest. Bobby's face, creased with a concern that doesn't quite fit the cocky architecture of it. BB in a rare moment of honesty about his own limits. Something new, he said. Something powerful. Something that makes a thing that unmade another entity with its bare hands sit next to you on a pile of blankets and admit it doesn't have an answer.

You exhale, turning to stare at the yellow wall instead. 

“I want you to teach me,” you tell him after a moment.

His head turns. The dog-tilt. Quick, surprised.

You look back towards him. “About this place. The levels. The entities. The doors, the rules, whatever—I want to understand it. I don't want to just—” You gesture at the blankets, the room, the warm patch you've been sleeping in for however long you've been here. “I don't want to be something you put in a nest and guard. I want to know what's out there. How to move through it. I don't want to be helpless whenever you leave.”

BB studies you. That long, reading look, line by line, extracting meaning. You expect resistance. Protectiveness. The instinct to keep you in the soft, warm place where nothing can touch you, where he can fold himself around you like armour and pretend the world ends at the walls of this room.

Instead, slowly, he nods.

“There are rules,” he insists. The caution is audible. Measured, considered, a thing that’s used to absolute control, negotiating the edges of a concession. “I go with you. Always. You don't wander alone. Not until you understand enough.”

“Okay.”

“And there are levels I won't take you to. Places where my presence doesn't offer the protection it does on 0. Places where—” He pauses, choosing his words the way you'd choose a path through uneven ground. “Places where going would be… foolish.”

“Okay. Deal.”

You watch him watch you, just like earlier in the sunlight. “Okay,” he says eventually. “I'll teach you.”

Time passes.

You don't know how much. The Backrooms don't have seasons, don't have sunrise and sunset. No reliable Monday into Tuesday into Wednesday that structures a life on the other side of the wall. What you have is rhythm—the rhythm of sleep and waking, of walking and resting, of BB's hand on yours as he leads you through doorways you're learning to see.

You miss the real world.

It hits you at strange moments. 

Not when you'd expect, not during the long stretches of yellow or the nights when the hum shifts pitch and BB goes rigid and watchful beside you. It hits you in the quiet. In the nothing moments.

You'll be sitting in the nest sketching a corridor layout, and the pen will skip, and you'll shake it the way you used to shake the pens at Clark's register. And the muscle memory will drag the whole world through. 

The smell of the showroom, lemon polish and particleboard, the radio playing low from the boombox behind the counter, the particular quality of California dusk through the front windows when the strip mall parking lot emptied out.

The apartment. The couch. The sound of Bobby's camera clicking in the other room.

You miss rain. Not Level 14 rain, or drizzle of the Poolrooms. Actual rain, East Bay winter rain, the kind that hammered the apartment windows and turned the parking lot at Clark's into a shallow lake and made Bobby curse because he'd left the car windows cracked again.

You miss the smell of wet asphalt. You even miss traffic. The dull boredom of a slow Tuesday shift with no customers, leaning on the counter with a magazine, watching the clock crawl toward closing.

You miss cereal. The specific crunch of it, dry, eaten by the handful out of the box at midnight because you were too tired to make real food after a close. You miss the weight of your own blankets on your bed, not the gathered nest-pile BB assembled for you. You miss the answering machine clicking on. You miss the phone ringing at all.

You think about going back.

Not the way you thought about it in the first weeks. That was rantic, clawing, animal desperation to find the wall you fell through and push back to the other side. That's burned out. What's left is quieter. More deliberate. A slow, circular calculation that runs in the background of your brain like a programme you can't close: Is there a way? If BB knows the doors, if the doors go between levels, if levels connect to each other in ways that don't follow geometry, could one of them connect back? Could there be a threshold that opens onto Clark's storage basement, onto the real world?

You don't ask BB. Because the calculation always stalls at the same place, the same, indestructible wall. 

The wall in your chest. The one built from the last six months of your life in Santa Clara, from every unanswered question and unfinished sentence and cold sheet and blue TV light and grunt. 

The wall that asks one simple question: Go back to what?

Go back to the apartment where Bobby looked through you like glass? Go back to the doorway where you stood with your keys in your hand and your heart in your eyes, and he didn't look up? Go back to being the woman who measures love in deficits, who keeps count of kisses the way she keeps count of inventory, watching the numbers dwindle, knowing exactly what the shortage means, and not being able to stop counting.

Bobby is probably relieved.

The thought arrives fully formed, mid-step, on a walk through Level 4, and it stops you so completely that BB turns back, his hand sliding to the small of your back, his head doing that quick, concerned tilt. You wave him off. Fine. I'm fine. But the thought is there now, lodged behind your sternum like a splinter, and you can feel it every time you breathe.

Bobby is probably relieved. Bobby is probably sleeping diagonally again. Bobby is probably eating cereal over the sink, leaving his bowl on the counter. Watching TV with his feet up and the apartment is probably messier, quieter. Less cluttered without your books and your magazines and your shoes by the door.

Your presence in every corner asking to be noticed. 

Bobby is probably lighter, breathing easier. Maybe he looked up from the television one day and realised the doorway was empty and felt—what? Guilt? Or the guilty cousin of relief, the exhale of a man whose obligation to pretend has been finally lifted?

You haven't felt needed in months. Not once.

The realisation surfaces slowly, a gradual saturation of a truth you've been standing ankle-deep in since before you fell through the wall. 

Bobby didn't need you. Bobby needed the idea of you—the girlfriend, the warm body, the person in the apartment who made it feel less empty—but he didn't need you. The particular, inconvenient you who wanted to be talked to and looked at and held and kissed goodbye every morning. That version of you was too much work. 

That version required maintenance he couldn't be bothered to perform.

But the ache—god, the ache. It hasn't faded. You thought it would. You thought time and distance and the sheer alien absurdity of your circumstances would erode it the way the Backrooms erode seemingly everything. Until the original shape is unrecognisable. 

But the ache for Bobby sits in the centre of your chest like a second heartbeat, stubborn and alive, and it doesn't care that he let you down.

It doesn't care that the last thing he gave you was a grunt. Love has no quality control. Love doesn't audit the recipient and adjust its intensity based on merit. 

You still love Bobby with the same enormous, stupid devotion you loved him with on that Thursday morning when the sun was on the sheets and he ignored the phone and pulled you closer and rasped stay. That love has not diminished by a single degree despite every reason it should have, and the persistence of it is the cruellest thing about being here. 

Because it means you’re aching for a man who made you feel invisible while standing in front of a being who has never once looked away.

You cry about it. Once. In the nest, in the dark, turned away from BB, muffling it in the blankets.

He doesn't say anything. His hand finds your shoulder. His thumb moves, once, twice, a slow circuit over the curve of bone. He doesn't ask what's wrong because he already knows—he's always known, he heard it all through the wall—and the kindness of his silence, the restraint of it, the choice to hold space instead of fill it, makes you cry harder.

You stop crying. You wipe your face. You pick up the notebook.

And you start mapping instead.

BB finds the notebook for you. God knows where, god knows how, a composition book with a mottled black-and-white cover and pages that smell like basement storage. 

You hold it and the weight of it in your hands feels so familiar it aches. The pen he gives you is a ballpoint, blue ink, the cheap kind that skips if you press too hard. You uncap it and the click of the cap settles something in your chest. An old reflex. The same one that used to kick in when you opened the inventory binder at the store. 

The satisfaction of a system, a structure, a way to organise chaos into a shape you can hold.

If you can't go back, you'll go forward. If you can't be needed there, you'll be needed here. Anything but the slow decay of being unwanted. And then, one day, when you're ready, you'll ask BB to find you a door back.

One day.

Level 0 comes first. The hallways you know, the ones BB takes you through, the turns and junctions and the places where the carpet changes texture and means something. A border, a threshold, a shift in territory. 

You draw diagrams. Floor plans. Rough, imprecise, the proportions wrong because the proportions are wrong. Because the hallways don't obey geometry in any way you can verify. But the act of drawing them—of putting pen to paper, using the things Clark used to tell you about rendering shapes and rooms—makes it less vast. Less formless. Containable. 

The pen moves and the world shrinks and for the first time in months you have purpose.

BB watches you work with undisguised fascination.

He sits beside you while you sketch, his chin on your shoulder, his breath warm on your neck, and sometimes he corrects you (that corridor turns left, not right or there's a junction there you haven't found yet) and sometimes he just watches your hand move and hums in his throat. That low, warm rumble that you've started to associate with contentment. 

His chin digs into your shoulder when he leans in to see your shorthand and you flick his nose without looking up and he huffs—offended, amused, delighted, nosing closer—and the exchange is so easy, so thoughtless, so much like two people who’ve known each other long enough that the edges have been worn smooth by repetition.

Half the time you forget he's not human.

That's the truth you don't examine too closely. Because it would mean confronting what it says about you, about your standards, about how broken your idea of normal has become. 

But BB sits beside you with his chin on your shoulder and his warmth against your side. He asks about your shorthand, remembers the answer, asks follow-up questions. He brings you food without being asked.

The line between an inhuman entity wearing a man's face and a person who cares about me blurs until it's less a line and more a smudge, a gradation, a slow dissolve from one thing into the other.

He cares for you. Genuinely. Not the way you care for a pet. 

You see it in the small things first. The way he checks the temperature of the carpet before he lets you sit, and how he positions himself between you and the corridor when you sleep. His head turns toward you when you shift in the nest, tracking your movement the way a compass tracks north. 

Most of all in how he says your name. Not baby, not the endearment—your actual name, the one he uses rarely, carefully, like he's holding it in his mouth and tasting each syllable. When BB says your name, it sounds like a discovery. Like a fact he's still pleased to know.

“You're organising it,” he says one day. Amused. Impressed. “The way you organised the inventory at the store.”

“It helps me think.”

“You're applying human systems to a place that doesn't follow human rules.”

“Is that a problem?”

He considers this. His head tilts. “No,” he replies slowly, like he's arriving at a conclusion that surprises him. “No, I think it might be… useful. No one's ever tried to map it like this. Most wanderers are too busy surviving to catalogue."

“Well,” you say teasingly. “I've got you for the surviving part.”

He goes quiet. You glance up from the notebook. His face is going through layers again, rearranging, the cocky default giving way to the newer expression underneath. The one that showed up when you named him. A door opening inward.

He catches you looking, and the default snaps back, the half-grin, the raised eyebrow.

“Yeah,” he drawls lightly. Entirely failing to conceal the sudden warmth radiating off him like heat from a furnace. “Yeah, you do.”

You add to the notebook every day. Layouts, landmarks, and the sensory details that serve as navigation. 

BB takes you exploring.

Not every day. Some days the hum is wrong, or BB is tense in a way he won't explain, or you can feel the level holding its breath the way it did the night he disappeared and came back wearing a freshly assembled face. On those days, you stay in the nest. You write in the notebook. You read the pages you've already filled and trace the paths you've already walked and commit them to memory because memory is the only filing system you've got. 

On those days, the ache comes back—Bobby's hands, Bobby's mouth, the way he used to drop his forehead against yours in the dark and whisper your name, just your name, over and over—and you let it sit in your chest and you don't fight it. But you don't follow it, either. 

You just write around it. Inventory the grief the way you inventory everything else. Label it. File it. Move on to the next entry.

But most days, BB takes you out.

Level 1, first. BB walks beside you, and his posture changes here. Subtly mostly, the ease tightening into a coiled attention. His head on a swivel, hand at the small of your back with a pressure that says I'm tracking everything in this room and nothing will get within twenty feet of you.

You sketch the layout in the notebook while he stands guard. You mark the exits, the supply caches, the places where other wanderers have left graffiti on the shelving units. Messages, warnings, crude maps of their own.

You get braver. You ask questions. About the Smilers, the Howlers, about the hierarchy of things that live here. How they relate to each other and what makes some dangerous and some merely present. 

BB answers. Not always fully, not always clearly. There are concepts here that he doesn't have a human language for. Mechanics that exist in the gap between what he perceives and what your brain can hold, but he answers, and you write it all down, and the notebook fills.

You develop a routine. You wake up, eat whatever BB has found or produced, and you walk. You explore together, map, and come back. You sit together in the nest afterwards and talk. 

And the talking is easier now, less charged, less careful. You tell him about your life. The books you loved. The way you used to organise your bookshelves by colour rather than by author, because it made you happy to look at them. The hiking trails in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Big Basin and Castle Rock, the way the redwoods smelled after rain.

He listens the way he always listens. Total attention. Full presence. The thing Bobby couldn't do. The thing BB does like breathing.

And you catch yourself, one evening, doing something unthinkable. 

You’re sitting in the nest with your notebook open, pen behind your ear, telling BB about the time you got lost on the Skyline-to-the-Sea trail. You had to navigate back using a park map you'd annotated so heavily it was more your handwriting than cartography. BB’s laughing. That low huff through his nose, his shoulder pressed against yours. 

You're laughing too, and the yellow light is warm, and you realise, suddenly, that you haven’t thought about Bobby in three days.

The guilt is instantaneous.

A hot, lurching, physical thing that grabs you by the sternum and pulls. Three days. You went three days without the ache, and the absence of it feels like a betrayal so total it makes you nauseous. As if the love you carry for Bobby is a fire that requires constant tending, and you let it gutter, and that makes you—what? 

The kind of woman who forgets? The kind who moves on? The kind who finds comfort in a pair of borrowed eyes while the original owner of those eyes is somewhere in Santa Clara, probably sleeping diagonal, probably relieved?

You go quiet. BB notices. 

His shoulder presses against yours (a question, not a demand), and you shake your head, picking up the pen. Start sketching a corridor you mapped that morning, but the lines are slightly too hard, the ink pressing dents into the page. 

BB watches your hand and says nothing, and the nothing is the right thing, the exact right thing, and you hate him a little for being so consistently, unbearably right.

You grow comfortable.

Not comfortable like safe, or comfortable like home. Because this place is neither of those things, and you know it. The notebook full of entity classifications and danger ratings is proof that you know it.

But comfortable the way you get with a person—a being, entity, a whatever-he-is—when enough time has passed that their presence stops being a question and starts being an answer. 

You stop flinching when he appears in doorways. You stop tensing when his hand finds yours. You lean into his shoulder when you're tired, and he holds steady. The meadow on Level 14 becomes your Sunday, your weekend, the place he takes you when the yellow gets to be too much, and you need to remember what sky looks like.

You stop keeping count.

You don't notice it happening. It's quiet cessation of a habit so ingrained you didn't know it was still running until it stopped. 

No more tallying. No more, he didn't today, that's the fourth day in a row. Because BB doesn't generate deficits. BB doesn't create gaps to count. He’s present the way the hum is present. Woven into the structure of your days so thoroughly that his attention isn't an event anymore, it's an environment. 

You live inside his attention the way you live inside Level 0. It's just where you are.

But the ache for Bobby doesn't go away. Only migrates from the centre of your chest to somewhere deeper, somewhere quieter, a room in the back of you where it can sit with the memory of your first kiss and his arm around your shoulder by the ocean and the way he used to say stay and mean it. 

You don't visit that room every day anymore. But you know it's there. You can feel its weight when you lie down at night, BB's arm around your waist, his breath on your neck. 

The ache says remember, and you say I know, and you close your eyes, and you stay.

Your handwriting fills the notebook. Page after page. The careful, slightly messy script. A system. A structure. 

A way to survive.

“It's circling again.”

You look up sharply. 

BB is standing at the edge of the nest, head tilted, that almost-human listening posture—chin cocked, eyes unfocused, his whole body oriented toward a frequency you can't hear. His jaw is tight.

You set the pen down. “How close?”

“Closer than last time,” ee says evenly, too evenly. “It's running along the edge and then pulling back. Then running a little further.”

Ignoring the sudden chill at your nape, you say, “Like it's looking for a gap.”

His eyes flick to you. A beat of surprise follows. Quick and subtle, the kind he still has when you demonstrate that you've been paying attention to the lessons, that the notebook isn't just busywork but comprehension.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Like that.”

You pull your knees up. Wrap your arms around them. The notebook sits open on the blanket beside you, the page half-covered in your shorthand. A corridor map, danger annotations, the new symbol you invented last week for an unknown entity, and behaviour unclassified. You used it for the first time yesterday. The ink is still dark.

“What are you going to do?”

“I need to check the perimeter. See if anything's shifted. If it's been probing a specific section or moving along the full boundary.” He's already calculating. The ancient one surfaces behind Bobby's eyes, not all the way, just enough to sharpen the edges. To give his posture that predatory geometry that doesn't belong on a twenty-something in a crop top. “I want to understand its pattern before I kill it.”

“BB.” You say his name, and he stills. Focuses. The ancient thing recedes a fraction, and the warmth returns to the surface. You hold his gaze and say, carefully, gently, “Be careful.”

His mouth parts. 

He crosses the nest in two steps. Drops into a crouch in front of you, his knees on the blanket, and his hand finds the side of your head. His fingers glide over one side of your face slowly. He strokes, long, gentle, from your temple to the nape of your neck. 

“Stay here,” he says gently, his thumb tracing the curve behind your ear. “Stay in the nest. Don't go into the corridor. Not even the first junction.”

“I know the rules.”

“I know you know.” His hand stills in your hair, cupping the back of your skull. He dips his head until his forehead is close to yours, not quite touching, his breath warm on your face. His eyes are darker, layered, and the thing behind them is looking at you, too. For a moment, both of them are present. BB and the creature he's built on top of, and both of them are saying the same thing. “I'll be back.”

“You better be.”

The corner of his mouth lifts. Just barely. The private curve that's his and not Bobby's, the one you named into existence in a meadow on Level 14. He presses his lips to your forehead. Holds them there for a beat. You feel the hum vibrate through the contact, that low sub-frequency that lives in his chest and transfers through skin, settling behind your sternum like a second pulse.

Then he straightens. His hand slides from your hair. The softness drops from his posture in a single clean motion. 

What's left is the thing that walks these hallways, silent and certain and very, very old.

He rounds the corner, and the yellow swallows him.

You pick up the pen. Open the notebook to a fresh page. You write: Entity X — perimeter — closer. Testing the boundary for gaps. BB checking pattern. Unknown motivation. Unknown capability.

You underline unknown twice.

Eleven minutes.

You know this because you've been counting. 

Your brain just does it now, keeps a running tally of the seconds since his silhouette disappeared. Because your body has learned that when he's not here, the math of your survival changes. 

With him, you’re the safest thing in this strange place. Without him, you’re a girl sitting on a damp carpet in a place that eats people. But BB always comes back, you remind yourself. Always. 

You're sketching the rough map of the corridors you explored yesterday, trying to get the proportions right on a hallway junction that you're fairly sure had five walls, when you hear the footsteps.

Not his. His steps are almost silent, a predator's tread, weight distributed in a way that isn't quite human. These are boots. Multiple sets. Heavy, deliberate.

You close the notebook slowly.

Six figures come around the corner.

Not researchers BB warned you about. Wrong uniforms, wrong insignia, a logo you don't recognise stitched onto black tactical gear. They're armed. Not with the improvised weapons most wanderers carry. Real weapons. Professional grade. The kind that suggests funding, organisation, a chain of command that exists somewhere outside this place.

The one in front spots you and signals the others to stop. He says something into the radio on his shoulder, clipped and fast, and you catch the words “confirmed,” and “companion” and “entity absent.”

They waited for BB to leave.

“Ma'am.” The lead one steps forward. Voice flat. Professional. “You need to come with us. We're here to extract you.”

Your body tenses at those words, coiling, and you stand at once. “No.”

It comes out sharper than you expect. Hard-edged. The backrooms have made you harder than you realise.

“Ma'am, that's not—”

“I said no,” you repeat firmly. “I'm not going anywhere with a bunch of strangers.”

His jaw tightens. He glances at the others. Some signal passes between them. A shift in posture, a nod, the silent language you’re not privy to.

He reaches for your arm.

You hit him.

A closed fist, fast, driven by weeks of survival instinct and adrenaline and the specific, white-hot fury of being grabbed by a stranger in a place where the only person who touches you has earned it inch by inch.

Your knuckles connect with his cheekbone. The man’s head snaps sideways, and for one bright second, you feel savage satisfaction.

Then three of them are on you.

You kick. You bite. Drive your elbow into someone's throat and hear someone choke behind you. You're feral with it. No technique, no training, just the scrappy, vicious fighting of a girl who's survived the backrooms and is not going to be dragged by men who couldn’t even bother to introduce themselves. 

Your nails rake across someone's forearm and draw blood. You wrench free of one grip and slam your heel into a kneecap. Someone swears, loud, furious.

“Fucking—hold her, HOLD HER—”

A hand fists in your hair. Yanks. Your neck snaps back, and your eyes water. Someone wrenches your arm behind you hard enough that the joint screams. You thrash, snarling. Your free hand catches someone across the mouth. You feel a tooth cut your knuckle.

The lead one is in front of you again. There's a red mark blooming on his cheekbone where you hit him, and his professionalism has curdled into something uglier.

“You want to do this the hard way?”

You spit at him. It catches his vest.

He hits you.

Open palm across your face. Your head rocks to one side. The world around you whites out for half a second, and then there's carpet under your hands and knees. Your lip throbs, burning numb, and you can taste copper in your mouth, dribbling. A boot slots between your shoulder blades, pressing you flat, and your cheek presses against the damp fibres. 

Your wrists get pinned behind you roughly at an angle that sends bright, screaming pain up to your shoulder.

“Stay DOWN—”

You’re on the floor, bleeding. There’s a boot on your back and hands pinning your wrists. You’re away from the only safe thing in this place, and the carpet is wet against your split lip. You’re afraid. For the first time since your encounter with the Smiler, you’re terrified. Immediate, animal fear of being held down by someone stronger than you.

You open your mouth. You fill your lungs.

And you scream.

“BB—”

One word. It tears out of your throat raw and desperate, hitting the yellow walls, and the walls absorb it, and the walls move.

The fluorescent lights don't flicker. They detonate.

Every tube in the hallway blows simultaneously, glass raining down like ice, and in the darkness that follows, the hum of level 0 drops—drops—drops into a frequency that you feel in your teeth, in your ribs, in the boot on your back that suddenly isn't pressing as hard because the man wearing it has stopped breathing. Not dead. Frozen. 

The way an animal freezes in terror when it smells something at the top of the food chain.

The walls crack. Clean fissures running floor to ceiling, splitting the drywall in deliberate, surgical lines, as if something were tearing its way through the building's architecture. The carpet ripples under your cheek. You feel it. The backrooms responding, contracting, the whole of level 0 seizing like a body in pain.

The boot lifts off your back.

Not because the man chose to move it. Because the floor tilted. Subtle. Just enough to shift his weight. Just enough to free you. The backrooms—him, it, the thing that is both—clearing the path.

You hear them before you see them react. The soldiers. Breathing fast. The click of weapons being raised. Someone screaming “what the fuck what the fuck what the—”

He comes out of the dark.

Not through a door but from the dark itself. Like the darkness peeled open and someone stepped through the seam. 

He’s not fully human-shaped.

The Bobby suit is slipping. Shoulders too wide. Arms too long, hanging at angles that make your hindbrain scream. His fingers have too many joints—you can see them in the fractured emergency glow of the one tube that didn't shatter—long and wrong, curling like they're remembering a shape that predates hands. 

His face is still Bobby's face but the geometry behind it is pressing outward, cheekbones like blades, jaw too sharp, too angular, the skull beneath rearranging itself into something that was never meant to be looked at directly. And his eyes are black. Fully, completely, endlessly black. Two holes in the front of his skull that open onto something without a floor.

He sees you on the ground.

The blood on your lip. The bruises on your skin. The tear tracks cutting down your face.

BB sees the boot print on your back.

There’s a sound.

It booms from the walls, the floor, and the ceiling simultaneously. From every surface of level 0, because he is level 0, and every square inch of it is snarling.

The remaining fluorescent tube doesn't shatter. 

It melts. The glass softens and drips. The carpet under the soldiers' feet goes wet, soaked, saturated, as though the floor is turning into a swamp.

You press your face into the carpet and close your eyes.

It takes less than a minute.

You don't watch, but you hear it. Screaming that starts human and ends keening. Wet sounds. Heavy sounds. The particular acoustic signature of a body being opened by something that doesn't need tools. That horrible, snarling, clicking growl of pure rage.

One of them manages to fire a weapon, and the sound of the shot is enormous in the enclosed hallway. It cuts out, followed by a crunch of bone, and another, and another, and another—

Then there's nothing.

Silence.

The level settles. The hum reasserts itself, climbing back up from that sub-basement frequency to its usual buzz. You can feel it in the carpet against your cheek, scratchy and too warm.

One fluorescent tube fizzes back to life overhead. Yellow. Sickly. 

You feel the air change. The temperature drops, and you know he's close before anything touches you. 

When it does—a hand on your shoulder, delicate, so delicate—it's not quite a hand yet. Too many joints. The fingers too long, still retracting to Bobby's proportions, still remembering how to be the thing that strokes your hair instead of the thing that just—

You turn over.

He's crouching over you. Still wrong. The proportions haven't settled. BB’s arms are too long, and his spine is curved at an angle that doesn't work with human vertebrae. His face is a rough draft. Bobby's features sketched over the older, sharper one. Black fluid coats his hands. His jaw. His chest. Not all of it is black.

His eyes are still dark, but the blue is bleeding back in around the edges. Like ink dropped into water, spreading, reclaiming.

You reach for him.

Your hands are shaking so badly that you miss the first time. 

Your fingers slip against the wrong texture of his jaw, the skin too smooth, too cool, still settling back to its bony configuration. You reach again, and this time you get his neck (too long, the vertebrae too prominent, sharp ridges under your palms where Bobby's neck was smooth), and you pull.

You pull yourself into him, and you cling. 

Arms around his neck, face buried in his throat, legs curling up, making yourself as small as possible against his chest because if you can get close enough, maybe nothing will ever reach you again. 

You wrap yourself around him with a muffled sob. One sob, then another, then a third that breaks open into something ragged and ugly and not at all brave.

You’re shaking and bleeding, crying into the neck of a monster, and you don't care. You don't care about the wrong temperature, the wrong shape or the black fluid soaking into your shirt. 

You don't care.

BB freezes. One second. Two. The violence still running, the gentleness needing a moment to boot up. You feel it. The exact instant the system switches. His whole body shudders once, and then his arms come around you.

Tight. So tight. He scoops you up like you're nothing—one arm under your legs, one around your back—and pulls you into his chest and holds you against him like he's trying to absorb you. Like he could fold you into his body and keep you there where nothing touches you ever again. 

His chin comes down on the top of your head. His whole body curves around you. You feel the strength in every inch of him. The same strength that just did what it just did, repurposed. Every ounce of force that tore six armed men apart, now calibrated with impossible precision to the exact pressure of holding without breaking.

“I'm here.” His voice. Rough. Not fully Bobby's voice yet. There's an edge underneath it still, something vast and deep, like hearing someone speak from several floors down. “I'm here, baby. I'm here.”

You press closer. Your fingers curl into the fabric of his jacket. Bobby's jacket. Your face is against his throat, and you can feel the absence of a pulse under your cheek. No heartbeat. Just the hum. His hum. Vibrating through his chest and into yours.

“They—” Your voice is thick, muffled against his skin. “They grabbed me, they were trying to—I fought, I tried to—”

“I know.” His hand finds the back of your head. Cradles it. His fingers—the right number of joints now, almost fully Bobby-shaped again—thread into your hair the way they do in the nest, slow, gentle, the careful repetitive motion that means safe, you're safe, I'm here. “I know. It's over.”

“There were six of them and I couldn't—”

“You don't have to.”

His other hand finds your face. Tilts it up. His thumb traces your split lip with a touch so light it barely registers. Just the ghost of contact, the pad of his thumb skating over the cut, and you watch his jaw tighten. The blue in his eyes flickers. Darkness swims underneath it, surfacing and submerging, and you know he is looking at the blood on your mouth, and memorising who put it there, and the fact that they’re already dead is not enough. Will never be enough.

“Does it hurt?” Quiet. Bobby's voice now, almost entirely. That specific soft register he uses in the nest, the one that makes your chest ache.

“A little.”

His thumb moves to the bruise on your cheekbone. Traces the edge of it. Down to your jaw. Along the finger-shaped marks on your wrist, and the sound he makes is barely audible. Low, tight snarl. A vibration caught behind his teeth.

“I should have been here.”

“You came.”

“Not fast enough.”

You almost laugh. What comes out instead is a wet, clogged sound. “You came very quickly, BB.”

“Not fast enough,” he repeats, and means it. 

You put your head back against his chest. He holds you tighter. He hums. Shaky at first, the frequency wobbles. Then it steadies. Finding its rhythm. His song. The one that doesn't exist anywhere outside of him.

You feel the backrooms settle around you both. The lights dim softer. Temperature rises, degree by gentle degree, until the air feels like a room in a house instead of a hallway in purgatory. He’s doing that. Rewriting the space around your body because you’re shaking, and he can't make you stop shaking, but he can make everything else softer.

“BB.” Your voice is small. Muffled against his chest.

“Yeah?” Immediate. Soft.

“Don't leave.” You swallow. Press your face harder into the fabric of his jacket. “Just—for a bit. Don't leave.”

His arms tighten, cheek pressing against the top of your head. You feel him breathe—not because he needs to, but because you need to feel it, and he knows what you need, even before you know it yourself.

“Never,” he whispers.

One word. A law. Written into the fabric of this place. Never. As in: the sun will come up. As in: water runs downhill. As in: I will be here.

You close your eyes.

The shaking ebbs, not all at once but in increments, your body releasing its grip on the panic the way a fist unclenches. One finger, then another, then another. His hand keeps moving over your hair. Rhythmic. Patient. He will do this for as long as you need.

He will do this forever if you let him.

You stay like that. On the floor. In the hallway. Curled in the lap of a thing that’s just killed six men.

The backrooms are changing. You can feel it beneath you, a shuddering grind. Hallways folding. Routes sealing shut. The architecture of level 0 quietly, methodically, permanently rearranging itself around you both. Doors that used to lead here now lead nowhere. 

He’s taking you somewhere no one will find you.

And you let him. Eyes closed. Face against his chest. Listening to the hum.

You let him.

M.E.G. INTERNAL — MAJOR EXPLORER GROUP

DEPARTMENT OF ENTITY RESEARCH & CONTAINMENT

▓▓▓▓▓▓ CLASSIFIED // LEVEL 4 — RESTRICTED // URGENT REVIEW ▓▓▓▓▓▓

INCIDENT REPORT: IR-0-27 DOCUMENT ID: MEG-ENT-0000-IR-0-27 CLASSIFICATION: LEVEL 4 — URGENT FILED BY: Operations Director ██████ DATE: ██/██/199█ RE: Unauthorised Engagement With Entity 0 / Companion — Hostile Extraction Attempt by External Agency STATUS: CRITICAL — ONGOING CONSEQUENCES

SUMMARY OF INCIDENT

On ██/██/199█, at approximately ██:██ hours, a six-person tactical unit operating under the authority of ██████████████████████████████████ (hereafter "the Agency") conducted an unauthorised extraction attempt on the individual designated "the Companion" in M.E.G. Entity 0 documentation.

M.E.G. had no advance knowledge of this operation. We were not consulted or informed. We were not given the opportunity to do what we have spent the last eighteen months doing, which is explicitly and repeatedly recommending against exactly this course of action.

Our recommendation, stated in Section 7.2 of the Entity 0 dossier and reiterated in no fewer than six inter-agency memoranda, was as follows:

"Do not intervene. Do not extract. Do not, under any circumstances, threaten the Companion's safety within Entity 0's perceptual range."

The Agency disregarded this recommendation.

All six members of the tactical unit are dead.

RECONSTRUCTION OF EVENTS

The following timeline has been assembled from recovered equipment (three body cameras, one partially functional radio unit) and corroborating seismic data from M.E.G. monitoring equipment on Levels 0 through 3.

██:██ — Six-person tactical unit enters Level 0 via access point ██████. Equipment and insignia consistent with ██████████████████████████████████. The unit is armed with ██████████████████████████████████. They are equipped for a hostile extraction. This was not a rescue. This was a retrieval.

██:██ — Unit locates the Companion in a hallway junction on Level 0, sublevel ██████. Entity 0 is not present. Body camera footage confirms the unit waited for Entity 0 to leave the Companion's immediate vicinity before approaching. This indicates prior surveillance. The Agency was watching. We did not know they were watching. This is itself a security failure that is being reviewed separately.

██:██ — Unit lead makes verbal contact with the Companion. Instructs her to comply with the extraction. Companion refuses. She states clearly, on camera, that she does not wish to be removed. Her exact words are "No" and "I'm not going anywhere."

██:██ — Unit lead attempts physical restraint. The Companion resists violently. Body camera footage shows her striking the unit lead in the face, drawing blood from a secondary operative, and disabling a third with a knee strike before being subdued by multiple operatives simultaneously. She fought like someone who has been surviving the Backrooms for ██████, and it shows. The Companion is subsequently struck across the face by the unit lead and forced to the ground. Bruising consistent with forcible restraint is visible on both wrists.

I will repeat that for the record: a civilian who had clearly, verbally, on camera refused extraction was beaten to the floor by a six-person tactical unit. 

██:██ — M.E.G. seismic monitoring stations on Levels 0, 1, 2, and 3 register a simultaneous anomalous event. The reading does not correspond to any known geological or structural phenomenon. Dr. ██████ has described the waveform as "an earthquake." I am including her analysis verbatim because I do not have a better description.

██:██ — The Companion screams.

██:██ — Entity 0 arrives.

The gap between ██:██ and ██:██ is approximately 1.3 seconds. Entity 0's last confirmed position was ██████████████████████████████████, an estimated █████████████ meters from the Companion's location. It covered this distance in 1.3 seconds. We do not have a theoretical framework for this. We are not going to develop one. It doesn't matter. What matters is what happened next.

██:██ (CONCURRENT) — What we did not understand at the time—and what has only become clear through post-incident analysis—is that Entity 0 did not move through the Backrooms to reach the Companion. It moved the Backrooms.

Temporal monitoring equipment across Levels 0 through 266 recorded simultaneous, catastrophic time distortion events at the moment of Entity 0's displacement. On Level 1, clocks ran backwards for approximately 3.7 seconds. On Level 2, a monitoring team reported experiencing the same eleven-second interval twenty times in succession. On Level 49, two operatives aged approximately 6 years in the space of 1.3 real-time seconds. Medical examination confirmed accelerated cellular turnover consistent with temporal compression. Both operatives have been placed on medical leave.

Entity 0 tore through the temporal fabric of the Backrooms to close the distance between itself and the Companion. It did not navigate. It did not transit. It ripped a hole through the structure of the intervening space.

The damage on the lower levels was temporary. The damage on Level ███ was not.

Level ███ is gone.

Level ███—a fully mapped, documented, and intermittently populated level of the Backrooms—no longer exists. It was not sealed. M.E.G. operatives who attempted to access Level ███ via three separate confirmed entry points found nothing. Not empty corridors. Not blank walls. Nothing. The space that Level ███ occupied is simply absent. As though it was never there at all. 

Entity 0's transit path between its last confirmed location and the Companion passed directly through Level ███. The conclusion is unavoidable: Entity 0, in the 1.3 seconds it took to reach the Companion, annihilated an entire level of the Backrooms as collateral damage. The way a bullet destroys the wall behind the target. Level ███ was simply in the way.

We do not know if there were casualties. Level ███ was classified as intermittently populated. Wanderers passed through; some may have been sheltering there at the time of the event. We will likely never know. There is nothing left to recover. There is nothing left to examine. An entire level of reality was erased in 1.3 seconds.

Dr. ██████ has requested that this section of the report be classified as Level 5. I have denied this request. Everyone needs to read this. Everyone needs to understand what we are dealing with.

██:██ through ██:██ — Body camera footage for this period is partially corrupted. What remains has been reviewed by myself, Dr. ██████, and Dr. ███████████. Dr. ████ has declined to review it. Her decision is respected.

Entity 0 was not in its standard manifestation. I am not going to describe the specific deviations in this report. The footage is available for personnel with Level 4 clearance and a strong stomach.

The engagement lasted approximately 42 seconds.

Entity 0 did not use weapons. Entity 0 is the weapon.

All six operatives were killed. Cause of death for four: ████████████████████████ Cause of death for the remaining two: ██████████████████████████████████. Recovery of remains has been deemed inadvisable at this time, as Entity 0 ██████████████████████████████████.

██:██ — Final body camera footage shows Entity 0 approaching the Companion. It is partially restructured to its usual template, but not fully. The Companion does not retreat. She reaches for it. She clings to it. Entity 0 gathers her. The word "cradles" appears in three separate reviewer notes, and I am allowing it despite its lack of clinical precision because nothing else is accurate, and assumes a protective posture. Audio, though degraded, captures the Companion's voice saying something indistinct, and Entity 0 responding with a single word. Audio analysis has been unable to confirm the word. Dr. ██████ believes it was "never." The camera fails shortly after.

ASSESSMENT OF CONSEQUENCES

I said in Section 7.2 of the Entity 0 dossier that I did not want to see what it does to us. I have now seen it. I was right not to want to.

But the killings are not the primary concern of this report. Soldiers die. Operations fail. This is the nature of work in the Backrooms. The primary concern is what this incident has done to years of carefully maintained observational neutrality between M.E.G. and Entity 0.

Entity 0 tolerated us. That is not an exaggeration or a simplification. We have operated monitoring equipment on Level 0 for eighteen months. Entity 0 knew it was there. It knew we were watching. And it allowed it, the way a homeowner allows a bird to nest in their gutter. Not because they approve, but because it doesn't bother them enough to act.

That tolerance is, as of this incident, in question.

Within 48 hours of IR-0-27, the following changes were observed:

Level ███ remains nonexistent. Repeated attempts to locate it via all known access points have failed. Dr. ██████ has formally recommended that it be struck from the Backrooms cartography index. The level is not missing. It was unmade. The temporal scarring along Entity 0's transit path shows no sign of healing or regeneration. This is, as far as we can determine, permanent. An entire level of the Backrooms has been permanently destroyed as a byproduct of Entity 0's emotional response to a threat against the Companion. 

M.E.G. monitoring equipment on Level 0, sublevel ██████ through ██████, ceased functioning. Not damaged. Removed. Every sensor, every camera, every seismic monitor. Gone. No debris. No evidence of destruction. The equipment is simply no longer there.

Three M.E.G. personnel conducting routine observation on Level 0 reported that the hallways they had used for months had "rearranged." Routes that previously led to confirmed Companion sighting locations now terminate in dead ends. Level 0 has been restructured. We believe Entity 0 has deliberately altered the architecture to prevent future observation.

The Companion has not been sighted since IR-0-27. She is not at any previously confirmed location. The blanket nest—documented across seven sighting reports as Entity 0's primary base of operation with the Companion—is empty. Every blanket, every scavenged item, every trace of habitation has been removed. As though no one was ever there.

Entity 0 has not been sighted on Level 0 since IR-0-27.

The implication is clear: Entity 0 has relocated the Companion. To where, we do not know. Dr. ██████ has proposed that they may have moved to a sublevel of Level 0 that is not represented in our current mapping. A level beneath the level, a space that Entity 0 has carved out or always possessed and simply never used until now. Until it had a reason to hide something it could not afford to lose.

We have, in the space of one unauthorised operation conducted by an agency that ignored every warning we provided, lost the single greatest research asset in the history of M.E.G. entity studies. The Companion is gone. Our access is gone. Years of carefully accumulated observational data has been rendered functionally useless because the subject has moved to a location we cannot find and sealed the door behind it.

FORMAL OBJECTIONS

I want the following on the record:

M.E.G. explicitly, repeatedly, and in writing recommended against any attempt to extract, contain, or engage the Companion. These recommendations were provided to the Agency through proper inter-organisational channels on ██/██/198█, ██/██/198█, ██/██/198█, ██/██/199█, ██/██/199█, and ██/██/199█. Each was acknowledged. None were followed.

The Companion was not a hostage. She verbally refused extraction, clearly, and on camera. The Agency proceeded with force. This is not a rescue. This is an assault on a civilian by a government-adjacent organisation operating without jurisdiction inside a space they do not understand.

The Companion was injured. She fought back and was beaten to the ground for it. She bled. And the thing that has been protecting her heard her scream its name. We told them what it does to things that threaten what belongs to it. We told them. They didn't listen. At least six people are dead because they didn't listen.

Entity 0 has, until now, operated within a framework that M.E.G. was beginning to understand. It was predictable. Perhaps not in its actions, but in its priorities. The Companion was the variable. The Companion was the key. And now the Companion is gone, and Entity 0 has demonstrated that its response to perceived threats is not merely violent but architectural. It didn't just kill the threat. It restructured its entire domain to prevent the threat from recurring. It sealed Level 0. It erased its footprint. It took its Companion, and it disappeared.

An entire level of the Backrooms was destroyed. Gone. Erased from existence as collateral damage during Entity 0's transit. If there were wanderers sheltering on Level ███ they are dead. Or worse. Or something we don't have a word for because the space they occupied no longer exists in any meaningful sense. We will never know. The Agency's unauthorised operation may have cost lives far beyond the six operatives they sent in, and we have no way to calculate the true body count because there is nothing left to count.

We do not know where Entity 0 is. We do not know if it will allow future contact. We do not know if, the next time an M.E.G. operative enters Level 0, Entity 0 will distinguish between us and the Agency. We may have inherited the consequences of someone else's stupidity, and we may pay for it in personnel.

RECOMMENDATIONS

All M.E.G. operations on Level 0 are suspended indefinitely pending reassessment.

The Agency is to be formally censured and barred from independent Backrooms operations until further notice. Their response to this censure is noted and disregarded.

No further attempts to locate, contact, or extract the Companion are to be conducted by any organisation, under any authority, for any reason.

If—and I stress if—Entity 0 re-establishes contact with M.E.G. personnel, the interaction is to be treated as a diplomacy scenario, not a research scenario. Entity 0 is not a subject. Entity 0 is, functionally, a sovereign power that we have just watched an allied agency declare war on. We will conduct ourselves accordingly.

Someone needs to tell the Agency what "apex predator" means. I have included a dictionary to help and clear the confusion.

Filed: ██/██/199█

Operations Director ██████

Addendum, handwritten:

She screamed his name, and the level cracked open.

I've been doing this for eleven years. I have never seen a response that fast. 1.3 seconds. It wasn't travel. He didn't cross the distance. The distance stopped existing. She called, and the Backrooms folded to put him where she was. And everything between them—every hallway, every corridor, every room, an entire level—ceased to exist because it was in his way.

The body camera audio from the aftermath is mostly static. But there is a moment, mostly degraded, where you can hear humming. And underneath the humming, faintly, a voice. Hers. Saying "don't leave." And then his. One word.

We are not dealing with an entity that lives in the Backrooms.

We are dealing with the Backrooms. And it is in love.

God help us all.

▓▓▓▓▓▓ END OF REPORT // FILE STATUS: OPEN — NEVER CLOSED ▓▓▓▓▓▓

[the-darklings]

𓈒 ˳ ˳ 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐁𝐎𝐁𝐁𝐘 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓.

Bobby's been a shit boyfriend for months. When you disappear through a wall in the basement of Clark's furniture store, you wake up in the Backrooms, where a better version of Bobby is waiting. One who actually shows up, one who loves you, one who never, ever wants to let you go.

bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby

cw: emotional neglect, psychological horror, backroom entities/lore, implied creature violence, emotional manipulation by non-human entity, alcohol abuse (secondary character), grief/loss, verbal arguments (no physical violence), angst.

𓈒 asks/mini concepts 𓈒 𓈒 𓈒 playlist

‽ part one / concept. ‽ part two. ‽ part three. ⸘ interlude: entity 0

extras:

Ꮺ୧ making out w/ better bobby. Ꮺ୧ better you! Ꮺ୧ "baby." Ꮺ୧ "open your mouth." Ꮺ୧ pillow fort. Ꮺ୧ in the beginning. Ꮺ୧ my, what long tongue you have.

⎋ M.E.G. ENTITY 0 — RESEARCH FILE INDEX:

↹ MEG-ENT-0000-ADDM-██ — Restricted Addendum: Reproductive Capability Assessment (Filed Under Protest)

[femaleberdart]

Whibney....

(Edit) RAAAAAAAAAAHGGHHHHHHHHHH

[ghostslittlegf]

NEW LOOK OF SAMUEL ROUKIN AS GHOST IN MW4

IM BACK IN THE FUCKING BUILDING

[picturemedrowning]

I'd know that walk anywhere

[hunnam]

Barry Sloane as Gary Packer The Cage (2026-)

[purple-1995]

Yeah... Aemond really needs his haircare... 🤭

He must've forgotten to pack it

[hr00hraa]

Raw. Next question.

[rozzed]

why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? it won't hurt him....

[thewindowofthesummerhouse]

Reverie Collins (Revi)

[phantom-threaded]

Ewan Mitchell as Aemond Targaryen House of the Dragon S3 Trailer

[lalalovelyly]

I Think I Miss My Wife 2

Aerion Targaryen X Reader Summary: In which you come back TW: OOC AERION, Loser! Aerion, he's so incredibly down bad he needs a warning

The carriage had barely rolled to a stop in the courtyard of Summerhall before Aerion was at the window.

He had not meant to be at the window. He had made a solemn vow to himself, sworn on the blood of Old Valyria and the bones of Balerion the Black Dread and every other suitably dramatic thing he could think of, that he would not be waiting for you. He would be in the great hall. He would be seated. He would be reading something—a history, perhaps, or dragonlore—and when you entered, he would look up with calm, measured surprise and say something devastatingly casual. Ah. You've returned. I hadn't noticed you were gone.

He had practiced the line. He had practiced it in the mirror. He had practiced it on Aemon, who had stared at him with the blank, unimpressed expression of a child who had seen too much and said, "You're going to cry the moment you see her."

Aerion had been deeply offended. He did not cry. He was a dragon. Dragons did not cry. They smoldered. They burned with quiet, dignified intensity. They did not weep.

And yet, when the outrider had appeared on the hill that morning, when the word had spread through the castle like wildfire—the princess returns, the princess is coming home—Aerion had felt something crack open in his chest, something hot and desperate and utterly undignified. He had abandoned his carefully planned position in the great hall. He had abandoned the book he was pretending to read. He had abandoned all pretense of nonchalance and had pressed himself against the window of your shared chambers, palms flat against the glass, breath fogging the pane as he watched the distant speck of your carriage grow larger and larger against the green of the Reach.

Three weeks. You had been gone three weeks. Three weeks and two days, if one was being precise, and Aerion was always precise when it came to you. Three weeks and two days of emptiness. Of cold sheets and cold meals and cold everything. Three weeks and two days of his family looking at him with varying degrees of pity and exasperation. Three weeks and two days of writing you letters—gods, so many letters—each one more desperate than the last, each one sent with trembling hands and a prayer to whatever gods might be listening that you would read them and understand. That you would read them and come home.

And you had written back. Twice. Do not starve. I will be back when I am back. And then, three days later, after his seventh letter had gone out, a second note: Stop sending ravens. You're going to exhaust the poor birds. I'm coming home. Do not starve before I get there.

He had kept both notes under his pillow. He had read them so many times the parchment was starting to wear thin at the creases.

Now you were here. The carriage was in the courtyard. The door was opening. A footman was extending a hand—

Aerion was moving before he consciously decided to move. Down the corridor. Down the stairs. Through the great hall, past servants who pressed themselves against walls to avoid being trampled, past Aemon who called something after him that he did not hear, past his father who was also in the courtyard, apparently, because Maekar Targaryen had abandoned his dignity approximately two letters ago and was now standing by the main doors with an expression of profound relief that he was trying very hard to conceal.

Aerion burst through the doors.

The sunlight hit him like a physical force. He squinted, blinked, and there you were.

You were climbing out of the carriage with the particular carelessness of someone who had been traveling for days and no longer cared about grace. Your traveling gown was rumpled. Your hair was escaping its pins in a dozen directions. There was a smudge of dust on your cheek and a distinctly unimpressed set to your jaw as you surveyed the courtyard, and you were the most beautiful thing Aerion had ever seen. You were more beautiful than the sunrise over starfall. You were more beautiful than the flames of wildfire. You were more beautiful than every poem he had written in your absence, which was saying something, because he had written some truly excellent poems. And sent them. All of them.

He opened his mouth. His carefully prepared line—Ah. You've returned. I hadn't noticed you were gone—rose to his lips.

What came out instead was a sound that might generously be described as a strangled wheeze.

Your head turned. Your eyes found him. For a moment, just a moment, something flickered in your expression and Aerion felt his knees go weak.

Then you raised an eyebrow. "You look terrible," you said.

Aerion's mouth opened and closed. He was aware, suddenly, of his appearance. He had not shaved in four days. His hair, usually immaculate, was a silver disaster that he had been running his hands through obsessively. He was wearing a doublet that did not quite match his breeches because he had dressed himself without servants, unable to bear anyone in his chambers while he was in such a state. The shawl—your shawl, the one you had left draped over the chair, the one that still smelled like you—was still wrapped around his shoulders. He had forgotten he was wearing it. He had forgotten it was not actually his. He had been wearing it for three weeks.

He was a mess. He was a complete and utter mess, and you were standing there looking at him with that eyebrow raised and that smirk playing at your lips, and he loved you so much he thought he might die.

"I—" He swallowed. Straightened his shoulders. Attempted to gather the shreds of his dignity. "You are mistaken. I am perfectly well. I have been perfectly well in your absence. I barely noticed you were gone."

Your smirk widened. "Is that my shawl?"

Aerion looked down. The shawl—soft wool, dyed a deep Targaryen crimson, embroidered with tiny black dragons along the hem—was indeed wrapped around his shoulders like a sad, silver-haired grandmother.

"No," he said.

"It is."

"It is not."

"Aerion."

"It is—" He grasped for an explanation, any explanation. "It is a new fashion. All the princes in the Seven Kingdoms are wearing their wives' garments. It is a statement. It signifies—" He waved a hand vaguely. "—devotion. Fealty. The eternal bond of—"

"You've been sleeping with it, haven't you."

"I have not—" He stopped. Your eyes were sparkling. You were enjoying this. You were standing in the courtyard of your home, rumpled and dusty and perfect, watching him flounder, and you were enjoying every second of it.

Something in his chest loosened.

"Yes," he admitted, and his voice came out smaller than he intended. "I have."

Your expression shifted. The smirk softened into something fonder, something that made his heart stutter in his chest. You crossed the courtyard toward him, your boots clicking against the stone, and stopped just in front of him. Close enough to touch. Close enough that he could smell you, that floral, sharp, you scent that he had been chasing in empty pillows for three weeks.

You reached up and touched his jaw. Your fingers were cool against his stubble rough skin.

"You didn't shave," you observed.

"I was—" He swallowed. "I was occupied."

"Occupied with what?"

With missing you. With writing you letters. With sending you letters. With waiting for ravens to return. With reading your two-sentence replies a hundred times each. With standing in the rain because the sky was crying and I did not know how to stop. With talking to your rose bush. With forgetting how to breathe.

"Reading," he said. "I was reading. Histories. Important—important texts. I have been very productive in your absence. I have barely thought of you at all."

Your thumb traced the line of his jaw. "Barely at all."

"Perhaps—" His voice cracked. "Perhaps once or twice. In passing. When I had a moment to spare. Which was rare. I am very busy. I am a prince. I have—I have responsibilities."

"Mm." You were smiling now, properly smiling, that sharp, wicked smile that meant you knew exactly what you were doing to him. "And the shawl?"

"I was cold."

"It's summer."

"Summerhall is drafty."

"Summerhall is not drafty."

"It is when you are not here," he said, and the words came out before he could stop them, raw and honest and utterly without pretense. "It is cold. All the time. The fires do not help. Nothing helps. I have been—" He stopped. Swallowed. Tried again. "I have been cold for three weeks."

Your hand stilled against his jaw. For a long moment, you simply looked at him—looked at him properly, taking in the shadows under his eyes, the pallor of his skin, the way his hands were trembling slightly at his sides. Your expression flickered through something complicated. Fondness. Exasperation. Something that might have been guilt, though you would never admit to guilt.

Then you sighed. It was the sigh of someone who had long since accepted that they had married a madman and were, against all reason, perfectly content with that decision.

"You are ridiculous," you said.

"I am devoted."

"You are a fool."

"Your fool."

"My fool," you agreed, and then you grabbed the front of his doublet and kissed him.

It was not a gentle kiss. It was not soft or sweet or any of the things that poets wrote about. It was sharp and demanding and it tasted faintly of dust and travel and the honeyed figs you had been eating in the carriage, and it was the best thing Aerion had ever experienced. Better than flying. Better than fire. Better than every poem he had ever written and sent and agonized over.

He made a sound against your mouth, something embarrassingly close to a whimper, and his hands came up to grip your waist, pulling you closer, pressing you against him as though he could fuse you together and never be separated again. The shawl slipped from his shoulders. He did not notice. He did not care. You were here. You were warm and solid and real, and you were kissing him, and nothing else in the entire world mattered.

When you finally pulled back, your lips were red and your eyes were bright and you were looking at him with that expression, the one that said I see you, I have you, you are mine.

"Three weeks," you said, and your voice was rough. "You couldn't survive three weeks without me."

"I could not survive three days." He pressed his forehead to yours, breathing you in. "I could not survive three hours. I am nothing without you. I am less than nothing. I am—"

"I know." You kissed him again, quick and soft. "I know. I got your letters."

Aerion went very still. "You—my letters. You got them. All of them."

"All seven." Your smirk was back, sharper than ever. "Including the one with the forty-line poem about my eyes. And the one with the drawing. And the one where you described my laugh as 'a silver bell that shatters the darkness.'"

The world tilted slightly. He had sent those. He had sent those. In the grip of his madness, in the depths of his longing, he had actually sealed them with wax and handed them to the maester and watched ravens carry them away toward King's Landing. Toward you.

"The drawing was—" His voice came out strangled. "The dragon was meant to be breathing a heart-shaped flame. It was symbolic. It represented—"

"It looked like a deformed lizard."

"It was a dragon."

"It had three legs, Aerion. I counted."

He opened his mouth to defend his artistic vision, but you were laughing now, that sharp, bright, shatter-the-darkness laugh that he had written forty lines about, and the sound of it made everything else fall away. You were laughing. You were here.

"You wrote to me every three days," you said, and your voice was softer now. "Even when I only sent two lines back. Even when I told you to stop exhausting the ravens. You kept writing."

"I could not stop." His hands were still on your waist. He could not let go. He would never let go again. "I tried. I sat at your desk and I told myself I would not write. I would be strong. I would give you space. And then I would find something—a ribbon, a book you had left open, the dent in your pillow—and I would be at the desk again, writing, because it was the only way I could—" His voice cracked. "It was the only way I could feel close to you."

You looked at him for a long moment. Then you reached into the folds of your traveling gown and pulled out a folded piece of parchment, worn and creased from being opened and closed many times.

"I kept them," you said quietly. "All of them. Under my pillow. Even the one with the terrible drawing."

Aerion's heart stopped. "You—"

"My mother asked why I was smiling at breakfast. I told her it was the figs." Your lips curved. "It was not the figs."

He kissed you then. He could not help it. He kissed you with three weeks of loneliness, with seven letters worth of longing, with every poem and every unsent word and every moment he had spent staring at the horizon waiting for you to come back. And you kissed him back, just as fierce, just as desperate, your fingers curling into his disastrous silver hair and holding on.

When you finally broke apart, both of you breathing hard, Aerion became aware of several things at once.

First: his father was still standing by the main doors, and he was not alone. Daeron had emerged from whatever corner he had been hiding in. Aemon was there too, small and serious, watching with the particular resignation of a child who had seen far too much. Even Aegon had wandered out, blinking in the sunlight like a man who had just woken up, which he probably had.

Second: the entire courtyard had gone silent. Servants, guards, stable hands, all of them were staring at their prince and princess with varying expressions of embarrassment, amusement, and in the case of Maekar Targaryen, profound, bone-deep relief.

Third: Aerion did not care. Not even a little.

"My prince," one of the guards ventured, his voice carefully neutral. "Shall we see to the princess's luggage?"

Aerion did not look away from you. "Yes. Fine. Do that. Take everything to our chambers. Actually—" He paused, considering. "Leave the luggage. Take everything else. Take the furniture. Take the tapestries. I do not care. I need nothing but my wife."

"Aerion," you said.

"The bed," he continued, warming to his theme. "Take the bed. We do not need it. I will hold her in my arms for the rest of eternity. I will become her bed. I will—"

"Aerion."

"Yes, my love?"

"We are keeping the bed."

He considered this. "The bed stays. Everything else—discretionary. I am feeling generous. I am feeling magnanimous. My wife has returned to me and I am willing to share her with the furniture, but only barely."

You sighed, but you were smiling. "You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Being dramatic."

"I am expressing my joy." He pulled you closer, tucking you against his side as though you might vanish if he let go. "This is restrained joy. You should see me when I am truly happy. There is usually fire involved."

"There will be no fire," came Maekar's voice from across the courtyard, flat and tired and deeply parental. "There has been enough fire in this family. No more fire."

Aerion ignored him. He was too busy looking at you. The way the sunlight caught your hair. The way your eyes were still bright with laughter. The way you fit against his side like you had been made to be there, like the Seven themselves had shaped you specifically to fill the empty space beside him.

"I wrote you another poem," he said quietly, as the courtyard slowly returned to life around you. Servants began unloading the carriage. Daeron retreated back toward the library. Aemon lingered for a moment longer, watching his brother with something that might have been affection, before Aegon tugged him away. "On the road, I mean. While you were traveling. I did not send it. There was no point. You would be here before the raven arrived. But I wrote it anyway."

"What is it about?"

"Your return." He pressed a kiss to your temple. "It is very good. I think you will like it."

"Does it compare me to the sun?"

"Among other celestial bodies."

"The moon?"

"Of course."

"The stars?"

"All of them. Every single one. You outshine them all."

You laughed again, and Aerion felt it in his chest, in his bones, in the very core of him. The world had color again. The sun was shining. The birds were singing. Everything was exactly as it should be.

"I love you," he said, and it came out simple and true, without drama or flourish or any of the things he usually wrapped his feelings in. Just the words. Just the truth.

You stopped walking. You turned to face him fully, and for a moment, you simply looked at him, this ridiculous, dramatic, utterly devoted man who had married you and somehow made you believe that love could be like this. Fierce and consuming and absolutely, completely mad. Who had sent you seven letters in three weeks. Who had worn your shawl and talked to your rose bush and stood in the rain because the sky was crying with him. Who loved you so loudly that everyone in a hundred-mile radius knew it.

"I love you too," you said. "Even when you smell like a stable."

"I smell like—"

"Longing. I know." You took his hand and tugged him toward the doors. "Come on, my dragon. Let's get you cleaned up. And then you can read me that poem."

Hope flickered in his chest. "Truly? You want to hear it?"

"I want to hear all of them. Every poem you wrote while I was gone. Every letter you didn't send." You glanced back at him, and your smile was soft and real and his. "I was only gone three weeks, Aerion. You have a lot of poetry to catch me up on."

He had never loved you more than in that moment.

"I wrote fourteen poems," he admitted, as you pulled him through the great hall. "Fifteen, if you count the one about your hands. And there are fragments. Many fragments. Some of them are just your name repeated with different adjectives."

"Of course they are."

"'Beautiful' features heavily. 'Radiant' as well. I am particularly proud of a stanza that compares your eyes to—"

"Tell me upstairs."

"—dragonglass lit from within by an inner fire that—"

"Aerion."

"Yes, my love?"

"Upstairs."

He went. Of course he went. He would follow you anywhere.

Later that evening, after Aerion had bathed and shaved and eaten an actual meal and split your insides in two, he lay in your shared bed with you curled against his side. Your head was on his chest. Your hand was over his heart. You were warm and solid and there, and he was never, ever letting you leave again.

He had read you all fifteen poems. You had laughed at the right parts and gone quiet at the right parts and kissed him at the end of the last one, soft and sweet, and told him he was a madman. He had agreed. Happily.

"I'm not going to King's Landing for at least a year," you murmured against his skin. "My mother asked if I would come back for a tourney in three moons. I told her no."

Aerion's heart, which had been beating steadily for the first time in weeks, stuttered. "You did?"

"I did." You tilted your head up to look at him, your eyes soft in the candlelight. "Apparently my husband cannot survive three weeks without me. I would hate to see what three more would do."

"I would die," Aerion said seriously. "I would simply perish. They would find me in the courtyard, turned to ash, with only your shawl to mark my—"

You kissed him. It was quick and soft and it silenced him completely.

"I know," you said against his lips. "That's why I'm staying."

Aerion pulled you closer, burying his face in your hair, breathing you in. Outside, the moon rose over Summerhall. The birds had started singing again. The flowers in the garden were blooming.

And somewhere in the castle, Maekar Targaryen was writing a letter that he would never send, addressed to no one, consisting of exactly two words:

Thank the gods.

---

It started the morning after your return.

You woke, extracted yourself from Aerion's octopus-like grip, and padded toward the privy. You had made it approximately four steps when you heard the rustle of sheets behind you.

You turned.

Aerion was sitting up in bed, silver hair a catastrophic mess, eyes still half-lidded with sleep but fixed on you with the intensity of a man watching his only lifeline drift out to sea.

"Where are you going?"

"The privy."

He swung his legs over the side of the bed.

"Aerion. No."

"I will accompany you."

"You will not."

"What if you fall?"

"Into the privy? I'm not a toddler."

"What if you realize you've missed me terribly and need me there?"

"I am going to pee."

"And I will be there. For emotional support." He was already standing, already reaching for your shawl—which he had apparently decided was now his shawl—to wrap around his shoulders. "You held my hand through three weeks of despair. The least I can do is hold yours through this."

You stared at him. He stared back, tragic and earnest and utterly insane.

"Fine," you said, because you were still too tired to argue. "But you are not coming in."

Which is how you found yourself, five minutes later, seated on the privy with your husband's hand clutched in yours through the crack in the door. True to his word—and your demand—he had tied a cloth over his eyes. He was sitting on the floor just outside, his back against the doorframe, his fingers interlaced with yours like you were both on the verge of something profound and sacred rather than you simply emptying your bladder.

"I can hear you," he said softly.

"Stop listening."

"I am not listening. I am being present. There is a difference. I am offering my unwavering support during this—"

"Aerion."

"—this intimate moment. This private ritual. This—"

"If you call my pissing a 'private ritual' one more time, I am locking you out of our chambers tonight."

He fell silent.

For approximately three heartbeats.

"I wrote a poem about this," he whispered.

"About what."

"About this. About how even in the smallest moments, I want to be near you. About how absence has made me cherish every breath you take, every step you make, every—"

"You wrote a poem about me pissing?"

"I wrote a poem about us. About how love is not just the grand gestures but the quiet intimacies. The hand held through a door. The presence offered without question. The—"

"Aerion."

"Yes, my love?"

"I am finished."

You cleaned yourself. You stood, adjusted your nightgown, and opened the door fully. Aerion was still on the floor, blindfold still in place, hand still extended toward you like a knight awaiting his lady's favor.

You pulled the cloth from his eyes.

He blinked up at you, violet eyes soft and devoted and completely, utterly mad.

"Welcome back," he said.

You stared at him for a long moment. Then you sighed, pulled him to his feet, and kissed his forehead.

"I love you," you said. "But if you follow me to the privy again, I am divorcing you and moving to Lys."

[lalalovelyly]

I Think... I Miss My Wife... (Aerion's version)

Aerion Targaryen X Reader Summary: In which you're visiting your parents and your husband misses you TW: ooc aerion probably he's whipped and lowkey a victim? he takes you throwing stuff at him as a love language

wc: 7K

GIF di elena-gilbert

Summerhall burned without her.

Not with dragonflame, not with the great conflagrations his ancestors had commanded, but with a dull, suffocating emptiness that crept into every corridor, every chamber, every breath Aerion Targaryen took. The hearths were lit, the servants moved in their endless silent procession, his brothers' voices echoed somewhere in the courtyard and yet the world had lost all color. The very stones of the castle seemed to sigh, as though they too mourned the absence of their lady.

She had been gone three days.

Three days since Y/N had ridden for King's Landing with her escort, off to visit her family, off to leave him behind in this grey mockery of a palace. Three days since the sun had last shone, or so it felt. Three days since Aerion had last tasted peace, last drawn a full breath, last felt his heart beat with anything other than the dull, persistent ache of longing.

He stood at the window of their chambers, his chambers now, though he refused to think of them that way, staring out at the rolling hills of the Reach with an expression of such profound tragedy that any who saw it might have thought the realm had fallen. His doublet was carelessly fastened, half untied at the collar, as though he could not summon the will to dress himself properly. A goblet of wine sat untouched on the table beside him, which was perhaps the most alarming sign of all, for Aerion Brightflame had never been known to refuse wine.

His boots were still unlaced. His rings, the gold and onyx band she had given him on their wedding night, the small ruby she had pressed into his palm with a smirk and a command to wear it always so everyone knows you belong to me, sat in a small dish by the bed. He could not bear to put them on. Could not bear to look at them without her there to see them on his fingers.

He had not slept. Not truly. He would lie in their bed, in the hollow where her body should have been, and press his face into her pillow, breathing in the fading scent of her, something floral, something sharp, something that was simply her. He had forbidden the servants from changing the linens. When the maid had come that morning with fresh sheets, he had snarled at her so fiercely that she had dropped the bundle and fled, and Aerion had spent the next hour smoothing out the rumpled side of the bed where Y/N had last slept, arranging the pillows exactly as she liked them, preserving the shrine of her absence.

He was being dramatic. He knew this. He did not care.

"My prince," came a hesitant voice from the doorway. A serving girl, young and pale with fear, her hands clasped so tightly before her that her knuckles had gone white. "Your father requests your presence at the midday meal."

Aerion did not turn. His voice, when it came, was distant, thrumming with barely suppressed anguish. "Tell him I am indisposed."

"My prince, he was most insistent—"

"Tell him," Aerion's head snapped toward her, violet eyes blazing with such sudden ferocity that the girl took a stumbling step backward, "that my wife—my heart—has been torn from my breast and carted off to that stinking city, and I will not sit at a table pretending to enjoy the company of men who still have their wives beside them while mine languishes in absence. Tell him that I am in mourning. Tell him that the light has gone out of Summerhall. Tell him—" His voice cracked, and for a moment he looked less like a dragon prince and more like a man utterly undone. "Tell him that I cannot."

The girl fled. He heard her footsteps echoing down the corridor, a panicked staccato, and he almost felt a flicker of satisfaction. Let them all know. Let them all see what her absence had done to him.

He turned back to the window, pressing his palm flat against the glass. His breath fogged the pane, and for a moment he fancied he could trace her name in the condensation. Y/N. He traced it once, twice, a third time, watching the letters blur and fade, and something in his chest constricted so painfully that he had to brace himself against the window frame.

Gods, but he missed her.

He missed the sound of her voice, sharp and commanding, telling him his hair was a mess and to sit still while she fixed it. He missed the way she would sprawl across their bed as though she owned it, as though she owned him, with that imperious tilt to her chin and her feet bare and her hair spilling everywhere. He missed the fire in her eyes when she was displeased, which was often, and the way she would make him work for her smile, which was everything. He missed the weight of her hand on his arm when they walked together, the possessive curl of her fingers.

He missed her in the morning, when he woke and reached for her and found only cold sheets. He missed her at night, when the candles burned low and the quiet of their chambers became unbearable. He missed her at meals, when he looked to the seat beside him and saw it empty, and his stomach turned at the sight of food he could not share with her. He missed her in the training yard, where he had no one to impress with his prowess, no one to roll her eyes at his boasting and call him a preening fool in that tone that meant she loved him. He missed her in his blood, in his bones, in the very marrow of him.

She was perfection. She was the sun around which his entire wretched existence orbited.

When she walked, flowers bloomed. He had seen it himself, well, perhaps not seen, but he knew. The grass grew greener in her footsteps, the air itself became sweeter, the very sky seemed to brighten. Birds sang when she passed. The clouds parted. The Seven themselves must have looked down upon her and marveled at their creation. She was a vision of grace and gentleness, his lady wife, his dragonness, his beautiful, beautiful—

"Brother."

Aemon's voice cut through his reverie like a blade. Aerion did not bother to hide his scowl as the younger prince entered the chamber without knocking, as was his irritating habit. Aemon was ten, small and serious, and he looked at Aerion with the particular expression of a child who had long since grown accustomed to his elder brother's eccentricities.

"What," Aerion said flatly. He did not move from the window.

Aemon leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms in a gesture that was far too old for his years. "The servants are saying you've refused to eat for two days."

"I am not hungry."

"You're always hungry. I've seen you eat an entire pheasant by yourself."

Aerion turned, finally, and the full force of his tragic countenance fell upon his little brother. His eyes were red rimmed, his pale skin even paler than usual, his jaw shadowed with the barest hint of stubble he had not bothered to shave away. "My appetite has departed with my wife. How can I be expected to eat when she is not here to grace the table with her presence? When I must look upon your face instead of hers? When every bite I take is ash in my mouth because she is not beside me to share it?"

Aemon's expression did not change. "She's been gone three days."

"Three centuries." Aerion pressed the back of his hand to his forehead in a gesture that would have been comical if he were not entirely sincere. "Three eternities. I have aged a thousand years in her absence. Look at me, Aemon. Look at what has become of me."

He did look. Aerion was, objectively, still the same sharp featured, silver haired prince he had always been, perhaps slightly more disheveled than usual but otherwise unchanged. Aemon seemed to reach this conclusion as well, because his eyebrow arched with the precision of a courtier twice his age.

"You look the same."

"I am wasted," Aerion insisted. "I am a hollow shell. A ghost haunting these halls. Without her, I am nothing. Less than nothing. I am—" He paused, searching for a word sufficiently dramatic. "—diminished."

Aemon sighed. It was a heavy sound for such a small boy. "Father is concerned."

"Father can concern himself with his own marriage." Aerion finally moved from the window, but only to throw himself into a chair with all the despair of a tragedy hero in his final act. He let his head fall back, staring at the ceiling, one arm draped across his eyes. "You do not understand. None of you understand. You have never loved."

"I'm ten."

"Age is no barrier to understanding true love. I knew I loved Y/N from the moment she threw a candlestick at my head during our first meeting. It was a magnificent throw. She has such strength in her wrist, such precision, such—" He let out a shuddering breath. "Such perfection."

Aemon, who had been present for that first meeting and had witnessed Y/N hurl a candlestick at Aerion's head because he had made some comment about her family that was, in retrospect, deeply offensive, said nothing.

"Do you know what she said to me, the night before she left?" Aerion asked, his voice going soft and distant. He did not wait for an answer. "She said, 'Don't be a fool while I'm gone.' And I said, 'I am always a fool for you, my love.' And she—" His voice cracked. "She laughed. She laughed, Aemon. The most beautiful sound in all the Seven Kingdoms. And then she kissed me, here—" He touched his lips "—and she said, 'I know.'"

He was quiet for a moment, lost in the memory. Then he surged up from the chair, suddenly animated, pacing the chamber with wild, restless energy.

"Her hair," he said, "do you remember her hair? The way it catches the light? and when the sun hits it just so, it glows, Aemon. It glows like embers. And her eyes—gods, her eyes—they are like nothing else in this world, and when she is angry they darken, and when she laughs they lighten, and when she looks at me—"

"She usually looks at you like you're about to do something stupid," Aemon observed.

"With love," Aerion corrected fiercely. "She looks at me with love. The love of a woman who has chosen me, who has bound herself to me, who has—" He stopped mid pace, a thought striking him with such force that he went pale. "What if she decides to stay longer? What if her family convinces her that King's Landing is more pleasant than Summerhall? What if she—what if she forgets me?"

"That seems unlikely."

"You don't know! You don't know the power of her family's influence. Her mother, that woman—she never approved of me. She said I was—" He lowered his voice to a pompous imitation. "—'volatile and overly dramatic.' As though those are insults."

"They might be."

"They are virtues," Aerion declared. "I am a Targaryen. Volatility is in my blood. And yet her mother looks at me as though I am a stain upon her daughter's gown. What if she spends this fortnight whispering in Y/N's ear? What if she convinces her to—to—"

He could not say it. Could not even form the word leave.

He sank back into the chair, all the manic energy draining out of him. His hands gripped the armrests so tightly his knuckles went white. "If she does not return to me, I shall burn something. I don't know what. Something important. Something that will make them all regret taking her from me."

"She's visiting her family, Aerion. No one took her."

"They took her from me." His voice cracked again, raw and honest in a way he rarely allowed anyone to see. "They took her from me and I am here alone, in this cold place, without her warmth. Do you know what it is to share a bed with someone for a year and then have it empty? Do you know what it is to reach for someone in the night and find only a pillow? Do you know—"

He stopped. Swallowed. Looked away.

Aemon, to his credit, did not mock him. The little boy crossed the room and stood beside his brother's chair, and after a moment, he placed a small hand on Aerion's arm.

"She'll come back," Aemon said quietly. "She likes Summerhall better than King's Landing. She told me so. She said—" He paused, clearly debating whether to share what he had been told. Then: "She said the food is better here and her mother gives her headaches."

"She said that?"

"She said the roast lamb here is better than anything in the Red Keep. She said—" Aemon's voice dropped to a whisper. "—she said she married you for your family's kitchens."

"She did not."

"She did. I was there." Aemon's expression was solemn. "She said it to Mother when she thought you couldn't hear. She said, 'At least the food is good, even if my husband is a madman.'"

Aerion pressed a hand to his chest, overcome. "She adores me."

"She said you were a madman."

"A term of endearment." He was smiling now, a real smile, the first in three days. "She calls me a madman because she finds my passion invigorating. She finds my intensity—my focus—she finds it romantic. I know she does. She told me once that I loved her more fiercely than any man had ever loved anything, and that she—that she—" His voice caught. "She said she would not have it any other way."

He looked toward the window again, but this time his expression was softer, almost hopeful. "Do you think she misses me?"

Aemon considered the question with the gravity of a maester pondering a philosophical treatise. Finally, he said: "She said you were annoying before you left. But she also packed your favorite doublet. The blue one. She told the maid to make sure it was clean for you while she was gone."

Aerion closed his eyes, overwhelmed. "She does miss me."

"Maybe."

"She does. She packed my doublet. She thinks of me, even when she is away. She carries me in her heart, as I carry her in mine. We are bound, Aemon. Bound by something greater than marriage, greater than duty, greater than—" He opened his eyes, seized by a sudden thought. "I should write to her."

"You said you wouldn't. You said you wanted her to come to you first, to prove that she—" Aemon paused, clearly trying to remember the exact phrasing. "—'yearns for you as desperately as you yearn for her.'"

"I changed my mind." Aerion was already moving, crossing to the writing desk that sat by the window, the desk where Y/N usually sat when she wrote her letters, where her inkpot still sat and her quill still lay, where he could see the faint scratch marks she had left in the wood from pressing too hard when she was angry about something. He dropped into the chair—her chair—and pulled a sheet of parchment toward him.

His hand trembled as he dipped the quill. He had so much to say. So much. How could he possibly contain it all in a single letter? How could he capture the depth of his longing, the breadth of his devotion, the way the world had dimmed without her in it?

He began to write.

My love, my life, my dragonness—

He paused, reading the words. Too small. Too insufficient. He crumpled the parchment and threw it aside.

To the most beautiful woman in all the Seven Kingdoms, without whom I am nothing but a shadow, a ghost, a man already dead—

Too dramatic? No. No such thing. But perhaps she would roll her eyes, and he loved when she rolled her eyes. He loved the way she looked at him when he was being too much, because even then, even when she was exasperated, there was something in her gaze that said I see you, I have you, you are mine.

He wrote again.

Y/N—

I am dying. Not the slow death of age or illness, but the swift death of absence. My heart has stopped beating. My lungs have stopped drawing air. I exist only as a vessel of longing, a monument to my own foolishness for ever allowing you to leave my sight.

The sun has not shone since you departed. I have looked for it. I have searched the sky each morning, hoping to see it, and each morning I find only grey. The flowers in the garden have wilted. The birds have stopped singing. The very stones of Summerhall have grown cold, as though the castle itself knows that its lady is gone.

I have not eaten. I have not slept. I have not done anything but think of you, dream of you, ache for you. Your pillow still smells of your hair. I lie in your place in the bed and pretend you are beside me. I speak to you in the empty chambers, and sometimes, sometimes I can almost hear you answering.

Do not stay away too long. I fear I shall not survive it.

Come back to me.

Come back to me.

Come back to me.

Your devoted husband,

Aerion

He read it over three times, making small adjustments, crossing out a word here, adding a flourish there. Then, seized by a final impulse, he turned the parchment sideways and drew a small dragon at the bottom, breathing a heart shaped flame. Y/N had once told him his drawings were terrible. He had been offended. He was a Targaryen. Dragons were in his blood. The fact that his dragons looked more like deformed lizards with wings was entirely irrelevant.

He folded the letter carefully, pressed his seal into wax—his personal seal, the three-headed dragon encircled by flames—and held it to his lips for a moment before setting it aside to be sent.

"There," he said, satisfied. "Now she will know. Now she will understand the depth of my suffering, and she will return to me, and everything will be right again."

Aemon, who had watched the entire process with the expression of a child who had long since learned not to question his brother's peculiarities, picked up one of the crumpled attempts from the floor. He smoothed it out, read it, and looked at Aerion with an arched eyebrow.

"You wrote 'my dragonness' with two n's."

"It is spelled with two n's."

"It is not."

"It is when I spell it. She is not a dragoness, like some common beast. She is my dragonness. The extra n signifies—" He waved a hand vaguely. "—grandeur. Magnificence. The ineffable quality of her being."

Aemon stared at him for a long moment. Then, with the particular weariness of a child who has long since given up trying to understand his brother, he said: "Father wants to know if you'll be joining us for the rest of the week, or if you intend to waste away in here until Y/N returns."

"I shall waste away," Aerion declared, settling deeper into her chair, pulling her shawl, which had been left draped over the back, around his shoulders. It smelled of her. He breathed in deeply. "Let them bury me in my wedding cloak. Let them say: here lies Aerion Targaryen, who loved too much and too well. Who could not survive the absence of his beloved. Whose heart, like his ancestor's before him, turned to ash without the fire of his—"

Aemon, ten years old and already possessed of more sense than his elder brother, crossed his arms. “Y/N threw a book at your head the morning before she left.”

“It was a love note.”

“It was a history of House Targaryen. She threw it because you said her new gown made her look ‘pleasantly round.’”

Aerion clutched his chest. “And I was wrong. She is not pleasantly round. She is exquisitely formed. Perfect in every proportion. A goddess descended from the heavens to grace unworthy me with her—”

“She also called you a ‘silver haired fool’ and said she hoped the journey to King’s Landing took twice as long as usual so she might have some peace.”

The words landed, but they did not land as Aemon intended. Aerion’s eyes went soft, dreamy, a smile curving his lips for the first time in three days.

“She was teasing,” he breathed. “She does that. She teases me because she loves me. Her wit is so sharp, so brilliant—do you know how fortunate I am to be married to a woman of such intellect? When she calls me a fool, it is affection. When she throws things, it is passion. When she—”

“She broke your nose last moon.”

“A light passion.” Aerion touched his nose fondly. “It was an accident. She was aiming for the vase.”

Aemon stared at him for a long moment. Then, with the particular weariness of a child who has long since given up trying to understand his brother, he said: "She's going to be back in a fortnight, Aerion. Try not to die of heartbreak before then."

The door closed.

Aerion sat in silence for a long moment, wrapped in his wife's shawl, surrounded by her scent, her things, her absence. He picked up the letter he had written, unfolded it, read it again. The words stared back at him, inadequate as they were, but they would have to do. They would have to carry the weight of everything he could not say.

He thought of Y/N. Of the way she would wrinkle her nose when she was displeased. Of the way she would snap her fingers at servants and nobles alike, expecting obedience and receiving it because she was his wife, because she was his, because she was terrifying and magnificent and the most beautiful creature to ever draw breath. He thought of the way she would push his hair back from his face when he was brooding, the way she would kiss his forehead and tell him to stop being so much, the way she would say it like it was not a criticism but a compliment, like his excess was something she treasured rather than tolerated.

He thought of the way she had looked at him on their wedding night, with something like wonder in her eyes, as though she could not quite believe that this ridiculous, passionate, infuriating man belonged to her. He thought of the way she had said his name—Aerion—as though it was a secret only she knew. He thought of the way she had fallen asleep in his arms, her breathing soft and even, her hand curled against his chest like she was holding onto him even in sleep.

He missed her. Gods, he missed her.

He lifted the letter to his lips, pressed a kiss to the folded parchment, and set it carefully on the desk to be sent with the morning's ravens.

"Come back soon, my dragonness," he murmured to the empty room, to the lingering scent of her on her shawl, to the hollow space beside him in the bed. "The flowers are wilting without you. The sun has forgotten how to shine. And I—I am nothing without you. Nothing at all."

He pulled the shawl tighter, closed his eyes, and pretended, for just a moment, that she was there.

Meanwhile, in King's Landing:

You sat in your family's solar, feet propped on an embroidered cushion, a plate of honeyed figs balanced on your stomach, and a look of supreme contentment on your face. You were sprawled across a chaise in a manner that would have horrified your septa, one hand trailing lazily through a bowl of grapes you had commandeered from the kitchens, the other holding a cup of wine that you had refilled three times already.

Your mother, seated across from you with the rigid posture of a woman who had spent her entire life cultivating proper manners, watched you with the particular resignation of a parent who had long since given up trying to impose decorum.

"Must you sprawl like that?" your mother asked, not for the first time.

"I am comfortable," you said, not moving. "You should try it. Loosen your stays. Unlace your boots. Live a little."

"I am a lady of the court. I do not 'live a little.'"

You snorted. "Your loss."

You bit into a fig with relish, letting the honeyed sweetness coat your tongue. The figs in King's Landing were good, better than Summerhall's if you were being honest, though you would never admit it. The wine was passable, and your mother's servants were efficient and unobtrusive, and for the first time in months you were not being followed around by a silver haired shadow who watched you with the intensity of a dragon guarding its hoard.

You loved Aerion. You did. Fiercely. But the man was exhausting.

He looked at you like you were the sun and the moon and the stars all rolled into one. He followed you from room to room like a devoted puppy, except puppies did not usually compose epic poetry about the curve of your neck. He touched you constantly, your hand, your hair, your waist, as though he needed the physical reassurance that you were still there, still real, still his. He was dramatic and possessive and utterly, completely mad, and you would not have him any other way.

But seven hells, a fortnight without him was a vacation.

"You have been here three days," your mother observed, breaking into your thoughts. "Should you not be writing to your husband?"

You popped another fig into your mouth. "I will."

"When?"

"When I feel like it." You stretched, languid and comfortable, your arms reaching above your head in a gesture that made your mother wince at the impropriety. "He is probably moping around Summerhall writing me letters. He gets dramatic when I am gone."

"And that does not concern you?"

You considered the question. You thought of Aerion, beautiful, mad, your Aerion, pacing your shared chambers, composing florid verses about your eyes, refusing to eat, driving his family to distraction with his theatrical suffering. You thought of the letter that would inevitably arrive in a day or two, covered in his cramped, urgent handwriting, filled with declarations of undying devotion and descriptions of his agony in your absence.

A slow, pleased smile spread across your face. "He will survive. He always does. Besides, it is good for him. It reminds him what it is like without me."

"Y/N." Your mother's voice was sharp. "You are a terror."

"I know." Your smile sharpened, affectionate and wicked all at once. "He loves it."

You thought of the way Aerion had looked at you before you left, his violet eyes wide and tragic, his hands gripping yours as though you were being led to the executioner's block rather than a carriage. Do not go, he had said, and he had meant it, had meant it with every fiber of his being, had meant it so fiercely that you had almost, almost considered staying. Do not leave me. I cannot breathe without you.

You had kissed him, soft and quick, and told him to be good, and then you had climbed into the carriage and watched him grow smaller and smaller in the window until he was just a silver haired speck in the distance, and you had felt not guilt, exactly. Not guilt. But something that might have been tenderness, if tenderness was the sort of thing you admitted to.

You missed him. You did. You missed the warmth of him beside you at night, the ridiculous things he said that made you laugh despite yourself, the way he looked at you like you had hung the moon. You missed the weight of his arm around your waist, the sound of his voice calling your name, the way he would press kisses to your shoulder in the morning when he thought you were still asleep.

But you also enjoyed the silence. The absence of constant, overwhelming Aerion. The ability to eat a meal without being stared at. The chance to sleep without someone wrapping around you like a starfish.

You would go back. Of course you would go back. You would go back in a fortnight, and you would find him in your chambers, pale and dramatic and probably unshaven, with a stack of desperate letters on the desk and your shawl wrapped around his shoulders like a security blanket, and you would kiss him, and he would weep, and you would call him a fool, and he would agree, and everything would be exactly as it should be.

But for now, you were going to enjoy your figs.

Your mother sighed, the sound of a woman who had long since accepted her daughter's nature. "Your father wants to host a dinner tomorrow night. Several of the courtiers have asked about you."

You wrinkled your nose. "I do not want to see courtiers. I came here to escape."

"You came here to visit your family."

"I came here to eat your figs and sleep in a bed that does not contain a five foot man who radiates heat like a furnace and twitches in his sleep." You reached for another fig. "The family is a bonus."

Your mother's lips pressed together in a thin line. "You have responsibilities. Appearances to maintain. You cannot simply"

"I can," you interrupted, "and I will. I am the wife of Aerion Targaryen. If I want to spend a fortnight eating figs and ignoring courtiers, I shall. Who is going to stop me? My husband?" You laughed, bright and sharp. "He would thank me for resting. He would probably compose an ode to my repose. Behold my dragonness, who reclines in splendor, her beauty outshining the very sun itself." You pitched your voice into a ridiculous imitation of Aerion's dramatic cadence. "See how her fingers curl around a fig, how her lips part to receive it, how the heavens themselves weep with envy at her grace."

Your mother stared at you.

You grinned. "I am going to write that down. He will love it. He will probably frame it."

"You are both utterly mad."

"Perhaps." You settled back against the chaise, closing your eyes, a smile still playing at your lips. "But we are mad together. That is the important part."

You did not write to him that day. Or the next. On the third day, a letter arrived from Summerhall, sealed with red wax and Aerion's personal sigil, and you read it in bed with a cup of tea, laughing aloud at the extravagant declarations of suffering and the tiny dragon breathing a heart shaped flame in the corner.

You folded it carefully and tucked it beneath your pillow, where you could feel it when you slept.

On the fourth day, you wrote back. Your letter was two lines long:

Do not starve. I will be back when I am back.

Y/N

--

From Prince Maekar Targaryen, Summerhall, to His Good-Daughter Y/N Targaryen, King's Landing

To Y/N, Princess of House Targaryen, Lady of Summerhall,

I hope this letter finds you well and that your visit with your family has been pleasant. I trust the capital agrees with you and that you are enjoying the comforts of your mother's home.

I write to you now with a request that I offer with as much dignity as I can muster, which is to say: please come home.

I am begging you.

Your husband has been moping through the halls of this castle for a week now and I cannot endure another day of it. When you are here, Aerion is a terror. He picks fights with his brothers. He argues with the household knights. He sets things on fire when he is bored. He is loud and obnoxious and he drives me to drink. These are his good qualities. These are the qualities I have, over the course of his life, learned to tolerate, even to expect. They are the qualities that have prepared me for the indignities of fatherhood.

But this?

He has not argued with anyone in six days. He has not set anything on fire. He has not even raised his voice. Instead, he drifts through the corridors like a ghost wrapped in your shawl. He sits by the window in your chambers and stares at the horizon for hours. He refused to attend meals for three days, and when I finally forced him to appear, he sat in your chair and pushed food around his plate with the expression of a man who had lost his will to live.

It is unbearable.

I have seen Aerion angry. I have seen Aerion cruel. I have seen Aerion so drunk that he tried to challenge a horse to single combat. I have seen him at his worst, Y/N, and I have weathered it all with the stoicism of a father who knows what his son is. But I have never seen him like this. I have never seen him sad. I did not know he was capable of it. I thought the emotion was foreign to him, that he was built for fury and passion and nothing in between.

I was wrong. He is capable of sadness. He is capable of a deep, theatrical, utterly pathetic sadness that is somehow ten times more irritating than his usual behavior because at least when he is terrorizing the castle I can yell at him. What am I supposed to do when he looks at me with those violet eyes and asks if I think you still love him? What am I supposed to say when he tells me that the birds have stopped singing because you took the music with you? What am I supposed to do when my son, who once tried to drink fire, begins to cry because he found a hair ribbon of yours under the bed and it still smells like you?

I am not equipped for this.

I had to watch Aerion sit in the rain for an hour because he said the sky was crying with him.

The sky was not crying with him. It was raining. It rains at Summerhall. It rains often. This is a normal occurrence that has never before prompted my son to stand in the courtyard with his arms outstretched like a man awaiting divine intervention.

The servants are talking. The household knights are uncomfortable. Your brother in law Daeron has taken to hiding in the library, and I cannot blame him.

I need you to come back. I need you to come back soon. I need you to restore my son to his natural state of being an insufferable, arrogant, occasionally violent menace because I have discovered that I prefer that Aerion to the alternative. I prefer being terrorized to being mourned. I prefer the chaos to the silence. I prefer the Aerion who makes me want to lock him in his chambers to the Aerion who makes me want to hold him and tell him everything will be alright, because I am a warrior, Y/N, I am a prince of House Targaryen, I have fought in battles and seen men die and I do not know how to comfort my own son.

I am not asking. I am begging. Come back. End this. Save us all.

Your good-father,

Maekar Targaryen

P.S. He has taken to sleeping with your shawl. He wears it around his shoulders like a cloak. I saw him walking through the garden at dawn with it wrapped around him, speaking to your favorite rose bush as though it might answer. I am not making this up. I wish I were making this up.

P.P.S. If you tell anyone about this letter, I will deny everything. I will claim it was forged. I will have you removed from the succession. I will do something dramatic and irreversible. Do not test me on this.

Letter the Second: From Prince Maekar Targaryen, Summerhall, to His Good-Daughter Y/N Targaryen, King's Landing

Y/N,

It has been three days since my last letter. I am writing again because the situation has deteriorated.

Aerion has begun composing poetry aloud. I do not mean that he is writing it down. I mean that he stands in the great hall, in the courtyard, in the corridors, and recites verses about your eyes and your hair and the way you walk. His voice carries. There is nowhere in this castle that is safe from declarations of his undying love for you and his profound suffering in your absence.

The servants are requesting transfers. Two of the kitchen maids asked to be reassigned to the Dornish border. The stable master has offered to take a pay cut if it means being sent to literally any other holding. I am running out of places to put people who do not want to hear my son describe the precise shade of your eyes for the fifth time in a single afternoon.

This morning, he cornered me in the armory to ask whether I thought you would be pleased with the poem he composed about your laugh. He read it to me. It was forty lines long. It described your laugh as a "silver bell that shatters the darkness" and "a melody that would make the Seven themselves weep with envy." I have heard you laugh. It is not a silver bell. It is a sharp, wicked sound that usually precedes someone being verbally eviscerated. I say this with affection. You are a good match for my son. But your laugh does not shatter darkness. It shatters egos.

I told him it was beautiful. What else was I supposed to say? He had tears in his eyes, Y/N. Actual tears. My son, who once laughed when I broke my arm falling from a horse, was on the verge of weeping because I might not appreciate his poetry about your laugh. I told him it was the finest poem I had ever heard. I told him you would cherish it. I told him I would personally ensure it was delivered to you with the next raven. He thanked me. He thanked me with such sincerity that I felt something twist in my chest, and I realized that I would rather have him set something on fire than look at me like that again.

Please come home.

Your good father,

Maekar Targaryen

P.S. He is now composing a poem about your hands. I overheard him telling Aemon that your fingers are "delicate as rose petals" and that he dreams of them every night. I do not know how Aemon tolerates this. I do not know how any of us tolerate this.

Letter the Third: From Prince Daeron Targaryen, Summerhall, to His Good-Sister Y/N Targaryen, King's Landing

Y/N,

Father does not know I am writing this. He has forbidden any of us from contacting you because he says it is "beneath the dignity of House Targaryen" to beg, which is ironic because he has sent you three letters already.

Do not tell him I wrote to you. He will be angry. But I cannot stay silent any longer.

I am hiding in the library. I have been hiding in the library for four days. I bring food with me in the mornings and I do not emerge until nightfall. The measters have stopped questioning it. They simply leave a candle for me and pretend I am not there. I am becoming friends with the dust. I am starting to understand the appeal of being a maester. Anything is better than being in the same room as Aerion right now.

He is unbearable. You know how he is when you are here. He is loud and arrogant and he follows you around like a dragon with a favorite treasure. It is annoying, yes. It is irritating. He picks fights with me for no reason. He calls me a drunkard. He says I have the personality of a wet scroll. He once challenged me to a duel because I suggested he might want to visit a brothel. These are the things I complain about when you are here. These are the things I tell Father I cannot tolerate.

I was wrong. I was so wrong. I would take a hundred duels. I would take a thousand. I would let him call me a drunkard every day for the rest of my life if it meant he would stop looking at me like that.

He does not pick fights anymore. He does not call me boring. He does not challenge me to duels. Instead, he finds me. He finds me wherever I am hiding, and he sits beside me, and he asks me questions. Questions, Y/N. He wants to know about my day. He wants to know what I am drinking. He wants to know if I am happy. He has never asked me if I am happy. I did not think he knew the word.

Yesterday, he put his hand on my shoulder. He has never touched me voluntarily in his entire life unless it was to shove me. He put his hand on my shoulder and he said, "Daeron, do you think she misses me?" And his voice was so small, Y/N. I did not know his voice could be small. His voice is always loud. His voice is always demanding. His voice is the sound of something about to be set on fire. But yesterday, his voice was small, and I did not know what to do, so I lied. I told him of course you missed him. I told him you probably thought about him every day. I told him you would be back soon.

He smiled. He smiled, Y/N. It was not his normal smile, which is sharp and cruel and usually means someone is about to be humiliated. It was a real smile. A soft smile. A smile that made him look like he was not a menace to society but just a man who missed his wife. It was the most unsettling thing I have ever seen.

I want my brother back. I want the brother who calls me boring and challenges me to duels and sets things on fire. I want the brother who makes me want to throw things at his head. I do not want this brother. This brother makes me feel things. This brother makes me want to help him. This brother makes me want to be kind to him, and I do not know how to be kind to Aerion. I do not know how to be kind to someone who has spent our entire lives making kindness feel like a trap.

Please come back. I am begging you. Come back and restore him to his natural state so I can go back to hating him in peace.

Your good-brother,

Daeron Targaryen

P.S. Aegon says to tell you that he misses you.

[circusbutch]

Desire (2025)

22.5 x 31.5 in

Ceramic, soda fired earthenware

[kwistowee]

PETER CLAFFEY as SER DUNCAN THE TALL A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS | 1.01

[asoiaf-things]

He's so boyfriend